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Windows Azure Recipe: Software as a Service (SaaS)

- by Clint Edmonson

The cloud was tailor built for aspiring companies to create innovative internet based applications and solutions. Whether you’re a garage startup with very little capital or a Fortune 1000 company, the ability to quickly setup, deliver, and iterate on new products is key to capturing market and mind share. And if you can capture that share and go viral, having resiliency and infinite scale at your finger tips is great peace of mind. Drivers Cost avoidance Time to market Scalability Solution Here’s a sketch of how a basic Software as a Service solution might be built out: Ingredients Web Role – this hosts the core web application. Each web role will host an instance of the software and as the user base grows, additional roles can be spun up to meet demand. Access Control – this service is essential to managing user identity. It’s backed by a full blown implementation of Active Directory and allows the definition and management of users, groups, and roles. A pre-built ASP.NET membership provider is included in the training kit to leverage this capability but it’s also flexible enough to be combined with external Identity providers including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The provider model provides extensibility to hook into other industry specific identity providers as well. Databases – nearly every modern SaaS application is backed by a relational database for its core operational data. If the solution is sold to organizations, there’s a good chance multi-tenancy will be needed. An emerging best practice for SaaS applications is to stand up separate SQL Azure database instances for each tenant’s proprietary data to ensure isolation from other tenants. Worker Role – this is the best place to handle autonomous background processing such as data aggregation, billing through external services, and other specialized tasks that can be performed asynchronously. Placing these tasks in a worker role frees the web roles to focus completely on user interaction and data input and provides finer grained control over the system’s scalability and throughput. Caching (optional) – as a web site traffic grows caching can be leveraged to keep frequently used read-only, user specific, and application resource data in a high-speed distributed in-memory for faster response times and ultimately higher scalability without spinning up more web and worker roles. It includes a token based security model that works alongside the Access Control service. Blobs (optional) – depending on the nature of the software, users may be creating or uploading large volumes of heterogeneous data such as documents or rich media. Blob storage provides a scalable, resilient way to store terabytes of user data. The storage facilities can also integrate with the Access Control service to ensure users’ data is delivered securely. Training & Examples These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and examples where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Developing Applications for the Cloud, 2nd Edition (eBook) This book demonstrates how you can create from scratch a multi-tenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud using the latest versions of the Windows Azure Platform and tools. The book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud. Fabrikam Shipping (SaaS reference application) This is a full end to end sample scenario which demonstrates how to use the Windows Azure platform for exposing an application as a service. We developed this demo just as you would: we had an existing on-premises sample, Fabrikam Shipping, and we wanted to see what it would take to transform it in a full subscription based solution. The demo you find here is the result of that investigation See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including more links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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The first day of JavaOne is already over!

- by delabassee

In the past Sunday used to be a more relaxing day with ‘just’ some JavaOne activities going on. Sunday used to be a soft day to prepare yourself for an exhausting week. This is now over as JavaOne is expanding; Sunday is now an integral part of the conference. One of the side effect of this extra day is that some activities related to JavaOne and OpenWorld such as MySQL Connect are being push to start a day earlier on Saturday (can you spot the pattern here?). On the GlassFish front, Sunday was a very busy day! It started at the Moscone Center with the annual GlassFish Community Event where the Java EE 7 and GF 4 roadmaps were presented and discussed. During the event, different GlassFish users such as ZeroTurnaround (the JRebel guys), Grupo RBS and IDR Solutions shared their views on GF, why they like GF but also what could be improved. The event was also a forum for the GF community to exchange with some of the key Java EE / GlassFish Oracle Executives and the different GF team members. The Strategy keynote and the Technical keynote were held in the Masonic Auditorium later in the after-noon. Oracle executives have presented the plans for Java SE, Java FX and Java EE. As on-demand replays will be available soon, I will not summarize several hours of content but here are some personal takeaways from those keynotes. Modularity Modularity is a big deal. We know by now that Project Jigsaw will not be ready for Java SE 8 but in any case, it is already possible (and encouraged) to test Jigsaw today. In the future, Java EE plan to rely on the modularity features provided by Java SE, so Project Jigsaw is also relevant for Java EE developers. Shorter term, to cover some of the modular requirements, Java SE will adopt the approach that was used for Java EE 6 and the notion of Profiles. This approach does not define a module system per say; Profiles is a way to clearly define different subsets of Java SE to fulfill different needs (e.g. the full JRE is not required for a headless application). The introduction of different Profiles, from the Base profile (10mb) to the Full Profile (+50mb), has been proposed for Java SE 8. Embedded Embedded is a strong theme going forward for the Java Plaform. There is now a dedicated program : Java Embedded @ JavaOne Java by nature (e.g. platform independence, built-in security, ability easily talks to any back-end systems, large set of skills available on the market, etc.) is probably the most suited platform for the Internet of Things. You can quickly be up-to-speed and develop services and applications for that space just by using your current Java skills. All you need to start developing on ARM is a 35$ Raspberry Pi ARM board (25$ if you are cheap and can live without an ethernet connection) and the recently released JDK for Linux/ARM. Obviously, GlassFish runs on Raspberry Pi. If you wan to go further in the embedded space, you should take a look Java SE Embedded, an optimized, low footprint, Java environment that support the major embedded architectures (ARM, PPC and x86). Finally, Oracle has recently introduced Java Embedded Suite, a new solution that brings modern middleware capabilities to the embedded space. Java Embedded Suite is an optimized solution that leverage Java SE Embedded but also GlassFish, Jersey and JavaDB to deploy advanced value added capabilities (eg. sensor data filtering and) deeper in the network, closer to the devices. JavaFX JavaFX is going strong! Starting from Java SE 7u6, JavaFX is bundled with the JDK. JavaFX is now available for all the major desktop platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). JavaFX is now also available, in developer preview, for low end device running Linux/ARM. During the keynote, JavaFX was shown running on a Raspberry Pi! And as announced during the keynote, JavaFX should be fully open-sourced by the end of the year; contributions are welcome!. There is a strong momentum around JavaFX, it’s the ideal client solution for the Java platform. A client layer that works perfectly with GlassFish on the back-end. If you were not convince by JavaFX, it’s time to reconsider it! As an old Chinese proverb say “One tweet is worth a thousand words!” HTML5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 HTML5 got a lot of airtime too, it was covered during the Java EE 7 section of the keynote. Some details about Project Avatar, Oracle’s incubator project for a TSA (Thin Server Architecture) solution, were diluted and shown during the keynote. On the tooling side, Project Easel running on NetBeans 7.3 beta was demo’ed, including a cool NetBeans debugging session running in Chrome! HTML 5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 deserve separate posts... Feedback We need your feedback! There are many projects, JSRs and products cooking : GlassFish 4, Project Jigsaw, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236), OpenJFX, OpenJDK to name just a few. Those projects, those specifications will have a profound impact on the Java platform for the years to come! So if you have the opportunity, download, install, learn, tests them and give feedback! Remember, you can "Make the Future Java!" Finally, the traditional GlassFish Party at the Thirsty Bear concluded the first JavaOne day. This party is another place where the community can freely exchange with the GlassFish team in a more relaxed, more friendly (but sometime more noisy) atmosphere. Arun has posted a set of pictures to reflect the atmosphere of the keynotes and the GlassFish party. You can find more details on the others Java EE and GlassFish activities here.

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Odd company release cycle: Go Distributed Source Control?

- by MrLane

sorry about this long post, but I think it is worth it! I have just started with a small .NET shop that operates quite a bit differently to other places that I have worked. Unlike any of my previous positions, the software written here is targetted at multiple customers and not every customer gets the latest release of the software at the same time. As such, there is no "current production version." When a customer does get an update, they also get all of the features added to he software since their last update, which could be a long time ago. The software is highly configurable and features can be turned on and off: so called "feature toggles." Release cycles are very tight here, in fact they are not on a shedule: when a feature is complete the software is deployed to the relevant customer. The team only last year moved from Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server. The problem is they still use TFS as if it were VSS and enforce Checkout locks on a single code branch. Whenever a bug fix gets put out into the field (even for a single customer) they simply build whatever is in TFS, test the bug was fixed and deploy to the customer! (Myself coming from a pharma and medical devices software background this is unbeliveable!). The result is that half baked dev code gets put into production without being even tested. Bugs are always slipping into release builds, but often a customer who just got a build will not see these bugs if they don't use the feature the bug is in. The director knows this is a problem as the company is starting to grow all of a sudden with some big clients coming on board and more smaller ones. I have been asked to look at source control options in order to eliminate deploying of buggy or unfinished code but to not sacrifice the somewhat asyncronous nature of the teams releases. I have used VSS, TFS, SVN and Bazaar in my career, but TFS is where most of my experience has been. Previously most teams I have worked with use a two or three branch solution of Dev-Test-Prod, where for a month developers work directly in Dev and then changes are merged to Test then Prod, or promoted "when its done" rather than on a fixed cycle. Automated builds were used, using either Cruise Control or Team Build. In my previous job Bazaar was used sitting on top of SVN: devs worked in their own small feature branches then pushed their changes to SVN (which was tied into TeamCity). This was nice in that it was easy to isolate changes and share them with other peoples branches. With both of these models there was a central dev and prod (and sometimes test) branch through which code was pushed (and labels were used to mark builds in prod from which releases were made...and these were made into branches for bug fixes to releases and merged back to dev). This doesn't really suit the way of working here, however: there is no order to when various features will be released, they get pushed when they are complete. With this requirement the "continuous integration" approach as I see it breaks down. To get a new feature out with continuous integration it has to be pushed via dev-test-prod and that will capture any unfinished work in dev. I am thinking that to overcome this we should go down a heavily feature branched model with NO dev-test-prod branches, rather the source should exist as a series of feature branches which when development work is complete are locked, tested, fixed, locked, tested and then released. Other feature branches can grab changes from other branches when they need/want, so eventually all changes get absorbed into everyone elses. This fits very much down a pure Bazaar model from what I experienced at my last job. As flexible as this sounds it just seems odd to not have a dev trunk or prod branch somewhere, and I am worried about branches forking never to re-integrate, or small late changes made that never get pulled across to other branches and developers complaining about merge disasters... What are peoples thoughts on this? A second final question: I am somewhat confused about the exact definition of distributed source control: some people seem to suggest it is about just not having a central repository like TFS or SVN, some say it is about being disconnected (SVN is 90% disconnected and TFS has a perfectly functional offline mode) and others say it is about Feature Branching and ease of merging between branches with no parent-child relationship (TFS also has baseless merging!). Perhaps this is a second question!

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AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

- by Robz / Fervent Coder

Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack). So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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yield – Just yet another sexy c# keyword?

- by George Mamaladze

yield (see NSDN c# reference) operator came I guess with .NET 2.0 and I my feeling is that it’s not as wide used as it could (or should) be. I am not going to talk here about necessarity and advantages of using iterator pattern when accessing custom sequences (just google it). Let’s look at it from the clean code point of view. Let's see if it really helps us to keep our code understandable, reusable and testable. Let’s say we want to iterate a tree and do something with it’s nodes, for instance calculate a sum of their values. So the most elegant way would be to build a recursive method performing a classic depth traversal returning the sum. private int CalculateTreeSum(Node top) { int sumOfChildNodes = 0; foreach (Node childNode in top.ChildNodes) { sumOfChildNodes += CalculateTreeSum(childNode); } return top.Value + sumOfChildNodes; } “Do One Thing” Nevertheless it violates one of the most important rules “Do One Thing”. Our method CalculateTreeSum does two things at the same time. It travels inside the tree and performs some computation – in this case calculates sum. Doing two things in one method is definitely a bad thing because of several reasons: · Understandability: Readability / refactoring · Reuseability: when overriding - no chance to override computation without copying iteration code and vice versa. · Testability: you are not able to test computation without constructing the tree and you are not able to test correctness of tree iteration. I want to spend some more words on this last issue. How do you test the method CalculateTreeSum when it contains two in one: computation & iteration? The only chance is to construct a test tree and assert the result of the method call, in our case the sum against our expectation. And if the test fails you do not know wether was the computation algorithm wrong or was that the iteration? At the end to top it all off I tell you: according to Murphy’s Law the iteration will have a bug as well as the calculation. Both bugs in a combination will cause the sum to be accidentally exactly the same you expect and the test will PASS. J Ok let’s use yield! That’s why it is generally a very good idea not to mix but isolate “things”. Ok let’s use yield! private int CalculateTreeSumClean(Node top) { IEnumerable<Node> treeNodes = GetTreeNodes(top); return CalculateSum(treeNodes); } private int CalculateSum(IEnumerable<Node> nodes) { int sumOfNodes = 0; foreach (Node node in nodes) { sumOfNodes += node.Value; } return sumOfNodes; } private IEnumerable<Node> GetTreeNodes(Node top) { yield return top; foreach (Node childNode in top.ChildNodes) { foreach (Node currentNode in GetTreeNodes(childNode)) { yield return currentNode; } } } Two methods does not know anything about each other. One contains calculation logic another jut the iteration logic. You can relpace the tree iteration algorithm from depth traversal to breath trevaersal or use stack or visitor pattern instead of recursion. This will not influence your calculation logic. And vice versa you can relace the sum with product or do whatever you want with node values, the calculateion algorithm is not aware of beeng working on some tree or graph. How about not using yield? Now let’s ask the question – what if we do not have yield operator? The brief look at the generated code gives us an answer. The compiler generates a 150 lines long class to implement the iteration logic. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class <GetTreeNodes>d__0 : IEnumerable<Node>, IEnumerable, IEnumerator<Node>, IEnumerator, IDisposable { ... 150 Lines of generated code ... } Often we compromise code readability, cleanness, testability, etc. – to reduce number of classes, code lines, keystrokes and mouse clicks. This is the human nature - we are lazy. Knowing and using such a sexy construct like yield, allows us to be lazy, write very few lines of code and at the same time stay clean and do one thing in a method. That's why I generally welcome using staff like that. Note: The above used recursive depth traversal algorithm is possibly the compact one but not the best one from the performance and memory utilization point of view. It was taken to emphasize on other primary aspects of this post.

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Modularity through HTTP

- by Michael Williamson

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

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Windows for IoT, continued

- by Valter Minute

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products. *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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On Reflector Pricing

- by Nick Harrison

I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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NDepend Evaluation: Part 3

- by Anthony Trudeau

NDepend is a Visual Studio add-in designed for intense code analysis with the goal of high code quality. NDepend uses a number of metrics and aggregates the data in pleasing static and active visual reports. My evaluation of NDepend will be broken up into several different parts. In the first part of the evaluation I looked at installing the add-in. And in the last part I went over my first impressions including an overview of the features. In this installment I provide a little more detail on a few of the features that I really like. Dependency Matrix The dependency matrix is one of the rich visual components provided with NDepend. At a glance it lets you know where you have coupling problems including cycles. It does this with number indicating the weight of the dependency and a color-coding that indicates the nature of the dependency. Green and blue cells are direct dependencies (with the difference being whether the relationship is from row-to-column or column-to-row). Black cells are the ones that you really want to know about. These indicate that you have a cycle. That is, type A refers to type B and type B also refers to Type A. But, that’s not the end of the story. A handy pop-up appears when you hover over the cell in question. It explains the color, the dependency, and provides several interesting links that will teach you more than you want to know about the dependency. You can double-click the problem cells to explode the dependency. That will show the dependencies on a method-by-method basis allowing you to more easily target and fix the problem. When you’re done you can click the back button on the toolbar. Dependency Graph The dependency graph is another component provided. It’s complementary to the dependency matrix, but it isn’t as easy to identify dependency issues using the window. On a positive note, it does provide more information than the matrix. My biggest issue with the dependency graph is determining what is shown. This was not readily obvious. I ended up using the navigation buttons to get an acceptable view. I would have liked to choose what I see. Once you see the types you want you can get a decent idea of coupling strength based on the width of the dependency lines. Double-arrowed lines are problematic and are shown in red. The size of the boxes will be related to the metric being displayed. This is controlled using the Box Size drop-down in the toolbar. Personally, I don’t find the size of the box to be helpful, so I change it to Constant Font. One nice thing about the display is that you can see the entire path of dependencies when you hover over a type. This is done by color-coding the dependencies and dependants. It would be nice if selecting the box for the type would lock the highlighting in place. I did find a perhaps unintended work-around to the color-coding. You can lock the color-coding in by hovering over the type, right-clicking, and then clicking on the canvas area to clear the pop-up menu. You can then do whatever with it including saving it to an image file with the color-coding. CQL NDepend uses a code query language (CQL) to work with your code just like it was a database. CQL cannot be confused with the robustness of T-SQL or even LINQ, but it represents an impressive attempt at providing an expressive way to enumerate and interrogate your code. There are two main windows you’ll use when working with CQL. The CQL Query Explorer allows you to define what queries (rules) are run as part of a report – I immediately unselected rules that I don’t want in my results. The CQL Query Edit window is where you can view or author your own rules. The explorer window is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t mention it further other than to say that any queries you author will appear in the custom group. Authoring your own queries is really hard to screw-up. The Intellisense-like pop-ups tell you what you can do while making composition easy. I was able to create a query within two minutes of playing with the editor. My query warns if any types that are interfaces don’t start with an “I”. WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TYPES WHERE IsInterface AND !NameLike “I” The results from the CQL Query Edit window are immediate. That fact makes it useful for ad hoc querying. It’s worth mentioning two things that could make the experience smoother. First, out of habit from using Visual Studio I expect to be able to scroll and press Tab to select an item in the list (like Intellisense). You have to press Enter when you scroll to the item you want. Second, the commands are case-sensitive. I don’t see a really good reason to enforce that. CQL has a lot of potential not just in enforcing code quality, but also enforcing architectural constraints that your enterprise has defined. Up Next My next update will be the final part of the evaluation. I will summarize my experience and provide my conclusions on the NDepend add-in. ** View Part 1 of the Evaluation ** ** View Part 2 of the Evaluation ** Disclaimer: Patrick Smacchia contacted me about reviewing NDepend. I received a free license in return for sharing my experiences and talking about the capabilities of the add-in on this site. There is no expectation of a positive review elicited from the author of NDepend.

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7-Eleven Improves the Digital Guest Experience With 10-Minute Application Provisioning

- by MichaelM-Oracle

By Vishal Mehra - Director, Cloud Computing, Oracle Consulting Making the Cloud Journey Matter There’s much more to cloud computing than cutting costs and closing data centers. In fact, cloud computing is fast becoming the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age. Oracle Consulting Services contributes to our customers’ cloud journey by accelerating application provisioning and rapidly deploying enterprise solutions. By blending flexibility with standardization, our Middleware as a Service (MWaaS) offering is ensuring the success of many cloud initiatives. 10-Minute Application Provisioning Times at 7-Eleven As a case in point, 7-Eleven recently highlighted the scope, scale, and results of a cloud-powered environment. The world’s largest convenience store chain is rolling out a Digital Guest Experience (DGE) program across 8,500 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Everyday, 7-Eleven connects with tens of millions of customers through point-of-sale terminals, web sites, and mobile apps. Promoting customer loyalty, targeting promotions, downloading digital coupons, and accepting digital payments are all part of the roadmap for a comprehensive and rewarding customer experience. And what about the time required for deploying successive versions of this mission-critical solution? Ron Clanton, 7-Eleven's DGE Program Manager, Information Technology reported at Oracle Open World, " We are now able to provision new environments in less than 10 minutes. This includes the complete SOA Suite on Exalogic, and Enterprise Manager managing both the SOA Suite, Exalogic, and our Exadata databases ." OCS understands the complex nature of innovative solutions and has processes and expertise to help clients like 7-Eleven rapidly develop technology that enhances the customer experience with little more than the click of a button. OCS understood that the 7-Eleven roadmap required careful planning, agile development, and a cloud-capable environment to move fast and perform at enterprise scale. Business Agility Today’s business-savvy technology leaders face competing priorities as they confront the digital disruptions of the mobile revolution and next-generation enterprise applications. To support an innovation agenda, IT is required to balance competing priorities between development and operations groups. Standardization and consolidation of computing resources are the keys to success. With our operational and technical expertise promoting business agility, Oracle Consulting's deep Middleware as a Service experience can make a significant difference to our clients by empowering enterprise IT organizations with the computing environment they seek to keep up with the pace of change that digitally driven business units expect. Depending on the needs of the organization, this environment runs within a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Through on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, IT delivers the standard tools and methods for developing, integrating, deploying, and scaling next-generation applications. Gold profiles of predefined configurations eliminate the version mismatches among databases, application servers, and SOA suite components, delivered both by Oracle and other enterprise ISVs. These computing resources are well defined in business terms, enabling users to select what they need from a service catalog. Striking the Balance between Development and Operations As a result, development groups have the flexibility to choose among a menu of available services with descriptions of standard business functions, service level guarantees, and costs. Faced with the consumerization of enterprise IT, they can deliver the innovative customer experiences that seamlessly integrate with underlying enterprise applications and services. This cloud-powered development and testing environment accelerates release cycles to ensure agile development and rapid deployments. At the same time, the operations group is relying on certified stacks and frameworks, tuned to predefined environments and patterns. Operators can maintain a high level of security, and continue best practices for applications/systems monitoring and management. Moreover, faced with the challenges of delivering on service level agreements (SLAs) with the business units, operators can ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of the infrastructure. The elasticity of a cloud-computing environment – the ability to rapidly add virtual machines and storage in response to computing demands -- makes a difference for hardware utilization and efficiency. Contending with Continuous Change What does it take to succeed on the promise of the cloud? As the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age, IT must face not only the technical transformations but also the organizational challenges of the cloud. Standardizing key technologies, resources, and services through cloud computing is only one part of the cloud journey. Managing relationships among multiple department and projects over time – developing the management, governance, and monitoring capabilities within IT – is an often unmentioned but all too important second part. In fact, IT must have the organizational agility to contend with continuous change. This is where a skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. With a lifecycle services approach to delivering innovative business solutions, Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help enterprise customers succeed on their cloud journeys as well as other converging mega trends .

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CPU Usage in Very Large Coherence Clusters

- by jpurdy

When sizing Coherence installations, one of the complicating factors is that these installations (by their very nature) tend to be application-specific, with some being large, memory-intensive caches, with others acting as I/O-intensive transaction-processing platforms, and still others performing CPU-intensive calculations across the data grid. Regardless of the primary resource requirements, Coherence sizing calculations are inherently empirical, in that there are so many permutations that a simple spreadsheet approach to sizing is rarely optimal (though it can provide a good starting estimate). So we typically recommend measuring actual resource usage (primarily CPU cycles, network bandwidth and memory) at a given load, and then extrapolating from those measurements. Of course there may be multiple types of load, and these may have varying degrees of correlation -- for example, an increased request rate may drive up the number of objects "pinned" in memory at any point, but the increase may be less than linear if those objects are naturally shared by concurrent requests. But for most reasonably-designed applications, a linear resource model will be reasonably accurate for most levels of scale. However, at extreme scale, sizing becomes a bit more complicated as certain cluster management operations -- while very infrequent -- become increasingly critical. This is because certain operations do not naturally tend to scale out. In a small cluster, sizing is primarily driven by the request rate, required cache size, or other application-driven metrics. In larger clusters (e.g. those with hundreds of cluster members), certain infrastructure tasks become intensive, in particular those related to members joining and leaving the cluster, such as introducing new cluster members to the rest of the cluster, or publishing the location of partitions during rebalancing. These tasks have a strong tendency to require all updates to be routed via a single member for the sake of cluster stability and data integrity. Fortunately that member is dynamically assigned in Coherence, so it is not a single point of failure, but it may still become a single point of bottleneck (until the cluster finishes its reconfiguration, at which point this member will have a similar load to the rest of the members). The most common cause of scaling issues in large clusters is disabling multicast (by configuring well-known addresses, aka WKA). This obviously impacts network usage, but it also has a large impact on CPU usage, primarily since the senior member must directly communicate certain messages with every other cluster member, and this communication requires significant CPU time. In particular, the need to notify the rest of the cluster about membership changes and corresponding partition reassignments adds stress to the senior member. Given that portions of the network stack may tend to be single-threaded (both in Coherence and the underlying OS), this may be even more problematic on servers with poor single-threaded performance. As a result of this, some extremely large clusters may be configured with a smaller number of partitions than ideal. This results in the size of each partition being increased. When a cache server fails, the other servers will use their fractional backups to recover the state of that server (and take over responsibility for their backed-up portion of that state). The finest granularity of this recovery is a single partition, and the single service thread can not accept new requests during this recovery. Ordinarily, recovery is practically instantaneous (it is roughly equivalent to the time required to iterate over a set of backup backing map entries and move them to the primary backing map in the same JVM). But certain factors can increase this duration drastically (to several seconds): large partitions, sufficiently slow single-threaded CPU performance, many or expensive indexes to rebuild, etc. The solution of course is to mitigate each of those factors but in many cases this may be challenging. Larger clusters also lead to the temptation to place more load on the available hardware resources, spreading CPU resources thin. As an example, while we've long been aware of how garbage collection can cause significant pauses, it usually isn't viewed as a major consumer of CPU (in terms of overall system throughput). Typically, the use of a concurrent collector allows greater responsiveness by minimizing pause times, at the cost of reducing system throughput. However, at a recent engagement, we were forced to turn off the concurrent collector and use a traditional parallel "stop the world" collector to reduce CPU usage to an acceptable level. In summary, there are some less obvious factors that may result in excessive CPU consumption in a larger cluster, so it is even more critical to test at full scale, even though allocating sufficient hardware may often be much more difficult for these large clusters.

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Why Executives Need Enterprise Project Portfolio Management: 3 Key Considerations to Drive Value Across the Organization

- by Melissa Centurio Lopes

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} By: Guy Barlow, Oracle Primavera Industry Strategy Director Over the last few years there has been a tremendous shift – some would say tectonic in nature – that has brought project management to the forefront of executive attention. Many factors have been driving this growing awareness, most notably, the global financial crisis, heightened regulatory environments and a need to more effectively operationalize corporate strategy. Executives in India are no exception. In fact, given the phenomenal rate of progress of the country, top of mind for all executives (whether in finance, operations, IT, etc.) is the need to build capacity, ramp-up production and ensure that the right resources are in place to capture growth opportunities. This applies across all industries from asset-intensive – like oil & gas, utilities and mining – to traditional manufacturing and the public sector, including services-based sectors such as the financial, telecom and life sciences segments are also part of the mix. However, compounding matters is a complex, interplay between projects – big and small, complex and simple – as companies expand and grow both domestically and internationally. So, having a standardized, enterprise wide solution for project portfolio management is natural. Failing to do so is akin to having two ERP systems, one to manage “large” invoices and one to manage “small” invoices. It makes no sense and provides no enterprise wide visibility. Therefore, it is imperative for executives to understand the full range of their business commitments, the benefit to the company, current performance and associated course corrections if needed. Irrespective of industry and regardless of the use case (e.g., building a power plant, launching a new financial service or developing a new automobile) company leaders need to approach the value of enterprise project portfolio management via 3 critical areas: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} 1. Greater Financial Discipline – Improve financial rigor and results through better governance and control is an imperative given today’s financial uncertainty and greater investment scrutiny. For example, as India plans a US$1 trillion investment in the country’s infrastructure how do companies ensure costs are managed? How do you control cash flow? Can you easily report this to stakeholders? 2. Improved Operational Excellence – Increase efficiency and reduce costs through robust collaboration and integration. Upwards of 66% of cost variances are driven by poor supplier collaboration. As you execute initiatives do you have visibility into the performance of your supply base? How are they integrated into the broader program plan? 3. Enhanced Risk Mitigation – Manage and react to uncertainty through improved transparency and contingency planning. What happens if you’re faced with a skills shortage? How do you plan and account for geo-political or weather related events? In summary, projects are not just the delivery of a product or service to a customer inside a predetermined schedule; they often form a contractual and even moral obligation to shareholders and stakeholders alike. Hence the intimate connection between executives and projects, with the latter providing executives with the platform to demonstrate that their organization has the capabilities and competencies needed to meet and, whenever possible, exceed their customer commitments. Effectively developing and operationalizing corporate strategy is the hallmark of successful executives and enterprise project and portfolio management allows them to achieve this goal. Article was first published for Manage India, an e-newsletter, PMI India.

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Windows 8 for productivity?

- by Charles Young

At long last I’ve started using Windows 8. I boot from a VHD on which I have installed Office, Visio, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc. For a week, now, I’ve been happily writing code and documents and using Visio and PowerPoint. I am, very much, a ‘productivity’ user rather than a content consumer. I spend my days flitting between countless windows and browser tabs displayed across dual monitors. I need to access a lot of different functionality and information in as fluid a fashion as possible. With that in mind, and like so many others, I was worried about Windows 8. The Metro interface is primarily about content consumption on touch-enabled screens, and not really geared for people like me sitting in front of an 8-core non-touch laptop and an additional Samsung monitor. I still use a mouse, not my finger. And I create more than I consume. Clearly, Windows 8 won’t be viable for people like me unless Metro keeps out of my hair when using productivity and development tools. With this in mind, I had long expected Microsoft to provide some mechanism for switching Metro off. There was a registry hack in last year’s Developer Preview, but this capability has been removed. That’s brave. So, how have things worked out so far? Well, I am really quite surprised. When I played with the Developer Preview last year, it was clear that Metro was unfinished and didn’t play well enough with the desktop. Obviously I expected things to improve, but the context switching from desktop to full-screen seemed a heavy burden to place on users. That sense of abrupt change hasn’t entirely gone away (how could it), but after a few days, I can’t say that I find it burdensome or irritating. I’ve got used very quickly to ‘gesturing’ with my mouse at the bottom or top right corners of the screen to move between applications, using the Windows key to toggle the Start screen and generally finding my way around. I am surprised at how effective the Start screen is, given the rather basic grouping features it provides. Of course, I had to take control of it and sort things the way I want. If anything, though, the Start screen provides a better navigation and application launcher tool than the old Start menu. What I didn’t expect was the way that Metro enhances the productivity story. As I write this, I’ve got my desktop open with a maximised Word window. However, the desktop extends only across about 85% of the width of my screen. On the left hand side, I have a column that displays the new Metro email client. This is currently showing me a list of emails for my main work account. I can flip easily between different accounts and read my email within that same column. As I work on documents, I want to be able to monitor my inbox with a quick glance. The desktop, of course, has its own snap feature. I could run the desktop full screen and bring up Outlook and Word side by side. However, this doesn’t begin to approach the convenience of snapping the Metro email client. Consider that when I snap a window on the desktop, it initially takes up 50% of the screen. Outlook doesn’t really know anything about snap, and doesn’t adjust to make effective use of the limited screen estate. Even at 50% screen width, it is difficult to use, so forget about trying to use it in a Metro fashion. In any case, I am left with the prospect of having to manually adjust everything to view my email effectively alongside Word. Worse, there is nothing stopping another window from overlapping and obscuring my email. It becomes a struggle to keep sight of email as it arrives. Of course, there is always ‘toast’ to notify me when things arrive, but if Outlook is obscured, this just feels intrusive. The beauty of the Metro snap feature is that my email reader now exists outside of my desktop. The Metro app has been crafted to work well in the fixed width column as well as in full-screen. It cannot be obscured by overlapping windows. I still get notifications if I wish. More importantly, it is clear that careful attention has been given to how things work when moving between applications when ‘snapped’. If I decide, say to flick over to the Metro newsreader to catch up with current affairs, my desktop, rather than my email client, obligingly makes way for the reader. With a simple gesture and click, or alternatively by pressing Windows-Tab, my desktop reappears. Another pleasant surprise is the way Windows 8 handles dual monitors. It’s not just the fact that both screens now display the desktop task bar. It’s that I can so easily move between Metro and the desktop on either screen. I can only have Metro on one screen at a time which makes entire sense given the ‘full-screen’ nature of Metro apps. Using dual monitors feels smoother and easier than previous versions of Windows. Overall then, I’m enjoying the Windows 8 improvements. Strangely, for all the hype (“Windows reimagined”, etc.), my perception as a ‘productivity’ user is more one of evolution than revolution. It all feels very familiar, but just better.

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Qt vs .NET - plz no n00bs who don't know wtf they're talking about [closed]

- by Pirate for Profit

Man in all these Qt vs. .NET discussions 90% these people don't know WTF they're talking about. Trying to get a real comparison chart going before we embark on a major fucking project. And yes I'm drunk, and yes I use cocaine. Event Handling In Qt the event handling system you just emit signals when something cool happens and then catch them in slots, for instance emit valueChanged(int percent, bool something); and void MyCatcherObj::valueChanged(int p, bool ok){} blocking them and disconnecting them when needed, doing it across threads... once you get the hang of it, it just seems a lot more natural and intuitive than the way the .NET event handling is set up (you know, object sender, CustomEventArgs e). And I'm not just talking about syntax, because in the end the .NET delegate crap is the bomb. I'm also talking about in more than just reflection (because, yes, .NET obviously has much stronger reflection capabilities). I'm talking about in the way the system feels to a human being. Qt wins hands down i m o. Basically, the footprints make more sense and you can visualize the project easier without the clunky event handling system. I wish I could it explain it better. The only thing is, I do love some of the ease of C# compared to C++ and .NET's assembly architecture. That is a big bonus for modular projects, which are a PITA to do in C++. Database Ease of Doing Crap Also what about datasets and database manipulations. I think .net wins here but I'm not sure. Threading/Conccurency How do you guys think of the threading? In .NET, all I've ever done is make like a list of master worker threads with locks. I like QConcurrentFramework, you don't worry about locks or anything, and with the ease of the signal slot system across threads it's nice to get notified about the progress of things. Memory Usage Also what do you think of the overall memory usage comparison. Is the .NET garbage collector pretty on the ball and quick compared to the instantaneous nature of native memory management? Or does it just let programs leak up a storm and lag the computer then clean it up when it's about to really lag? However, I am a n00b who doesn't know what I'm talking about, please school me on the subject.

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Best Practice for Images with Codeigniter : Generating Thumbs or Resizing on the Fly

- by Steve K

Hi all, I know there’s been a good deal written on thumbnail generation and the like with CI, but I wanted to explain what I’ve made and see what kind of best-practice advice I could find. Here’s my story… Currently, I have a site which allows users to upload collections of photos to projects they’ve created after first creating an account. Upon account creation, the site generates folders for the users in the following fashion for each of five pre-defined projects: /students/username/project_num/images/thumbs/ (This is to say that within a pre-created students folder, the username, project_num, images and thumbs folders are created recursively five times.) When a user uploads images to a project, I have a gallery controller which uploads the full images into the images folder for the project_num, and then creates a smaller thumbnail which maintains its ratio. So far so good. On the index page of the site, where these thumbnails and full images are displayed, I had a bit of a brain lapse, thinking I could simply output the full image while resizing it via css for a ‘medium-size’ image which would lead to the full-size image when clicked. (To be clear, the path is: Click on thumbnail— Load scaled full-size (medium-size) image via ajax into a display area above thumbs— Click on medium-sized image— Load full size image via lightbox, or something of that nature.) I have everything working to this point, except, as one might imagine, resizing the full-sized images with css doesn’t maintain aspect ratio for the thumbs, which means I need to find the best way to resize these. In thinking about it, I figured I had two options: I could resize the image on the fly when the user clicks a thumbnail to load the medium-sized image via ajax. (I have a method ‘get_image($url)’ in my gallery controller which simply loads a view with an image tag and the image source passed to it, etc.) I thought perhaps I could send it first to my gallery model, resize it there on the fly, and send it on to the view. The problem I’m having is that resizing it on the fly and echoing it out gives me the raw image data (I apologize, I don’t know that’s the right term). I’ve tried using data_uris to format the raw data into something echoable, but with no success. Is this method possible? The second option I considered was to generate a second medium-sized thumbnail when the user uploads the image with maintain_ratio set to true. This method is slightly less ideal, given that when providing a way for the user to delete their projects, I’ll need to scan for an additional set of images to delete. Not a huge deal, definitely, but something I figured could be avoided by generating the medium-sized image on the fly. I hope I’ve been clear in my explanations, if long-winded! I’m very curious to see what suggestions folks have about the best way to handle this. Much thanks for reading, and any suggestions are much-appreciated! Steve K.

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Reliable way of generating unique hardware ID

- by mr.b

Question: what's the best way to accomplish following. I have to come up with unique ID for each networked client, such that: it (ID) should persist once client software is installed on target computer, and should continue to persist if software is re-installed on same computer and same OS installment, it should not change if hardware configuration is modified in most ways (except changing the motherboard) When hard drive with client software installed is cloned to another computer with identical hardware configuration (or, as similar as possible), client software should be aware of that change. A little bit of explanation and some back-story: This question is basically age old question that also touches topic of software copy-protection, as some of mechanisms used in that area are mentioned here. I should be clear at this point that I'm not looking for a copy-protection scheme. Please, read on. :) I'm working on a client-server software that is supposed to work in local network. One of problems I have to solve is to identify each unique client in network (not so much of a problem), so that I can apply certain attributes to every specific client, retain and enforce those attributes during deployment lifetime of a specific client. While I was looking for a solution, I was aware of following: Windows activation system uses some kind of heavy fingerprinting mechanism, that is extremely sensitive to hardware modifications, Disk imaging software copies along all Volume IDs (tied to each partition when formatted), and custom, uniquely generated IDs during installation process, during first run, or in any other way, that is strictly software in its nature, and stored in registry or on hard drive, so it's very easy to confuse two Obvious choice for this kind of problem would be to find out BIOS identifiers (not 100% sure if this is unique through identical motherboard models, though), as that's the only thing I can rely on, that isn't duplicated, transferred by cloning, and that can't be changed (at least not by using some user-space program). Everything else fails as either being not reliable (MAC cloning, anyone?), or too demanding (in terms that it's too sensitive to configuration changes). Am I missing something obvious here? Sub-question that I'd like to ask is, am I doing it correctly, architecture-wise? Perhaps there is a better tool for task that I have to accomplish... Another approach I had in mind is something similar to handshake mechanism, where server maintains internal lookup table of connected client IDs (which can be even completely software-based and non-unique at any given moment), and tells client to come up with different ID during handshake, if duplicate ID is provided upon connection. That approach, unfortunately, doesn't play nicely with one of requirements to tie attributes to specific client during lifetime.

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What was your the most impressive technical programming achievement performed to impress a romantic

- by DVK

OK, so the archetypal human story is for a guy to go out and impress the girl with some wonderful achievement like slaying a dragon or building a monument or conquering neighboring tribe. This being enlightened 21st century on SO, let's morph this into a: StackOverflower performing a feat of programming to impress a romantic interest. There are two ways to do this: Technical achievement: Impressing a person with suitable background/understanding of programming with actual coding powerss you displayed. A dumb movie example would be that kid in "Hackers" move showing off his hacking skills in front of Angeline Jolie. Artistic achievement: Impressing a person with a result of running said code, whether they understand just how incredible the code itself is. An example is the animated ANSI rose (for a guy who actually wrote the ANSI code) This question is only about the first kind (technical achievements) - e.g. the person of interest was presented with impressive code/design that (s)he was able to properly appreciate. Rules (what doesn't qualify): The target audience must have been a person of romantic interest (prospective or present significant other or random hook-up). E.g. showing your program to your sister who's also a software developer doesn't count. The achievement must have been done specifically with the goal to impress such a person. However, it is OK if the achievement was done to impress a generic qualifying person, not someone specific. Although... if you write code to impress girls in general, I'd say "get a better idea of the opposite sex" The achievement must have been done with the goal of impressing the person. In other words, if you would have done it without romantic interest's knowledge anyway, it doesn't count. As examples, the following does not count: programming for your job. Programming for a coding contest. Open Source program that you'd have done anyway. The precise nature of the awesomeness of the achievement is somewhat irrelevant - from learning entire J2EE in 2 days to writing fancy game engine to implementing Python compiler in LOGO. As long as it's programming/software development related. The achievement should preferably be something other people would rank highly as well. If your date was impressed with your skill at calculating Fibonacci sequence without recursive function calls, it doesn't mean most developers will be. But it does mean you need to start finding better things to do on dates ;)

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Oracle Coding Standards Feature Implementation

- by Mike Hofer

Okay, I have reached a sort of an impasse. In my open source project, a .NET-based Oracle database browser, I've implemented a bunch of refactoring tools. So far, so good. The one feature I was really hoping to implement was a big "Global Reformat" that would make the code (scripts, functions, procedures, packages, views, etc.) standards compliant. (I've always been saddened by the lack of decent SQL refactoring tools, and wanted to do something about it.) Unfortunatey, I am discovering, much to my chagrin, that there doesn't seem to be any one widely-used or even "generally accepted" standard for PL-SQL. That kind of puts a crimp on my implementation plans. My search has been fairly exhaustive. I've found lots of conflicting documents, threads and articles and the opinions are fairly diverse. (Comma placement, of all things, seems to generate quite a bit of debate.) So I'm faced with a couple of options: Add a feature that lets the user customize the standard and then reformat the code according to that standard. —OR— Add a feature that lets the user customize the standard and simply generate a violations list like StyleCop does, leaving the SQL untouched. In my mind, the first option saves the end-users a lot of work, but runs the risk of modifying SQL in potentially unwanted ways. The second option runs the risk of generating lots of warnings and doing no work whatsoever. (It'd just be generally annoying.) In either scenario, I still have no standard to go by. What I'd need to know from you guys is kind of poll-ish, but kind of not. If you were going to use a tool of this nature, what parts of your SQL code would you want it to warn you about or fix? Again, I'm just at a loss due to a lack of a cohesive standard. And given that there isn't anything out there that's officially published by Oracle, I think this is something the community could weigh in on. Also, given the way that voting works on SO, the votes would help to establish the popularity of a given "refactoring." P.S. The engine parses SQL into an expression tree so it can robustly analyze the SQL and reformat it. There should be quite a bit that we can do to correct the format of the SQL. But I am thinking that for the first release of the thing, layout is the primary concern. Though it is worth noting that the thing already has refactorings for converting keywords to upper case, and identifiers to lower case.

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Making a Grid in an NSView

- by Hooligancat

I currently have an NSView that draws a grid pattern (essentially a guide of horizontal and vertical lines) with the idea being that a user can change the spacing of the grid and the color of the grid. The purpose of the grid is to act as a guideline for the user when lining up objects. Everything works just fine with one exception. When I resize the NSWindow by dragging the resize handle, if my grid spacing is particularly small (say 10 pixels). the drag resize becomes lethargic in nature. My drawRect code for the grid is as follows: -(void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect { NSRect thisViewSize = [self bounds]; // Set the line color [[NSColor colorWithDeviceRed:0 green:(255/255.0) blue:(255/255.0) alpha:1] set]; // Draw the vertical lines first NSBezierPath * verticalLinePath = [NSBezierPath bezierPath]; int gridWidth = thisViewSize.size.width; int gridHeight = thisViewSize.size.height; int i; while (i < gridWidth) { i = i + [self currentSpacing]; NSPoint startPoint = {i,0}; NSPoint endPoint = {i, gridHeight}; [verticalLinePath setLineWidth:1]; [verticalLinePath moveToPoint:startPoint]; [verticalLinePath lineToPoint:endPoint]; [verticalLinePath stroke]; } // Draw the horizontal lines NSBezierPath * horizontalLinePath = [NSBezierPath bezierPath]; i = 0; while (i < gridHeight) { i = i + [self currentSpacing]; NSPoint startPoint = {0,i}; NSPoint endPoint = {gridWidth, i}; [horizontalLinePath setLineWidth:1]; [horizontalLinePath moveToPoint:startPoint]; [horizontalLinePath lineToPoint:endPoint]; [horizontalLinePath stroke]; } } I suspect this is entirely to do with the way that I am drawing the grid and am open to suggestions on how I might better go about it. I can see where the inefficiency is coming in, drag-resizing the NSWindow is constantly calling the drawRect in this view as it resizes, and the closer the grid, the more calculations per pixel drag of the parent window. I was thinking of hiding the view on the resize of the window, but it doesn't feel as dynamic. I want the user experience to be very smooth without any perceived delay or flickering. Does anyone have any ideas on a better or more efficient method to drawing the grid? All help, as always, very much appreciated.

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Ajax problem not displaying data using multiple javascript calls...

- by Ronedog

I'm writing an app that uses ajax to retrieve data from a mysql db using php. Because of the nature of the app, the user clicks an href link that has an "onclick" event used to call the javascript/ajax. I'm retrieving the data from mysql, then calling a separate php function which creates a small html table with the necessary data in it. The new table gets passed back to the responseText and is displayed inside a div tag. The tables only have around 10-20 rows of data in them. This functionality is working fine and displays the data in html form exactly as it needs to be on the page. The problem is this. the HREF "onclick" event needs to run multiple scripts one right after the other. The first script updates the "existing" data and inside the "update_existing" function is a call to refresh a section of the page with the updated HTML from the responseText. Then when that is done a "display_html" function is called which also updates a different section of the page with it's newly created HTML table. The event looks like this: Update This string gets built dynamically using php with parameters supplied, but for this example I simply took the parameters out so it didn't get confusing. The "update_existion() function actually calls the display_html() function which updates a section of the page as needed. I need to update a different section of the page on the same click of the mouse right after the update, which is why I'm calling the display_html() again, right after it. The problem is only the last call is being updated on my screen. In other words, the 2nd function call "display_html()" executes and displays the refreshed data just fine, but the previous call to update_existing() runs and updates the database properly, but doesn't display on the screen unless I press the browsers "refresh" button, which of course displays the new data exactly how I want it to, but I don't want the users to have to press the "refresh" button. I tried adding multiple "display_html() calls one right after the other, separating all of them with the semicolon and learned that only the very last function call actually refreshed the div element on the html page with the table information, although all the previous display_html() calls worked, they couldn't be seen on the page without a refresh of the browser. Is this a problem with javascript, or the ajax call, or is this a limitation in the DOM that only allows one element to be updated at a time. The ajax call is asynchroneous, but I've tried both, only async works period. This is the same in both Firefox and Internet Explorer Any ideas what's going on and how to get around it so I can run these multiple scripts?

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QT vs. Net - REAL comparisons for R.A.D. projects

- by Pirate for Profit

Man in all these Qt vs. .NET discussions 90% these people argue about the dumbest crap. Trying to get a real comparison chart here, because I know a little about both frameworks but I don't know everything. I believe Qt and .NET both have strengths and weaknesses. This is to make a comparison that highlights these so people can make more informed decisions before embarking on a project, in the spirit of R.A.D. Event Handling In Qt the event handling system is very simple. You just emit signals when something cool happens and then catch them in slots. ie. // run some calculations, then emit valueChanged(30, false, 20.2); and then catching it, any object can make a slot to recieve that message easily void MyObj::valueChanged(int percent, bool ok, float timeRemaining). It's easy to "block" an event or "disconnect" when needed, and works seamlessly across threads... once you get the hang of it, it just seems a lot more natural and intuitive than the way the .NET event handling is set up (you know, void valueChanged(object sender, CustomEventArgs e). And I'm not just talking about syntax, because in the end the .NET anonymous delegates are the bomb. I'm also talking about in more than just reflection (because, yes, .NET obviously has much stronger reflection capabilities). I'm talking about in the way the system feels to a human being. Qt wins hands down for the simplest yet still flexible event handling system ever i m o. Plugins and such I do love some of the ease of C# compared to C++, as well as .NET's assembly architecture, even though it leads to a bunch of .dll's (there's ways to combine everything into a single exe though). That is a big bonus for modular projects, which are a PITA to import stuff in C++ as far as RAD is concerned. Database Ease of Doing Crap Also what about datasets and database manipulations. I think .net wins here but I'm not sure. Threading/Conccurency How do you guys think of the threading? In .NET, all I've ever done is make like a list of master worker threads with locks. I like QConcurrentFramework, you don't worry about locks or anything, and with the ease of the signal slot system across threads it's nice to get notified about the progress of things. QConcurrent is the simplest threading mechanism I've ever played with. Memory Usage Also what do you think of the overall memory usage comparison. Is the .NET garbage collector pretty on the ball and quick compared to the instantaneous nature of native memory management? Or does it just let programs leak up a storm and lag the computer then clean it up when it's about to really lag? Doesn't the just-in-time compiler make native code that is pretty good, like and that only happens the first time the program is run? However, I am a n00b who doesn't know what I'm talking about, please school me on the subject.

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extra vertical space within <li> in IE7

- by powerboy

The test case is in below. Or you can view it in jsbin: http://jsbin.com/uxagi. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style type="text/css"> body {margin: 20px; } #main {border: 1px solid red;} img {float: left; height: 100px; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;} ul {margin: 0; padding: 0; list-style-type: none;} </style> </head> <body> <div id="main"> <ul> <li> <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/07/CranebyLinson1894.jpg/100px-CranebyLinson1894.jpg" /> <div class="content">"The Open Boat" is a short story by American author Stephen Crane. First published in 1897, it was based on Crane's experience of having survived a shipwreck off the coast of Florida earlier that year while traveling to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent. Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar. He and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat; one of the men, an oiler named Billie Higgins, drowned. Crane subsequently adapted his report into narrative form, and the short story "The Open Boat" was published in Scribner's Magazine. The story is told from the point of view of an anonymous correspondent, Crane's fictional doppelgänger, and the action closely resembles the author's experiences after the shipwreck. A volume titled The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure was published in the United States in 1898. Praised for its innovation by contemporary critics, the story is considered an exemplary work of literary Naturalism. One of the most frequently discussed works in Crane's canon, it is notable for its use of imagery, irony, symbolism, and exploration of themes including survival, solidarity, and the conflict between man and nature. H. G. Wells considered "The Open Boat" to be "beyond all question, the crown of all [Crane's] work".</div> </li> </ul> </div> </body> </html> Note that in standards-compliant browsers and IE8, there is no vertical space between the red border and the text. But there is vertical space in IE7 (haven't tested in IE6).

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Boggling Direct3D9 dynamic vertex buffer Lock crash/post-lock failure on Intel GMA X3100.

- by nj

Hi, For starters I'm a fairly seasoned graphics programmer but as wel all know, everyone makes mistakes. Unfortunately the codebase is a bit too large to start throwing sensible snippets here and re-creating the whole situation in an isolated CPP/codebase is too tall an order -- for which I am sorry, do not have the time. I'll do my best to explain. B.t.w, I will of course supply specific pieces of code if someone wonders how I'm handling this-or-that! As with all resources in the D3DPOOL_DEFAULT pool, when the device context is taken away from you you'll sooner or later will have to reset your resources. I've built a mechanism to handle this for all relevant resources that's been working for years; but that fact nothingwithstanding I've of course checked, asserted and doubted any assumption since this bug came to light. What happens is as follows: I have a rather large dynamic vertex buffer, exact size 18874368 bytes. This buffer is locked (and discarded fully using the D3DLOCK_DISCARD flag) each frame prior to generating dynamic geometry (isosurface-related, f.y.i) to it. This works fine, until, of course, I start to reset. It might take 1 time, it might take 2 or it might take 5 resets to set off a bug that causes an access violation either on the pointer returned by the Lock() operation on the renewed resource or a plain crash -- regarding a somewhat similar address, but without the offset that it has tacked on to it in the first case because in that case we're somewhere halfway writing -- iside the D3D9 dll Lock() call. I've tested this on other hardware, upgraded my GMA X3100 drivers (using a MacBook with BootCamp) to the latest ones, but I can't reproduce it on any other machine and I'm at a loss about what's wrong here. I have tried to reproduce a similar situation with a similar buffer (I've got a large scratch pad of the same type I filled with quads) and beyond a certain amount of bytes it started to behave likewise. I'm not asking for a solution here but I'm very interested if there are other developers here who have battled with the same foe or maybe some who can point me in some insightful direction, maybe ask some questions that might shed a light on what I may or may not be overlooking. Another interesting artifact is that the vertex buffer starts to bug if I supply both D3DLOCK_DISCARD and D3DLOCK_NOOVERWRITE together which, even though not very logical (you're not going to overwrite if you've just discarded all), gives graphics glitches. Thanks and any corrections are more than welcome. Niels p.s - A friend of mine raised the valid point that it is a huge buffer for onboard video RAM and it's being at least double or triple buffered internally due to it's dynamic nature. On the other hand, the debug output (D3D9 debug DLL + max. warning output) remains silent. p.s 2 - Had it tested on more machines and still works -- it's probably a matter of circumstance: the huge dynamic, internally double/trippled buffered buffer, not a lot of memory and drivers that don't complain when they should.. Unless someone has a better suggestion; I'd still love to hear it :)

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Qt vs .NET - a few comparisons [closed]

- by Pirate for Profit

Event Handling In Qt the event handling system you just emit signals when something cool happens and then catch them in slots, for instance emit valueChanged(int percent, bool something); and void MyCatcherObj::valueChanged(int p, bool ok){} blocking them and disconnecting them when needed, doing it across threads... once you get the hang of it, it just seems a lot more natural and intuitive than the way the .NET event handling is set up (you know, object sender, CustomEventArgs e). And I'm not just talking about syntax, because in the end the .NET delegate crap is the bomb. I'm also talking about in more than just reflection (because, yes, .NET obviously has much stronger reflection capabilities). I'm talking about in the way the system feels to a human being. Qt wins hands down i m o. Basically, the footprints make more sense and you can visualize the project easier without the clunky event handling system. I wish I could it explain it better. The only thing is, I do love some of the ease of C# compared to C++ and .NET's assembly architecture. That is a big bonus for modular projects, which are a PITA to do in C++. Database Ease of Doing Crap Also what about datasets and database manipulations. I think .net wins here but I'm not sure. Threading/Conccurency How do you guys think of the threading? In .NET, all I've ever done is make like a list of master worker threads with locks. I like QConcurrentFramework, you don't worry about locks or anything, and with the ease of the signal slot system across threads it's nice to get notified about the progress of things. Memory Usage Also what do you think of the overall memory usage comparison. Is the .NET garbage collector pretty on the ball and quick compared to the instantaneous nature of native memory management? Or does it just let programs leak up a storm and lag the computer then clean it up when it's about to really lag? However, I am a n00b who doesn't know what I'm talking about, please school me on the subject.

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What's the standard algorithm for syncing two lists of objects?

- by Oliver Giesen

I'm pretty sure this must be in some kind of text book (or more likely in all of them) but I seem to be using the wrong keywords to search for it... :( A common task I'm facing while programming is that I am dealing with lists of objects from different sources which I need to keep in sync somehow. Typically there's some sort of "master list" e.g. returned by some external API and then a list of objects I create myself each of which corresponds to an object in the master list. Sometimes the nature of the external API will not allow me to do a live sync: For instance the external list might not implement notifications about items being added or removed or it might notify me but not give me a reference to the actual item that was added or removed. Furthermore, refreshing the external list might return a completely new set of instances even though they still represent the same information so simply storing references to the external objects might also not always be feasible. Another characteristic of the problem is that both lists cannot be sorted in any meaningful way. You should also assume that initializing new objects in the "slave list" is expensive, i.e. simply clearing and rebuilding it from scratch is not an option. So how would I typically tackle this? What's the name of the algorithm I should google for? In the past I have implemented this in various ways (see below for an example) but it always felt like there should be a cleaner and more efficient way. Here's an example approach: Iterate over the master list Look up each item in the "slave list" Add items that do not yet exist Somehow keep track of items that already exist in both lists (e.g. by tagging them or keeping yet another list) When done iterate once more over the slave list Remove all objects that have not been tagged (see 4.) Update Thanks for all your responses so far! I will need some time to look at the links. Maybe one more thing worthy of note: In many of the situations where I needed this the implementation of the "master list" is completely hidden from me. In the most extreme cases the only access I might have to the master list might be a COM-interface that exposes nothing but GetFirst-, GetNext-style methods. I'm mentioning this because of the suggestions to either sort the list or to subclass it both of which is unfortunately not practical in these cases unless I copy the elements into a list of my own and I don't think that would be very efficient. I also might not have made it clear enough that the elements in the two lists are of different types, i.e. not assignment-compatible: Especially, the elements in the master list might be available as interface references only.

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