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Formatting Telerik Chart and Legend Labels in Silverlight

- by Bryan

I am trying to format a column called 'Month' using the 3-character month abbreviation in my data grid which is bound to a bar chart. My grid and chart are based on this demo example: http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#Chart/Aggregates. Basically, the grid compiles data and summarizes by Year, Quarter, Month, and then some other categories as well. For the Month column, I tried two different methods (for sorting purposes, I have to use an integer or some date value for the month). First, I just made Month an integer field and then used a converter mapped in the xaml for the 'Month' field to display 'JAN', 'FEB', etc. This worked fine for the grid, but the chart would display 1, 2, etc. instead of the month abbreviation. I researched this and was not able to come up with a solution to map the converter to the chart. So, I tried making the Month field a datetime and then set the value to 1/1/1900, 2/1/1900, etc. and specified the format of the field to 'MMM' in the xaml for the grid. I then used the following statement to set the the format in the chart when the user grouped by month: SalesAnalysisChart.DefaultView.ChartArea.AxisX.DefaultLabelFormat = "MMM"; This partially worked in that when the months were displayed across the x-axis they were labeled properly, but not when they appeared in the legend (the user, of course, can group by any of the columns which may or may not include month). I've tried setting LegendItemLabelFormat, ItemLabelFormat, etc. but without success. I'm not sure of the element on which to set the property. I only need to change the default format for just the Month column - all other columns should display normally when grouped. I also came across a class called 'LegendItemFormatConverter' which looks promising but I can't find any examples as to how to implement it. I would actually prefer the converter method because the converter I wrote displays the month abbreviation in all caps, whereas the 'MMM' format displays in upper/lower case. Here is the converter code that I originally used for the grid: using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using System.Windows.Data; namespace ApolloSL { public class MonthConverter : IValueConverter { public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { if (value != null) { DateTime date = new DateTime(1900, (Int32)value, 1); return date.ToString("MMM").ToUpper(); } else { return ""; } } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { return value.ToString(); } } } Please help... Thanks in advance for your assistance, Bryan

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How to get data from struts2 action with jQuery?

- by Rafa Romero

I have an Struts2 Web with GoogleMaps. I want to load a list of markers which are saved in a SQL DDBB. To do this, I tried with jQuery and Ajax. Here you are the code: loadMarkers.java public class loadMarkers extends ActionSupport implements ServletRequestAware,ServletResponseAware{ //Variables de sesion/cookie FunctionClass ses; protected HttpServletResponse servletResponse; protected HttpServletRequest servletRequest; private String userID=""; //Variables del marker private List<marker> markersList = new ArrayList<marker>(); public String execute() throws Exception{ FunctionClass friends = new FunctionClass(); //Leemos de la cookie for(Cookie c : servletRequest.getCookies()) { if (c.getName().equals("userID")) userID = (c.getValue()); } System.out.println("en el loadMarkers"); connectionBBDD con = new connectionBBDD(); markersList = con.loadMarkers(userID); return SUCCESS; } I want to use the markerList array in Javascript, to create the markers. This is the struts.xml file: <package name="jsonActions" namespace="/test" extends="json-default"> <action name="LoadMarkers" class="web.localizadroid.maps.loadMarkers"> <interceptor-ref name="basicStack"/> <result type="json"> <param name="root">markersList</param> </result> </action> </package> And here you are the Javascript (jQuery) code: function loadMarkersJ(){ alert("dentro"); $.ajax({ type : "post", url : "LoadMarkers", dataType: "json", success : function(data) { alert(data); var image = new google.maps.MarkerImage ('http://i53.tinypic.com/ettquh.png'); var jSon_Object = eval("(" + data + ")"); //For para analizar los datos (Json) obtenidos de la BBDD for (x = 0; x < jSon_Object.length; x++) { var markersArray = []; var myLatlng = new google.maps.LatLng(jSon_Object[x].lat, jSon_Object[x].lon); markerLoaded = new google.maps.Marker( { position : myLatlng, map : map, icon: image, title: "NOMBRE: " + jSon_Object[x].tarjetName + "\n" + "ANOTACIONES: " + jSon_Object[x].anotaciones + "\n" + "TIME: " + jSon_Object[x].time }); markersArray.push(markerLoaded); if (markersArray) { for (i in markersArray) { alert("entro en forColocaMarkers"); if (markersArray[i].getAnimation() != null) { markersArray[i].setAnimation(null); } else { markersArray[i].setAnimation(google.maps.Animation.BOUNCE); } markersArray[i].setMap(map); } } } } }); } From success : function(data) { to the end, is JavaScript code to create de markers, and this it's OK. The problem is whith ajax, because I don't get to obtain markerList Array by jSon data return...I think that the problem is in the url attribute from $.ajax...I tried loadMarkers.action and loadMarkers, but nothing happens. When I execute the web, only prints the alert alert("dentro"), the alert alert(data) never has been printed. I have forgotten to add the code where I call the Javascript function (loadMarkersJ). Here you are: <p><s:a action="LoadMarkers.action" namespace="/test" onclick="loadMarkersJ(this)">Cargar Marcadores S</s:a></p> Somebody can help me please?

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SurfaceView drawn on top of other elements after coming back from specific activity

- by spirytus

I have an activity with video preview displayed via SurfaceView and other views positioned over it. The problem is when user navigates to Settings activity (code below) and comes back then the surfaceview is drawn on top of everything else. This does not happen when user goes to another activity I have, neither when user navigates outside of app eg. to task manager. Now, you see in code below that I have setContentVIew() call wrapped in conditionals so it is not called every time when onStart() is executed. If its not wrapped in if statements then all works fine, but its causing loosing lots of memory (5MB+) each time onStart() is called. I tried various combinations and nothing seems to work so any help would be much appreciated. @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); //Toast.makeText(this,"Create ", 2000).show(); // set 32 bit window (draw correctly transparent images) getWindow().getAttributes().format = android.graphics.PixelFormat.RGBA_8888; // set the layout of the screen based on preferences of the user sharedPref = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(this); } public void onStart() { super.onStart(); String syncConnPref = null; syncConnPref = sharedPref.getString("screensLayouts", "default"); if(syncConnPref.contentEquals("default") && currentlLayout!="default") { setContentView(R.layout.fight_recorder_default); } else if(syncConnPref.contentEquals("simple") && currentlLayout!="simple") { setContentView(R.layout.fight_recorder_simple); } // I I uncomment line below so it will be called every time without conditionals above, it works fine but every time onStart() is called I'm losing 5+ MB memory (memory leak?). The preview however shows under the other elements exactly as I need memory leak makes it unusable after few times though // setContentView(R.layout.fight_recorder_default); if(getCamera()==null) { Toast.makeText(this,"Sorry, camera is not available and fight recording will not be permanently stored",2000).show(); // TODO also in here put some code replacing the background with something nice return; } // now we have camera ready and we need surface to display picture from camera on so // we instantiate CameraPreviw object which is simply surfaceView containing holder object. // holder object is the surface where the image will be drawn onto // this is where camera live cameraPreview will be displayed cameraPreviewLayout = (FrameLayout) findViewById(id.camera_preview); cameraPreview = new CameraPreview(this); // now we add surface view to layout cameraPreviewLayout.removeAllViews(); cameraPreviewLayout.addView(cameraPreview); // get layouts prepared for different elements (views) // this is whole recording screen, as big as screen available recordingScreenLayout=(FrameLayout) findViewById(R.id.recording_screen); // this is used to display sores as they are added, it displays like a path // each score added is a new text view simply and as user undos these are removed one by one allScoresLayout=(LinearLayout) findViewById(R.id.all_scores); // layout prepared for controls like record/stop buttons etc startStopLayout=(RelativeLayout) findViewById(R.id.start_stop_layout); // set up timer so it can be turned on when needed //fightTimer=new FightTimer(this); fightTimer = (FightTimer) findViewById(id.fight_timer); // get views for displaying scores score1=(TextView) findViewById(id.score1); score2=(TextView) findViewById(id.score2); advantages1=(TextView) findViewById(id.advantages1); advantages2=(TextView) findViewById(id.advantages2); penalties1=(TextView) findViewById(id.penalties1); penalties2=(TextView) findViewById(id.penalties2); RelativeLayout welcomeScreen=(RelativeLayout) findViewById(id.welcome_screen); Animation fadeIn = AnimationUtils.loadAnimation(this, R.anim.fade_in); welcomeScreen.startAnimation(fadeIn); Toast.makeText(this,"Start ", 2000).show(); animateViews(); } Settings activity is below, after coming back from this activity surfaceview is drawn on top of other elements. public class SettingsActivity extends PreferenceActivity { @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); if(MyFirstAppActivity.getCamera()==null) { Toast.makeText(this,"Sorry, camera is not available",2000).show(); return; } addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.preferences); } }

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UITextView doesn't not resize when keyboard appear if loaded from a tab bar cotroller

- by elio.d

I have a simple view controller (SecondViewController) used to manage a UITextview (I'm building a simple editor) this is the code of the SecondViewController.h @interface SecondViewController : UIViewController { IBOutlet UITextView *textView; } @property (nonatomic,retain) IBOutlet UITextView *textView; @end and this is the SecondViewController.m // // EditorViewController.m // Editor // // Created by elio d'antoni on 13/01/11. // Copyright 2011 none. All rights reserved. // @implementation SecondViewController @synthesize textView; /* // Implement loadView to create a view hierarchy programmatically, without using a nib. - (void)loadView { } */ // Implement viewDidLoad to do additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib. - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"uiViewBg.png"]]; textView.layer.borderWidth=1; textView.layer.cornerRadius=5; textView.layer.borderColor=[[UIColor darkGrayColor] CGColor]; [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(keyboardWillAppear:) name:UIKeyboardWillShowNotification object:nil]; [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(keyboardWillDisappear:) name:UIKeyboardWillHideNotification object:nil]; } -(void) matchAnimationTo:(NSDictionary *) userInfo { NSLog(@"match animation method"); [UIView setAnimationDuration:[[userInfo objectForKey:UIKeyboardAnimationDurationUserInfoKey] doubleValue]]; [UIView setAnimationCurve:[[userInfo objectForKey:UIKeyboardAnimationCurveUserInfoKey] intValue]]; } -(CGFloat) keyboardEndingFrameHeight:(NSDictionary *) userInfo { NSLog(@"keyboardEndingFrameHeight method"); CGRect keyboardEndingUncorrectedFrame = [[ userInfo objectForKey:UIKeyboardFrameEndUserInfoKey ] CGRectValue]; CGRect keyboardEndingFrame = [self.view convertRect:keyboardEndingUncorrectedFrame fromView:nil]; return keyboardEndingFrame.size.height; } -(CGRect) adjustFrameHeightBy:(CGFloat) change multipliedBy:(NSInteger) direction { NSLog(@"adjust method"); return CGRectMake(20, 57, self.textView.frame.size.width, self.textView.frame.size.height + change * direction); } -(void)keyboardWillAppear:(NSNotification *)notification { NSLog(@"keyboard appear"); [UIView beginAnimations:nil context:NULL]; [self matchAnimationTo:[notification userInfo]]; self.textView.frame = [self adjustFrameHeightBy:[self keyboardEndingFrameHeight: [notification userInfo]] multipliedBy:-1]; [UIView commitAnimations]; } -(void)keyboardWillDisappear:(NSNotification *) notification { NSLog(@"keyboard disappear"); [UIView beginAnimations:nil context:NULL]; [self matchAnimationTo:[notification userInfo]]; self.textView.frame = [self adjustFrameHeightBy:[self keyboardEndingFrameHeight: [notification userInfo]] multipliedBy:1]; [UIView commitAnimations]; } // Override to allow orientations other than the default portrait orientation. - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { return YES; } (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning { // Releases the view if it doesn't have a superview. [super didReceiveMemoryWarning]; // Release any cached data, images, etc that aren't in use. } (void)viewDidUnload { // Release any retained subviews of the main view. // e.g. self.myOutlet = nil; } (void)dealloc { [super dealloc]; } @end the problem is that if load the view controller from a tab bar controller the textView doesn't resize when the keyboard appear, but the SAME code works if loaded as a single view based app. I hope I was clear enough. I used the tabBar template provided by xcode no modifications.

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Calling popToRootViewControllerAnimated causing crash. How should I be doing this?

- by Lewis42

The app is for taking body measurements. The user can say I want to measure: legs, arms and neck, in the settings tab and in the main tab there is a view which loops round to take each measurement. This is achieved like so: i have tab controller the first tab has a navigation controller the first view controller on the storyboard and has one segue to itself the board loops round until it has all the measurements then it segues to a different controller the problem is: if the user changes which measurements they are taking in the settings tab, the first tab needs to completely reload, as if the app was just starting up, clearing down the whole nav stack etc. at the moment the tab controller calls popToRootViewControllerAnimated on the navigation controller in the measurements tab, but this is causing a crash. Each screen has a slider control and a call to titleForRow:forComponent: is being called on a deleted view causing it to crash. What am I doing wrong?! Here's the tab bar controller code // TabBarController.m // #import "TabBarController.h" #import "TodaysMeasurementObject.h" #import "AppDelegateProtocol.h" #import "AddMeasurementViewController.h" #import "ReadPerson.h" #import "AppDelegate.h" @interface TabBarController () <UITabBarControllerDelegate> @end @implementation TabBarController bool resetWizardView = false; - (id)initWithNibName:(NSString *)nibNameOrNil bundle:(NSBundle *)nibBundleOrNil { self = [super initWithNibName:nibNameOrNil bundle:nibBundleOrNil]; if (self) { } return self; } - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // Do any additional setup after loading the view. self.delegate = self; [[UIDevice currentDevice] beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications]; [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(orientationChanged:) name:UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification object:nil]; [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(measurementsSettingsUpdated:) name:@"MeasurementsSettingsUpdated" object:nil]; } - (void) measurementsSettingsUpdated:(NSNotification *) notification { // UINavigationController *navigationController = [self.viewControllers objectAtIndex:0]; // AddMeasurementViewController *addMeasurement = [[AddMeasurementViewController alloc] init]; // [navigationController setViewControllers: [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:addMeasurement, nil]]; resetWizardView = YES; } - (void) viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated { if (![ReadPerson userHasRecords]) { [self setSelectedIndex:3]; } } - (void)orientationChanged:(NSNotification *)notification { // We must add a delay here, otherwise we'll swap in the new view // too quickly and we'll get an animation glitch [self performSelector:@selector(showGraphs) withObject:nil afterDelay:0]; } - (void)showGraphs { UIDeviceOrientation deviceOrientation = [UIDevice currentDevice].orientation; if (deviceOrientation == UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft && !isShowingLandscapeView) { [self performSegueWithIdentifier: @"toGraph" sender: self]; isShowingLandscapeView = YES; } else if (deviceOrientation != UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft && isShowingLandscapeView) { [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES]; isShowingLandscapeView = NO; } } - (void)viewDidUnload { [super viewDidUnload]; // Release any retained subviews of the main view. } - (void)dealloc { [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self]; [[UIDevice currentDevice] endGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications]; } - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { if(interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight) { [self performSegueWithIdentifier: @"toGraph" sender: self]; } return false; } - (void)tabBarController:(UITabBarController *)tabBarController didSelectViewController:(UIViewController *)viewController { int tbi = tabBarController.selectedIndex; if (tbi == 0) { [[viewController view] setNeedsDisplay]; if (resetWizardView) { [(UINavigationController*)[self.viewControllers objectAtIndex:0] popToRootViewControllerAnimated: NO]; // ******* POP CALLED HERE ****** resetWizardView = false; } } } - (TodaysMeasurementObject*) theAppDataObject { id<AppDelegateProtocol> theDelegate = (id<AppDelegateProtocol>) [UIApplication sharedApplication].delegate; TodaysMeasurementObject* theDataObject; theDataObject = (TodaysMeasurementObject*) theDelegate.theAppDataObject; return theDataObject; } - (BOOL)shouldAutorotate { return NO; } - (NSUInteger)supportedInterfaceOrientations { return UIInterfaceOrientationMaskPortrait; } @end UPDATED - (void) measurementsSettingsUpdated:(NSNotification *) notification { NSMutableArray *viewControllers = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithArray: self.viewControllers]; UINavigationController *navigationController = [viewControllers objectAtIndex:0]; AddMeasurementViewController *addMeasurement = [[AddMeasurementViewController alloc] init]; [navigationController setViewControllers: [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:addMeasurement, nil]]; [viewControllers setObject:navigationController atIndexedSubscript:0]; self.viewControllers = viewControllers; } and removed the code from - tabBarController:didSelectViewController: but still the same error. I think the problem is that it's trying to get a value for the slide control after the view has been deleted. But some part of the view must still be alive...? Anyway to kill that off? Or leave it all alive??

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UIScrollView message handler

- by cs221313

Hi, all, I want to create a scroll view and put thumbnail view in that scroll view. but I can not get the touchBegan message in my program. My source code is like following. - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; NSError* error; NSString *bundleRoot = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath]; dirContents = [[[NSFileManager defaultManager] contentsOfDirectoryAtPath:bundleRoot error: &error] copy]; scrollView = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:[[self view] bounds]]; scrollView.pagingEnabled = YES; scrollView.showsHorizontalScrollIndicator = NO; scrollView.userInteractionEnabled = YES; scrollView.clipsToBounds = YES; // default is NO, we want to restrict drawing within our scrollview scrollView.scrollEnabled = YES; [scrollView setDelegate:self]; [[self view] addSubview:scrollView]; DLog(@"scroll frame top = %d, left = %d, width = %d, height = %d", scrollView.frame.origin.x, scrollView.frame.origin.y, scrollView.frame.size.width, scrollView.frame.size.height); int i, j; UIView* onePageView = [[UIView alloc] init]; int pageNumber = 0; int iconNumber = 0; for (NSString *tString in dirContents) { if ([tString hasSuffix:@"_chess.png"]) { if(iconNumber == 9) { onePageView.tag = pageNumber + 1; [scrollView addSubview: onePageView]; onePageView = [[UIView alloc] init]; pageNumber++; iconNumber = 0; } j = iconNumber % 3; i = iconNumber / 3; const float WIDTH = 150.0; const float HEIGHT = 150.0; CGRect imageRect = CGRectMake(j * 200 + 50.0, i * 200 + 50.0, WIDTH, HEIGHT); //remove the charactors of "_chess.png". NSString* sgfName = [tString substringToIndex: tString.length - 10]; sgfName = [sgfName stringByAppendingString: @".sgf"]; ThumbnailView *thumbnailImage = [[ThumbnailView alloc] initWithFilename: sgfName frame: imageRect]; thumbnailImage.delegate = self; [thumbnailImage setImage:[UIImage imageNamed: tString]]; thumbnailImage.opaque = YES; // explicitly opaque for performance //[self.view addSubview:thumbnailImage]; [onePageView addSubview:thumbnailImage]; [thumbnailImage release]; iconNumber++; } } pageControl.numberOfPages = pageNumber + 1; pageControl.currentPage = 0; onePageView.tag = pageNumber + 1; [scrollView addSubview: onePageView]; [self layoutScrollPages]; } ThumbnailView class is like following. // // ThumbnailView.m // go // // Created by David Li on 2/18/11. // Copyright 2011 __MyCompanyName__. All rights reserved. // #import "common.h" #import "ThumbnailView.h" #import "ipad_goViewController.h" @implementation ThumbnailView @synthesize delegate; @synthesize sgfName; -(id) initWithFilename: (NSString*)filename frame: (CGRect)frame { sgfName = [[NSString alloc] initWithString: filename]; return [self initWithFrame: frame]; } - (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame { self = [super initWithFrame:frame]; if (self) { // Initialization code. self.userInteractionEnabled = YES; } return self; } - (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated { [super viewDidAppear:animated]; [self becomeFirstResponder]; } /* refer to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/855095/how-can-i-detect-the-touch-event-of-an-uiimageview */ -(BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder { return YES; } - (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { DLog(@"touched"); [[self delegate] loadGame: sgfName]; } /* // Only override drawRect: if you perform custom drawing. // An empty implementation adversely affects performance during animation. - (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect { // Drawing code. } */ - (void)dealloc { [super dealloc]; } @end I can not catch the touchesBegan message in my program. Can anyone help me? I stucked by this problem by couple days. Thanks so much.

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Javascript/Jquery Super Scrollorama Navigation Issues

- by Rosencruez

On a Wordpress site I am currently working on, my client wanted the different sections of the front page to slide up from the bottom and cover up the previous section, like a wipe or slide transition. Using super scrollorama found here: http://johnpolacek.github.com/superscrollorama/, I managed to achieve the desired result. Next, I needed to create a navigation menu on the front page only. I did so, and set anchors at various different points on the pages. I also used the scrollTo library for scolling animations when I click the nav menu links. However, there are a number of problems I have encountered: When at the top and I click "showcase", it brings me down to the showcase section, but the products section (the div right after it) is overlapping it. Other divs seems to have the same problem of the following divs overlapping the current one I can only navigate forwards. When I try to go backwards, it won't (except for "Home") I thought it might have something to do with the CSS "top" property of the divs, so I tried resetting them every time the click function kicked in, but it didn't work. So I removed it for the time being. Currently set the javascript to prevent the default action of scrolling to the anchors and instead setting it to scroll to the actual divs themselves. However, I'm still having the same issues. Here is the site I am currently working on: http://breathe.simalam.ca/ Here is the javascript for the scrolling: $(document).ready(function() { jQuery('.home-link').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); jQuery(window).scrollTo(0, 1000, {queue:true}); }); jQuery('.showcase-link').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); jQuery(window).scrollTo('#showcase_content', 1000, {queue:true}); }); jQuery('.products-link').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); jQuery(window).scrollTo('#products_content', 1000, {queue:true}); }); jQuery('.about-link').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); jQuery(window).scrollTo('#about_content', 1000, {queue:true}); }); jQuery('.locator-link').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); jQuery(window).scrollTo('#locator_content', 1000, {queue:true}); }); jQuery('.contact-link').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); jQuery(window).scrollTo('#contact_content', 1000, {queue:true}); }); }); scrollorama code: $(document).ready(function() { $('#wrapper').css('display','block'); var controller = $.superscrollorama(); var pinDur = 4000; /* set duration of pin scroll in pixels */ // create animation timeline for pinned element var pinAnimations = new TimelineLite(); pinAnimations .append([ TweenMax.to($('#showcase'), .5, {css:{top:0}}) ], .5) .append([ TweenMax.to($('#products'), .5, {css:{top:0}}) ], .5) .append([ TweenMax.to($('#about'), .5, {css:{top:0}}) ], .5) .append([ TweenMax.to($('#locator'), .5, {css:{top:0}}) ], .5) .append([ TweenMax.to($('#contact'), .5, {css:{top:0}}) ], .5) .append(TweenMax.to($('#pin-frame-unpin'), .5, {css:{top:'100px'}})); controller.pin($('#examples-pin'), pinDur, { anim:pinAnimations, onPin: function() { $('#examples-pin').css('height','100%'); }, onUnpin: function() { $('#examples-pin').css('height','2000px'); } }); }); All of the section divs are inside a parent div. The section divs all have a height, width, and top of 100%. The parent div containing all of these section divs are as follows: #examples-pin { position: relative; /* relative positioning for transitions to work? */ width: 101%; /* max width */ height: 2000px; /* height of 2000px for now */ overflow: hidden; /* hide the overflow for transitions to work */ margin-bottom: -200px; /* negative bottom margin */ }

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Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider

- by Gopinath

If you going to buy iPhone 4S on a two year contract in USA, Europe or Australia you may not find it expensive. But if you are planning to buy it in any other parts of the world, you will definitely feel the heat of ridiculous iPhone 4S price. In India iPhone 4S costs approximately costs $1000 which is 30% more than the price tag of an unlocked iPhone sold in USA. Personally I love iPhones as there is no match for the user experience provided by Apple as well as the wide range of really meaning applications available for iPhone. But it breaks heart to spend $1000 for a phone and I’m forced to look at alternates available in the market. Here are the four iPhone 4S alternates available in almost all the countries where we can buy iPhone 4S Google Galaxy Nexus The Galaxy Nexus is Google’s own Android smartphone manufactured by Samsung and sold under the brand name of Google Nexus. Galaxy Nexus is the pure Android phone available in the market without any bloat software or custom user interfaces like other Androids available in the market. Galaxy Nexus is also the first Android phone to be shipped with the latest version of Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. This phone is the benchmark for the rest of Android phones that are going to enter the market soon. In the words of Google this smartphone is called as “Galaxy Nexus: Simple. Beautiful. Beyond Smart.”. BGR review summarizes the phone as This is almost comical at this point, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is my favourite Android device in the world. Easily replacing the HTC Rezound, the Motorola DROID RAZR, and Samsung Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Nexus champions in a brand new version of Android that pushes itself further than almost any other mobile OS in the industry. Samsung Galaxy S II The one single company that is able to sell more smartphones than Apple is Samsung. Samsung recently displaced Apple from the top smartphone seller spot and occupied it with loads of pride. Samsung’s Galaxy S II fits as one the best alternatives to Apple’s iPhone 4S with it’s beautiful design and remarkable performance. Engadget summarizes Samsung Galaxy S2 review as It’s the best Android smartphone yet, but more importantly, it might well be the best smartphone, period. Of course, a 4.3-inch screen size won’t suit everyone, no matter how stupendously thin the device that carries it may be, and we also can’t say for sure that the Galaxy S II would justify a long-term iOS user foresaking his investment into one ecosystem and making the leap to another. Nonetheless, if you’re asking us what smartphone to buy today, unconstrained by such externalities, the Galaxy S II would be the clear choice. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Nokia Lumia 800 Here comes unexpected Windows Phone in to the boxing ring. May be they are not as great as Androids available in the market today, but they are picking up very quickly. Especially the Nokia Lumia 800 seems to be first ever Windows Phone 7 aimed at competing serious with Androids and iPhones available in the market. There are reports that Nokia Lumia 800 is outselling all Androids in UK and few high profile tech blogs are calling it as the king of Windows Phone. Considering this phone while evaluating the alternative of iPhone 4S will not disappoint you. We assure. Droid RAZR Remember the Motorola Driod that swept entire Android market share couple of years ago? The first two version of Motorola Droids were the best in the market and they out performed almost every other Android phone those days. The invasion of Samsung Androids, Motorola lost it charm. With the recent release of Droid RAZR, Motorola seems to be in the right direction to reclaiming the prestige. Droid RAZR is the thinnest smartphone available in the market and it’s beauty is not just skin deep. Here is a review of the phone from Engadget blog the RAZR’s beauty is not only skin deep. The LTE radio, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM make sure this sleek number is ready to run with the big boys. It kept pace with, and in some cases clearly outclassed its high-end competition. Despite its deficiencies in the display department and underwhelming battery life, the RAZR looks to be a perfectly viable alternative when considering the similarly-pricey Rezound and Galaxy Nexus Further Reading So we have seen the four alternates of iPhone 4S available in the market and I personally love to buy a Samsung smartphone if I’m don’t have money to afford an iPhone 4S. If you are interested in deep diving into the alternates, here few links that help you do more research Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs. Motorola Droid RAZR: How Their Specs Compare by Huffington Post Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Nexus Galaxy: Spec Smackdown by PC World Browser Speed Test: Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II – by Gizmodo iPhone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy S II by pocket lint Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II by techie buzz This article titled,Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

- by raul.goycoolea

@font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA. Introduction A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders. Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc. Purpose of Reference Architecture In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness. Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level: · Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise · Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. · Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles · Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc · A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information · Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security · Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. · Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets · Has a shorter implementation time and cost Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO). Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider: · In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. · Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. · Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. · Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. · Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. · Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. · Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape. Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges. “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum. The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture: · Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements · Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. · Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) · Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services · Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem · (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks · Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products · Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products Drivers of Reference Architecture The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure. Telecom reference architectures are today expected to: · Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems · Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services · Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure · Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. · Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g. Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. · Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations · Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) · Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management · Lower operating costs to drive profitability Enterprise Reference Architecture The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA. • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture Telecom Reference Architecture Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements: · The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. · The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. · The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. · The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes. NGOSS Architecture Standards are: · Centralized data · Loosely coupled distributed systems · Application components/re-use · A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations · Interoperability to service provider data/processes · Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios · Workflow automation The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers, · Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. · Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. · Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. · Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility. Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows: 1. Customer Relationship Management CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty. CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise. The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are · Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. · Create and manage customer profiles. · Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. · Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. · Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. · Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). · Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions. CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing. 2. Billing and Revenue Management Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services. The key functionalities provided by these applications are · To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. · To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. · To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. · Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. · Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. · Support prepaid and post-paid rating. · Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. · Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. · Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. · Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. · Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc. Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements. 3. Mediation Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution. · Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. · Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. · Validate Usage Data Records from each source. · Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. · Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. · Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. · Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. · Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. · Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window. 4. Fulfillment This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category. The key functionalities provided by these applications are · Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; · Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; · Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; · Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; · Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; · Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; · Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and · Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer. These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders. 5. Enterprise Management This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that · Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.; · Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business; · Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc. (i) Enterprise Risk Management: Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are: · Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o Interconnect bill verification. o Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized. · Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator. The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows: o Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems (ii) Knowledge Management This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions. Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to · Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. · Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse · Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. · Run report generator. · Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc. (iii) Document Management It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system. (iv) Data Management It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management. Key responsibilities of Data Management are · Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. · Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) · Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. · Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use. (v) Business Intelligence It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level: · It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. · It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. · It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. · It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. · It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. · It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions. It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer · It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence. (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations. (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment. The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below: · It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. · It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. · It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. · It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. · It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges. 6. External Interfaces/Touch Points The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including: · Exchange of emails or faxes · Call Centers · Web Portals · Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points. Typical characteristics of these touch points are · Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine · Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment · Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses. 7. Middleware The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution. · As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces · Provide a web service framework with service registry. · Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. · Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. · Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. · Use standard XML for data exchange. · Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. · Provide a tracking until the response completion. · Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. · Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. · Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. · Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component. 8. Network Elements The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service. Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc. Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment. 9. 3rd Party Applications 3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government. Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done. 10. Service Delivery Platform A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction. SOA Reference Architecture SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques. In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables: · The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services · Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface · A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs · Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services · Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change · Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services · A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits. Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers. COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives. The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers. The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1. Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation. ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc. CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc. Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components: · Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges · Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured. MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data. 2. Enterprise Component Layer: This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing. Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are: · Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc. · Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query. · Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design. Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc. 3. Integration Layer: This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime. • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework. 4. Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains. 5. Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services. 6. Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications. 7. Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications. 8. Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance. 9. EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices: EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology). Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey. Conclusions Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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MEF CompositionInitializer for WPF

- by Reed

The Managed Extensibility Framework is an amazingly useful addition to the .NET Framework. I was very excited to see System.ComponentModel.Composition added to the core framework. Personally, I feel that MEF is one tool I’ve always been missing in my .NET development. Unfortunately, one perfect scenario for MEF tends to fall short of it’s full potential is in Windows Presentation Foundation development. In particular, there are many times when the XAML parser constructs objects in WPF development, which makes composition of those parts difficult. The current release of MEF (Preview Release 9) addresses this for Silverlight developers via System.ComponentModel.Composition.CompositionInitializer. However, there is no equivalent class for WPF developers. The CompositionInitializer class provides the means for an object to compose itself. This is very useful with WPF and Silverlight development, since it allows a View, such as a UserControl, to be generated via the standard XAML parser, and still automatically pull in the appropriate ViewModel in an extensible manner. Glenn Block has demonstrated the usage for Silverlight in detail, but the same issues apply in WPF. As an example, let’s take a look at a very simple case. Take the following XAML for a Window: <Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.MainView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="MainWindow" Height="220" Width="300"> <Grid> <TextBlock Text="{Binding TheText}" /> </Grid> </Window> This does nothing but create a Window, add a simple TextBlock control, and use it to display the value of our “TheText” property in our DataContext class. Since this is our main window, WPF will automatically construct and display this Window, so we need to handle constructing the DataContext and setting it ourselves. We could do this in code or in XAML, but in order to do it directly, we would need to hard code the ViewModel type directly into our XAML code, or we would need to construct the ViewModel class and set it in the code behind. Both have disadvantages, and the disadvantages grow if we’re using MEF to compose our ViewModel. Ideally, we’d like to be able to have MEF construct our ViewModel for us. This way, it can provide any construction requirements for our ViewModel via [ImportingConstructor], and it can handle fully composing the imported properties on our ViewModel. CompositionInitializer allows this to occur. We use CompositionInitializer within our View’s constructor, and use it for self-composition of our View. Using CompositionInitializer, we can modify our code behind to: public partial class MainView : Window { public MainView() { InitializeComponent(); CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this); } [Import("MainViewModel")] public object ViewModel { get { return this.DataContext; } set { this.DataContext = value; } } } We then can add an Export on our ViewModel class like so: [Export("MainViewModel")] public class MainViewModel { public string TheText { get { return "Hello World!"; } } } MEF will automatically compose our application, decoupling our ViewModel injection to the DataContext of our View until runtime. When we run this, we’ll see: There are many other approaches for using MEF to wire up the extensible parts within your application, of course. However, any time an object is going to be constructed by code outside of your control, CompositionInitializer allows us to continue to use MEF to satisfy the import requirements of that object. In order to use this from WPF, I’ve ported the code from MEF Preview 9 and Glenn Block’s (now obsolete) PartInitializer port to Windows Presentation Foundation. There are some subtle changes from the Silverlight port, mainly to handle running in a desktop application context. The default behavior of my port is to construct an AggregateCatalog containing a DirectoryCatalog set to the location of the entry assembly of the application. In addition, if an “Extensions” folder exists under the entry assembly’s directory, a second DirectoryCatalog for that folder will be included. This behavior can be overridden by specifying a CompositionContainer or one or more ComposablePartCatalogs to the System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.CompositionHost static class prior to the first use of CompositionInitializer. Please download CompositionInitializer and CompositionHost for VS 2010 RC, and contact me with any feedback. Composition.Initialization.Desktop.zip Edit on 3/29: Glenn Block has since updated his version of CompositionInitializer (and ExportFactory<T>!), and made it available here: http://cid-f8b2fd72406fb218.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/blog/Composition.Initialization.Desktop.zip This is a .NET 3.5 solution, and should soon be pushed to CodePlex, and made available on the main MEF site.

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LWJGL - Eclipse error [on hold]

- by Zarkopafilis

When I try to run my lwjgl project, an error pops . Here is the log file: # A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment: # EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x6d8fcc0a, pid=5612, tid=900 # JRE version: 6.0_16-b01 Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (14.2-b01 mixed mode windows-x86 ) Problematic frame: V [jvm.dll+0xfcc0a] # If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit: http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp # --------------- T H R E A D --------------- Current thread (0x016b9000): JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_vm, id=900, stack(0x00160000,0x001b0000)] siginfo: ExceptionCode=0xc0000005, reading address 0x00000000 Registers: EAX=0x00000000, EBX=0x00000000, ECX=0x00000006, EDX=0x00000000 ESP=0x001af4d4, EBP=0x001af524, ESI=0x016b9000, EDI=0x016b9110 EIP=0x6d8fcc0a, EFLAGS=0x00010246 Top of Stack: (sp=0x001af4d4) 0x001af4d4: 6da44bd8 016b9110 00000000 001af668 0x001af4e4: ffffffff 22200000 001af620 76ec39c2 0x001af4f4: 001af524 6d801086 0000000b 001afd34 0x001af504: 016b9000 016dd990 016b9000 00000000 0x001af514: 001af5f4 6d9ee000 6d9ef2f0 ffffffff 0x001af524: 001af58c 10008c85 016b9110 00000000 0x001af534: 00000000 000a0554 00000000 00000024 0x001af544: 00000000 00000000 001af6ac 00000000 Instructions: (pc=0x6d8fcc0a) 0x6d8fcbfa: e8 e8 d0 1d 08 00 8b 45 10 c7 45 d8 0b 00 00 00 0x6d8fcc0a: 8b 00 8b 48 08 0f b7 51 26 8b 40 0c 8b 4c 90 20 Stack: [0x00160000,0x001b0000], sp=0x001af4d4, free space=317k Native frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code, C=native code) V [jvm.dll+0xfcc0a] C [lwjgl.dll+0x8c85] C [USER32.dll+0x18876] C [USER32.dll+0x170f4] C [USER32.dll+0x1119e] C [ntdll.dll+0x460ce] C [USER32.dll+0x10e29] C [USER32.dll+0x10e84] C [lwjgl.dll+0x1cf0] j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.createWindow(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DrawableLWJGL;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DisplayMode;Ljava/awt/Canvas;II)V+102 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.createWindow()V+71 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/Drawable;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/ContextAttribs;)V+72 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;)V+12 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create()V+7 j zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main.main([Ljava/lang/String;)V+16 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub V [jvm.dll+0xecf9c] V [jvm.dll+0x1741e1] V [jvm.dll+0xed01d] V [jvm.dll+0xf5be5] V [jvm.dll+0xfd83d] C [javaw.exe+0x2155] C [javaw.exe+0x833e] C [kernel32.dll+0x51154] C [ntdll.dll+0x5b2b9] C [ntdll.dll+0x5b28c] Java frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code) j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.nCreateWindow(IIIIZZJ)J+0 j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.createWindow(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DrawableLWJGL;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DisplayMode;Ljava/awt/Canvas;II)V+102 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.createWindow()V+71 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/Drawable;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/ContextAttribs;)V+72 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;)V+12 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create()V+7 j zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main.main([Ljava/lang/String;)V+16 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub --------------- P R O C E S S --------------- Java Threads: ( = current thread ) 0x0179a400 JavaThread "Low Memory Detector" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=4460, stack(0x0b900000,0x0b950000)] 0x01795400 JavaThread "CompilerThread0" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=5264, stack(0x0b8b0000,0x0b900000)] 0x01790c00 JavaThread "Attach Listener" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=6080, stack(0x0b860000,0x0b8b0000)] 0x01786400 JavaThread "Signal Dispatcher" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=1204, stack(0x0b810000,0x0b860000)] 0x01759c00 JavaThread "Finalizer" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=5772, stack(0x0b7c0000,0x0b810000)] 0x01755000 JavaThread "Reference Handler" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=4696, stack(0x01640000,0x01690000)] =0x016b9000 JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_vm, id=900, stack(0x00160000,0x001b0000)] Other Threads: 0x01751c00 VMThread [stack: 0x015f0000,0x01640000] [id=4052] 0x0179c800 WatcherThread [stack: 0x0b950000,0x0b9a0000] [id=3340] VM state:not at safepoint (normal execution) VM Mutex/Monitor currently owned by a thread: None Heap def new generation total 960K, used 816K [0x037c0000, 0x038c0000, 0x03ca0000) eden space 896K, 91% used [0x037c0000, 0x0388c2c0, 0x038a0000) from space 64K, 0% used [0x038a0000, 0x038a0000, 0x038b0000) to space 64K, 0% used [0x038b0000, 0x038b0000, 0x038c0000) tenured generation total 4096K, used 0K [0x03ca0000, 0x040a0000, 0x077c0000) the space 4096K, 0% used [0x03ca0000, 0x03ca0000, 0x03ca0200, 0x040a0000) compacting perm gen total 12288K, used 2143K [0x077c0000, 0x083c0000, 0x0b7c0000) the space 12288K, 17% used [0x077c0000, 0x079d7e38, 0x079d8000, 0x083c0000) No shared spaces configured. Dynamic libraries: 0x00400000 - 0x00424000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe 0x77550000 - 0x7768e000 C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll 0x75a80000 - 0x75b54000 C:\Windows\system32\kernel32.dll 0x758d0000 - 0x7591b000 C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll 0x759e0000 - 0x75a80000 C:\Windows\system32\ADVAPI32.dll 0x76070000 - 0x7611c000 C:\Windows\system32\msvcrt.dll 0x77250000 - 0x77269000 C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\sechost.dll 0x771a0000 - 0x77241000 C:\Windows\system32\RPCRT4.dll 0x76eb0000 - 0x76f79000 C:\Windows\system32\USER32.dll 0x76e60000 - 0x76eae000 C:\Windows\system32\GDI32.dll 0x77770000 - 0x7777a000 C:\Windows\system32\LPK.dll 0x75fd0000 - 0x7606e000 C:\Windows\system32\USP10.dll 0x770b0000 - 0x770cf000 C:\Windows\system32\IMM32.DLL 0x770d0000 - 0x7719c000 C:\Windows\system32\MSCTF.dll 0x7c340000 - 0x7c396000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\msvcr71.dll 0x6d800000 - 0x6da8b000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\client\jvm.dll 0x73a00000 - 0x73a32000 C:\Windows\system32\WINMM.dll 0x75610000 - 0x7565b000 C:\Windows\system32\apphelp.dll 0x6d7b0000 - 0x6d7bc000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\verify.dll 0x6d330000 - 0x6d34f000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java.dll 0x6d290000 - 0x6d298000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\hpi.dll 0x776e0000 - 0x776e5000 C:\Windows\system32\PSAPI.DLL 0x6d7f0000 - 0x6d7ff000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\zip.dll 0x10000000 - 0x1004c000 C:\Users\theo\Desktop\workspace\JavaFX1\lib\natives\windows\lwjgl.dll 0x5d170000 - 0x5d238000 C:\Windows\system32\OPENGL32.dll 0x6e7b0000 - 0x6e7d2000 C:\Windows\system32\GLU32.dll 0x70620000 - 0x70707000 C:\Windows\system32\DDRAW.dll 0x70610000 - 0x70616000 C:\Windows\system32\DCIMAN32.dll 0x75b60000 - 0x75cfd000 C:\Windows\system32\SETUPAPI.dll 0x759b0000 - 0x759d7000 C:\Windows\system32\CFGMGR32.dll 0x76d70000 - 0x76dff000 C:\Windows\system32\OLEAUT32.dll 0x75db0000 - 0x75f0c000 C:\Windows\system32\ole32.dll 0x758b0000 - 0x758c2000 C:\Windows\system32\DEVOBJ.dll 0x74060000 - 0x74073000 C:\Windows\system32\dwmapi.dll 0x74b60000 - 0x74b69000 C:\Windows\system32\VERSION.dll 0x745f0000 - 0x7478e000 C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.windows.common-controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.7600.16661_none_420fe3fa2b8113bd\COMCTL32.dll 0x75d50000 - 0x75da7000 C:\Windows\system32\SHLWAPI.dll 0x74370000 - 0x743b0000 C:\Windows\system32\uxtheme.dll 0x22200000 - 0x22206000 C:\Program Files\ESET\ESET Smart Security\eplgHooks.dll VM Arguments: jvm_args: -Djava.library.path=C:\Users\theo\Desktop\workspace\JavaFX1\lib\natives\windows -Dfile.encoding=Cp1253 java_command: zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main Launcher Type: SUN_STANDARD Environment Variables: PATH=C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/bin/client;C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/bin;C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/lib/i386;C:\Perl\site\bin;C:\Perl\bin;C:\Ruby200\bin;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Shared;C:\Users\theo\Desktop\eclipse; USERNAME=theo OS=Windows_NT PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=x86 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5, GenuineIntel --------------- S Y S T E M --------------- OS: Windows 7 Build 7600 CPU:total 4 (8 cores per cpu, 2 threads per core) family 6 model 37 stepping 5, cmov, cx8, fxsr, mmx, sse, sse2, sse3, ssse3, sse4.1, sse4.2, ht Memory: 4k page, physical 2097151k(1257972k free), swap 4194303k(4194303k free) vm_info: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (14.2-b01) for windows-x86 JRE (1.6.0_16-b01), built on Jul 31 2009 11:26:58 by "java_re" with MS VC++ 7.1 time: Wed Oct 23 22:00:12 2013 elapsed time: 0 seconds Code: Display.setDisplayMode(new DisplayMode(800,600)); Display.create();//Error here I am using JDK 6

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C# 5 Async, Part 1: Simplifying Asynchrony – That for which we await

- by Reed

Today’s announcement at PDC of the future directions C# is taking excite me greatly. The new Visual Studio Async CTP is amazing. Asynchronous code – code which frustrates and demoralizes even the most advanced of developers, is taking a huge leap forward in terms of usability. This is handled by building on the Task functionality in .NET 4, as well as the addition of two new keywords being added to the C# language: async and await. This core of the new asynchronous functionality is built upon three key features. First is the Task functionality in .NET 4, and based on Task and Task<TResult>. While Task was intended to be the primary means of asynchronous programming with .NET 4, the .NET Framework was still based mainly on the Asynchronous Pattern and the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern. The .NET Framework added functionality and guidance for wrapping existing APIs into a Task based API, but the framework itself didn’t really adopt Task or Task<TResult> in any meaningful way. The CTP shows that, going forward, this is changing. One of the three key new features coming in C# is actually a .NET Framework feature. Nearly every asynchronous API in the .NET Framework has been wrapped into a new, Task-based method calls. In the CTP, this is done via as external assembly (AsyncCtpLibrary.dll) which uses Extension Methods to wrap the existing APIs. However, going forward, this will be handled directly within the Framework. This will have a unifying effect throughout the .NET Framework. This is the first building block of the new features for asynchronous programming: Going forward, all asynchronous operations will work via a method that returns Task or Task<TResult> The second key feature is the new async contextual keyword being added to the language. The async keyword is used to declare an asynchronous function, which is a method that either returns void, a Task, or a Task<T>. Inside the asynchronous function, there must be at least one await expression. This is a new C# keyword (await) that is used to automatically take a series of statements and break it up to potentially use discontinuous evaluation. This is done by using await on any expression that evaluates to a Task or Task<T>. For example, suppose we want to download a webpage as a string. There is a new method added to WebClient: Task<string> WebClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync(Uri). Since this returns a Task<string> we can use it within an asynchronous function. Suppose, for example, that we wanted to do something similar to my asynchronous Task example – download a web page asynchronously and check to see if it supports XHTML 1.0, then report this into a TextBox. This could be done like so: private async void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { string url = "http://reedcopsey.com"; string content = await new WebClient().DownloadStringTaskAsync(url); this.textBox1.Text = string.Format("Page {0} supports XHTML 1.0: {1}", url, content.Contains("XHTML 1.0")); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Let’s walk through what’s happening here, step by step. By adding the async contextual keyword to the method definition, we are able to use the await keyword on our WebClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync method call. When the user clicks this button, the new method (Task<string> WebClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync(string)) is called, which returns a Task<string>. By adding the await keyword, the runtime will call this method that returns Task<string>, and execution will return to the caller at this point. This means that our UI is not blocked while the webpage is downloaded. Instead, the UI thread will “await” at this point, and let the WebClient do it’s thing asynchronously. When the WebClient finishes downloading the string, the user interface’s synchronization context will automatically be used to “pick up” where it left off, and the Task<string> returned from DownloadStringTaskAsync is automatically unwrapped and set into the content variable. At this point, we can use that and set our text box content. There are a couple of key points here: Asynchronous functions are declared with the async keyword, and contain one or more await expressions In addition to the obvious benefits of shorter, simpler code – there are some subtle but tremendous benefits in this approach. When the execution of this asynchronous function continues after the first await statement, the initial synchronization context is used to continue the execution of this function. That means that we don’t have to explicitly marshal the call that sets textbox1.Text back to the UI thread – it’s handled automatically by the language and framework! Exception handling around asynchronous method calls also just works. I’d recommend every C# developer take a look at the documentation on the new Asynchronous Programming for C# and Visual Basic page, download the Visual Studio Async CTP, and try it out.

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Secure wipe of a hard drive using WinPE.

- by Derek Meier

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The wiping of a hard drive is typically seen as fairly trivial. There are tons of applications out there that will do it for you. Point àClickàGlobal-Thermo Nuclear War. However, these applications are typically expensive or unreliable. Plus, if you have a laptop or lack a secondary computer to put the hard drive into – how on earth do you wipe it quickly and easily while still conforming to a 7 pass rule (this means that every possible bit on the hard drive is set to 0 and then to 1 seven times in a row)? Yes, one pass should be enough – as turning every bit from a 1 to a zero will wipe the data from existence. But, we’re dealing with tinfoil hat wearing types here people. DOD standards dictate at least 3 passes, and typically 7 is the preferred amount. I’m not going to argue about data recovery. I have been told to use 7 passes, and so I will. So say we all! Quite some time ago I used to make a BartPE XP-based boot cd for the original purpose of securely wiping data. I loved BartPE and integrated so many plugins into my builds that I could do pretty much anything directly from CD. Reset passwords, uninstall security updates, wipe drives, chkdsk, remove spyware, install Windows, etc. However, with the newer multi-core systems and new chipsets coming out from vendors, I found that BartPE was rather difficult to keep up to date. I have since switched to WinPE 3.0 (Windows Preinstallation Environment). http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748933(WS.10).aspx It is fairly simple to create your own CD, and I have made a few helpful scripts to easily integrate drivers and rebuild the ISO file for you. I’ll cover making your own boot CD utilizing WinPE 3.0 in a later post – I can talk about WinPE forever and need to collect my thoughts!! My wife loves talking about WinPE almost as much as talking about Doctor Who. Wait, did I say loves? Hmmmm, I may have meant loathes. The topic at hand? Right. Wiping a drive! I must have drunk too much coffee this morning. I like to use a simple batch script that calls a combination of diskpart.exe from Microsoft® and Sdelete.exe created by our friend Mark Russinovich. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx All of the following files are located within the same directory on my WinPE boot CD. Here are the contents of wipe_me.bat, script.txt and sdelete.reg. Wipe_me.bat: @echo off echo. echo I will completely wipe the local hard drives using echo 7 individual wipes. The data will NOT echo be recoverable. I will begin after you pause echo. echo Preparing to partition and format disk. Diskpart.exe /s "script.txt" REM I was annoyed by not having a completely automated script – and Sdelete wants you to accept the license agreement. So, I added a registry file to skip doing that. regedit /S sdelete.reg rem sdelete options selected are: -p (passes) -c (zero free space) -s (recurse through subdirectories, if any) -z (clean free space) [drive letter] sdelete.exe -p 7 -c -s -z c: echo. echo Pass seven complete. echo. echo Wiping complete. Pause exit script.txt: list disk select disk 0 clean create partition primary select partition 1 active format FS=NTFS LABEL="New Volume" QUICK assign letter=c exit *Notes: This script assumes one local hard drive – change the script as you see fit for your environment. The clean command will overwrite the master boot record and any hidden sector information – so be careful! sdelete.reg: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sysinternals\SDelete] "EulaAccepted"=dword:00000001 With a combination of WinPE, sdelete.exe and your friendly neighborhood text editor you can begin wiping drives as quickly and easily as possible! I hope this helps, I get asked this a lot in my line of work. Best of luck, Derek

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ASP.NET MVC Custom Profile Provider

- by Ben Griswold

It’s been a long while since I last used the ASP.NET Profile provider. It’s a shame, too, because it just works with very little development effort: Membership tables installed? Check. Profile enabled in web.config? Check. SqlProfileProvider connection string set? Check. Profile properties defined in said web.config file? Check. Write code to set value, read value, build and test. Check. Check. Check. Yep, I thought the built-in Profile stuff was pure gold until I noticed how the user-based information is persisted to the database. It’s stored as xml and, well, that was going to be trouble if I ever wanted to query the profile data. So, I have avoided the super-easy-to-use ASP.NET Profile provider ever since, until this week, when I decided I could use it to store user-specific properties which I am 99% positive I’ll never need to query against ever. I opened up my ASP.NET MVC application, completed steps 1-4 (above) in about 3 minutes, started writing my profile get/set code and that’s where the plan broke down. Oh yeah. That’s right. Visual Studio auto-generates a strongly-type Profile reference for web site projects but not for ASP.NET MVC or Web Applications. Bummer. So, I went through the steps of getting a customer profile provider working in my ASP.NET MVC application: First, I defined a CurrentUser routine and my profile properties in a custom Profile class like so: using System.Web.Profile; using System.Web.Security; using Project.Core; namespace Project.Web.Context { public class MemberPreferencesProfile : ProfileBase { static public MemberPreferencesProfile CurrentUser { get { return (MemberPreferencesProfile) Create(Membership.GetUser().UserName); } } public Enums.PresenceViewModes? ViewMode { get { return ((Enums.PresenceViewModes) ( base["ViewMode"] ?? Enums.PresenceViewModes.Category)); } set { base["ViewMode"] = value; Save(); } } } } And then I replaced the existing profile configuration web.config with the following: <profile enabled="true" defaultProvider="MvcSqlProfileProvider" inherits="Project.Web.Context.MemberPreferencesProfile"> <providers> <clear/> <add name="MvcSqlProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/"/> </providers> </profile> Notice that profile is enabled, I’ve defined the defaultProvider and profile is now inheriting from my custom MemberPreferencesProfile class. Finally, I am now able to set and get profile property values nearly the same way as I did with website projects: viewMode = MemberPreferencesProfile.CurrentUser.ViewMode; MemberPreferencesProfile.CurrentUser.ViewMode = viewMode;

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Oracle Announces New Oracle Exastack Program for ISV Partners

- by pfolgado

Oracle Exastack Program Enables ISV Partners to Leverage a Scalable, Integrated Infrastructure to Deliver Their Applications Tuned and Optimized for High-Performance News Facts Enabling Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and other members of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) to rapidly build and deliver faster, more reliable applications to end customers, Oracle today introduced Oracle Exastack Ready, available now, and Oracle Exastack Optimized, available in fall 2011 through OPN. The Oracle Exastack Program focuses on helping ISVs run their solutions on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud -- integrated systems in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide partners with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Leveraging the new Oracle Exastack Program in which applications can qualify as Oracle Exastack Ready or Oracle Exastack Optimized, partners can use available OPN resources to optimize their applications to run faster and more reliably -- providing increased performance to their end users. By deploying their applications on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, ISVs can reduce the cost, time and support complexities typically associated with building and maintaining a disparate application infrastructure -- enabling them to focus more on their core competencies, accelerating innovation and delivering superior value to customers. After qualifying their applications as Oracle Exastack Ready, partners can note to customers that their applications run on and support Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud component products including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server. Customers can be confident when choosing a partner's Oracle Exastack Optimized application, knowing it has been tuned by the OPN member on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with a goal of delivering optimum speed, scalability and reliability. Partners participating in the Oracle Exastack Program can also leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized applications to advance to Platinum or Diamond level in OPN. Oracle Exastack Programs Provide ISVs a Reliable, High-Performance Application Infrastructure With the Oracle Exastack Program ISVs have several options to qualify and tune their applications with Oracle Exastack, including: Oracle Exastack Ready: Oracle Exastack Ready provides qualifying partners with specific branding and promotional benefits based on their adoption of Oracle products. If a partner application supports the latest major release of one of these products, the partner may use the corresponding logo with their product marketing materials: Oracle Solaris Ready, Oracle Linux Ready, Oracle Database Ready, and Oracle WebLogic Ready. Oracle Exastack Ready is available to OPN members at the Gold level or above. Additionally, OPN members participating in the program can leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready applications toward advancement to the Platinum or Diamond levels in the OPN Specialized program and toward achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status. Oracle Exastack Optimized: When available, for OPN members at the Gold level or above, Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide direct access to Oracle technical resources and dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments so OPN members can test and tune their applications to deliver optimal performance and scalability on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide OPN members with specific branding and promotional benefits including the use of the Oracle Exastack Optimized logo. OPN members participating in the program will also be able to leverage their Oracle Exastack Optimized applications toward advancement to Platinum or Diamond level in the OPN Specialized program. Oracle Exastack Labs and ISV Enablement: Dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments and related technical enablement resources (including Guided Learning Paths and Boot Camps) will be available through OPN for OPN members to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack offerings, and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized or Oracle Exastack Ready. Oracle Exastack labs will be available to qualifying OPN members at the Gold level or above. Partners are eligible to participate in the Oracle Exastack Ready program immediately, which will help them meet the requirements to attain Oracle Exastack Optimized status in the future. Guidelines for Oracle Exastack Optimized, as well as Oracle Exastack Labs will be available in fall 2011. Supporting Quotes "In order to effectively differentiate their software applications in the marketplace, ISVs need to rapidly deliver new capabilities and performance improvements," said Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president of Worldwide Alliances and Channels and Embedded Sales. "With Oracle Exastack, ISVs have the ability to optimize and deploy their applications with a complete, integrated and cloud-ready infrastructure that will help them accelerate innovation, unlock new features and functionality, and deliver superior value to customers." "We view performance as absolutely critical and a key differentiator," said Tom Stock, SVP of Product Management, GoldenSource. "As a leading provider of enterprise data management solutions for securities and investment management firms, with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, we see an opportunity to notably improve data processing performance -- providing high quality 'golden copy' data in a reduced timeframe. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status will be a stamp of approval that our solution will provide the performance and scalability that our customers demand." "As a leading provider of Revenue Intelligence solutions for telecommunications, media and entertainment service providers, our customers continually demand more readily accessible, enriched and pre-analyzed information to minimize their financial risks and maximize their margins," said Alon Aginsky, President and CEO of cVidya Networks. "Oracle Exastack enables our solutions to deliver the power, infrastructure, and innovation required to transform our customers' business operations and stay ahead of the game." Supporting Resources Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Oracle Exastack Datasheet Judson Althoff blog Connect with the Oracle Partner community at OPN on Facebook, OPN on LinkedIn, OPN on YouTube, or OPN on Twitter

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C# 4.0: Dynamic Programming

- by Paulo Morgado

The major feature of C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Not just dynamic typing, but dynamic in broader sense, which means talking to anything that is not statically typed to be a .NET object. Dynamic Language Runtime The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is piece of technology that unifies dynamic programming on the .NET platform, the same way the Common Language Runtime (CLR) has been a common platform for statically typed languages. The CLR always had dynamic capabilities. You could always use reflection, but its main goal was never to be a dynamic programming environment and there were some features missing. The DLR is built on top of the CLR and adds those missing features to the .NET platform. The Dynamic Language Runtime is the core infrastructure that consists of: Expression Trees The same expression trees used in LINQ, now improved to support statements. Dynamic Dispatch Dispatches invocations to the appropriate binder. Call Site Caching For improved efficiency. Dynamic languages and languages with dynamic capabilities are built on top of the DLR. IronPython and IronRuby were already built on top of the DLR, and now, the support for using the DLR is being added to C# and Visual Basic. Other languages built on top of the CLR are expected to also use the DLR in the future. Underneath the DLR there are binders that talk to a variety of different technologies: .NET Binder Allows to talk to .NET objects. JavaScript Binder Allows to talk to JavaScript in SilverLight. IronPython Binder Allows to talk to IronPython. IronRuby Binder Allows to talk to IronRuby. COM Binder Allows to talk to COM. Whit all these binders it is possible to have a single programming experience to talk to all these environments that are not statically typed .NET objects. The dynamic Static Type Let’s take this traditional statically typed code: Calculator calculator = GetCalculator(); int sum = calculator.Sum(10, 20); Because the variable that receives the return value of the GetCalulator method is statically typed to be of type Calculator and, because the Calculator type has an Add method that receives two integers and returns an integer, it is possible to call that Sum method and assign its return value to a variable statically typed as integer. Now lets suppose the calculator was not a statically typed .NET class, but, instead, a COM object or some .NET code we don’t know he type of. All of the sudden it gets very painful to call the Add method: object calculator = GetCalculator(); Type calculatorType = calculator.GetType(); object res = calculatorType.InvokeMember("Add", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, calculator, new object[] { 10, 20 }); int sum = Convert.ToInt32(res); And what if the calculator was a JavaScript object? ScriptObject calculator = GetCalculator(); object res = calculator.Invoke("Add", 10, 20); int sum = Convert.ToInt32(res); For each dynamic domain we have a different programming experience and that makes it very hard to unify the code. With C# 4.0 it becomes possible to write code this way: dynamic calculator = GetCalculator(); int sum = calculator.Add(10, 20); You simply declare a variable who’s static type is dynamic. dynamic is a pseudo-keyword (like var) that indicates to the compiler that operations on the calculator object will be done dynamically. The way you should look at dynamic is that it’s just like object (System.Object) with dynamic semantics associated. Anything can be assigned to a dynamic. dynamic x = 1; dynamic y = "Hello"; dynamic z = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3 }; At run-time, all object will have a type. In the above example x is of type System.Int32. When one or more operands in an operation are typed dynamic, member selection is deferred to run-time instead of compile-time. Then the run-time type is substituted in all variables and normal overload resolution is done, just like it would happen at compile-time. The result of any dynamic operation is always dynamic and, when a dynamic object is assigned to something else, a dynamic conversion will occur. Code Resolution Method double x = 1.75; double y = Math.Abs(x); compile-time double Abs(double x) dynamic x = 1.75; dynamic y = Math.Abs(x); run-time double Abs(double x) dynamic x = 2; dynamic y = Math.Abs(x); run-time int Abs(int x) The above code will always be strongly typed. The difference is that, in the first case the method resolution is done at compile-time, and the others it’s done ate run-time. IDynamicMetaObjectObject The DLR is pre-wired to know .NET objects, COM objects and so forth but any dynamic language can implement their own objects or you can implement your own objects in C# through the implementation of the IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface. When an object implements IDynamicMetaObjectProvider, it can participate in the resolution of how method calls and property access is done. The .NET Framework already provides two implementations of IDynamicMetaObjectProvider: DynamicObject : IDynamicMetaObjectProvider The DynamicObject class enables you to define which operations can be performed on dynamic objects and how to perform those operations. For example, you can define what happens when you try to get or set an object property, call a method, or perform standard mathematical operations such as addition and multiplication. ExpandoObject : IDynamicMetaObjectProvider The ExpandoObject class enables you to add and delete members of its instances at run time and also to set and get values of these members. This class supports dynamic binding, which enables you to use standard syntax like sampleObject.sampleMember, instead of more complex syntax like sampleObject.GetAttribute("sampleMember").

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Turn Photos and Home Videos into Movies with Windows Live Movie Maker

- by DigitalGeekery

Are you looking for an easy way to take your digital photos and videos and turn them into a movie or slideshow? Today we’ll take a detailed look at how to do use Windows Live Movie Maker. Installation Windows Live Movie Maker comes bundled as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite (link below). However, you don’t have to install any of the programs you may not want. Take notice of the You’re almost done screen. Before clicking Continue, be sure to uncheck the boxes to set your search provider and homepage. Adding Pictures and Videos Open Windows Live Movie Maker. You can add videos or photos by simply dragging and dropping them onto the storyboard area. You can also click on the storyboard area or on the Add videos and photos button on the Home tab to browse for videos and photos. Windows Live Movie Maker supports most video, image, and audio file types. Select your files and add click Open to add them to Windows Live Movie Maker. By default WLMM doesn’t allow you to add files from network locations…so check out our article on how to add network support to Windows Live MovieMaker if the files you want to add are on a network drive. Layout All of your added clips will appear in the storyboard area on the right, while the currently selected clip will appear in the preview window on the left. You can adjust the size of the two areas by clicking and dragging the dividing line in the middle. Make the clips on the storyboard bigger or smaller by clicking on the thumbnail size icon. The slider at the lower right adjusts the zoom time scale. Previewing your Movie At any time, you can playback your movie and preview how it will look in the Preview window by clicking the space bar, or by pushing the play button under the preview window. You can also manually move the preview bar slider across the storyboard to view the clips as the video progresses. Adjusting Clips on the Storyboard You can click and drag clips on the storyboard to change the order in which the photos and videos appear. Adding Music Nothing brings a movie to life quite like music. Selecting Add music will add your music to the beginning of the movie. Select Add music at the current point to include it in the movie to the current location of your preview bar slider, then browse for your music clip. WLMM supports many common audio files such as WAV, MP3, M4A, WMA, AIFF, and ASF. The music clip will appear above the video / photos clips on the storyboard. You can change the location of music clips by clicking and dragging them to a different location on the storyboard. Add Titles, Captions, and Credits To add a Title screen to your movie, click the Title button on the Home tab. Type your title directly into the text box on the preview screen. The title will be placed at the location of the preview slider on the storyboard. However, you can change the location by clicking and dragging title to other areas of the storyboard. On the Format tab, there are a handful of text settings. You can change the font, color, size, alignment, and transparency. The Adjust group allows you to change the background color, edit the text, and set the length of time the Title will appear in the movie. The Effects group on the Format tab allows you to select an effect for your title screen. By hovering your cursor over each option, you will get a live preview of how each effect will appear in the preview window. Click to apply any of the effects. For captions, select where you want your caption to appear with the preview slider on the storyboard, then click the captions button on the Home tab. Just like the title, you type your caption directly into the text box on the preview screen, and you can make any adjustments by using the Font and Paragraph, Adjust, and Effects groups above. Credits are done the same as titles and captions, except they are automatically placed at the end of the movie. Transitions Go to the Animation tab on the ribbon to apply transitions. Select a clip from the storyboard and hover over one of the transition to see it in the preview window. Click on the transition to apply it to the clip. You can apply transitions separately to clips or hold down Ctrl button while clicking to select multiple clips to which to apply the same transition. Pan and zoom effects are also located on the Animations tab, but can be applied to photos only. Like transition, you can apply them individually to a clip or hold down Ctrl button while clicking to select multiple clips to which to apply the same pan and zoom effect. Once applied, you can adjust the duration of the transitions and pan and zoom effects. You can also click the dropdown for additional transitions or effects. Visual Effects Similar to Pan and Zoom and Transitions, you can apply a variety of Visual Effects to individual or multiple clips. Editing Video and Music Note: This does not actually edit the original video you imported into your Windows Live Movie Maker project, only how it appears in your WLMM project. There are some very basic editing tools located on the Home tab. The Rotate left and Rotate right button will adjust any clip that may be oriented incorrectly. The Fit to music button will automatically adjust the duration of the photos (if you have any in your project) to fit the length of the music in your movie. Audio mix allows you to change the volume level You can also do some slightly more advanced editing from the Edit tab. Select the video clip on the storyboard and click the Trim tool to edit or remove portions of a video clip. Next, click and drag the sliders in the preview windows to select the are you wish to keep. For example, the area outside the sliders is the area trimmed from the movie. The area inside is the section that is kept in the movie. You can also adjust the Start and End points manually on the ribbon. When you are finished, click Save trim. You can also split your video clips. Move the preview slider to the location in the video clip where you’d like to split it, and select Split. Your video will be split into separate sections. Now you can apply different effects or move them to different locations on the storyboard. Editing Music Clips Select the music clip on the storyboard and then the Options tab on the ribbon. You can adjust the music volume by moving the slider right and left. You can also choose to have your music clip fade in or out at the beginning and end of your movie. From the Fade in and Fade out dropdowns, select None, Slow, Medium, or Fast. To adjust the sound of your audio clips, click on the Edit tab, select the Video volume button, and adjust the slider. Move it all the way to the left to mute any background noise in your video clips. AutoMovie As you have seen, Windows Live Movie Maker allows you to add effects, transitions, titles, and more. If you don’t want to do any of that stuff yourself, AutoMovie will automatically add title, credits, cross fade transitions between items, pan and zoom effects to photos, and fit your project to the music. Just select the AutoMovie button on the Home tab. You can go from zero to movie in literally a couple minutes. Uploading to YouTube You can share your video on YouTube directly from Windows Live Movie Maker. Click on the YouTube icon in the Sharing group on the Home tab. You’ll be prompted for your YouTube username and password. Fill in the details about your movie and click Publish. The movie will be converted to WMV before being uploaded to YouTube. As soon as the YouTube conversion is complete, you’re new movie is live and ready to be viewed. Saving your Movie as a Video File Select the icon at the top left, then select Save movie. As you hover your mouse over each of the options, you will see the output display size, aspect ratio, and estimated file size per minute of video. All of these settings will output your movie as a WMV file. (Unfortunately, the only option is to save a movie as a WMV file.) The only difference is how they are encoded based on preset common settings. The Burn to DVD option also outputs a WMV file, but then opens Windows DVD Maker and walks you through the process of creating and burning a DVD. If you choose the Burn to DVD option, close this window when the WMV file conversion is complete and the Windows DVD Maker will prompt you to begin. When your movie is finished, it’s time to relax and enjoy. Conclusion Windows Live Movie Maker makes it easy for the average person to quickly churn out nice looking movies and slideshows from there own pictures and videos. However, long time users of previous editions (formerly called Windows Movie Maker) will likely be disappointed by some features missing in Windows Live Movie Maker that existed in earlier editions. Looking for details on burning your new project to DVD, check out our article on how to create and author DVDs with Windows DVD Maker. Download Windows Live Movie Maker Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Family Fun: Share Photos with Photo Gallery and Windows Live SpacesCreate and Author DVDs in Windows 7Rotate a Video 90 degrees with VLC or Windows Live Movie MakerInstall Windows Live Essentials In Windows 7How to Make/Edit a movie with Windows Movie Maker in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010

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Silverlight 4 Training Kit

- by ScottGu

We recently released a new free Silverlight 4 Training Kit that walks you through building business applications with Silverlight 4. You can browse the training kit online or alternatively download an entire offline version of the training kit. The training material is structured on teaching how to use the new Silverlight 4 features to build an end to end business application. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands on labs. Below is a breakdown and links to all of the content. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Module 1: Introduction Click here to watch this module. In this video John Papa and Ian Griffiths discuss the key areas that the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course focuses on. This module is the overview of the course and covers many key scenarios that are faced when building business applications, and how Silverlight can help address them. Module 2: WCF RIA Services Click here to explore this module. In this lab, you will create a web site for managing conferences that will be the basis for the other labs in this course. Don’t worry if you don’t complete a particular lab in the series – all lab manual instructions are accompanied by completed solutions, so you can either build your own solution from start to finish, or dive straight in at any point using the solutions provided as a starting point. In this lab you will learn how to set up WCF RIA Services, create bindings to the domain context, filter using the domain data source, and create domain service queries. Online Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 2.1 - WCF RIA Services Ian Griffiths sets up the Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services for the sample Event Manager application for the course. He covers how to set up the services, how the Domain Services work and the role that the DomainContext plays in the sample application. He also reviews the metadata classes and integrating the navigation framework. Module 2.2 – Using WCF RIA Services to Edit Entities Ian Griffiths discusses how he adds the ability to edit and create individual entities with the features built into WCF RIA Services into the sample Event Manager application. He covers data binding fundamentals, IQueryable, LINQ, the DomainDataSource, navigation to a single entity using the navigation framework, and how to use the Visual Studio designer to do much of the work . Module 2.3 – Showing Master/Details Records Using WCF RIA Services Ian Griffiths reviews how to display master/detail records for the sample Event Manager application using WCF RIA Services. He covers how to use the Include attribute to indicate which elements to serialize back to the client. Ian also demonstrates how to use the Data Sources window in the designer to add and bind controls to specific data elements. He wraps up by showing how to create custom services to the Domain Services. Module 3 – Authentication, Validation, MVVM, Commands, Implicit Styles and RichTextBox Click here to visit this module. This lab demonstrates how to build a login screen, integrate ASP.NET authentication, and perform validation on data elements. Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) is introduced and used in this lab as a pattern to help separate the UI and business logic. You will also learn how to use implicit styling and the new RichTextBox control. Online Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 3.1 – Authentication Ian Griffiths covers how to integrate a login screen and authentication into the sample Event Manager application. Ian shows how to use the ASP.NET authentication and integrate it into WCF RIA Services and the Silverlight presentation layer. Module 3.2 – MVVM Ian Griffiths covers how to Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) patterns into the sample Event Manager application. He discusses why MVVM exists, what separated presentation means, and why it is important. He shows how to connect the View to the ViewModel, why data binding is important in this symbiosis, and how everything fits together in the overall application. Module 3.3 –Validation Ian Griffiths discusses how validation of user input can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He demonstrates how to use the DataAnnotations, the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface, binding markup extensions, and WCF RIA Services in concert to achieve great validation in the sample application. He discusses how this technique allows for property level validation, entity level validation, and asynchronous server side validation. Module 3.4 – Implicit Styles Ian Griffiths discusses how why implicit styles are important and how they can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He shows how implicit styles defined in a resource dictionary can be applied to all elements of a particular kind throughout the application. Module 3.5 – RichTextBox Ian Griffiths discusses how the new RichTextBox control and it can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He demonstrates how the RichTextBox can provide editing for the event information and how it can display the rich text for selection and copying. Module 4 – User Profiles, Drop Targets, Webcam and Clipboard Click here to visit this module. This lab builds new features into the sample application to take the user's photo. It teaches you how to use the webcam to capture an image, use Silverlight as a drop target, and take advantage of programmatic access to the clipboard. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 4.1 – Webcam Ian Griffiths demonstrates how the webcam adds value to the sample Event Manager application by capturing an image of the attendee. He discusses the VideoCaptureDevice, the CaptureDviceConfiguration, and the CaptureSource classes and how they allow audio and video to be captured so you can grab an image from the capture device and save it. Module 4.2 - Drag and Drop in Silverlight Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to capture and handle the Drop in the sample Event Manager application so the user can drag a photo from a file and drop it into the application. Ian reviews the AllowDrop property, the Drop event, how to access the file that can be dropped, and the other drag related events. He also reviews how to make this work across browsers and the challenges for this. Module 5 – Schedule Planner and Right Mouse Click Click here to visit this module. This lab builds on the application to allow grouping in the DataGrid and implement right mouse click features to add context menu support. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 5.1 – Grouping and Binding Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to use the grouping features for data binding in the DataGrid and how it applies to the sample Event Manager application. He reviews the role of the CollectionViewSource in grouping, customizing the templates for headers, and how to work with grouping with ItemsControls. Module 5.2 – Layout Visual States Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to use the Fluid UI animation support for visual states in the ListBox control DataGrid and how it applies to the sample Event Manager application. He reviews the 3 visual states of BeforeLoaded, AfterLoaded, and BeforeUnloaded. Module 5.3 – Right Mouse Click Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to add support for handling the right mouse button click event to display a context menu for the Event Manager application. He demonstrates how to handle the event, show a custom context menu control, and integrate it into the scheduling portion of the application. Module 6 – Printing the Schedule Click here to visit this module. This lab teaches how to use the new printing features in Silverlight 4. The lab walks through the PrintDocument class and the ViewBox control, while showing how to print multiple pages of content using them. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 6.1 – Printing and the Viewbox Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to add the ability to print the schedule to the sample Event Manager application. He walks through the importance of the PrintDocument class and its members. He also shows how to handle printing the visual tree and how the ViewBox control can help. Module 6.2 – Multi Page Printing Ian Griffiths expands on his printing discussion by showing how to handle printing multiple pages of content for the sample Event Manager application. He shows how to paginate the content and points out various tips to keep in mind when determining the printable area. Module 7 – Running the Event Dashboard Out of Browser Click here to visit this module. This lab builds a dashboard for the sample application while explaining the fundamentals of the out of browser features, how to handle authentication, displaying notifications (toasts), and how to use native integration to use COM Interop with Silverlight. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 7.1 – Out of Browser Ian Griffiths discusses the role of an Out of Browser application for administrators to manage the events and users in the sample Event Manager application. He discusses several reasons why out of browser applications may better suit your needs including custom chrome, toasts, window placement, cross domain access, and file access. He demonstrates the basic technique to take your application and make it work out of browser using the tools. Module 7.2 – NotificationWindow (Toasts) for Elevated Trust Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses the how toasts can be used in the sample Event Manager application to show information that may require the user's attention. Ian covers how to create a toast using the NotificationWindow, security implications, and how to make the toast appear as needed. Module 7.3 – Out of Browser Window Placement Ian Griffiths discusses the how to manage the window positioning when building an out of browser application, handling the windows state, and controlling and handling activation of the window. Module 7.4 – Out of Browser Elevated Trust Application Overview Ian Griffiths discusses the implications of creating trusted out of browser application for the Event Manager sample application. He reviews why you might want to use elevated trust, what features is opens to you, and how to take advantage of them. Topics Ian covers include the dynamic keyword in C# 4, the AutomationFactory class, the API to check if you are in a trusted application, and communicating with Excel. Module 8 – Advanced Out of Browser and MEF Click here to visit this module. This hands-on lab walks through the creation of a trusted out of browser application and the new functionality that comes with that. You will learn to use COM Automation, handle the window closing event, set custom window chrome, digitally sign your Silverlight out of browser trusted application, create a silent install option, and take advantage of MEF. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 8.1 – Custom Window Chrome for Elevated Trust Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses how to replace the standard operating system window chrome with customized chrome for an elevated trusted out of browser application. He covers how it is important to handle close, resize, minimize, and maximize events. Ian mentions that the tooling was not ready when he shot this video, but the good news is that the tooling now supports setting the custom chrome directly from the property page for the Silverlight application. Module 8.2 – Window Closing Event for Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses the WindowClosing event and how to handle and optionally cancel the event. Module 8.3 – Silent Install of Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses how to use the SLLauncher executable to install an out of browser application. He discusses the optional command line switches that can be set including how the emulate switch can help you emulate the install process. Ian also shows how to setup a shortcut for the application and tell the application where it should look for future updates online. Module 8.4 – Digitally Signing Out of Browser Application Ian Griffiths discusses how and why to digitally sign an out of browser application using the signtool program. He covers what trusted certificates are, the implications of signing (or not signing), and the effect on the user experience. Module 8.5 – The Value of MEF with Silverlight Ian Griffiths discusses what MEF is, how your application can benefit from it, and the fundamental features it puts at your disposal. He covers the 3 step import, export and compose process as well as how to dynamically import XAP files using MEF. Summary As you can probably tell from the long list above – this series contains a ton of great content, and hopefully provides a nice end-to-end walkthrough that helps explain how to take advantage of Silverlight 4 (and all its new features). Hope this helps, Scott

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 21, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 21, 2010New Projects.Net wrapper around the Neo4j Rest Server: Neo4jRestSharp is a .Net API wrapper for the Neo4j Rest Server. Neo4j is an open sourced java based transactional graph database that stores data ...3D Editor Application Framework: A starting point for building 3D editing applications, such as video game editors, particle system editors, 3D modelling tools, visualization tools...Bulk Actions for SharePoint: This project aims to provide some essential and generic bulk actions for SharePoint lists. Idea is to include any custom actions that can be applie...CineRemote - The hometheater control board: CineRemote's purpose is to offer an alternative to expensive control system for dedicated hometheater rooms. CrmContrib: CrmContrib is a collection of useful items for developers and customizers working with the Dynamics CRM platform.db2xls: OleDb,Sql Server,Sqlite,....to excel, from sqlHappyNet - Silverlight reference application: HappyNet is a project using best practices to build an e-commerce web site. It is a full Silverlight application based on a solid architecture (PR...IP Multicast Library: IP Multicast Library makes it easier for developers to add Multicast, messaging to projects.Linkbutton Web Part: This Link Button Web Part can be installed in any SharePoint 2007 web site. You can onfigure a URL with query string that will be used by the Link...Majordomus pro Windows: Nástroj určený pro správce a vývojáře slouží k řízenému spuštění používaných a vypnutí nepotřebných služeb, procesů a aplikací ve Windows. Pomocí s...MRDS Samples: The MRDS Samples site hosts a variety of code samples for Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS).Mute4: Mute4 is a simple application that allows you to set a mute/vibration profile and it will switch back to your normal profile automatically after a ...Niko Neko Pureya: Niko Neko Pureya is a media player designed for people who watches a series of videos (like anime). It is very simple and easy to use & learn. And ...NVPX - VP8 Video Codec for .Net: NVPx allows you to use the now open-source VP8 codec on the .Net platform.openrs: openrs is an open-source RuneScape 2 emulator designed to be used with newer engine clients.Prism Evaluation: prism evaluationProj4Net: Proj4Net is a C#/.Net library to transform point coordinates from one geographic coordinate system to another, including datum transformation. The ...Read it to me!: Read it to me will allow you to load txt and rtf files and then speak them using SAPI 5 voices that are installed on your computer with an option t...sGSHOPedit: -SilverDice: SilverDice...SilverDude Toolkit for Silverlight: SilverDude Toolkit for Silverlight contains a collection of silverlight controls making life easier for developers. You'll no longer have to worry ...Silverlight Report: Open-Source Silverlight Reporting Engine. This project allows you to create and print reports using Silverlight 4.SimTrain5000: Train simulation project on University College of Northern Denmark.Springshield Sample Site for EPiServer CMS: City of Springshield - The accessible sample site for EPiServer CMS 6.Teach.Net: Teach.Net is a library/framework that can be used to create applications for testing and learning.The Amoeba Project: The Amoeba Project is a platform to be developed to embrace most of the latest Microsoft Technologies. Still in a conceptual stage however, it loo...The Fastcopy Helper: The Fastcopy Helper is a auxiliary tool for fastcopy.vow: vowWCF Client Generator: This code generator avoids the shortcomings of svcutil when generating proxies for services with a large number of methods.WebCycle: WebCycle is a screensaver application that cycles through web pages. This was originally created to cycle through Reporting Services reports so th...XGate2D - XNA 2D Game Engine: XGate2D is 2D game engine built using XNA Framework. XGate2D currently has 8 features: input handler, animation, Graphical User Interface (GUI), ...XNA Catapult Minigame for XNA 4: XNA 4 implementation of the Catapult Minigame Sample from XNA Creators Club.New ReleasesADefHelpDesk: ADefHelpDesk (Standard ASP.NET Version) 01.00.00: ADefHelpDesk a Help Desk / Ticket Tracker module * NOTE: This version is NOT a DotNetNuke module - It is a standard ASP.NET Application * SQL 2005...Bulk Actions for SharePoint: First Release: First Release - Includes following bulk list actions: *Delete *Checkin/Checkout *Publish/Unpublish *Move *Update MetadataCheck-in Wizard for ArenaChMS: v1.2.1: v 1.2.0 updated to work with Arena 2009.2 (see notes below). Added support for "At Kiosk" and "At Location" printing. Added support for print l...ConfigTray: 1.5: Version 1.5 will have a new UI for managing ConfigTray config. Instead of manually editing configtray.exe.config to add/delete/edit settings and fi...CrmContrib: CrmContribWorkflow 1.0 ALPHA1: This is an initial release of the CrmContribWorkflow 1.0 components. At the moment there are only two activities included in this release. Add Cont...DemotToolkit: DemotToolkit-0.1.0.50830: Initial release.DemotToolkit: DemotToolkit-0.1.1.51107: Fixed crashing in some circumstances.Dot Game: Dot Game Stable Release: Dot Game This is latest stable release without network play mode. (Network play mode is under development)Dynamic Survey Forms - SharePoint Web Part: Fix for missing dlls and documentation: Added missing assemblies to setup.zip. Installation instructions.EnhSim: V1.9.8.7: Added Sharpened Twilight ScaleEvent Scavenger: Viewer 3.2.2: Fixed a bug in the viewer where the previous view 'Top x' filter was not restored after the application was reopened.F# Project Extender: V0.9.2.0 (VS2008,VS2010): F# project extender for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. Fixed bugs: -VS2010 crash on MoveUp(MoveDown) of renamed file -Adding files brea...FlickrNet API Library: 3.0 Beta 2: The final Beta for the 3.0 release. Fixes a major issue with Photosets.GetList as well as a number of smaller bugs, and adds the new Usage extras ...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.5.7: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.5.7), with the new Help feature - all the instructions needed to use the software (If you have any sugges...Linkbutton Web Part: V1.1: Use WinZip to unzip. See docs folder for installation instructions.Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Live-Exchange Calendar Sync Final: Live-Exchange Calendar Sync Beta May 14, 2010 release of Live-Exchange Calendar Sync 1.0 . (Version 46127) Getting StartedInfo about installation ...MEFedMVVM: MEFedMVVM: This version contains the MEFedMVVM ViewModelLocator and also some basic services such as Mediator and StateManager. You can download the code fr...Mentor Text Database: May 2010 Release with instrumentation: This should function the same as the previous version. Some enhancements have been made, and additional instrumentation has been added to help anal...Merthin: SSF 2010: Code and documentation presented at the Student Science Fair of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Habana. The ma...NB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store_02.01.00: NB_Store v2.1.0 THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE FOR TESTING ONLY......DO NOT USE IT ON A LIVE SYSTEM.NerdDinner.com - Where Geeks Eat: NerdDinner - Four Database Access Samples: Chris Sells worked with Nick Muhonen from Useable Concepts and Nick created four samples exploring how an ASP.NET MVC application can access databa...openrs: Devstart: Trunk release, empty project.Over Store: OverStore 1.19.0.0: - Version number is increased. - Add methods for specifying custom callback methods to TableMappingRepositoryConfiguration. - Object attaching fu...Rnwood.SmtpServer: Rnwood.SmtpServer 2.0: SmtpServer 2.0 is a .NET SMTP server component written in pure c#. It was written to power http://smtp4dev.codeplex.com/ but can easily be used by ...Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.48524 (.NET 4-TFS 2010): What is new in this release? #6132 - Bug with open work hours; Added untested support for MSF for Agile process template; Improved data reporti...SharePoint Rsync List: 1.0.0.0: This initial 1.0 release includes a new feature which manages timer jobs on your sync listShould: Beta 1.1: Updated the namespaces. The extension methods are now in the root Should namespace. The other classes are not in child namespaces.SilverDude Toolkit for Silverlight: SilverDude Toolkit for Silverlight: Kindly give your comments about this project and tell how you feel about it. I'm still new in creating controls, hopefully you guys can support me....Silverlight Report: SilverlightReport_v0.1_alpha_bin: SilverlightReport v0.1 alphaSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit: SLARToolkit 1.0.2.0: Fixed a problem with long referenced DetectionResults that might have caused an IndexOutOfRangeException Added Marker.LoadFromResource to get rid...The Fastcopy Helper: My Fastcopy Helper 1.0: This Source Code Is use a method to run it . The method is thinked by my bain. So , The Performance maybe lower.Thinktecture.DataObjectModel: Thinktecture.DataObjectModel v0.12: Some bugs fixed. See ChangeLog.txt for more infos.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.0.4.1: A stability release fixing 13 issues based on feedback from 4.0.3 users. Most importantly is a fix to a serious date bug where day and month could ...Usa*Usa Libraly: Smart.Web.Mobile ver 0.2: Smart.Web.Mobile pictgram convert library for japanese galapagos k-tai( ﾟдﾟ) ver 0.2. - Custom encoding for HttpRequest.ContentEncoding / HttpResp...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30520.0: Automatic drop of latest buildvow: dream: I have a dreamvow: test: testWCF Client Generator: Version 0.9.1.42927: Initial feature set complete. Detailed UI pending.WebCycle: WebCycle 1.0.20: Initial CodePlex releaseWebCycle: WebCycle 1.0.21: Added Uri validataion before saving settingsWhois Application: 1.5 release: - uses the whois.iana.org to dynamically lookup the whois server for each top level domain - enables enter key press for searchWing Beats: Wing Beats 0.9: This first release is focused on the core functionality and XHTML 1.0 strict generation in Asp.NET MVC.Most Popular ProjectsWeb Service Software FactoryPlasmaAquisição de Sinais Vitais em Tempo Real (Vital signs realtime data acquisition)Octtree XNA-GS DrawableGameComponentRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETSQL Server PowerShell ExtensionsCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceFluent Ribbon Control Suite

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“Being Agile” Means No Documentation, Right?

- by jesschadwick

Ask most software professionals what Agile is and they’ll probably start talking about flexibility and delivering what the customer wants. Some may even mention the word “iterations”. But inevitably, they’ll say at some point that it means less or even no documentation. After all, doesn’t creating, updating, and circulating painstakingly comprehensive documentation that everyone and their mother have officially signed off on go against the very core of Agile? Of course it does! But really, they’re missing the point! Read The Agile Manifesto. (No, seriously - read it now. It’s short. I’ll wait.) It’s essentially a list of values. More specifically, it’s a right-side/left-side weighted list of values: “Value this over that”. Many people seem to get the impression that this is really a “good vs. bad” list and that those values on the right side are evil and should essentially be tossed on the floor. This leads to the conclusion that in order to be Agile we must throw away our fancy expensive tools, document as little as possible, and scoff at the idea of a project plan. This conclusion is quite convenient because it essentially means “less work, more productivity!” (particularly in regards to the documentation and project planning). I couldn’t disagree with this conclusion more. My interpretation of the Manifesto targets “over” as the operative word. It’s not just a list of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad. It’s a list of priorities. In other words, none of the concepts on the list should be removed from your development lifecycle – they are all important… just not equally important. This is not a unique interpretation, in fact it says so right at the end of the manifesto! So, the next time your team sits down to tackle that big new project, don’t make the first order of business to outlaw all meetings, documentation, and project plans. Instead, collaborate with both your team and the business members involved (you do have business members sitting in the room, directly involved in the project planning, right?) and determine the bare minimum that will allow all of you to work and communicate in the best way possible. This often means that you can pick and choose which parts of the Agile methodologies and process work for your particular project and end up with an amalgamation of Waterfall, Agile, XP, SCRUM and whatever other methodologies the members of your team have been exposed to (my favorite is “SCRUMerfall”). The biggest implication of this is that there is no one way to implement Agile. There is no checklist with which you can tick off boxes and confidently conclude that, “Yep, we’re Agile™!” In fact, depending on your business and the members of your team, moving to Agile full-bore may actually be ill-advised. Such a drastic change just ends up taking everyone out of their comfort zone which they inevitably fall back into by the end of the project. This often results in frustration to the point that Agile is abandoned altogether because “we just need to ship something!” Needless to say, this is far more devastating to a project. Instead, I offer this approach: keep it simple and take it slow. If your business members or customers are only involved at the beginning phases and nowhere to be seen until the project is delivered, invite them to your daily meetings; encourage them to keep up to speed on what’s going on on a daily basis and provide feedback. If your current process is heavy on the documentation, try to reduce it as opposed to eliminating it outright. If you need a “TPS Change Request” signed in triplicate with a 5-day “cooling off period” before a change is implemented, try a simple bug tracking system! Tighten the feedback loop! Finally, at the end of every “iteration” (whatever that means to you, as long as it’s relatively frequent), take as much time as you can spare (even if it’s an hour or so) and perform some kind of retrospective. Learn from your mistakes. Figure out what’s working for you and what’s not, then fix it. Before you know it you’ve got a handful of iterations and/or projects under your belt and you sit down with your team to realize that, “Hey, this is working - we’re pretty Agile!” After all, Agile is a Zen journey. It’s a destination that you aim for, not force, and even if you never reach true “enlightenment” that doesn’t mean your team can’t be exponentially better off from merely taking the journey.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 12, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 12, 2010New ProjectsAdverTool (Advertisement tool): AdverTool is an online tool which integrates the most popular advertisement networks (such as Microsoft adCenter, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Mar...Authentication Configuration Tool for SharePoint: Helpful tools to automatically configure SharePoint 2007 and 2010 for forms based authentication and other authentication mechanisms.Bacicworx: A C# .Net 3.5 helper library containing functionality for compression, encryption, hashes, downloading, PayPal API, text analysis and generation, a...BlogEngine.Net iPhone Theme: A port of BETouch originally created by soundbbgBT UPnP Nat Library: This Library makes it extremly simple to add NAT upnp port forwarding to your .net applications. Developed in C# using .Net 4.0CheckBox & CheckBoxList Validators: These validators fill the much needed gap in the Asp.Net Server controlsDataFactories: The DataFactories project was created to provide a standardized interface to SSAS and MSSQL data. However, as it is implemented using the Abstract ...DVD Swarm: Converts unprotected DVD video & audio streams to H.264 with AAC/Vorbis.Frio IM: Frio IM - is cross protocol instant messenger.jiuyuan: jiuyuan management systemMGM: MyGroupManager is a simple graphical interface written in PowerShell that can be deployed to Active Directory users to simplify the managed of grou...MGR2010: This the MA thesis by Witold Stanik & Michał Sereja, PJWSTK.Nauplius.ActiveDirectory: Web-based Active Directory management.Partial rendering control using JQuery: This article show a web custom control that allows partial rendering using JQueryREG - The Random Entertainment Generator: A simple tool to make your mid up when you can't figure out what you want to do!Runes of Magic - Heilerrechner: Heilerrechner für die Heiler von Runes of Magic (www.runes.ofmagic.com)Semagsoft Calculator: Basic calculator for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.SO League Tables: SOLT: Stack Overflow League Tables. A fun little app that lets you compare your stack overflow performance for each month, relative to other member...Stacky StackApps .Net Client Library: StackApps is a REST API for which provides access to the stackoverflow.com family of websites. Stacky is a .net client for that API. Stacky current...TwitterDotNet: TwitterDotNet is a TwitterLibrary for .NET Framework.ValiVIN: VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) Validator Validate Vin NumberWorkLogger: Simple work hour logger in WPFNew ReleasesAdverTool (Advertisement tool): Official releases: Please visit http://advertool.org to access the complete source code and downloads.Authentication Configuration Tool for SharePoint: Auth Config Tool (WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007 version): This tool automates the setup of dual authentication web applications in SharePoint that use Windows Authentication and Forms Based Authentication....BlogEngine.Net iPhone Theme: Version 0.1: Original version 0.1 from soundbbgBraintree Client Library: Braintree-2.3.0: Return AvsErrorResponseCode, AvsPostalCodeResponseCode, AvsStreetAddressResponseCode, CurrencyIsoCode, CvvResponseCode with Transaction Return Cr...BT UPnP Nat Library: Bt_Upnp Nat Library Alpha: Alpha Release of the libraryCNZK Library: Silverlight Behaviors - Deep Zoom Tag Filter: Behavior library for Silverlight 4 containing a Deep Zoom Tag Filter Behavior. Sample at the Expression Gallery http://gallery.expression.microsof...Demina: Demina Binaries version 0.2: Updated binaries. This release contains all of the new features, including simple animation transitions.DTLoggedExec: 1.0.0.2: -Fixed a bug that prevented loading packages from SSIS Package Store -Added support for {filename} placeholder in both Data Flow Profiling and CSV ...DVD Swarm: v0.8.10.611: Initial release, mostly stable.Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI) - updated on 6/11/2010: RBAC Editor 0.9.5.1: now supports creating and editing Role Assignment Policies; rest of the stuff is the same - still a lot of way to go :) Please use email address i...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.021: Compatible with SmallBasic v0.9 Lame version of TicTacToe Added - more coming later.Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.1.1 GA Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.1.1 GA with the following features: * Logarithmic Axis * ShowIndicator() in Chart. * HideIndica...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.5.4 GA Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.1.1 GA with the following features: Logarithmic Axis ShowIndicator() in Chart. HideIndicator() in Chart...Keep Focused - an enhanced tool for Time Management using Pomodoro Technique: Release 0.3.1 Alpha: Release 0.3.1 Alpha Technical patch. The previous release 0.3 Alpha had some errors and missing features. It was probably not build from the source...Mesopotamia Experiment: Mesopotamia 1.2.96: Bug Fixes - Fixed duplicate cells being added on creating new cells via mutations - Fixed bug where organisms without IO synapses where getting ios...NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.06.11.001: Changes since the last build:No changes. Unit test results:Passed 243/243 (100%) Passed 243/243 (100%) Passed 267/267 (100%) Passed 269/269 (100%)...Partial rendering control using JQuery: JQuery Web Control V 1.0: This is the first release of the code. It includes the source code and a web application to see how it worksphpxw: Phpxw2.0: 框架目录说明 ./_mod 模块存放目录 ./phpxw/ 框架核心目录 ./phpxw/common/ 框架核心函数 ./phpxw/system/ 框架核心基础类存放目录 ./phpxw/userlib/ 用户继承类存放目录 ./temp...Questionable Content Screensaver: Questionable Content Screensaver: Should be pretty self explanatory, install the appropriate version for your computer (x64 or x86). Features Include Cache comics for offline viewi...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.4.1: Added option to change the 'minimum' maximum value visible on the graph at run-time. Also fixed a number of other bugs.Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix v0.1.0.82 ALPHA: This has now been run against a real life project to tease out some of the issues. While this remains alpha software, which you use at your own ris...Rhyduino - Arduino and Managed Code: Beta Release (v0.8.2): ContentsSample Project - Demonstrates basic functionality and is flooded with code comments, so it's capable of being used as a learning tool. It d...Runes of Magic - Heilerrechner: Rom_Heiler_0.1: Erste Version von "RoM Heilerrechner". .Net 4.0 Framework wird vorausgesetzt. Das erhälst du hier: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?...Semagsoft Calculator: 2.0: new theme and bug fix'sSilverlight Reporting: Release 2: Updated to correct issue in report footer xaml, and to add support for a calculated report footer.Stacky StackApps .Net Client Library: Beta Preview: This is a beta preview to go along with the StackApps beta.TwitterDotNet: TwitterDotNet Library: first versionUnOfficial AW Wrapper dot Net: Aw Wrapper 1.0.0.0 (5.0): New Functions :DValiVIN: ValiVIN first release: First Iteration. METHODS: IsValid(string vin) - Checks if a string is a valid VIN (returns true or false) GetCheckSumValue(string vin) - Returns...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30611.0: Automatic drop of latest buildViewModelSupport: ViewModelSupport 1.0: Version 1.0 More information: http://houseofbilz.net/archives/2010/05/08/adventures-in-mvvm-my-viewmodel-base/ http://houseofbilz.net/archives/201...VolgaTransTelecomClient: v.1.0.3.0: v.1.0.3.0WCF Client Generator: Version 0.9.3.19259: Changed: - Always generate full type names for parameters and return typesWCF Client Generator: Version 0.9.3.21153: Fixed: - Service contracts namespace generation Added: - Templates assembly code base read from configurationXen: Graphics API for XNA: Xen 2.0 ALPHA: This is a very early alpha for Xen 2.0. Please note: The documentation for this alpha has not been updated yet. Xen 2.0 is not backwards compatib...ZGuideTV.NET: ZGuideTV.NET 0.93: Vendredi 11 avril 2010 (ZGuideTV.NET bêta 9 build 0.93) - English below Ajout : - Classement du contenu dans la description (affichage légende si...Most Popular ProjectsCAML GeneratorSharePoint Geographic Data VisualizerDbIdiom for ADO.NET CorestudyDTSRun Job RunnerXBStudio.asp.net.automationSilverlight load on demand with MEFCloud Business ServicesSharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Import UtilitySTS Federation Metadata EditorMost Active ProjectsRhyduino - Arduino and Managed Codepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeCassandraemonBlogEngine.NETMediaCoder.NETMicrosoft Silverlight Media FrameworkAndrew's XNA Helpers

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010New ProjectsASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Open source Content management system based on ASP.NET MVC platform.AutoFolders: AutoFolders package for Umbraco CMS This package auto creates folder structures for new and existing pages. The folders structures can be date bas...AutoPex: This project combines CCI with Pex by allowing the developer to run Pex on methods based on differences between two assemblies. Canvas VSDOC Intellisense: JavaScript VSDOC documentation for HTML5 Canvas element and 2d Context interface.CSUDH: California State University, Domguiez Hills Game projectsD-AMPS: System for Analysis of Microelectronic and Photonic StructuresDispX: Disease PredictorEmployee Info Starter Kit: This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (crud) the employee info of a com...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Provide later... publishing project to share with Malaysians firstFlowPad: Flowpad is a light, fast and easy to use flow diagram editor. It helps you quickly pour your algorithms from your mind to 'paper'. It is written us...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D is a 3D physics library written in C# for XNA. It is implemented entirely in managed code and is compatible with the XBOX 360.Hybrid Windows Service: Abstracted design pattern for running a windows service interactively. Implemented as a base class to replace ServiceBase it will automatically pro...Image Cropper datatype for Umbraco: Stand alone version of the Image Cropper datatype in Umbraco. Listinator: A social wishlist application done in asp.net MVCMicrosoft Dynamics Ax User Group (AXUG) Code Repository: The goal of this project is to make it easier for customers of Microsoft Dynamics Ax to be able to share relevant source code. Code base should inc...Mobil Trials: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Demo : http://gameagam.co.cc/default.html Mirror link...NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NExtLib: NExtLib is a general-purpose extension library for .NET, which adds some useful features and addresses some alleged omissions.Nom - .NET object-mapper: Nom is a light-weight, storage-type agnostic persistence framework which is intended to provide an abstraction over both relational and non-relatio...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods, Silverlight, Math Parser, Simple, EulerOpenGLViewController for Visual Basic .NET 2008: A single class in pure VB.NET code to create and control an OpenGL window by calling opengl32.dll directly without use of additional wrapper librar...RestaurantMIS: RestaurantMIS is a simple Restaurant management system developed in Visual C# 2008 with Chinese language.SmartKonnect: <project name>A WPF application for windows with shoutcast, twitter, facebook and etc.SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: SSRS wont support renaming excel reports sheet rename. This program support to generate the report and change the excel sheet nameSWENTRIZ.NET: SWENTRIZ.NET allows to build graphics of implicit functions via .NET functionality.TFT: Tropical forecast tracker is a web application. It will measure the error of the National Hurricane Center's forecast as compared to the actual tr...WCF Dynamic Client Proxy: A WCF Dynamic Client Proxy so you don't have to inherit from ClientBase all the time. The proxy also has fault tolerance so you don't have to dispo...Web.Config Role Provider: Stores ASP.NET Roles in web.config. Easy to set up and deploy. Works great for simple websites with authentication. The projects includes support ...WPF Line of Business App: Example WPF patterns for line of business applications. Includes navigation, animation, and visualization.YuBiS Framework: Silverlight and WF based a workflow RAD framework. New ReleasesASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): AtomicCms 1.0: This is the first public release of AtomicCms. To get more information about this content management system, visit website http://atomiccms.com/Blogsprajeesh.Blogspot samples: Designing Modular Smart Clients using CAL: This whitepaper provides architectural guidance for designing and implementing enterprise WPF/ silverlight client applications based on the Composi...DB Ghost Build Tools: 1.0.2: Made a change to the datetime format per dewee.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.02.03: Major HighlightsFixed the issue where LinkClick.aspx links were incorrect for child portals Fixed the issue with the PayPal URL settings. Fixed...Employee Directory webpart for sharepoint 2007 user profiles: Employee Directory Source V2.0: Features: 1. Displays a complete list of all Active Directory profiles imported by the SSP into SharePoint 2007. 2. Displays the following fields ...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Alpha Release: Meant for those who attended my presentation. Not cleaned upESPEHA: Espeha 9 PFR: Some small issues fixedFlowPad: FlowPad 0.1: FlowPad 0.1 build. Run it to get fammiliar with major concepts of easy diagramming :)Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2 Includes: - Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) - Demo Application - Samples - Foundation (Tabs, Groups, Contextu...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D Source (2010-02): This is the initial 2010-02 release.Highlight: Highlight 2.5: This release is primarily a maintenance release of the library and is functionally equivalent to version 2.3 that was released in 2004.Magiq: Magiq 0.3.0: Magiq 0.3.0 contains: Magiq-to-objects: Full support to Linq-to-objects Magiq-to-sql: Full support to Linq-to-sql New features: Plugin model Bu...Microsoft Points Converter: Pre-Alpha ClickOnce Installer v0.03: This release builds on the 0.02 release by adding more thorough validation checks for the amount to convert from as well as adding several currency...Mobil Trials: Mobil Trials Source Code: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Game ini masih perlu dikembangkan lebih jauh lagi! Si...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods on Silverlight 1.00: This a new version of Numerical Methods on Silverlight.OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.5.0.0): Changed point is as next. 7037 Fix spell miss of RequestFactoryMedthodSharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.0.1.0: Now it supports simply attaching SharePoint documents feature.Sharpy: Sharpy 1.1 Alpha: This is the second Sharpy release. Only a single change has been made - the foreach function now uses IEnumerable as a source instead of IList. Th...SkinDroidCreator: SkinDroidCreator ALPHA 1: Primera releaseTan solo carga mapas, ya sea de un zip o de un directorio. Para probarlo se pueden cargar temas Metamorph o temas flasheables, ya se...SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 0.8.9: SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly version 0.8.9. Changes/improvements: - Added Web Proxy support - Introduced WebDriveInfo - Introduced DownloadUrl...spikes: Salient.Web.Administration 1.0: WebAdmin is simply the built in ASP.NetWebAdministrationFiles application cleaned up with codebehinds to make customization and refactoring possibl...SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: Change SSRS excel file sheet name: Create stored procedure from the attached file in sql server 2005/2008SWENTRIZ.NET: Approach 1: First approachTortoiseSVN Addin for Visual Studio: TortoiseSVN Addin 1.0.4: Visual Studio 2005 support Custom working root bug fixingTotal Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.4: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.4. Bug fixes: - Upgraded SkyDriveWebClient to version 0.8.9 Please do not forget to expres...UnOfficial AW Wrapper dot Net: UAWW.Net 0.1.5.85 Béta 2: Fixed and Added SomethingVr30 OS: Space Brick Break 1.1: A brick breaker. ADD Level 3, 4, 5Web.Config Role Provider: First release: Three downloads are available: A compiled dll ready to use. The schema to enable intellisense The complete source (zipped)WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.1: This release improves the work item selection functionality. These selection methods are now supported (some require at least one item selected): ...WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.2: Improved error handling and fix for linking several times in a row. DISCLAIMER: While I have tested this app on my TFS Server, by downloading and...ZipStorer - A Pure C# Class to Store Files in Zip: ZipStorer 2.30: Added stream-oriented methods Improved support for ePUB & Open Container Format specification (OCF) Automatic switch from Deflate to Store algo...Most Popular ProjectsRawrDotNetNuke® Community EditionASP.NET Ajax LibraryFacebook Developer ToolkitWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolWSPBuilder (SharePoint WSP tool)Virtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2Json.NETPerformance Analysis of Logs (PAL) ToolQuickGraph, Graph Data Structures And Algorithms for .NetMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrSharpyBlogEngine.NETSimple SavantjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelFacebook Developer Toolkit

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Commercial Drupal Modules & Themes

- by Ravish

A discussion at Drupal.org forums prompted me to give my input about commercial ecosystem around Open Source Content Management Systems. WordPress and Joomla have been growing rapidly since past few years. But, growth rate of Drupal seems to be almost flat. Despite being the most powerful CMS around, Drupal is still not being adopted by masses. Many people will argue that Drupal is not targeted towards masses, but developers. I agree, Drupal is more of a development platform than a consumer CMS. Drupal is ‘many things to many people’, and I can build almost any type of website with it. Drupal is being used for building blogs, corporate websites, Intranet portals, social networking and even a project management system. Looking at the wide array of Drupal implementations, it deserves to be the most widely adopted CMS. I believe there are few challenges that Drupal community needs to overcome. To understand these challenges, I surveyed some webmasters who use Joomla or WordPress but not Drupal. I asked them why they don’t want to use Drupal, following are the responses I got from them: Drupal is too complicated, takes time to learn. Drupal is great, but its admin panel is overwhelming. I couldn’t find any nice themes for Drupal. There is no WYSIWYG editor in Drupal. Most Drupal modules do not work out of the box. There aren’t enough modules like Ubercart which provides any out of the box functionality. I tried modules like CCK, Views and Panels. After wasting several hours struggling with them, I decided to give up on Drupal. I don’t use Drupal because of pushbutton and Garland theme. I had hard time trying to customize Garland and it messed up the whole layout. There are no premium modules and themes for Drupal. Joomla has tons of awesome themes and modules. I don’t want a million hacks like CCK, Views, Tokens, Pathauto, ImageCache and CTools just to run a simple website. Most of the complaints from users are related to the learning and development curve involved with Drupal, and the lack of ecosystem. While most of the problems will be gone in Drupal 7, ecosystem is something that needs to be built by the Drupal community. Drupal distributions are a great step forward. There are few awesome Drupal distributions available like Open Publish, Open Atrium and Drupal Commons. I predict, there will be a wave of many powerful Drupal distributions after Drupal 7 release. Many of them will be user-friendly and commercial supported. Following is my post at Drupal.org forums: Quote from: http://drupal.org/node/863776#comment-3313836 Brian Gardner (StudioPress) and Woo Themes launched premium WordPress themes in 2007, the developer community did not accept it at first. Moreover, they were not even GPL licensed. There was an outcry in WordPress community against them. Following that, most premium theme providers switched to GPL licensing. Despite controversies, users voted for premium theme and plugins by buying them. Inspired by their success, hundreds of other developers started to sell premium themes and plugins. It is now the acceptable and in fact most popular business model among WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg once told me, they would not support premium themes. If he supported, developers would no more give out free GPL themes & plugins. He pointed me towards Joomla, there were hardly any nice free themes & modules available. Now two years forward, premium products are not just accepted but embraced by the WordPress community – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/ The quality and number of themes & modules has increased, even the free ones. This also helped to boost the adoption and ecosystem of WordPress. Today, state of Drupal is like WordPress was in 2007. There are hardly any out of the box solutions available for Drupal. Ubercart, Open Publish and Open Atrium are the only ones I can think of. Many of the popular Drupal modules are patches and hole-fillers. Thankfully, these hole-filler modules are going to be in Drupal 7 core. Drupal 7 and distributions will spawn a new array of solutions built upon Drupal. Soon, we will have more like Ubercarts and Open Atriums. If commercial solutions can help fuel this ecosystem and growth, Drupal community will accept them eventually. This debate will not stop your customers from buying your product. If your product is awesome, they will vote for you by buying your product.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 11, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 11, 2010New ProjectsArkzia: This Silverlight game.CodePlex Wiki Editor: CodePlex Wiki Editor makes it easier for CodePlex users to create their wiki documentations. This project offer a rich interface for the edition...Evaluate: Evaluate & Comet DWR like .NET library with powerfull Evaluate and Ajax Comet support. Also, you may use Evaluate library in your own .Net applicat...FamAccountor: 家庭记账薄Horadric: This is common tools freamwork!K8061.Managed: This is a solution to use the Velleman Extended K8061 USB Interface board with .net and to have a nice wrapper handling most of the overhead for us...Latent semantic analysis: all you need is to use!: Baggr is feed aggregator with web interface, user rating and LSA filter. Enjoy it!LIF7 ==> RISK : TOWER DEFENSE: Université Lyon 1, L2 MATH-INFO 2009-2010 Semestre de printemps Projet RISK : TOWER DEFENSE Membres : Jessica El Melhem, Vincent Sébille, et Jonat...Managed ESL Suite: Managed ESL Suite using C# for FreeSWITCH Omni-Tool - A program version concept of the tool used in Mass Effect.: A program version concept of the tool used in Mass Effect. It will support little apps (plugins) that run inside the UI. Its talor mainly at develo...PdxCodeCamp: Web application for Portland Code CampProjeto Vírus: Desenvolvimento do Jogo Virus em XNAsilverlight control - stars with rounded corners: Draw stars and cogs including rounded cornersSilverlight MathParser: Implementation of mathematical expressions parser to compute and functions.turing machine simulator: Project for JCE in course SW engeenering. Turing Machine simulator with GUI.WpD - Wallpapers Downloader: You can easy download wallpapers to your computer without any advertising or registration. On 5 minutes you can download so many wallpapers!New ReleasesAJAX Control Framework: v1.0.0.0: New AJAX project that helps you create AJAX enabled controls. Make use of control level AJAX methods, a Script Manager that works like you'd expect...AutoFixture: Version 1.1: This is version 1.1 of AutoFixture. This release contains no known bugs. Compared to Release Candidate 1 for version 1.1, there are no changes. Ho...AutoPoco: AutoPoco 0.3: Method Invocation in configuration Custom type providers during configuration Method invocation for generationBacicworx (Basic Services Framework): 3.0.10.410 (Beta): Major update, winnowing, and recode of the library. Removed redundant classses and methods which have similar functionality to those available in ...Bluetooth Radar: Version 1.5: Mostly UI and Animation Changes.BUtil: BUtil 4.9: 1. Icons of kneo are almost removed 2. Deployment was moved to codeplex.com 3. Adding of storages was unavailable when any of storages are used FIXEDcrudwork library: crudwork 2.2.0.3: few bug fixes new object viewer - allow the user to view and change an object through the property grid and/or the simple XML editor pivot table ...EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.5: Release v1.9.8.5Removed the debugging output from the Armor Penetration change.EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.6: Release v1.9.8.6Updated release to include the correct version of EnhSimGUIEvaluate: Evaluate Library: This file contains Evaluate library source code under Visual Studio project. Also, there is a sample project to see the use.ExcelDna: ExcelDna Version 0.25: This is an important bugfix release, with the following changes: Fix case where unpacked .config temp file might not be deleted. Fix compiler pro...FamAccountor: 家庭账薄预览版v0.0.1: 家庭账薄预览版v0.0.1 该版本提供基本功能，还有待扩展! Feature: 实现基本添加、编辑、删除功能。FamAccountor: 家庭账薄预览版v0.0.2: 家庭账薄预览版v0.0.2 该版本提供基本功能，还有待扩展! Feature: 添加账户管理功能。Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.2: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.2), with general improvements. It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.3 Beta: Added Silverlight support for Gko.Utils Added ExtensionsHash Calculator: HashCalculator 1.2: HashCalculator 1.2HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: Version: TrailersOnly if set to 'true' only titles with 'trailer' in the title will be download MinTrailerSize Added a minimum trailer size, this avoids t...Home Access Plus+: v3.2.6.0: v3.2.5.1 Release Change Log: Add lesson naming Fixed a bug in the help desk which was rendering the wrong URL for tickets Planning has started ...HTML Ruby: 6.20.0: All new concept, all new code. Because this release does not support complex ruby annotations, "Furigana Injector" is not supported by this release...HTML Ruby: 6.20.1: Fixed problem where ruby with closed tags but no rb tag will result in empty page Added support for complex ruby annotation (limited single ruby)...K8061.Managed: K8061.Managed: This is a pre-compilled K8061.Managed.DLL file release 1.0.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 2.1.0.0: Users of Kooboo CMS 2.0, please use the "Check updates" feature under System to upgrade New featuresWebDav support You can now use tools like w...Kooboo forum: Kooboo Forum Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo GoogleAnalytics: Kooboo GoogleAnalytics Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo wiki: Kooboo CMS Wiki module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Mavention: Mavention Simple SiteMapPath: Mavention Simple SiteMapPath is a custom control that renders breadcrumbs as an unordered list what makes it a perfect solution for breadcrumbs on ...MetaSharp: MetaSharp v0.3: MetaSharp v0.3 Roadmap: Oslo Independence Custom Grammar library Improved build environment dogfooding Project structure simplificationsRoTwee: RoTwee (10.0.0.7): New feature of this version is support for mouse wheel. You can rotate tweets rotating mouse wheel.silverlight control - stars with rounded corners: first step: These are the first examples.Silverlight MathParser: Silverlight MathParser 1.0: Implementation of mathematical expressions parser to compute and functions.SimpleGeo.NET: SimpleGeo.NET example website project: ConfigurationYou must change these three configuration values in AppSettings.config: Google Maps API key: for the maps on the test site. Get one he...StickyTweets: 0.6.0: Version 0.6.0 Code - PERFORMANCE Hook into Async WinInet to perform async requests without adding an additional thread Code - Verify that async r...System.Html: Version 1.3; fixed bugs and improved performance: This release incorporates bug fixes, a new normalize method proposed by RudolfHenning of Codeplex.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30410.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVFPX: FoxTabs 0.9.2: The following issues were addressed: 26744 24954 24767Visual Studio DSite: Advanced Guessing Number Game (Visual C++ 2008): A guessing number game made in visual c 2008.WpD - Wallpapers Downloader: WpD v0.1: My first release, I hope you enjoyMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsRawrnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.AutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with PexFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterBlogEngine.NETBeanProxy

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Does IntelliJ-Idea support Groovy 2.x?

- by Freewind

I just tried IntelliJ-Idea 11.x and 12.x (EPA), but when I use Groovy 2.0.1 or 2.0.5, the code can't be run and there are some errors out there. The Groovy plugin of idea has little information about which version of Groovy has been supported. Does idea support Groovy 2.x? I want to try the new @TypeChecked annotation of Groovy 2. UPDATE My groovy code: class X { def hello() { println("hello, groovy") } def static main(String[] args) { new X().hello() } } It uses groovy 2.0.5: And the error thrown: E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\bin\java -Didea.launcher.port=7532 "-Didea.launcher.bin.path=E:\java\IntelliJ IDEA 11.1.4\bin" -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -classpath "E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\charsets.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\deploy.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\javaws.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\jce.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\jsse.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\management-agent.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\plugin.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\resources.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\rt.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\dcevm.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\dnsns.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\localedata.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\sunjce_provider.jar;E:\WORKSPACE\TestGroovy2\out\production\TestGroovy2;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-antlr-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-junit-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-launcher-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\antlr-2.7.7.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-analysis-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-commons-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-tree-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-util-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\bsf-2.4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\commons-cli-1.2.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\commons-logging-1.1.1.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\gpars-1.0-beta-3.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-ant-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-bsf-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-console-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-docgenerator-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-groovydoc-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-groovysh-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-jmx-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-json-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-jsr223-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-servlet-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-sql-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-swing-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-templates-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-test-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-testng-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-xml-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\hamcrest-core-1.1.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ivy-2.2.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jansi-1.6.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jcommander-1.12.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jline-1.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jsp-api-2.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jsr166y-1.7.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\junit-4.10.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\qdox-1.12.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\servlet-api-2.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\testng-6.5.2.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\xmlpull-1.1.3.1.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\xstream-1.4.2.jar;E:\java\IntelliJ IDEA 11.1.4\lib\idea_rt.jar" com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain X Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError: Found interface org.objectweb.asm.MethodVisitor, but class was expected at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteGenerator.genConstructor(CallSiteGenerator.java:141) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteGenerator.genPogoMetaMethodSite(CallSiteGenerator.java:162) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteGenerator.compilePogoMethod(CallSiteGenerator.java:215) at org.codehaus.groovy.reflection.CachedMethod.createPogoMetaMethodSite(CachedMethod.java:228) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.PogoMetaMethodSite.createCachedMethodSite(PogoMetaMethodSite.java:212) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.PogoMetaMethodSite.createPogoMetaMethodSite(PogoMetaMethodSite.java:188) at groovy.lang.MetaClassImpl.createPogoCallSite(MetaClassImpl.java:3035) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteArray.createPogoSite(CallSiteArray.java:147) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteArray.createCallSite(CallSiteArray.java:161) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteArray.defaultCall(CallSiteArray.java:45) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.AbstractCallSite.call(AbstractCallSite.java:108) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.AbstractCallSite.call(AbstractCallSite.java:112) at X.main(sta.groovy:6) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:120) Process finished with exit code 1

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