Search Results

Search found 66801 results on 2673 pages for 'near real time'.

Page 389/2673 | < Previous Page | 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396  | Next Page >

  • The art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET

    - by outcoldman
    First time when I familiarized with unit testing was 5 or 6 years ago. It was start of my developing career. I remember that somebody told me about code coverage. At that time I didn’t write any Unit tests. Guy, who was my team lead, told me “Do you see operator if with three conditions? You should check all of these conditions”. So, after that I had written some code, I should go to interface and try to invoke all code which I wrote from user interface. Nice? At current time I know little more about tests and unit testing. I have not participated in projects, designed by Test Driven Development (TDD). Basics of my knowledge are a spying code of my colleagues, some articles and screencasts. I had decide that I should know much more, and became a real professional of unit testing, this is why I had start to read book The art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET. More than, in my current job place looks like I’m just one who writing unit tests for my code. I should show good examples of my tests. ,a href="http://outcoldman.ru/en/blog/show/267"Read more...

    Read the article

  • Getting Started with Puppet on Oracle Solaris 11

    - by Glynn Foster
    One of the exciting enhancements with Oracle Solaris 11.2 has been the introduction of Puppet. While upstream Puppet did have some rudimentary support for Oracle Solaris 11, Drew Fisher and Ginnie Wray worked tirelessly to add enhance the Oracle Solaris Puppet offering. We've talked to customers over the past few years and asked them what their problems were and what technologies they were using, particularly for configuration management. Puppet came up time and time again, and it made a huge amount of sense bringing it as a 1st class citizen in the Oracle Solaris platform. So what is Puppet, and why is it useful? To quote from PuppetLabs, the guys who are responsible for creating Puppet: Puppet is a declarative, model-based approach to IT automation, helping you manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to orchestration and reporting. Using Puppet, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage change, scaling from 10s of servers to 1000s, on-premise or in the cloud. What's more, with Puppet support for Oracle Solaris, administrators can now manage a completely heterogeneous data center from a single or series of Puppet masters. Better still, it's an excellent tool when combined with our new compliance framework to ensure you're meeting your compliance regulations. We're not stopping there of course, and we'll enhance our offerings over time, and work with PuppetLabs to get some of this support upstream (or into the Puppet Forge). So if you've heard some of the buzz around Puppet and never quite got started, and have some Oracle Solaris real estate that you'd love to manage, check out the Getting Started with Puppet on Oracle Solaris 11 guide.

    Read the article

  • May I know what python is great at [on hold]

    - by user108437
    I am amazed by python on how tidy the code is, so i decided to learn it, and 2 days pass and I am completely in love with python, but I just code it for hobby thing like chatting robot, uploading to file hosting scripts, etc that small tools for my own daily internet life, and not much for work. I can't find a real life usage of python here. I live in Singapore, when I see in the job skill needed, from those companies hiring, only one asking for python. so I begin to be doubtful whether this skill of mine really worth my time investing it? I also heard about django, and don't know how much popular it is comparing to asp.net. So i ask your help to tell me your country and how popular python there and whether you like python or not? I really like python because of the easy scripting language (not complicated like C++) but the usefulness is almost near C++ where many open source library out there that can run both in windows and linux, so the portability is great! i just want to justify my time for learning python, as because my job does not require python, and I don't have much time at home to learn something new.

    Read the article

  • Coherence Special Interest Group: First Meeting in Toronto and Upcoming Events in New York and Calif

    - by [email protected]
    The first meeting of the Toronto Coherence Special Interest Group (TOCSIG). Date: Friday, April 23, 2010 Time: 8:30am-12:00pm Where: Oracle Mississauga Office, Customer Visitation Center, 110 Matheson Blvd. West, Suite 100, Mississauga, ON L5R3P4 Cameron Purdy, Vice President of Development (Oracle), Patrick Peralta, Senior Software Engineer (Oracle), and Noah Arliss, Software Development Manager (Oracle) will be presenting. Further information about this event can be seen here   The New York Coherence SIG is hosting its seventh meeting. Date: Thursday, Apr 15, 2010 Time: 5:30pm-5:45pm ET social and 5:45pm-8:00pm ET presentations Where: Oracle Office, Room 30076, 520 Madison Avenue, 30th Floor, Patrick Peralta, Dr. Gene Gleyzer, and Craig Blitz from Oracle, will be presenting. Further information about this event can be seen here   The Bay Area Coherence SIG is hosting its fifth meeting. Date: Thursday, Apr 29, 2009 Time: 5:30pm-5:45pm PT social and 5:45pm-8:00pm PT presentations Where: Oracle Conference Center, 350 Oracle Parkway, Room 203, Redwood Shores, CA Tom Lubinski from SL Corp., Randy Stafford from the Oracle A-team, and Taylor Gautier from Grid Dynamics will be presenting Further information about this event can be seen here   Great news, aren't they? 

    Read the article

  • Loss of iPod nano connection via VirtualBox and iTunes

    - by user69245
    I use VirtualBox 4.12 with Ubuntu 12.04, and up until a couple of days ago I was able to sync my iPod nano, my iPod Classic and my iPad via Windows XP and iTunes. A few days ago, when I connected the iPod nano, iTunes told me it was in recovery and I'd have to Restore it. I did this, but when it started up again I was told it was still in recovery. I went through this loop a few times, and then I got it to work again, and synched successfully. Since then, I have been unable to sync my iPod nano, although both iPod Classic and iPad work fine. I have successfully synched the iPod on a laptop with Windows XP since then, but each time I connect it through VirtualBox I get the same error message. I have tried disabling the iPod service in (the VirtualBox version of) Windows, and find that the iPod isn't being mounted as a disc drive, which is what happens in Ubuntu, and on my Windows XP laptop. I've tried changing USB leads, and I've also booted Windows XP on my Ubuntu machine, and here iTunes recognises the iPod nano. As far as I know, I made no changes to the configuration of VirtualBox between the time it was synching satisfactorily and the time it failed. I don't think iTunes is at fault here, as the same version of iTunes syncs with the iPod nano on two different computers running Windows XP - I think it may be the way XP running in VirtualBox handles the mounting of the iPod. Any suggestions?

    Read the article

  • Need help with DNS. Registrar is NS, Web Site at WinHost, Email at eHost

    - by Leon
    Need help moving a web site for a client, which I will call ClientABC. The web site is ClientABC.com, which is hosted at Rackspace, with their email hosted at eHost. We are transferring the site from Rackspace to WinHost and are keeping the email hosted at eHost. I would like the transfer to happen with little to no down time for the web site and email (email is most important). Current Config: Client owns domain and registrar is Network Solutions Domain name is managed by VendorX at Rackspace Web site is hosted on Rackspace servers Email is hosted at eHost Post-Move Config: Web site is hosted at WinHost Keep Email at eHost Here is my plan for the transfer: Copy the site files to WinHost and test to assure site is fully functional Set up the MX record in the WinHost account to point to eHost servers Change the DNS in Network Solutions from Rackspace to Winhost Questions: Will this work? What am I missing? Should I expect down time or any issues with email? I understand that there will be a period of time that traffic to the site is handled at both Rackspace and Winhost and that email traffic will be routed through both hosts as well. Will this cause issues? How will I know when the change is fully propagated and that Rackspace is out of the equation and WinHost is handling everything (so I can kill the Rackspace account) Thanks in advance!

    Read the article

  • Go Big or Go Home

    - by Justin Kestelyn
    The Oracle Develop conference (#oracledevelop10), being co-located for the first time ever with JavaOne in San Francisco, is guaranteed to be the ultimate rush for developers this year. Where else can you go to learn about, interact with, and meet fellow devotees of the entire Oracle Development stack (welcome, Oracle Solaris)? This will also be the first time that the community space traditionally located at Oracle OpenWorld - and hosted by Oracle Technology Network, as always - will be present at the "developer" conference during this busy week. So, Oracle OpenWorld's loss is Oracle Develop's gain. And what a community space it will be: nearly 4,000 square feet for meeting space, contests and give-aways, consumption of various beverages, special speakers (Oracle ACEs among them, no doubt), and video-casting. The entire Oracle Technology Network crew will be on hand to "facilitate" your experience, of course. Even better, you can rub shoulders and share war stories with attendees from that "other" conference, JavaOne. (You have access to both conferences as a single package, so you may be having a conversation with yourself.) We call the whole enchilada "The Zone". As time goes on, we'll bring you more news about the activities described above, as well as OTN Night (which proves to be more raucous than ever), technical sessions and keynotes not to be missed, the unconference/open sessions, things to do at night, and more. In the meantime, stay in touch with us via Twitter or Oracle Mix.

    Read the article

  • How To Temporarily Disable The Touch Screen In X1 Carbon

    - by Daniel Cazzulino
    I know, why would anyone want to do that? Scott properly predicted: Don't knock a touchscreen until you've used one. Every laptop should (and will) have a touch screen in a year. Mark my words. And surely, less than a year later, the X1 Carbon (an amazing ultrabook for sure) has a touch model. And as of today, the price difference for the touch screen is a ridiculous $30 (actually $24 with a “back to school” coupon right now ;)): So why would you NOT get it? I know for some it works great. Now, let’s get real about touch *for a developer* for a minute. About 99.9% of my time in front of my laptop I’m either using Visual Studio or Chrome. I have my hands on the keyboard ALL THE TIME. I use the trackpoint ALL THE TIME. If I want to scroll, I only have to slightly move my fingers. I don’t click around much on pages: I READ them. So, in a few months of using the X1, I think I touched the screen like 10 times, and it was mostly to clear dust, which drives whatever app is in focus crazy. Plus, at home I have this simple setup:...Read full article

    Read the article

  • links for 2010-12-10

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Oracle VM Blade Cluster Reference Configuration (InfraRed) "All components listed in the reference configuration have been tested together by Oracle, reducing the need for customer testing and the time-consuming and complex effort of designing and deploying a stable configuration." -- Ferhat Hatay (tags: oracle virtualization clustering) White Paper: Accelerating Deployment of Virtualized Infrastructures with the Oracle VM Blade Cluster Reference Configuration  The Oracle VM blade cluster reference configuration described in this paper provides a complete and fully tested virtualized stack that can reduce deployment time by weeks or months while also reducing risk and improving application performance. (tags: oracle otn virtualization infrastructure) White Paper: Best Practices and Guidelines for Deploying the Oracle VM Blade Cluster Reference Configuration This paper provides recommendations and best practices for optimizing virtualization infrastructures when deploying the Oracle VM blade cluster reference configuration.  (tags: oracle otn virtualization clustering) Your Most Familiar Processes - Rethink before using E2.0 | Enterprise 2.0 Blogs "Imagine what gains your organization could have by asking basic questions and reviewing your familiar processes before setting up even the most fundamental E2.0 technologies to support them!" -- John Brunswick (tags: oracle enterprise2.0 otn) Oracle's Global Single Schema (Oracle Master Data Management) "The success of all business processes depends on the availability of accurate master data. Clearly, the solution to this problem is to consolidate all the master data an organization uses to run its business." -- David Butler (tags: oracle otn mdm entarch businessprocess) One step further towards proven results: IT Strategies from Oracle Oracle ACE Douwe Pieter van den Bos shares his thoughts on "IT Strategies from Oracle" in this Google translation of his original Dutch post. (tags: oracle itso entarch) The Underground Oracle VM Manual Just in time for the holidays! Roddy Rodstein's epic 354-page manual is now available in a single pdf.. (tags: oracle otn virtualization oraclevm)

    Read the article

  • View Word Definitions in IE 8 with the Define with Bing Accelerator

    - by Asian Angel
    Do you need an easy way to view word definitions while browsing with Internet Explorer? The Define with Bing Accelerator will display definitions in the same (or a new) tab and save you time while browsing. Using Define with Bing The installation consists of two steps. First, click on Add to Internet Explorer to start the process. Next you will be asked to confirm the installation. Once you have clicked Add your new accelerator is ready to use (no browser restart required). Whenever you encounter a word that needs defining highlight it, click on the small blue square, go to All Accelerators, and then Define with Bing. There are two ways to access the definition: Hover your mouse over the Define with Bing text to open a small popup window Click on Define with Bing to open a definition search in a new tab Being able to access a definition or explanation in the same tab will definitely save you time while browsing. In the example shown here you can get an idea of what SCORM means but clicking on the links inside the popup window is not recommended (webpage opens in popup and is not resizable). In the situation shown above it is better to click on Define with Bing and see more information in a new tab. Conclusion The Define with Bing Accelerator can be a very useful time saver while browsing with Internet Explorer. Finding those word definitions will be a much more pleasant experience now. Add the Define with Bing Accelerator to Internet Explorer Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Google Dictionary Power to ChromeChoose Custom New Tab Pages in ChromeSearch Alternative Search Engines from within Bing’s Search PageView Word Definitions in Google Chrome with DictionaryTipThe New Bing Bar Provides Easy Access to Searches and Microsoft Live Services TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox)

    Read the article

  • A Simple Approach For Presenting With Code Samples

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/07/31/a-simple-approach-for-presenting-with-code-samples.aspxI’ve been getting ready for a presentation and have been struggling a bit with the best way to show and execute code samples. I don’t present often (hardly ever), but when I do I like the presentation to have a lot of succinct and executable code snippets to help illustrate the points that I’m making. Depending on what the presentation is about, I might just want to build an entire sample application that I would run during the presentation. In other cases, however, building a full-blown application might not really be the best way to present the code. The presentation I’m working on now is for an open source utility library for dealing with dates and times. I could have probably cooked up a sample app for accepting date and time input and then contrived ways in which it could put the library through its paces, but I had trouble coming up with one app that would illustrate all of the various features of the library that I wanted to highlight. I finally decided that what I really needed was an approach that met the following criteria: Simple: I didn’t want the user interface or overall architecture of a sample application to serve as a distraction from the demonstration of the syntax of the library that the presentation is about. I want to be able to present small bits of code that are focused on accomplishing a single task. Several of these examples will look similar, and that’s OK. I want each sample to “stand on its own” and not rely much on external classes or methods (other than the library that is being presented, of course). “Debuggable” (not really a word, I know): I want to be able to easily run the sample with the debugger attached in Visual Studio should I want to step through any bits of code and show what certain values might be at run time. As far as I know this rules out something like LinqPad, though using LinqPad to present code samples like this is actually a very interesting idea that I might explore another time. Flexible and Selectable: I’m going to have lots of code samples to show, and I want to be able to just package them all up into a single project or module and have an easy way to just run the sample that I want on-demand. Since I’m presenting on a .NET framework library, one of the simplest ways in which I could execute some code samples would be to just create a Console application and use Console.WriteLine to output the pertinent info at run time. This gives me a “no frills” harness from which to run my code samples, and I just hit ‘F5’ to run it with the debugger. This satisfies numbers 1 and 2 from my list of criteria above, but item 3 is a little harder. By default, just running a console application is going to execute the ‘main’ method, and then terminate the program after all code is executed. If I want to have several different code samples and run them one at a time, it would be cumbersome to keep swapping the code I want in and out of the ‘main’ method of the console application. What I really want is an easy way to keep the console app running throughout the whole presentation and just have it run the samples I want when I want. I could setup a simple Windows Forms or WPF desktop application with buttons for the different samples, but then I’m getting away from my first criteria of keeping things as simple as possible. Infinite Loops To The Rescue I found a way to have a simple console application satisfy all three of my requirements above, and it involves using an infinite loop and some Console.ReadLine calls that will give the user an opportunity to break out and exit the program. (All programs that need to run until they are closed explicitly (or crash!) likely use similar constructs behind the scenes. Create a new Windows Forms project, look in the ‘Program.cs’ that gets generated, and then check out the docs for the Application.Run method that it calls.). Here’s how the main method might look: 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: do 4: { 5: Console.Write("Enter command or 'exit' to quit: > "); 6: var command = Console.ReadLine(); 7: if ((command ?? string.Empty).Equals("exit", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("Quitting."); 10: break; 11: } 12: 13: } while (true); 14: } The idea here is the app prompts me for the command I want to run, or I can type in ‘exit’ to break out of the loop and let the application close. The only trick now is to create a set of commands that map to each of the code samples that I’m going to want to run. Each sample is already encapsulated in a single public method in a separate class, so I could just write a big switch statement or create a hashtable/dictionary that maps command text to an Action that will invoke the proper method, but why re-invent the wheel? CLAP For Your Own Presentation I’ve blogged about the CLAP library before, and it turns out that it’s a great fit for satisfying criteria #3 from my list above. CLAP lets you decorate methods in a class with an attribute and then easily invoke those methods from within a console application. CLAP was designed to take the arguments passed into the console app from the command line and parse them to determine which method to run and what arguments to pass to that method, but there’s no reason you can’t re-purpose it to accept command input from within the infinite loop defined above and invoke the corresponding method. Here’s how you might define a couple of different methods to contain two different code samples that you want to run during your presentation: 1: public static class CodeSamples 2: { 3: [Verb(Aliases="one")] 4: public static void SampleOne() 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("This is sample 1"); 7: } 8:   9: [Verb(Aliases="two")] 10: public static void SampleTwo() 11: { 12: Console.WriteLine("This is sample 2"); 13: } 14: } A couple of things to note about the sample above: I’m using static methods. You don’t actually need to use static methods with CLAP, but the syntax ends up being a bit simpler and static methods happen to lend themselves well to the “one self-contained method per code sample” approach that I want to use. The methods are decorated with a ‘Verb’ attribute. This tells CLAP that they are eligible targets for commands. The “Aliases” argument lets me give them short and easy-to-remember aliases that can be used to invoke them. By default, CLAP just uses the full method name as the command name, but with aliases you can simply the usage a bit. I’m not using any parameters. CLAP’s main feature is its ability to parse out arguments from a command line invocation of a console application and automatically pass them in as parameters to the target methods. My code samples don’t need parameters ,and honestly having them would complicate giving the presentation, so this is a good thing. You could use this same approach to invoke methods with parameters, but you’d have a couple of things to figure out. When you invoke a .NET application from the command line, Windows will parse the arguments and pass them in as a string array (called ‘args’ in the boilerplate console project Program.cs). The parsing that gets done here is smart enough to deal with things like treating strings in double quotes as one argument, and you’d have to re-create that within your infinite loop if you wanted to use parameters. I plan on either submitting a pull request to CLAP to add this capability or maybe just making a small utility class/extension method to do it and posting that here in the future. So I now have a simple class with static methods to contain my code samples, and an infinite loop in my ‘main’ method that can accept text commands. Wiring this all up together is pretty easy: 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: do 4: { 5: try 6: { 7: Console.Write("Enter command or 'exit' to quit: > "); 8: var command = Console.ReadLine(); 9: if ((command ?? string.Empty).Equals("exit", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("Quitting."); 12: break; 13: } 14:   15: Parser.Run<CodeSamples>(new[] { command }); 16: Console.WriteLine("---------------------------------------------------------"); 17: } 18: catch (Exception ex) 19: { 20: Console.Error.WriteLine("Error: " + ex.Message); 21: } 22:   23: } while (true); 24: } Note that I’m now passing the ‘CodeSamples’ class into the CLAP ‘Parser.Run’ as a type argument. This tells CLAP to inspect that class for methods that might be able to handle the commands passed in. I’m also throwing in a little “----“ style line separator and some basic error handling (because I happen to know that some of the samples are going to throw exceptions for demonstration purposes) and I’m good to go. Now during my presentation I can just have the console application running the whole time with the debugger attached and just type in the alias of the code sample method that I want to run when I want to run it.

    Read the article

  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 12, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 12, 2010Popular ReleasesWii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.9 Beta: - Aqua or brushed metal style for Mac OS X - Shows selection count beside ID - Game list selection mode via settings - Compare Files <-> WBFS game lists - Verify game images/DVD/WBFS - WIT command line for log (via settings) - Cancel possibility for loading games process - Progress infos while loading games - Localization for dates - UTF-8 support - Shortcuts added - View game infos in browser - Transfer infos for log - All transfer routines rewritten - Extract image from image/WBFS - Support....NETTER Code Starter Pack: v1.0.beta: '.NETTER Code Starter Pack ' contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies and frameworks based on Microsoft .NET Framework. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database (for database driven scenarios). The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic...WPF Multiple Document Interface (MDI): Beta Release v1.1: WPF.MDI is a library to imitate the traditional Windows Forms Multiple Document Interface (MDI) features in WPF. This is Beta release, means there's still work to do. Please provide feedback, so next release will be better. Features: Position dependency property MdiLayout dependency property Menu dependency property Ctrl + F4, Ctrl + Tab shortcuts should work Behavior: don’t allow negative values for MdiChild position minimized windows: remember position, tile multiple windows, ...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.1 ALPHA: 2.2.1 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated th...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 Release Candidate: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669) and package format. See http://nupack.codeplex.com/documentation?title=Nuspe...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.DNN Simple Article: DNNSimpleArticle Module V00.00.03: The initial release of the DNNSimpleArticle module (labelled V00.00.03) There are C# and VB versions of this module for this initial release. No promises that going forward there will be packages for both languages provided for future releases. This module provides the following functionality Create and display articles Display a paged list of articles Articles get created as DNN ContentItems Categorization provided through DNN Taxonomy SEO functionality for article display providi...UOB & ME: UOB_ME 2.5: latest versionAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.2: - Added auto insertion of RLE (RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING) Unicode character for the RTL languages. - Fixed delete rows issue.PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.0 SP1: Fixed bugs: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration value .NET Version: 3.5 sp1My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).SharePoint Packager: SharePoint Packager release: Full source code and precompiled / ILmerged exeTweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 4: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous fixes and improvements to core engine Twitter API coverage: a...myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingNew ProjectsABR Manager: Fast and small Adobe brushes preset files manager developed in native c++.Aplicativo lembretes: Com esse aplicativo você poderá agentar atividades de forma que quando o dia e a hora do compromisso marcado chegar, o aplicativo ira lembra-lo com um sinal sonoro e visual e até poderá desligar seu pc. O programa ficará em execução de forma discreta no canto direito superiorBrogue: Grevious Sword of Carnage: * 24 damage * makes annoying sound on hitsC# LZF Real-Time Compression Algorithm: Improved C# LZF Compressor, a very small and extremely efficient real-time data compression library. The compression algorithm is extremely fast. Well suited for real-time data intensive applications (e.g.: packet streaming, embedded devices...).GIFT: gift appHeroBeastCodeProject: create a HeroBeastCodeProjects project,opensource my codeiFinance: The wpf/sl solution for personal finance manager.MailOnSocketChange: Send an alert via email, if a certain socket/TCP-connection-changes state on the PC running the MailOnSocketChange applicationMath Teacher for kids: This application will help your kids learn and practice Math. midnc: Proyecto en silverlight para el control interno de registro de actividades y eventosMusicWho: MusicWho compose music. It use biological neuron firing signals to generate music. so, what will the brain sound like? we'll see.Nabaztag Enterprise Services: The goal of the Nabaztag Enterprise Services is to come up with a free .NET implementation of the Nabaztag server. Additionally we think of building a whole platform around the core services using the newsest an coolest .NET technologies.pkEditor: pkEditor is a Poketscript or Pokescript script generator and editor.Second Block: Second Block is an block-based 3D multiplayer game.Share my speed: Coding4Fun Window Phone 7 "Share my speed" applicationSharePoint Image Resizer: Image Resizer allows to create custom policies to control image size of pictures in WSS 3.0/SharePoint 2007.ShoutStreamSource: ShoutStreamSource provides you an implementation of the MediaStreamSource of the ShoutCast protocol for the Windows Phone 7. It makes it possible to play a ShoutCast stream using a MediaElement on the phone.SSIS Reporting Pack: A suite of SQL Server Reporting Services reports that operate over the SSIS catalog in SQL Server code-named DenaliSunshine2011: testTrabalhando com Functoid Table Looping: Usado em conjunto com o Functoid “Table Extractor”, serve para criar estruturas de any registros podendo conter valores de campos, valores constantes, e valores que resultam de outros functoids. VKontakte API SDK: SDK for work with most popular russian social site VKontakte.ruwho's who: iYasmin: Yasmin - A WPF based Anime Database.YiDeSOFT: YiDe is EzDesk~!?????????? ?????: ?????????? ????? ?????????? ? ?????????????? ????????? ??????? ?????????????????? ? ????????? ???????

    Read the article

  • Autoscaling in a modern world&hellip;. Part 1

    - by Steve Loethen
    It has been a while since I have had time to sit down and blog.  I need to make sure I take the time.  It helps me to focus on technology and not let the administrivia keep me from doing the things I love. I have been focusing on the cloud for the last couple of years.  Specifically the  PaaS platform from Microsoft called Azure.  Time to dig in.. I wanted to explore Autoscaling.  Autoscaling is not native part of Azure.  The platform has the needed connection points.  You can write code that looks at the health and performance of your application components and react to needed scaling changes.  But that means you have to write all the code.  Luckily, an add on to the Enterprise Library provides a lot of code that gets you a long way to being able to autoscale without having to start from scratch. The tool set is primarily composed of a Autoscaler object that you need to host.  This object, when hosted and configured, looks at the performance criteria you specify and adjusts your application based on your needs.  Sounds perfect. I started with the a set of HOL’s that gave me a good basis to understand the mechanics.  I worked through labs 1 and 2 just to get the feel, but let’s start our saga at the end of lab3.  Lab3 end results in a web application, hosted in Azure and a console app running on premise.  The web app has a few buttons on it.  One set adds messages to a queue, another removes them.  A second set of buttons drives processor utilization to 100%.  If you want to guess, a safe bet is that the Autoscaler is configured to react to a queue that has filled up or high cpu usage.  We will continue our saga in the next post…

    Read the article

  • UX Design Principles Pluralsight course review

    - by pluginbaby
    I've just finished the "Creating User Experiences: Fundamental Design Principles" course on Pluralsight, I am glad I took it, and here is why you should. The course is held by Billy Hollis, an internationally known author and speaker focused on user experience design. It was published in May 2012, so it is quite fresh (You’ll hear some reference to XAML, even if the content is not focused on any particular technology). I think what I liked the most about this course is the fact that Billy is not just imposing design ideas and pushing them in your throat (which would be too confronting for us developers, even if he was right), he spends a fair share amount of time explaining each topics, and illustrate them with great metaphors. If you are a minimum open minded you should get great value out of this course. Billy makes you think outside the box, he encourages you to use your right side brain, and understand design principles by simply looking at what’s around us (physical objects, nature, …). During the course he refers several time to "don't make me think" a book on UX design, which is about giving confidence to users, by making it easier for them to achieve their goals when using your app. Billy thinks that every developer can participate in elaborating good design when building software, not only designers should be involved. Get away of the easy path "let's build functional stuff for now and we will hire a designer later if we have time and budget". The course is also live and interactive as the author suggests that you do some live exercises during each module. He actually makes you realize and understand by yourself the need for change. We’re in a new era of software and devices, where grids and menus aren't enough. You can’t remain satisfied by just making things possible, you need to make them easier for your users. Understanding some fundamental design principles will help. This course can definitely be followed by any developers who wants to improve user experience of software they are working on, and I definitely recommend it.

    Read the article

  • Testing for Auto Save and Load Game

    - by David Dimalanta
    I'm trying to make a simple app that will test the save and load state. Is it a good idea to make an app that has an auto save and load game every time the newbies open the first app then continues it on the other day? I'm trying to make a simple app with a simple moving block sprite, starting at the center coordinate. Once I moved the sprite to the top by touch n' drag, I touch the back key to close the app. I expected that once I re-open the app and the block sprite is still at the top. But instead, it goes back to the center instead. Where can I find more ways to use the preferences or manipulating by telling the dispose method to dispose only specific wastes but not the important records (fastest time, last time where the sprite is located via coordinates, etc.). Is there really an easy way or it has no shortcuts but most effective way? I need help to expand more ideas. Thank you. Here are the following links that I'm trying to figure it out how to use them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gER5GGQYzGc http://www.badlogicgames.com/wordpress/?p=1585 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0PtLexfBCA&feature=relmfu Take note that these links above are codes. But I'm not looking answers for code but to look how to start or figure it out how to use them. Tell me if I'm wrong.

    Read the article

  • Installing SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7

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

    Read the article

  • Modeling distribution of performance measurements

    - by peterchen
    How would you mathematically model the distribution of repeated real life performance measurements - "Real life" meaning you are not just looping over the code in question, but it is just a short snippet within a large application running in a typical user scenario? My experience shows that you usually have a peak around the average execution time that can be modeled adequately with a Gaussian distribution. In addition, there's a "long tail" containing outliers - often with a multiple of the average time. (The behavior is understandable considering the factors contributing to first execution penalty). My goal is to model aggregate values that reasonably reflect this, and can be calculated from aggregate values (like for the Gaussian, calculate mu and sigma from N, sum of values and sum of squares). In other terms, number of repetitions is unlimited, but memory and calculation requirements should be minimized. A normal Gaussian distribution can't model the long tail appropriately and will have the average biased strongly even by a very small percentage of outliers. I am looking for ideas, especially if this has been attempted/analysed before. I've checked various distributions models, and I think I could work out something, but my statistics is rusty and I might end up with an overblown solution. Oh, a complete shrink-wrapped solution would be fine, too ;) Other aspects / ideas: Sometimes you get "two humps" distributions, which would be acceptable in my scenario with a single mu/sigma covering both, but ideally would be identified separately. Extrapolating this, another approach would be a "floating probability density calculation" that uses only a limited buffer and adjusts automatically to the range (due to the long tail, bins may not be spaced evenly) - haven't found anything, but with some assumptions about the distribution it should be possible in principle. Why (since it was asked) - For a complex process we need to make guarantees such as "only 0.1% of runs exceed a limit of 3 seconds, and the average processing time is 2.8 seconds". The performance of an isolated piece of code can be very different from a normal run-time environment involving varying levels of disk and network access, background services, scheduled events that occur within a day, etc. This can be solved trivially by accumulating all data. However, to accumulate this data in production, the data produced needs to be limited. For analysis of isolated pieces of code, a gaussian deviation plus first run penalty is ok. That doesn't work anymore for the distributions found above. [edit] I've already got very good answers (and finally - maybe - some time to work on this). I'm starting a bounty to look for more input / ideas.

    Read the article

  • InvalidProgramException Running Unit Test (Bug Closed)

    - by Anthony Trudeau
    In a previous post I reported an InvalidProgramException that occurs in a certain circumstance with unit tests involving accessors on a private generic method.  It turns out that Bug #635093 reported through Microsoft Connect will not be fixed. The reason cited is that private accessors have been discontinued.  And why have private accessors been discontinued?  They don't have time is the reason listed in the blog post titled "Generation of Private Accessors (Publicize) and Code Generation for Visual Studio 2010". In my opinion, it's a piss poor decision to discontinue support for a feature that they're still using within automatically generated unit tests against private classes and methods.  But, I think what is worse is the lack of guidance cited in the aforementioned blog post.  Their advice?  Use the PrivateObject to help, but develop your own framework. At the end of the day what Microsoft is saying is, "I know you spent a lot of money for this product.  I know that you don't have time to develop a framework to deal with this.  We don't have time and that is all that's important."

    Read the article

  • C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentDictionary

    - by James Michael Hare
    Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#.  In this series of posts, we will discuss how the concurrent collections have been developed to help alleviate these multi-threading concerns.  Last week’s post began with a general introduction and discussed the ConcurrentStack<T> and ConcurrentQueue<T>.  Today's post discusses the ConcurrentDictionary<T> (originally I had intended to discuss ConcurrentBag this week as well, but ConcurrentDictionary had enough information to create a very full post on its own!).  Finally next week, we shall close with a discussion of the ConcurrentBag<T> and BlockingCollection<T>. For more of the "Little Wonders" posts, see the index here. Recap As you'll recall from the previous post, the original collections were object-based containers that accomplished synchronization through a Synchronized member.  While these were convenient because you didn't have to worry about writing your own synchronization logic, they were a bit too finely grained and if you needed to perform multiple operations under one lock, the automatic synchronization didn't buy much. With the advent of .NET 2.0, the original collections were succeeded by the generic collections which are fully type-safe, but eschew automatic synchronization.  This cuts both ways in that you have a lot more control as a developer over when and how fine-grained you want to synchronize, but on the other hand if you just want simple synchronization it creates more work. With .NET 4.0, we get the best of both worlds in generic collections.  A new breed of collections was born called the concurrent collections in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace.  These amazing collections are fine-tuned to have best overall performance for situations requiring concurrent access.  They are not meant to replace the generic collections, but to simply be an alternative to creating your own locking mechanisms. Among those concurrent collections were the ConcurrentStack<T> and ConcurrentQueue<T> which provide classic LIFO and FIFO collections with a concurrent twist.  As we saw, some of the traditional methods that required calls to be made in a certain order (like checking for not IsEmpty before calling Pop()) were replaced in favor of an umbrella operation that combined both under one lock (like TryPop()). Now, let's take a look at the next in our series of concurrent collections!For some excellent information on the performance of the concurrent collections and how they perform compared to a traditional brute-force locking strategy, see this wonderful whitepaper by the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform team here. ConcurrentDictionary – the fully thread-safe dictionary The ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue> is the thread-safe counterpart to the generic Dictionary<TKey, TValue> collection.  Obviously, both are designed for quick – O(1) – lookups of data based on a key.  If you think of algorithms where you need lightning fast lookups of data and don’t care whether the data is maintained in any particular ordering or not, the unsorted dictionaries are generally the best way to go. Note: as a side note, there are sorted implementations of IDictionary, namely SortedDictionary and SortedList which are stored as an ordered tree and a ordered list respectively.  While these are not as fast as the non-sorted dictionaries – they are O(log2 n) – they are a great combination of both speed and ordering -- and still greatly outperform a linear search. Now, once again keep in mind that if all you need to do is load a collection once and then allow multi-threaded reading you do not need any locking.  Examples of this tend to be situations where you load a lookup or translation table once at program start, then keep it in memory for read-only reference.  In such cases locking is completely non-productive. However, most of the time when we need a concurrent dictionary we are interleaving both reads and updates.  This is where the ConcurrentDictionary really shines!  It achieves its thread-safety with no common lock to improve efficiency.  It actually uses a series of locks to provide concurrent updates, and has lockless reads!  This means that the ConcurrentDictionary gets even more efficient the higher the ratio of reads-to-writes you have. ConcurrentDictionary and Dictionary differences For the most part, the ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue> behaves like it’s Dictionary<TKey,TValue> counterpart with a few differences.  Some notable examples of which are: Add() does not exist in the concurrent dictionary. This means you must use TryAdd(), AddOrUpdate(), or GetOrAdd().  It also means that you can’t use a collection initializer with the concurrent dictionary. TryAdd() replaced Add() to attempt atomic, safe adds. Because Add() only succeeds if the item doesn’t already exist, we need an atomic operation to check if the item exists, and if not add it while still under an atomic lock. TryUpdate() was added to attempt atomic, safe updates. If we want to update an item, we must make sure it exists first and that the original value is what we expected it to be.  If all these are true, we can update the item under one atomic step. TryRemove() was added to attempt atomic, safe removes. To safely attempt to remove a value we need to see if the key exists first, this checks for existence and removes under an atomic lock. AddOrUpdate() was added to attempt an thread-safe “upsert”. There are many times where you want to insert into a dictionary if the key doesn’t exist, or update the value if it does.  This allows you to make a thread-safe add-or-update. GetOrAdd() was added to attempt an thread-safe query/insert. Sometimes, you want to query for whether an item exists in the cache, and if it doesn’t insert a starting value for it.  This allows you to get the value if it exists and insert if not. Count, Keys, Values properties take a snapshot of the dictionary. Accessing these properties may interfere with add and update performance and should be used with caution. ToArray() returns a static snapshot of the dictionary. That is, the dictionary is locked, and then copied to an array as a O(n) operation.  GetEnumerator() is thread-safe and efficient, but allows dirty reads. Because reads require no locking, you can safely iterate over the contents of the dictionary.  The only downside is that, depending on timing, you may get dirty reads. Dirty reads during iteration The last point on GetEnumerator() bears some explanation.  Picture a scenario in which you call GetEnumerator() (or iterate using a foreach, etc.) and then, during that iteration the dictionary gets updated.  This may not sound like a big deal, but it can lead to inconsistent results if used incorrectly.  The problem is that items you already iterated over that are updated a split second after don’t show the update, but items that you iterate over that were updated a split second before do show the update.  Thus you may get a combination of items that are “stale” because you iterated before the update, and “fresh” because they were updated after GetEnumerator() but before the iteration reached them. Let’s illustrate with an example, let’s say you load up a concurrent dictionary like this: 1: // load up a dictionary. 2: var dictionary = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, int>(); 3:  4: dictionary["A"] = 1; 5: dictionary["B"] = 2; 6: dictionary["C"] = 3; 7: dictionary["D"] = 4; 8: dictionary["E"] = 5; 9: dictionary["F"] = 6; Then you have one task (using the wonderful TPL!) to iterate using dirty reads: 1: // attempt iteration in a separate thread 2: var iterationTask = new Task(() => 3: { 4: // iterates using a dirty read 5: foreach (var pair in dictionary) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + ":" + pair.Value); 8: } 9: }); And one task to attempt updates in a separate thread (probably): 1: // attempt updates in a separate thread 2: var updateTask = new Task(() => 3: { 4: // iterates, and updates the value by one 5: foreach (var pair in dictionary) 6: { 7: dictionary[pair.Key] = pair.Value + 1; 8: } 9: }); Now that we’ve done this, we can fire up both tasks and wait for them to complete: 1: // start both tasks 2: updateTask.Start(); 3: iterationTask.Start(); 4:  5: // wait for both to complete. 6: Task.WaitAll(updateTask, iterationTask); Now, if I you didn’t know about the dirty reads, you may have expected to see the iteration before the updates (such as A:1, B:2, C:3, D:4, E:5, F:6).  However, because the reads are dirty, we will quite possibly get a combination of some updated, some original.  My own run netted this result: 1: F:6 2: E:6 3: D:5 4: C:4 5: B:3 6: A:2 Note that, of course, iteration is not in order because ConcurrentDictionary, like Dictionary, is unordered.  Also note that both E and F show the value 6.  This is because the output task reached F before the update, but the updates for the rest of the items occurred before their output (probably because console output is very slow, comparatively). If we want to always guarantee that we will get a consistent snapshot to iterate over (that is, at the point we ask for it we see precisely what is in the dictionary and no subsequent updates during iteration), we should iterate over a call to ToArray() instead: 1: // attempt iteration in a separate thread 2: var iterationTask = new Task(() => 3: { 4: // iterates using a dirty read 5: foreach (var pair in dictionary.ToArray()) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + ":" + pair.Value); 8: } 9: }); The atomic Try…() methods As you can imagine TryAdd() and TryRemove() have few surprises.  Both first check the existence of the item to determine if it can be added or removed based on whether or not the key currently exists in the dictionary: 1: // try add attempts an add and returns false if it already exists 2: if (dictionary.TryAdd("G", 7)) 3: Console.WriteLine("G did not exist, now inserted with 7"); 4: else 5: Console.WriteLine("G already existed, insert failed."); TryRemove() also has the virtue of returning the value portion of the removed entry matching the given key: 1: // attempt to remove the value, if it exists it is removed and the original is returned 2: int removedValue; 3: if (dictionary.TryRemove("C", out removedValue)) 4: Console.WriteLine("Removed C and its value was " + removedValue); 5: else 6: Console.WriteLine("C did not exist, remove failed."); Now TryUpdate() is an interesting creature.  You might think from it’s name that TryUpdate() first checks for an item’s existence, and then updates if the item exists, otherwise it returns false.  Well, note quite... It turns out when you call TryUpdate() on a concurrent dictionary, you pass it not only the new value you want it to have, but also the value you expected it to have before the update.  If the item exists in the dictionary, and it has the value you expected, it will update it to the new value atomically and return true.  If the item is not in the dictionary or does not have the value you expected, it is not modified and false is returned. 1: // attempt to update the value, if it exists and if it has the expected original value 2: if (dictionary.TryUpdate("G", 42, 7)) 3: Console.WriteLine("G existed and was 7, now it's 42."); 4: else 5: Console.WriteLine("G either didn't exist, or wasn't 7."); The composite Add methods The ConcurrentDictionary also has composite add methods that can be used to perform updates and gets, with an add if the item is not existing at the time of the update or get. The first of these, AddOrUpdate(), allows you to add a new item to the dictionary if it doesn’t exist, or update the existing item if it does.  For example, let’s say you are creating a dictionary of counts of stock ticker symbols you’ve subscribed to from a market data feed: 1: public sealed class SubscriptionManager 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<string, int> _subscriptions = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, int>(); 4:  5: // adds a new subscription, or increments the count of the existing one. 6: public void AddSubscription(string tickerKey) 7: { 8: // add a new subscription with count of 1, or update existing count by 1 if exists 9: var resultCount = _subscriptions.AddOrUpdate(tickerKey, 1, (symbol, count) => count + 1); 10:  11: // now check the result to see if we just incremented the count, or inserted first count 12: if (resultCount == 1) 13: { 14: // subscribe to symbol... 15: } 16: } 17: } Notice the update value factory Func delegate.  If the key does not exist in the dictionary, the add value is used (in this case 1 representing the first subscription for this symbol), but if the key already exists, it passes the key and current value to the update delegate which computes the new value to be stored in the dictionary.  The return result of this operation is the value used (in our case: 1 if added, existing value + 1 if updated). Likewise, the GetOrAdd() allows you to attempt to retrieve a value from the dictionary, and if the value does not currently exist in the dictionary it will insert a value.  This can be handy in cases where perhaps you wish to cache data, and thus you would query the cache to see if the item exists, and if it doesn’t you would put the item into the cache for the first time: 1: public sealed class PriceCache 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<string, double> _cache = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, double>(); 4:  5: // adds a new subscription, or increments the count of the existing one. 6: public double QueryPrice(string tickerKey) 7: { 8: // check for the price in the cache, if it doesn't exist it will call the delegate to create value. 9: return _cache.GetOrAdd(tickerKey, symbol => GetCurrentPrice(symbol)); 10: } 11:  12: private double GetCurrentPrice(string tickerKey) 13: { 14: // do code to calculate actual true price. 15: } 16: } There are other variations of these two methods which vary whether a value is provided or a factory delegate, but otherwise they work much the same. Oddities with the composite Add methods The AddOrUpdate() and GetOrAdd() methods are totally thread-safe, on this you may rely, but they are not atomic.  It is important to note that the methods that use delegates execute those delegates outside of the lock.  This was done intentionally so that a user delegate (of which the ConcurrentDictionary has no control of course) does not take too long and lock out other threads. This is not necessarily an issue, per se, but it is something you must consider in your design.  The main thing to consider is that your delegate may get called to generate an item, but that item may not be the one returned!  Consider this scenario: A calls GetOrAdd and sees that the key does not currently exist, so it calls the delegate.  Now thread B also calls GetOrAdd and also sees that the key does not currently exist, and for whatever reason in this race condition it’s delegate completes first and it adds its new value to the dictionary.  Now A is done and goes to get the lock, and now sees that the item now exists.  In this case even though it called the delegate to create the item, it will pitch it because an item arrived between the time it attempted to create one and it attempted to add it. Let’s illustrate, assume this totally contrived example program which has a dictionary of char to int.  And in this dictionary we want to store a char and it’s ordinal (that is, A = 1, B = 2, etc).  So for our value generator, we will simply increment the previous value in a thread-safe way (perhaps using Interlocked): 1: public static class Program 2: { 3: private static int _nextNumber = 0; 4:  5: // the holder of the char to ordinal 6: private static ConcurrentDictionary<char, int> _dictionary 7: = new ConcurrentDictionary<char, int>(); 8:  9: // get the next id value 10: public static int NextId 11: { 12: get { return Interlocked.Increment(ref _nextNumber); } 13: } Then, we add a method that will perform our insert: 1: public static void Inserter() 2: { 3: for (int i = 0; i < 26; i++) 4: { 5: _dictionary.GetOrAdd((char)('A' + i), key => NextId); 6: } 7: } Finally, we run our test by starting two tasks to do this work and get the results… 1: public static void Main() 2: { 3: // 3 tasks attempting to get/insert 4: var tasks = new List<Task> 5: { 6: new Task(Inserter), 7: new Task(Inserter) 8: }; 9:  10: tasks.ForEach(t => t.Start()); 11: Task.WaitAll(tasks.ToArray()); 12:  13: foreach (var pair in _dictionary.OrderBy(p => p.Key)) 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + ":" + pair.Value); 16: } 17: } If you run this with only one task, you get the expected A:1, B:2, ..., Z:26.  But running this in parallel you will get something a bit more complex.  My run netted these results: 1: A:1 2: B:3 3: C:4 4: D:5 5: E:6 6: F:7 7: G:8 8: H:9 9: I:10 10: J:11 11: K:12 12: L:13 13: M:14 14: N:15 15: O:16 16: P:17 17: Q:18 18: R:19 19: S:20 20: T:21 21: U:22 22: V:23 23: W:24 24: X:25 25: Y:26 26: Z:27 Notice that B is 3?  This is most likely because both threads attempted to call GetOrAdd() at roughly the same time and both saw that B did not exist, thus they both called the generator and one thread got back 2 and the other got back 3.  However, only one of those threads can get the lock at a time for the actual insert, and thus the one that generated the 3 won and the 3 was inserted and the 2 got discarded.  This is why on these methods your factory delegates should be careful not to have any logic that would be unsafe if the value they generate will be pitched in favor of another item generated at roughly the same time.  As such, it is probably a good idea to keep those generators as stateless as possible. Summary The ConcurrentDictionary is a very efficient and thread-safe version of the Dictionary generic collection.  It has all the benefits of type-safety that it’s generic collection counterpart does, and in addition is extremely efficient especially when there are more reads than writes concurrently. Tweet Technorati Tags: C#, .NET, Concurrent Collections, Collections, Little Wonders, Black Rabbit Coder,James Michael Hare

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for April 12, 2010 -- #837

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Michael Washington, Joe McBride, Kirupa, Maurice de Beijer, Brad Abrams, Phil Middlemiss, and CorrinaB. Shoutout: Charlie Kindel has a post up about the incompatibility between VS2010RTM and what we currently have for WP7: Visual Studio 2010 RTM and the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP and if you want to be notified when that changes, submit your email here. Erik Mork and Co. have their latest This Week in Silverlight 4.9.2010 posted. From SilverlightCream.com: Simplified MVVM: Silverlight Video Player Michael Washington created a 'designable' video player using MVVM that allows any set of controls to implement the player. Great tutorial and all the code. Windows Phone 7 Panorama Behaviors Joe McBride posted a link to a couple WP7 gesture behaviors and a link out to some more by smartyP. Event Bubbling and Tunneling Kirupa has a great article up on Event Bubbling and Tunneling... showing the route that events take through your WPF or Silverlight app. Using dynamic objects in Silverlight 4 Maurice de Beijer has a blog up about binding to indexed properties in Silverlight 4... in other words, you don't have to know what you're binging to at design time. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Ajax Endpoint Brad Abrams is still continuing his RIA series. His latest is on exposing your RIA Services in JSON. Changing Data-Templates at run-time from the VM Looks like I missed Phil Middlemiss' latest post on Changing DataTemplates at run-time. He has a visual of why you might need this right up-front, and is a very common issue. Check out the solution he provides us. Windows System Color Theme for Silverlight - Part Three CorrinaB blogged screenshots and discussion of 3 new themes that are going to be coming up, and what they've done to the controls in general. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Friday Fun: Christmas Tree Light Up

    - by Asian Angel
    Another week has thankfully passed by, so it is time to take a break and have some fun. This week’s game tests your ability to light up the whole Christmas tree…can you figure out the correct wiring configuration? Christmas Tree Light Up The object of the game is simple…light up all of the bulbs on the Christmas tree. While the game may look quick and easy at first you will need to do some thinking and experimenting to come up with the correct wiring configuration. The instructions are very simple…just click on any of the wiring sections or bulbs to rotate them. Keep in mind that you may have to click a few times to line the wiring sections or bulbs up as desired since the rotation is always clockwise. Note: You will need use all of the wiring sections available to completely light the tree up. Each time you will be presented with a different starting setup coming from your power source. Time to hook up the lights! Note: It is recommended that you disable the sound for the game since the “rotation” sounds can be slightly irritating. A nice start but there are still a lot of bulbs to light up. Getting closer… Almost there…only two more bulbs to light up. Success! Have fun playing! Play Christmas Tree Light Up Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Settle into Orbit with the Voyage Theme for Chrome and Iron Awesome Safari Compass Icons Set Escape from the Exploding Planet Wallpaper Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress Pytask is an Easy to Use To-Do List Manager for Your Ubuntu System Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox

    Read the article

  • The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

    - by Rick Strahl
    About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

    Read the article

  • Glenn Fiedler's fixed timestep with fake threads

    - by kaoD
    I've implemented Glenn Fiedler's Fix Your Timestep! quite a few times in single-threaded games. Now I'm facing a different situation: I'm trying to do this in JavaScript. I know JS is single-threaded, but I plan on using requestAnimationFrame for the rendering part. This leaves me with two independent fake threads: simulation and rendering (I suppose requestAnimationFrame isn't really threaded, is it? I don't think so, it would BREAK JS.) Timing in these threads is independent too: dt for simulation and render is not the same. If I'm not mistaken, simulation should be up to Fiedler's while loop end. After the while loop, accumulator < dt so I'm left with some unspent time (dt) in the simulation thread. The problem comes in the draw/interpolation phase: const double alpha = accumulator / dt; State state = currentState*alpha + previousState * ( 1.0 - alpha ); render( state ); In my render callback, I have the current timestamp to which I can subtract the last-simulated-in-physics-timestamp to have a dt for the current frame. Should I just forget about this dt and draw using the physics thread's dt? It seems weird, since, well, I want to interpolate for the unspent time between simulation and render too, right? Of course, I want simulation and rendering to be completely independent, but I can't get around the fact that in Glenn's implementation the renderer produces time and the simulation consumes it in discrete dt sized chunks. A similar question was asked in Semi Fixed-timestep ported to javascript but the question doesn't really get to the point, and answers there point to removing physics from the render thread (which is what I'm trying to do) or just keeping physics in the render callback too (which is what I'm trying to avoid.)

    Read the article

  • Forget Black Friday: Today is Update Your Parents’ Browser Day

    - by The Geek
    Hopefully you aren’t reading this after a long night of sitting in the cold, fighting with other people to acquire a device that will be out of date in a month. Instead of shopping, it’s time to give the gift of less sucktacular browsers. Over at The Atlantic, they proposed that today be Update Your Parents’ Browser Day, and at How-To Geek, we couldn’t agree more, especially since many of you are probably over at your relatives right now, recovering from eating too much of their food. It’s time to upgrade your parents’ browser, and while you’re at it, make sure that they have anti-virus installed too. Want to be really awesome? Setup CCleaner to run on a schedule, and if they are using Windows XP, setup an automated defrag job. Might be a good time to setup CrossLoop or TeamViewer or some type of remote desktop application so you can easily gain control at a future date when you get that inevitable phone call. How to See What Web Sites Your Computer is Secretly Connecting To HTG Explains: When Do You Need to Update Your Drivers? How to Make the Kindle Fire Silk Browser *Actually* Fast!

    Read the article

  • Data Quality Through Data Governance

    Data Quality Governance Data quality is very important to every organization, bad data cost an organization time, money, and resources that could be prevented if the proper governance was put in to place.  Data Governance Program Criteria: Support from Executive Management and all Business Units Data Stewardship Program  Cross Functional Team of Data Stewards Data Governance Committee Quality Structured Data It should go without saying but any successful project in today’s business world must get buy in from executive management and all stakeholders involved with the project. If management does not fully support a project because they see it is in there and the company’s best interest then they will remove/eliminate funding, resources and allocated time to work on the project. In essence they can render a project dead until it is official killed by the business. In addition, buy in from stake holders is also very important because they can cause delays increased spending in time, money and resources because they do not support a project. Data Stewardship programs are administered by a data steward manager who primary focus is to support, train and manage a cross functional data stewards team. A cross functional team of data stewards are pulled from various departments act to ensure that all systems work to ensure that an organization’s goals are achieved. Typically, data stewards are subject matter experts that act as mediators between their respective departments and IT. Data Quality Procedures Data Governance Committees are composed of data stewards, Upper management, IT Leadership and various subject matter experts depending on a company. The primary goal of this committee is to define strategic goals, coordinate activities, set data standards and offer data guidelines for the business. Data Quality Policies In 1997, Claudia Imhoff defined a Data Stewardship’s responsibility as to approve business naming standards, develop consistent data definitions, determine data aliases, develop standard calculations and derivations, document the business rules of the corporation, monitor the quality of the data in the data warehouse, define security requirements, and so forth. She further explains data stewards responsible for creating and enforcing polices on the following but not limited to issues. Resolving Data Integration Issues Determining Data Security Documenting Data Definitions, Calculations, Summarizations, etc. Maintaining/Updating Business Rules Analyzing and Improving Data Quality

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396  | Next Page >