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• Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

  - by shiju

  Unlike other engineering industries, the software engineering industry is really lacking maturity. The lack of maturity can see in different aspects of entire software development life cycle. I think other engineering industries are well organised and structured with common, proven engineering practices. The software engineering industry is greatly a diverse industry with different operating systems, and variety of development platforms, programming languages, frameworks and tools. Now these days, people are going behind the hypes and intellectual thoughts without understanding their core business problems and adopting technologies and practices for the sake of technologies and practices and simply becoming a “poster child” of technologies and practices. Understanding the core business problem and providing best, solid solution with a platform neutral approach, will give you more business values and ROI, instead of blindly adopting technologies and tailor-made your applications for the sake of technologies and practices. People have been simply migrating their solutions in favour of new technologies and different versions of frameworks without any business need. The “Pepsi Challenge” in the Software Development  Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign of the 1980s was a popular and very interesting marketing promotion in which people taste one cup of Pepsi and another cup with Coca Cola. In the taste test, more than 50% of people were preferred Pepsi  over Coca Cola. The success story behind the Pepsi was more sweetness contains in the Pepsi cola. They have simply added more sugar and more people preferred more sweet flavour. You can’t simply identify the better one after sipping one cup of cola based on the sweetness which contains. These things have been happening in the software industry for choosing development frameworks and technologies. People have been simply choosing frameworks based on the initial sugary feeling without understanding its core strengths and weakness. The sugary framework might be more harmful when you develop real-world systems. There is not any silver bullet for solving all kind of problems and frameworks and tools do have strengths and weakness. So it would be better to understand their strength and weakness. And please keep in mind that you have to develop real apps to understand the real capabilities and weakness of a framework. Evaluating a technology based on few blog posts will harm your projects and these bloggers might be lacking real-world experience with the framework. The Problem with Align a Development Practice with Tools Recently I have observed a discussion in a group where one guy asked suggestions for practicing Continuous Delivery (CD) as part of the agile based application engineering. Then the discussion quickly went to using and choosing a Continuous Integration (CI) tool and different people suggested different Continuous Integration (CI) tools for simply practicing Continuous Delivery. If you have worked with core agile engineering practices, you could clearly know that the real essence of agile is neither choosing a tool nor choosing a process. By simply choosing CI tool from a particular vendor will not ensure that you are delivering an evolving software based on customer feedback. You have to understand the real essence of a engineering practice and choose a right tool for practicing it instead of simply focus on a particular tool for a practicing an development practice. If you want to adopt a practice, you need a solid understanding on it with its real essence where tools are just helping us for better automation. Adopting New Technologies for the Sake of Technologies The another problem is that developers have been a tendency to adopt new technologies and simply migrating their existing apps to new technologies. It is okay if your existing system is having problem  with a technology stack or or maintainability challenge with existing solution, and moving to new technology for solving the current problems. We have been adopting new technologies for solving new challenges like solving the scalability challenges when the application or user bases is growing unpredictably. Please keep in mind that all new technologies will become old after working with it for few years. The below Facebook status update of Janakiraman, expresses the attitude of a typical customer. For an example, Node.js is becoming a hottest buzzword in the software industry and many developers are trying to adopt Node.js for their apps. The important thing is that Node.js is a minimalist framework that does some great things for some problems, but it’s not a silver bullet. I have been also working with Node.js which is good for some problems, but really bad for choosing it for all kind of problems. By adopting new technologies for new projects is good if we could get real business values from it because newer framework would solve some existing well known problems and provide better solutions where it can incorporate good solutions for the latest challenges . But adopting a new technology for the sake of new technology is really bad idea. Another example is JavaScript is getting lot of attention so that lot of developers are developing heavy JavaScript centric web apps. First, they will adopt a client-side JavaScript MV* framework from AngularJS, Ember, Backbone etc, and develop a Single Page App(SPA) where they are repeating the mistakes we did in the past with server-side. The mistakes we did in the server-side is transforming to client-side. The problem is that people are just adopting new technologies, but not improving their solutions. I predict that many Single Page App will suck in the future. We need a hybrid approach where we should be able to leverage both server-side and client-side for developing next-generation web apps. The another problem is that if you like a particular framework, use it for all kind of apps. In the past, I know some Silverlight passionate guys were tried to use that framework for all kind of apps including larger line of business apps. And these days developers are migrating their existing Silverlight apps in favour of HTML5 buzzword. So the real question is, what is the business values we are getting from these apps when we are developing it for the sake of a particular technology instead of business need. The another problem is that our solutions consultants are trying to provide unnecessary solutions for the sake of a particular technology or for a hype. For an example, Big Data solutions are great for solving the problem of three Vs : volume, velocity and variety. But trying to put this for every application will make problems. Let’s say, there is a small web site running with limited budget and saying that we need a recommendation engine for the web site with a Hadoop based solution with a 16 node cluster, would be really horrible. If we really need a Hadoop based solution, got for it, but trying to put this for all application would be a big disaster. It would be great if could understand the core business problems first, and later choose a right framework for providing solutions for the actual business problem, instead of trying to provide so many solutions. The Problem with Tied Up to a Platform Vendor Some organizations and teams are tied up with a particular platform vendor where they don’t want to use any product other than their preferred or existing platform vendor. They will accept any product provided by the vendor regardless of its capability. This will lets you some benefits regards with integration and collaboration of different products provided by the same vendor, but it will loose your opportunity to provide better solution for your business problems. For a real world sample scenario, lot of companies have been using SAP for their ERP solutions. When they are thinking about mobility or thinking about developing hybrid mobile apps, they can easily find out a framework from SAP. SAP provides a framework for HTML 5 based UI development named SAPUI5. If you are simply adopting that framework only based for the preference of existing platform vendor, you might be loose different opportunities for providing better solution. Initially you might enjoy the sugary feeling provided by the platform vendor, but you have to think about developing apps which should be capable for solving future challenges. I am not saying that any framework is not good and I believe that all frameworks are good over another one for solving at least one problem. My point is that we should not tied up with any specific platform vendor unless your organization is having resource availability problems. Being Polyglot for Providing Right Solutions The modern software engineering industry is greatly diverse with different tools and platforms. Lot of open source frameworks and new programming languages have been releasing to the developer community, where choosing the right platform without any biased opinion, is really a difficult task. But it would really great if we could develop an attitude with platform neutral mindset and being a polyglot developer for providing better solutions based on the actual business problems. IMHO, we should learn a new programming language and a new framework every year. This will improve the quality of our developer capabilities and also improve the quality of our primary programming language skills. Being polyglot for individual developers and organizational teams will give you greater opportunity to your developer experience and also for your applications. Organizations can analyse their business problem without tied with any technology and later they can provide solutions by choosing different platform and tools. Summary    In this blog post, what I was trying to say that we should not tied up or biased with any development platform, technology, vendor or programming language and we should not adopt technologies and practices for the sake of technologies. If we are adopting a technology or a practice for the sake of it, we are simply becoming a “poster child” of the technology and practice. We should not become a poster child of other people’s intellectual thoughts and theories, instead of it we should become solutions developers and solutions consultants where we should be able to provide better solutions for the business problems. Being a polyglot developer is a good idea for improving your developer skills which lets you provide better solutions for the business problems. The most important thing is that we should become platform neutral developers where our passion should be for providing brilliant solutions. It would be great if we could provide minimalist, pragmatic business solutions. You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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• EF4 CPT5 Code First Remove Cascading Deletes

  - by Dane Morgridge

  I have been using EF4 CTP5 with code first and I really like the new code.  One issue I was having however, was cascading deletes is on by default.  This may come as a surprise as using Entity Framework with anything but code first, this is not the case.  I ran into an exception with some one-to-many relationships I had: Introducing FOREIGN KEY constraint 'ProjectAuthorization_UserProfile' on table 'ProjectAuthorizations' may cause cycles or multiple cascade paths. Specify ON DELETE NO ACTION or ON UPDATE NO ACTION, or modify other FOREIGN KEY constraints. Could not create constraint. See previous errors. To get around this, you can use the fluent API and put some code in the OnModelCreating: 1: protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) 2: { 3: modelBuilder.Entity<UserProfile>() 4: .HasMany(u => u.ProjectAuthorizations) 5: .WithRequired(a => a.UserProfile) 6: .WillCascadeOnDelete(false); 7: } This will work to remove the cascading delete, but I have to use the fluent API and it has to be done for every one-to-many relationship that causes the problem. I am personally not a fan of cascading deletes in general (for several reasons) and I’m not a huge fan of fluent APIs.  However, there is a way to do this without using the fluent API.  You can in the OnModelCreating, remove the convention that creates the cascading deletes altogether. 1: protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) 2: { 3: modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<OneToManyCascadeDeleteConvention>(); 4: } Thanks to Jeff Derstadt from Microsoft for the info on removing the convention all together.  There is a way to build a custom attribute to remove it on a case by case basis and I’ll have a post on how to do this in the near future.

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• Moving from Silverlight 4 Beta to RC - Part 2

  In my previous post I talked about updating my development environment from Silverlight 4 Beta to Silverlight 4 RC (release candidate). After updating, I opened the solution for my Task-It project and found that several things were broken. I would've been surprised if it just worked as is! What disappointed me is that after spending a decent amount of time searching the web, I could not find information telling me what I needed to update/change...and wouldn't it be nice if there was a wizard to update it for you? What changed? I wish I had made notes along the line of each of the things I found, but here are a few that I can recall: In the Web project, the following dll's no longer exist: System.Web.DomainServices.dll System.Web.DomainServices.LinqToSql.dll (if you are using the Entity Framework I believe that one is System.Web.DomainServices.EntityFramework.dll) System.Web.Ria.dll In the Silverlight project: System.Windows.Ria.dll I'm not positive which new assemblies need to be referenced for your project, but I'm going to list the ones I think you need. One way to verify is to create a new Silverlight application with support for WCF RIA Services and see which dlls are included. In the Web project: System.Data.Entity.dll System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.EntityFramework.dll (I've moved from LinqToSql to EntityFramework, so I'm not sure which one the LinqToSql stuff comes from) System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.dll System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Server.dll In the Silverlight project: System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Client.dll System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Client.Web.dll System.ServiceModel.Web.Extensions.dll Where are these dll's? These all live in either the Silverlight or RIA Services subdirectories under:         C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs Of if you are on a 64-bit machine like me:         C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs Wrap up Good luck, and I hope this helps to get you back in business! If anyone finds anything that I've missed, please enter a comment and I'll update the post accordingly.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• How do graphics programmers deal with rendering vertices that don't change the image?

  - by canisrufus

  So, the title is a little awkward. I'll give some background, and then ask my question. Background: I work as a web GIS application developer, but in my spare time I've been playing with map rendering and improving data interchange formats. I work only in 2D space. One interesting issue I've encountered is that when you're rendering a polygon at a small scale (zoomed way out), many of the vertices are redundant. An extreme case would be that you have a polygon with 500,000 vertices that only takes up a single pixel. If you're sending this data to the browser, it would make sense to omit ~499,999 of those vertices. One way we achieve that is by rendering an image on a server and and sending it as a PNG: voila, it's a point. Sometimes, though, we want data sent to the browser where it can be rendered with SVG (or canvas, or webgl) so that it can be interactive. The problem: It turns out that, using modern geographic data sets, it's very easy to overload SVG's rendering abilities. In an effort to cope with those limitations, I'm trying to figure out how to visually losslessly reduce a data set for a given scale and map extent (and, if necessary, for a known map pixel width and height). I got a great reduction in data size just using the Douglas-Peucker algorithm, and I believe I was able to get it to keep the polygons true to within one pixel. Unfortunately, Douglas-Peucker doesn't preserve topology, so it changed how borders between polygons got rendered. I couldn't readily find other algorithms to try out and adapt to the purpose, but I don't have much CS/algorithm background and might not recognize them if I saw them.

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• What I&rsquo;m Reading &ndash; Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development: Beginner&rs

  - by Dave Campbell

  I don’t have a lot of time for reading lately, so James Patterson and all those guys are *way* ahead of me … but I do try to make time to read technical material. A couple books have come across just recently and I thought I’d mention them one at a time. The book I want to mention tonight is Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development: Beginner’s Guide : by Cameron Albert and Frank LaVigne. Cameron and Frank are both great guys and you’ve seen their blog posts come across my SilverlightCream posts many times. I like the writing and format of the book. It leads you quite well from one concept to the next and for a technical book, it holds your interest. You can check out a free chapter here. I have the eBook because for technical material, at least lately, I’ve gravitated toward that. I can have it with me on a USB stick at work, or at home. Read the free chapter then check out their blogs. Even if you think you know a lot of this material, I think you’ll find yourself learning something, and besides, it’s a great one-place reference. Good work guys! Technorati Tags: Silverlight 4

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• Using XML as data storage

  - by Kian Mayne

  I was thinking about the XML format and the following quote: “XML is not a database. It was never meant to be a database. It is never going to be a database. Relational databases are proven technology with more than 20 years of implementation experience. They are solid, stable, useful products. They are not going away. XML is a very useful technology for moving data between different databases or between databases and other programs. However, it is not itself a database. Don't use it like one.“ -Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML by Elliotte Rusty Harold (page 230, Part 4, Item 41, 2nd paragraph) This seems to really stress that XML should not be used for data storage and should only be used for program to program interoperability. Personally, I disagree and .NET's app.config file that's used to store a program's settings is an example of data storage in an XML file. However for databases rather than configurations etc XML should not be used. To develop my point, I will use two examples: A) Data about customers with fields that are all on one level i.e. there are a number of fields all relating to one customer with no children B) Data about configuration of an application where nested fields and properties make a lot of sense So my question is, Is this still a valid statement and is it now acceptable to store data using XML? EDIT: I've sent an email to the author of that quote to ask for his input/extra context.

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• White Paper on Analysis Services Tabular Large-scale Solution #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Since the first beta of Analysis Services 2012, I worked with many companies designing and implementing solutions based on Analysis Services Tabular. I am glad that Microsoft published a white paper about a case-study using one of these scenarios: An Analysis Services Case Study: Using Tabular Models in a Large-scale Commercial Solution. Alberto Ferrari is the author of the white paper and many people contributed to it. The final result is a very technical document based on a case study, which provides a level of detail that I don’t see often in other case studies (which are usually more marketing-oriented). This white paper has the following structure: Requirements (data model, capacity planning, client tool) Options considered (SQL Server Columnstore Indexes, SSAS Multidimensional, SSAS Tabular) Data Model optimizations (memory compression, query performance, scalability) Partitioning and Processing strategy for near real-time latency Hardware selection (NUMA analysis, Azure VM tests) Scalability tests (estimation of maximum users per node) If you are in charge of evaluating Tabular as analytical engine, or if you have to design your solution based on Tabular, this white paper is a must read. But if you just want to increase your knowledge of Analysis Services, you will find a lot of useful technical information. That said, my favorite quote of the document is the following one, funny but true: […] After several trials, the clear winner was a video gaming machine that one guy on the team used at home. That computer outperformed any available server, running twice as fast as the server-class machines we had in house. At that point, it was clear that the criteria for choosing the server would have to be expanded a bit, simply because it would have been impossible to convince the boss to build a cluster of gaming machines and trust it to serve our customers.  But, honestly, if a business has the flexibility to buy gaming machines (assuming the machines can handle capacity) – do this. Owen Graupman, inContact I want to write a longer discussion about how companies are adopting Tabular in scenarios where it is the hidden engine of a more complex solution (and not the classical “BI system”), because it is more frequent than you might expect (and has several advantages over many alternative approaches).

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• Aggregating Excel cell contents that match a label [migrated]

  - by Josh

  I'm sure this isn't a terribly difficult thing, but it's not the type of question that easily lends itself to internet searches. I've been assigned a project for work involving a complex spreadsheet. I've done the usual =SUM and other basic Excel formulas, and I've got enough coding background that I'm able to at least fudge my way through VBA, but I'm not certain how to proceed with one part of the task. Simple version: On Sheet 1 I have a list of people (one on each row, person's name in column A), on sheet 2 I have a list of groups (one on each row, group name in column A). Each name in Sheet 1 has its own row, and I have a "Data Validation" dropdown menu where you choose the group each person belongs to. That dropdown is sourced from Sheet 2, where each group has a row. So essentially the data validation source for Sheet 1's "Group" column is just "=Sheet2!$a1:a100" or whatever. The problem is this: I want each group row in Sheet 2 to have a formula which results in a list of all the users which have been assigned to that group on Sheet 1. What I mean is something the equivalent of "select * from PeopleTab where GROUP = ThisGroup". The resulting cell would just stick the names together like "Bob Smith, Joe Jones, Sally Sanderson" I've been Googling for hours but I can't think of a way to phrase my search query to get the results I want. Here's an example of desired result (Dash-delimited. Can't find a way to make it look nice, table tags don't seem to work here): (Sheet 1) Bob Smith - Group 1 (selected from dropdown) Joe Jones - Group 2 (selected from dropdown) Sally Sanderson - Group 1 (selected from dropdown) (Sheet 2) Group 1 - Bob Smith, Sally Sanderson (result of formula) Group 2 - Joe Jones (result of formula) What formula (or even what function) do I use on that second column of sheet 2 to make a flat list out of the members of that group?

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• Silverlight 4 Twitter Client &ndash; Part 6

  - by Max

  In this post, we are going to look into implementing lists into our twitter application and also about enhancing the data grid to display the status messages in a pleasing way with the profile images. Twitter lists are really cool feature that they recently added, I love them and I’ve quite a few lists setup one for DOTNET gurus, SQL Server gurus and one for a few celebrities. You can follow them here. Now let us move onto our tutorial. 1) Lists can be subscribed to in two ways, one can be user’s own lists, which he has created and another one is the lists that the user is following. Like for example, I’ve created 3 lists myself and I am following 1 other lists created by another user. Both of them cannot be fetched in the same api call, its a two step process. 2) In the TwitterCredentialsSubmit method we’ve in Home.xaml.cs, let us do the first api call to get the lists that the user has created. For this the call has to be made to https://twitter.com/<TwitterUsername>/lists.xml. The API reference is available here. myService1.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService1.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService1.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(GlobalVariable.getUserName(), GlobalVariable.getPassword()); myService1.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(ListsRequestCompleted); myService1.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("https://twitter.com/" + GlobalVariable.getUserName() + "/lists.xml")); 3) Now let us look at implementing the event handler – ListRequestCompleted for this. public void ListsRequestCompleted(object sender, System.Net.DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e) { if (e.Error != null) { StatusMessage.Text = "This application must be installed first."; parseXML(""); } else { //MessageBox.Show(e.Result.ToString()); parseXMLLists(e.Result.ToString()); } } 4) Now let us look at the parseXMLLists in detail xdoc = XDocument.Parse(text); var answer = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("list") select status.Element("name").Value); foreach (var p in answer) { Border bord = new Border(); bord.CornerRadius = new CornerRadius(10, 10, 10, 10); Button b = new Button(); b.MinWidth = 70; b.Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black); b.Foreground = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black); //b.Width = 70; b.Height = 25; b.Click += new RoutedEventHandler(b_Click); b.Content = p.ToString(); bord.Child = b; TwitterListStack.Children.Add(bord); } So here what am I doing, I am just dynamically creating a button for each of the lists and put them within a StackPanel and for each of these buttons, I am creating a event handler b_Click which will be fired on button click. We will look into this method in detail soon. For now let us get the buttons displayed. 5) Now the user might have some lists to which he has subscribed to. We need to create a button for these as well. In the end of TwitterCredentialsSubmit method, we need to make a call to http://api.twitter.com/1/<TwitterUsername>/lists/subscriptions.xml. Reference is available here. The code will look like this below. myService2.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService2.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService2.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(GlobalVariable.getUserName(), GlobalVariable.getPassword()); myService2.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(ListsSubsRequestCompleted); myService2.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("http://api.twitter.com/1/" + GlobalVariable.getUserName() + "/lists/subscriptions.xml")); 6) In the event handler – ListsSubsRequestCompleted, we need to parse through the xml string and create a button for each of the lists subscribed, let us see how. I’ve taken only the “full_name”, you can choose what you want, refer the documentation here. Note the point that the full_name will have @<UserName>/<ListName> format – this will be useful very soon. xdoc = XDocument.Parse(text); var answer = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("list") select status.Element("full_name").Value); foreach (var p in answer) { Border bord = new Border(); bord.CornerRadius = new CornerRadius(10, 10, 10, 10); Button b = new Button(); b.Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black); b.Foreground = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black); //b.Width = 70; b.MinWidth = 70; b.Height = 25; b.Click += new RoutedEventHandler(b_Click); b.Content = p.ToString(); bord.Child = b; TwitterListStack.Children.Add(bord); } Please note, I am setting the button width to be auto based on the content and also giving it a midwidth value. I wanted to create a rounded corner buttons, but for some reason its not working. Also add this StackPanel – TwitterListStack of the Home.xaml <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center" Orientation="Horizontal" Name="TwitterListStack"></StackPanel> After doing this, you would get a series of buttons in the top of the home page. 7) Now the button click event handler – b_Click, in this method, once the button is clicked, I call another method with the content string of the button which is clicked as the parameter. Button b = (Button)e.OriginalSource; getListStatuses(b.Content.ToString()); 8) Now the getListsStatuses method: toggleProgressBar(true); WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp); WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(TimelineRequestCompleted); if (listName.IndexOf("@") > -1 && listName.IndexOf("/") > -1) { string[] arrays = null; arrays = listName.Split('/'); arrays[0] = arrays[0].Replace("@", " ").Trim(); //MessageBox.Show(arrays[0]); //MessageBox.Show(arrays[1]); string url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/" + arrays[0] + "/lists/" + arrays[1] + "/statuses.xml"; //MessageBox.Show(url); myService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(url)); } else myService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("http://api.twitter.com/1/" + GlobalVariable.getUserName() + "/lists/" + listName + "/statuses.xml")); Please note that the url to look at will be different based on the list clicked – if its user created, the url format will be http://api.twitter.com/1/<CurentUser>/lists/<ListName>/statuses.xml But if it is some lists subscribed, it will be http://api.twitter.com/1/<ListOwnerUserName>/lists/<ListName>/statuses.xml The first one is pretty straight forward to implement, but if its a list subscribed, we need to split the listName string to get the list owner and list name and user them to form the string. So that is what I’ve done in this method, if the listName has got “@” and “/” I build the url differently. 9) Until now, we’ve been using only a few nodes of the status message xml string, now we will look to fetch a new field - “profile_image_url”. Images in datagrid – COOL. So for that, we need to modify our Status.cs file to include two more fields one string another BitmapImage with get and set. public string profile_image_url { get; set; } public BitmapImage profileImage { get; set; } 10) Now let us change the generic parseXML method which is used for binding to the datagrid. public void parseXML(string text) { XDocument xdoc; xdoc = XDocument.Parse(text); statusList = new List<Status>(); statusList = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("status") select new Status { ID = status.Element("id").Value, Text = status.Element("text").Value, Source = status.Element("source").Value, UserID = status.Element("user").Element("id").Value, UserName = status.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value, profile_image_url = status.Element("user").Element("profile_image_url").Value, profileImage = new BitmapImage(new Uri(status.Element("user").Element("profile_image_url").Value)) }).ToList(); DataGridStatus.ItemsSource = statusList; StatusMessage.Text = "Datagrid refreshed."; toggleProgressBar(false); } We are here creating a new bitmap image from the image url and creating a new Status object for every status and binding them to the data grid. Refer to the Twitter API documentation here. You can choose any column you want. 11) Until now, we’ve been using the auto generate columns for the data grid, but if you want it to be really cool, you need to define the columns with templates, etc… <data:DataGrid AutoGenerateColumns="False" Name="DataGridStatus" Height="Auto" MinWidth="400"> <data:DataGrid.Columns> <data:DataGridTemplateColumn Width="50" Header=""> <data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Image Source="{Binding profileImage}" Width="50" Height="50" Margin="1"/> </DataTemplate> </data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> </data:DataGridTemplateColumn> <data:DataGridTextColumn Width="Auto" Header="User Name" Binding="{Binding UserName}" /> <data:DataGridTemplateColumn MinWidth="300" Width="Auto" Header="Status"> <data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> <DataTemplate> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="{Binding Text}"/> </DataTemplate> </data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> </data:DataGridTemplateColumn> </data:DataGrid.Columns> </data:DataGrid> I’ve used only three columns – Profile image, Username, Status text. Now our Datagrid will look super cool like this. Coincidentally,  Tim Heuer is on the screenshot , who is a Silverlight Guru and works on SL team in Microsoft. His blog is really super. Here is the zipped file for all the xaml, xaml.cs & class files pages. Ok let us stop here for now, will look into implementing few more features in the next few posts and then I am going to look into developing a ASP.NET MVC 2 application. Hope you all liked this post. If you have any queries / suggestions feel free to comment below or contact me. Cheers! Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LINQ,Twitter API,Twitter,Silverlight 4

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• TDD - Outside In vs Inside Out

  - by Songo

  What is the difference between building an application Outside In vs building it Inside Out using TDD? These are the books I read about TDD and unit testing: Test Driven Development: By Example Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide: A Practical Guide Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code The Art of Unit Testing: With Examples in .Net Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests---This one was really hard to understand since JAVA isn't my primary language :) Almost all of them explained TDD basics and unit testing in general, but with little mention of the different ways the application can be constructed. Another thing I noticed is that most of these books (if not all) ignore the design phase when writing the application. They focus more on writing the test cases quickly and letting the design emerge by itself. However, I came across a paragraph in xUnit Test Patterns that discussed the ways people approach TDD. There are 2 schools out there Outside In vs Inside Out. Sadly the book doesn't elaborate more on this point. I wish to know what is the main difference between these 2 cases. When should I use each one of them? To a TDD beginner which one is easier to grasp? What is the drawbacks of each method? Is there any materials out there that discuss this topic specifically?

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• SQLAuthority News – My Evaluation of Singapore SharePoint Conference

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier this year I presented at SQLAuthority News – Presenting at South East Asia SharePoint Conference – Oct 26, 27, 2010 – Singapore. I felt very good to be presenting at Singapore as SharePoint Conference as I was the only SQL Speaker at the event. The event was filled with SharePoint enthusiasts and lots of other experts from all around the globe. The event was one of the best organized event, I attended in subcontinent. I just received my feedback score of the event. I was very much surprised and stunned. My ratting are very high as well, my demo were considered as one of the best demo of the whole event. I am not sure how much feedback I can share with community as organizer did not specify to me but I am very certain that I am allowed to share my own feedback. Speaker – 4.39 (best score 4.74, average 3.84) Contents – 4.37 (best score 4.39, average 3.65) Demo – 4.48 (best score, 4.48, average 3.61) I am very glad that all of my efforts to do presentations at SharePoint Conference are finally paid up. I was very much worried earlier if attendees will accept me or not as I am coming as speaker from foreign technology and no one knows me there. I must thank all of you for the same. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SharePoint, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SharePoint

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• Designing configuration for subobjects

  - by Stefano Borini

  I have the following situation: I have a class (let's call it Main) encapsulating a complex process. This class in turn orchestrates a sequence of subalgorithms (AlgoA, AlgoB), each one represented by an individual class. To configure Main, I have a configuration stored into a configuration object MainConfig. This object contains all the config information for AlgoA and AlgoB with their specific parameters. AlgoA has no interest to the information relative to the configuration of AlgoB, so technically I could have (and in practice I have) a contained MainConfig.AlgoAConfig and MainConfig.AlgoBConfig instances, and initialize as AlgoA(MainConfig.AlgoAConfig) and AlgoB(MainConfig.AlgoBConfig). The problem is that there is some common configuration data. One example is the printLevel. I currently have MainConfig.printLevel. I need to propagate this information to both AlgoA and AlgoB, because they have to know how much to print. MainConfig also needs to know how much to print. So the solutions available are I pass the MainConfig to AlgoA and AlgoB. This way, AlgoA has technically access to the whole configuration (even that of AlgoB) and is less self-contained I copy the MainConfig.printLevel into AlgoAConfig and AlgoBConfig, so I basically have three printLevel information repeated. I create a third configuration class PrintingConfig. I have an instance variable MainConfig.printingConfig, and then pass to AlgoA both MainConfig.AlgoAConfig and MainConfig.printingConfig. Have you ever found this situation? How did you solve it ? Which one is stylistically clearer to a new reader of the code ?

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• array and array_view from amp.h

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is a very long post, but it also covers what are probably the classes (well, array_view at least) that you will use the most with C++ AMP, so I hope you enjoy it! Overview The concurrency::array and concurrency::array_view template classes represent multi-dimensional data of type T, of N dimensions, specified at compile time (and you can later access the number of dimensions via the rank property). If N is not specified, it is assumed that it is 1 (i.e. single-dimensional case). They are rectangular (not jagged). The difference between them is that array is a container of data, whereas array_view is a wrapper of a container of data. So in that respect, array behaves like an STL container, whereas the closest thing an array_view behaves like is an STL iterator (albeit with random access and allowing you to view more than one element at a time!). The data in the array (whether provided at creation time or added later) resides on an accelerator (which is specified at creation time either explicitly by the developer, or set to the default accelerator at creation time by the runtime) and is laid out contiguously in memory. The data provided to the array_view is not stored by/in the array_view, because the array_view is simply a view over the real source (which can reside on the CPU or other accelerator). The underlying data is copied on demand to wherever the array_view is accessed. Elements which differ by one in the least significant dimension of the array_view are adjacent in memory. array objects must be captured by reference into the lambda you pass to the parallel_for_each call, whereas array_view objects must be captured by value (into the lambda you pass to the parallel_for_each call). Creating array and array_view objects and relevant properties You can create array_view objects from other array_view objects of the same rank and element type (shallow copy, also possible via assignment operator) so they point to the same underlying data, and you can also create array_view objects over array objects of the same rank and element type e.g.   array_view<int,3> a(b); // b can be another array or array_view of ints with rank=3 Note: Unlike the constructors above which can be called anywhere, the ones in the rest of this section can only be called from CPU code. You can create array objects from other array objects of the same rank and element type (copy and move constructors) and from other array_view objects, e.g.   array<float,2> a(b); // b can be another array or array_view of floats with rank=2 To create an array from scratch, you need to at least specify an extent object, e.g. array<int,3> a(myExtent);. Note that instead of an explicit extent object, there are convenience overloads when N<=3 so you can specify 1-, 2-, 3- integers (dependent on the array's rank) and thus have the extent created for you under the covers. At any point, you can access the array's extent thought the extent property. The exact same thing applies to array_view (extent as constructor parameters, incl. convenience overloads, and property). While passing only an extent object to create an array is enough (it means that the array will be written to later), it is not enough for the array_view case which must always wrap over some other container (on which it relies for storage space and actual content). So in addition to the extent object (that describes the shape you'd like to be viewing/accessing that data through), to create an array_view from another container (e.g. std::vector) you must pass in the container itself (which must expose .data() and a .size() methods, e.g. like std::array does), e.g.   array_view<int,2> aaa(myExtent, myContainerOfInts); Similarly, you can create an array_view from a raw pointer of data plus an extent object. Back to the array case, to optionally initialize the array with data, you can pass an iterator pointing to the start (and optionally one pointing to the end of the source container) e.g.   array<double,1> a(5, myVector.begin(), myVector.end()); We saw that arrays are bound to an accelerator at creation time, so in case you don’t want the C++ AMP runtime to assign the array to the default accelerator, all array constructors have overloads that let you pass an accelerator_view object, which you can later access via the accelerator_view property. Note that at the point of initializing an array with data, a synchronous copy of the data takes place to the accelerator, and then to copy any data back we'll see that an explicit copy call is required. This does not happen with the array_view where copying is on demand... refresh and synchronize on array_view Note that in the previous section on constructors, unlike the array case, there was no overload that accepted an accelerator_view for array_view. That is because the array_view is simply a wrapper, so the allocation of the data has already taken place before you created the array_view. When you capture an array_view variable in your call to parallel_for_each, the copy of data between the non-CPU accelerator and the CPU takes place on demand (i.e. it is implicit, versus the explicit copy that has to happen with the array). There are some subtleties to the on-demand-copying that we cover next. The assumption when using an array_view is that you will continue to access the data through the array_view, and not through the original underlying source, e.g. the pointer to the data that you passed to the array_view's constructor. So if you modify the data through the array_view on the GPU, the original pointer on the CPU will not "know" that, unless one of two things happen: you access the data through the array_view on the CPU side, i.e. using indexing that we cover below you explicitly call the array_view's synchronize method on the CPU (this also gets called in the array_view's destructor for you) Conversely, if you make a change to the underlying data through the original source (e.g. the pointer), the array_view will not "know" about those changes, unless you call its refresh method. Finally, note that if you create an array_view of const T, then the data is copied to the accelerator on demand, but it does not get copied back, e.g.   array_view<const double, 5> myArrView(…); // myArrView will not get copied back from GPU There is also a similar mechanism to achieve the reverse, i.e. not to copy the data of an array_view to the GPU. copy_to, data, and global copy/copy_async functions Both array and array_view expose two copy_to overloads that allow copying them to another array, or to another array_view, and these operations can also be achieved with assignment (via the = operator overloads). Also both array and array_view expose a data method, to get a raw pointer to the underlying data of the array or array_view, e.g. float* f = myArr.data();. Note that for array_view, this only works when the rank is equal to 1, due to the data only being contiguous in one dimension as covered in the overview section. Finally, there are a bunch of global concurrency::copy functions returning void (and corresponding concurrency::copy_async functions returning a future) that allow copying between arrays and array_views and iterators etc. Just browse intellisense or amp.h directly for the full set. Note that for array, all copying described throughout this post is deep copying, as per other STL container expectations. You can never have two arrays point to the same data. indexing into array and array_view plus projection Reading or writing data elements of an array is only legal when the code executes on the same accelerator as where the array was bound to. In the array_view case, you can read/write on any accelerator, not just the one where the original data resides, and the data gets copied for you on demand. In both cases, the way you read and write individual elements is via indexing as described next. To access (or set the value of) an element, you can index into it by passing it an index object via the subscript operator. Furthermore, if the rank is 3 or less, you can use the function ( ) operator to pass integer values instead of having to use an index object. e.g. array<float,2> arr(someExtent, someIterator); //or array_view<float,2> arr(someExtent, someContainer); index<2> idx(5,4); float f1 = arr[idx]; float f2 = arr(5,4); //f2 ==f1 //and the reverse for assigning, e.g. arr(idx[0], 7) = 6.9; Note that for both array and array_view, regardless of rank, you can also pass a single integer to the subscript operator which results in a projection of the data, and (for both array and array_view) you get back an array_view of rank N-1 (or if the rank was 1, you get back just the element at that location). Not Covered In this already very long post, I am not going to cover three very cool methods (and related overloads) that both array and array_view expose: view_as, section, reinterpret_as. We'll revisit those at some point in the future, probably on the team blog. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• SQL SERVER – Load Generator – Free Tool From CodePlex

  - by pinaldave

  One of the most common questions I receive is if there any tool available to generate load on SQL Server. Absolutely there is a fabulous free tool available to generate load on SQL Server on Codeplex. This tool was released in 2008 but it is still extremely relevant to generate the load on SQL Server as well works fabulously. CodePlex is a project initiated by Microsoft for hosting open source softwares. The best part of this SQL Server Load Generator is that users can run multiple simultaneous queries again SQL Server using different login account and different application name. The interface of the tool is extremely easy to use and very intuitive as well. One of the things which I felt needed improvement was a default configuration. As every single time when I was adding a query the default settings were showing up and I had to manually change that. However, when I went to Menu >> Tools >>Options I was really happy as it has options to change every single default which is available. Here one can give default username, password, database name as well various settings related to configuration. Additionally application logging is also possible through the options. A couple of other important points I noticed was the button to reset counters as well status bar containing useful information of Total Threads, Completed Queries and Failed Queries. I use this frequently for my load testing. What tool do you use for SQL Server Load Generator? Download SQL Load Generator Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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• Informed TDD &ndash; Kata &ldquo;To Roman Numerals&rdquo;

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/28/informed-tdd-ndash-kata-ldquoto-roman-numeralsrdquo.aspxIn a comment on my article on what I call Informed TDD (ITDD) reader gustav asked how this approach would apply to the kata “To Roman Numerals”. And whether ITDD wasn´t a violation of TDD´s principle of leaving out “advanced topics like mocks”. I like to respond with this article to his questions. There´s more to say than fits into a commentary. Mocks and TDD I don´t see in how far TDD is avoiding or opposed to mocks. TDD and mocks are orthogonal. TDD is about pocess, mocks are about structure and costs. Maybe by moving forward in tiny red+green+refactor steps less need arises for mocks. But then… if the functionality you need to implement requires “expensive” resource access you can´t avoid using mocks. Because you don´t want to constantly run all your tests against the real resource. True, in ITDD mocks seem to be in almost inflationary use. That´s not what you usually see in TDD demonstrations. However, there´s a reason for that as I tried to explain. I don´t use mocks as proxies for “expensive” resource. Rather they are stand-ins for functionality not yet implemented. They allow me to get a test green on a high level of abstraction. That way I can move forward in a top-down fashion. But if you think of mocks as “advanced” or if you don´t want to use a tool like JustMock, then you don´t need to use mocks. You just need to stand the sight of red tests for a little longer ;-) Let me show you what I mean by that by doing a kata. ITDD for “To Roman Numerals” gustav asked for the kata “To Roman Numerals”. I won´t explain the requirements again. You can find descriptions and TDD demonstrations all over the internet, like this one from Corey Haines. Now here is, how I would do this kata differently. 1. Analyse A demonstration of TDD should never skip the analysis phase. It should be made explicit. The requirements should be formalized and acceptance test cases should be compiled. “Formalization” in this case to me means describing the API of the required functionality. “[D]esign a program to work with Roman numerals” like written in this “requirement document” is not enough to start software development. Coding should only begin, if the interface between the “system under development” and its context is clear. If this interface is not readily recognizable from the requirements, it has to be developed first. Exploration of interface alternatives might be in order. It might be necessary to show several interface mock-ups to the customer – even if that´s you fellow developer. Designing the interface is a task of it´s own. It should not be mixed with implementing the required functionality behind the interface. Unfortunately, though, this happens quite often in TDD demonstrations. TDD is used to explore the API and implement it at the same time. To me that´s a violation of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) which not only should hold for software functional units but also for tasks or activities. In the case of this kata the API fortunately is obvious. Just one function is needed: string ToRoman(int arabic). And it lives in a class ArabicRomanConversions. Now what about acceptance test cases? There are hardly any stated in the kata descriptions. Roman numerals are explained, but no specific test cases from the point of view of a customer. So I just “invent” some acceptance test cases by picking roman numerals from a wikipedia article. They are supposed to be just “typical examples” without special meaning. Given the acceptance test cases I then try to develop an understanding of the problem domain. I´ll spare you that. The domain is trivial and is explain in almost all kata descriptions. How roman numerals are built is not difficult to understand. What´s more difficult, though, might be to find an efficient solution to convert into them automatically. 2. Solve The usual TDD demonstration skips a solution finding phase. Like the interface exploration it´s mixed in with the implementation. But I don´t think this is how it should be done. I even think this is not how it really works for the people demonstrating TDD. They´re simplifying their true software development process because they want to show a streamlined TDD process. I doubt this is helping anybody. Before you code you better have a plan what to code. This does not mean you have to do “Big Design Up-Front”. It just means: Have a clear picture of the logical solution in your head before you start to build a physical solution (code). Evidently such a solution can only be as good as your understanding of the problem. If that´s limited your solution will be limited, too. Fortunately, in the case of this kata your understanding does not need to be limited. Thus the logical solution does not need to be limited or preliminary or tentative. That does not mean you need to know every line of code in advance. It just means you know the rough structure of your implementation beforehand. Because it should mirror the process described by the logical or conceptual solution. Here´s my solution approach: The arabic “encoding” of numbers represents them as an ordered set of powers of 10. Each digit is a factor to multiply a power of ten with. The “encoding” 123 is the short form for a set like this: {1*10^2, 2*10^1, 3*10^0}. And the number is the sum of the set members. The roman “encoding” is different. There is no base (like 10 for arabic numbers), there are just digits of different value, and they have to be written in descending order. The “encoding” XVI is short for [10, 5, 1]. And the number is still the sum of the members of this list. The roman “encoding” thus is simpler than the arabic. Each “digit” can be taken at face value. No multiplication with a base required. But what about IV which looks like a contradiction to the above rule? It is not – if you accept roman “digits” not to be limited to be single characters only. Usually I, V, X, L, C, D, M are viewed as “digits”, and IV, IX etc. are viewed as nuisances preventing a simple solution. All looks different, though, once IV, IX etc. are taken as “digits”. Then MCMLIV is just a sum: M+CM+L+IV which is 1000+900+50+4. Whereas before it would have been understood as M-C+M+L-I+V – which is more difficult because here some “digits” get subtracted. Here´s the list of roman “digits” with their values: {1, I}, {4, IV}, {5, V}, {9, IX}, {10, X}, {40, XL}, {50, L}, {90, XC}, {100, C}, {400, CD}, {500, D}, {900, CM}, {1000, M} Since I take IV, IX etc. as “digits” translating an arabic number becomes trivial. I just need to find the values of the roman “digits” making up the number, e.g. 1954 is made up of 1000, 900, 50, and 4. I call those “digits” factors. If I move from the highest factor (M=1000) to the lowest (I=1) then translation is a two phase process: Find all the factors Translate the factors found Compile the roman representation Translation is just a look-up. Finding, though, needs some calculation: Find the highest remaining factor fitting in the value Remember and subtract it from the value Repeat with remaining value and remaining factors Please note: This is just an algorithm. It´s not code, even though it might be close. Being so close to code in my solution approach is due to the triviality of the problem. In more realistic examples the conceptual solution would be on a higher level of abstraction. With this solution in hand I finally can do what TDD advocates: find and prioritize test cases. As I can see from the small process description above, there are two aspects to test: Test the translation Test the compilation Test finding the factors Testing the translation primarily means to check if the map of factors and digits is comprehensive. That´s simple, even though it might be tedious. Testing the compilation is trivial. Testing factor finding, though, is a tad more complicated. I can think of several steps: First check, if an arabic number equal to a factor is processed correctly (e.g. 1000=M). Then check if an arabic number consisting of two consecutive factors (e.g. 1900=[M,CM]) is processed correctly. Then check, if a number consisting of the same factor twice is processed correctly (e.g. 2000=[M,M]). Finally check, if an arabic number consisting of non-consecutive factors (e.g. 1400=[M,CD]) is processed correctly. I feel I can start an implementation now. If something becomes more complicated than expected I can slow down and repeat this process. 3. Implement First I write a test for the acceptance test cases. It´s red because there´s no implementation even of the API. That´s in conformance with “TDD lore”, I´d say: Next I implement the API: The acceptance test now is formally correct, but still red of course. This will not change even now that I zoom in. Because my goal is not to most quickly satisfy these tests, but to implement my solution in a stepwise manner. That I do by “faking” it: I just “assume” three functions to represent the transformation process of my solution: My hypothesis is that those three functions in conjunction produce correct results on the API-level. I just have to implement them correctly. That´s what I´m trying now – one by one. I start with a simple “detail function”: Translate(). And I start with all the test cases in the obvious equivalence partition: As you can see I dare to test a private method. Yes. That´s a white box test. But as you´ll see it won´t make my tests brittle. It serves a purpose right here and now: it lets me focus on getting one aspect of my solution right. Here´s the implementation to satisfy the test: It´s as simple as possible. Right how TDD wants me to do it: KISS. Now for the second equivalence partition: translating multiple factors. (It´a pattern: if you need to do something repeatedly separate the tests for doing it once and doing it multiple times.) In this partition I just need a single test case, I guess. Stepping up from a single translation to multiple translations is no rocket science: Usually I would have implemented the final code right away. Splitting it in two steps is just for “educational purposes” here. How small your implementation steps are is a matter of your programming competency. Some “see” the final code right away before their mental eye – others need to work their way towards it. Having two tests I find more important. Now for the next low hanging fruit: compilation. It´s even simpler than translation. A single test is enough, I guess. And normally I would not even have bothered to write that one, because the implementation is so simple. I don´t need to test .NET framework functionality. But again: if it serves the educational purpose… Finally the most complicated part of the solution: finding the factors. There are several equivalence partitions. But still I decide to write just a single test, since the structure of the test data is the same for all partitions: Again, I´m faking the implementation first: I focus on just the first test case. No looping yet. Faking lets me stay on a high level of abstraction. I can write down the implementation of the solution without bothering myself with details of how to actually accomplish the feat. That´s left for a drill down with a test of the fake function: There are two main equivalence partitions, I guess: either the first factor is appropriate or some next. The implementation seems easy. Both test cases are green. (Of course this only works on the premise that there´s always a matching factor. Which is the case since the smallest factor is 1.) And the first of the equivalence partitions on the higher level also is satisfied: Great, I can move on. Now for more than a single factor: Interestingly not just one test becomes green now, but all of them. Great! You might say, then I must have done not the simplest thing possible. And I would reply: I don´t care. I did the most obvious thing. But I also find this loop very simple. Even simpler than a recursion of which I had thought briefly during the problem solving phase. And by the way: Also the acceptance tests went green: Mission accomplished. At least functionality wise. Now I´ve to tidy up things a bit. TDD calls for refactoring. Not uch refactoring is needed, because I wrote the code in top-down fashion. I faked it until I made it. I endured red tests on higher levels while lower levels weren´t perfected yet. But this way I saved myself from refactoring tediousness. At the end, though, some refactoring is required. But maybe in a different way than you would expect. That´s why I rather call it “cleanup”. First I remove duplication. There are two places where factors are defined: in Translate() and in Find_factors(). So I factor the map out into a class constant. Which leads to a small conversion in Find_factors(): And now for the big cleanup: I remove all tests of private methods. They are scaffolding tests to me. They only have temporary value. They are brittle. Only acceptance tests need to remain. However, I carry over the single “digit” tests from Translate() to the acceptance test. I find them valuable to keep, since the other acceptance tests only exercise a subset of all roman “digits”. This then is my final test class: And this is the final production code: Test coverage as reported by NCrunch is 100%: Reflexion Is this the smallest possible code base for this kata? Sure not. You´ll find more concise solutions on the internet. But LOC are of relatively little concern – as long as I can understand the code quickly. So called “elegant” code, however, often is not easy to understand. The same goes for KISS code – especially if left unrefactored, as it is often the case. That´s why I progressed from requirements to final code the way I did. I first understood and solved the problem on a conceptual level. Then I implemented it top down according to my design. I also could have implemented it bottom-up, since I knew some bottom of the solution. That´s the leaves of the functional decomposition tree. Where things became fuzzy, since the design did not cover any more details as with Find_factors(), I repeated the process in the small, so to speak: fake some top level, endure red high level tests, while first solving a simpler problem. Using scaffolding tests (to be thrown away at the end) brought two advantages: Encapsulation of the implementation details was not compromised. Naturally private methods could stay private. I did not need to make them internal or public just to be able to test them. I was able to write focused tests for small aspects of the solution. No need to test everything through the solution root, the API. The bottom line thus for me is: Informed TDD produces cleaner code in a systematic way. It conforms to core principles of programming: Single Responsibility Principle and/or Separation of Concerns. Distinct roles in development – being a researcher, being an engineer, being a craftsman – are represented as different phases. First find what, what there is. Then devise a solution. Then code the solution, manifest the solution in code. Writing tests first is a good practice. But it should not be taken dogmatic. And above all it should not be overloaded with purposes. And finally: moving from top to bottom through a design produces refactored code right away. Clean code thus almost is inevitable – and not left to a refactoring step at the end which is skipped often for different reasons.   PS: Yes, I have done this kata several times. But that has only an impact on the time needed for phases 1 and 2. I won´t skip them because of that. And there are no shortcuts during implementation because of that.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #007

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 Find Stored Procedure Related to Table in Database – Search in All Stored Procedure In 2006 I wrote a small script which will help user  find all the Stored Procedures (SP) which are related to one or more specific tables. This was quite a popular script however, in SQL Server 2012 the same can be achieved using new DMV sys.sql-expression_dependencies. I recently blogged about it over Find Referenced or Referencing Object in SQL Server using sys.sql_expression_dependencies. 2007 SQL SERVER – Versions, CodeNames, Year of Release 1993 – SQL Server 4.21 for Windows NT 1995 – SQL Server 6.0, codenamed SQL95 1996 – SQL Server 6.5, codenamed Hydra 1999 – SQL Server 7.0, codenamed Sphinx 1999 – SQL Server 7.0 OLAP, codenamed Plato 2000 – SQL Server 2000 32-bit, codenamed Shiloh (version 8.0) 2003 – SQL Server 2000 64-bit, codenamed Liberty 2005 – SQL Server 2005, codenamed Yukon (version 9.0) 2008 – SQL Server 2008, codenamed Katmai (version 10.0) 2011 – SQL Server 2008, codenamed Denali (version 11.0) Search String in Stored Procedure Searching sting in the stored procedure is one of the most frequent task developer do. They might be searching for a table, view or any other details. I have written a script to do the same in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. This is worth bookmarking blog post. There is an alternative way to do the same as well here is the example. 2008 SQL SERVER – Refresh Database Using T-SQL NO! Some of the questions have a single answer NO! You may want to read the question in the original blog post. I had a great time saying No! SQL SERVER – Delete Backup History – Cleanup Backup History SQL Server stores history of all the taken backup forever. History of all the backup is stored in the msdb database. Many times older history is no more required. Following Stored Procedure can be executed with a parameter which takes days of history to keep. In the following example 30 is passed to keep a history of month. 2009 Stored Procedure are Compiled on First Run – SP taking Longer to Run First Time Is stored procedure pre-compiled? Why the Stored Procedure takes a long time to run for the first time?  This is a very common questions often discussed by developers and DBAs. There is an absolutely definite answer but the question has been discussed forever. There is a misconception that stored procedures are pre-compiled. They are not pre-compiled, but compiled only during the first run. For every subsequent runs, it is for sure pre-compiled. Read the entire article for example and demonstration. Removing Key Lookup – Seek Predicate – Predicate – An Interesting Observation Related to Datatypes This is one of the most important performance tuning lesson on my blog. I suggest this weekend you spend time reading them and let me know what you think about the concepts which I have demonstrated in the four part series. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Seek Predicate is the operation that describes the b-tree portion of the Seek. Predicate is the operation that describes the additional filter using non-key columns. Based on the description, it is very clear that Seek Predicate is better than Predicate as it searches indexes whereas in Predicate, the search is on non-key columns – which implies that the search is on the data in page files itself. Policy Based Management – Create, Evaluate and Fix Policies This article will cover the most spectacular feature of SQL Server – Policy-based management and how the configuration of SQL Server with policy-based management architecture can make a powerful difference. Policy based management is loaded with several advantages. It can help you implement various policies for reliable configuration of the system. It also provides additional administration assistance to DBAs and helps them effortlessly manage various tasks of SQL Server across the enterprise. 2010 Recycle Error Log – Create New Log file without Server Restart Once I observed a DBA to restaring the SQL Server when he needed new error log file. This was funny and sad both at the same time. There is no need to restart the server to create a new log file or recycle the log file. You can run sp_cycle_errorlog and achieve the same result. Get Database Backup History for a Single Database Simple but effective script! Reducing CXPACKET Wait Stats for High Transactional Database The subject is very complex and I have done my best to simplify the concept. In simpler words, when a parallel operation is created for SQL Query, there are multiple threads for a single query. Each query deals with a different set of the data (or rows). Due to some reasons, one or more of the threads lag behind, creating the CXPACKET Wait Stat. Threads which came first have to wait for the slower thread to finish. The Wait by a specific completed thread is called CXPACKET Wait Stat. Information Related to DATETIME and DATETIME2 There are quite a lot of confusion with DATETIME and DATETIME2. DATETIME2 is also one of the underutilized datatype of SQL Server.  In this blog post I have written a follow up of the my earlier datetime series where I clarify a few of the concepts related to datetime. Difference Between GETDATE and SYSDATETIME Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2 – WITH GETDATE Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2 2011 Introduction to CUME_DIST – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012 SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical function CUME_DIST(). This function provides cumulative distribution value. It will be very difficult to explain this in words so I will attempt small example to explain you this function. Instead of creating new table, I will be using AdventureWorks sample database as most of the developer uses that for experiment. Introduction to FIRST _VALUE and LAST_VALUE – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012 SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical functions FIRST_VALUE() and LAST_VALUE(). This function returns first and last value from the list. It will be very difficult to explain this in words so I’d like to attempt to explain its function through a brief example. Instead of creating a new table, I will be using the AdventureWorks sample database as most developers use that for experiment purposes. OVER clause with FIRST _VALUE and LAST_VALUE – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012 – ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING “Don’t you think there is bug in your first example where FIRST_VALUE is remain same but the LAST_VALUE is changing every line. I think the LAST_VALUE should be the highest value in the windows or set of result.” Puzzle – Functions FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE with OVER clause and ORDER BY You can see that row number 2, 3, 4, and 5 has same SalesOrderID = 43667. The FIRST_VALUE is 78 and LAST_VALUE is 77. Now if these function was working on maximum and minimum value they should have given answer as 77 and 80 respectively instead of 78 and 77. Also the value of FIRST_VALUE is greater than LAST_VALUE 77. Why? Explain in detail. Introduction to LEAD and LAG – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012 SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical function LEAD() and LAG(). This functions accesses data from a subsequent row (for lead) and previous row (for lag) in the same result set without the use of a self-join . It will be very difficult to explain this in words so I will attempt small example to explain you this function. Instead of creating new table, I will be using AdventureWorks sample database as most of the developer uses that for experiment. A Real Story of Book Getting ‘Out of Stock’ to A 25% Discount Story Available Our book was out of stock in 48 hours of it was arrived in stock! We got call from the online store with a request for more copies within 12 hours. But we had printed only as many as we had sent them. There were no extra copies. We finally talked to the printer to get more copies. However, due to festivals and holidays the copies could not be shipped to the online retailer for two days. We knew for sure that they were going to be out of the book for 48 hours. This is the story of how we overcame that situation! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Libgdx actor bounds are wrong

  - by Undume

  The Actor's boundaries are not centered at the ButtonText but I used the setBounds() method. The higher the Y position is, the less centered is the boundary. The weird thing is that i only created and added to the Stage one button but the screen shows two. When i click the top button, the bottom one is the one highlighted. How can i fix that? import com.badlogic.gdx.Game; import com.badlogic.gdx.Gdx; import com.badlogic.gdx.files.FileHandle; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.Stage; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.ui.Skin; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.ui.TextButton; public class MyGame extends Game { Stage stage; @Override public void create() { stage=new Stage(); FileHandle skinFile = new FileHandle("data/resources/uiskin/uiskin.json"); Skin skin = new Skin(skinFile); TextButton sas=new TextButton("dd",skin); sas.setBounds(0, 500, 100, 100); stage.addActor(sas); Gdx.input.setInputProcessor(stage); } @Override public void dispose() { super.dispose(); } @Override public void render() { super.render(); stage.act(Gdx.graphics.getDeltaTime()); stage.draw(); } @Override public void resize(int width, int height) { super.resize(width, height); } @Override public void pause() { super.pause(); } @Override public void resume() { super.resume(); } }

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• Using cascade in NHibernate

  - by Tyler

  I have two classes, call them Monkey and Banana, with a one-to-many bidirectional relationship. Monkey monkey = new Monkey(); Banana banana = new Banana(); monkey.Bananas.Add(banana); banana.Monkey = monkey; hibernateService.Save(banana); When I run that chunk of code, I want both monkey and banana to be persisted. However, it's only persisting both when I explicitly save the monkey and not vice versa. Initially, this made sense since only my Monkey.hbm.xml had a mapping with cascade="all". <set name="Bananas" inverse="true" cascade="all"> <key column="Id"/> <one-to-many class="Banana"/> </set> I figured I just needed to add the following to my Banana.hbm.xml file: <many-to-one name="Monkey" column="Id" cascade="all" /> Unfortunately, this resulted in a Parameter index is out of range error when I tried to run the snippet of code. I investigated this error and found this post, but I still don't see what I'm doing wrong. I have the relationship mapped once on each side as far as I can tell. For full disclosure, here are the two mapping files: Monkey.hbm.xml <class name="Monkey" table="monkies" lazy="true"> <id name="Id"> <generator class="increment" /> </id> <property name="Name" /> <set name="Bananas" inverse="true" cascade="all"> <key column="Id"/> <one-to-many class="Banana"/> </set> </class> Banana.hbm.xml <class name="Banana" table="bananas" lazy="true"> <id name="Id"> <generator class="increment" /> </id> <property name="Name" /> <many-to-one name="Monkey" column="Id" cascade="all" /> </class>

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• CodeGolf : Find the Unique Paths

  - by st0le

  Here's a pretty simple idea, in this pastebin I've posted some pair of numbers. These represent Nodes of a unidirected connected graph. The input to stdin will be of the form, (they'll be numbers, i'll be using an example here) c d q r a b d e p q so x y means x is connected to y (not viceversa) There are 2 paths in that example. a->b->c->d->e and p->q->r. You need to print all the unique paths from that graph The output should be of the format a->b->c->d->e p->q->r Notes You can assume the numbers are chosen such that one path doesn't intersect the other (one node belongs to one path) The pairs are in random order. They are more than 1 paths, they can be of different lengths. All numbers are less than 1000. If you need more details, please leave a comment. I'll amend as required. Shameless-Plug For those who enjoy Codegolf, please Commit at Area51 for its very own site:) (for those who don't enjoy it, please support it as well, so we'll stay out of your way...)

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• Are there any actual case studies on rewrites of software success/failure rates?

  - by James Drinkard

  I've seen multiple posts about rewrites of applications being bad, peoples experiences about it here on Programmers, and an article I've ready by Joel Splosky on the subject, but no hard evidence of case studies. Other than the two examples Joel gave and some other posts here, what do you do with a bad codebase and how do you decide what to do with it based on real studies? For the case in point, there are two clients I know of that both have old legacy code. They keep limping along with it because as one of them found out, a rewrite was a disaster, it was expensive and didn't really work to improve the code much. That customer has some very complicated business logic as the rewriters quickly found out. In both cases, these are mission critical applications that brings in a lot of revenue for the company. The one that attempted the rewrite felt that they would hit a brick wall at some point if the legacy software didn't get upgraded at some point in the future. To me, that kind of risk warrants research and analysis to ensure a successful path. My question is have there been actual case studies that have investigated this? I wouldn't want to attempt a major rewrite without knowing some best practices, pitfalls, and successes based on actual studies. Aftermath: okay, I was wrong, I did find one article: Rewrite or Reuse. They did a study on a Cobol app that was converted to Java.

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• Can't customize the application switcher

  - by Byron Hawkins

  I'm trying to change the shortcut for switching applications from Alt+Tab to Ctrl+Tab, but changes in the System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Navigation are being ignored. Even if I disable the Switch applications shortcut entirely, it still maps to Alt+Tab. At one point I had some keys remapped with xmodmap, but since then I have deleted that configuration and rebooted. My keyboard layout settings are all defaults. The OS is Ubuntu 12.04, with all software updated this afternoon. It would also be nice to have the variation of application switching that includes one icon per window, instead of one icon per application, since I am frequently switching between windows of an application and would rather not wait for the switcher to realize I want a different window of the current application. My other Ubuntu 12.04 install has the application switcher that I like, but I'm not sure how to choose between them on this install (which was set up by my university department). Thanks if anyone can help me with this.

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• Carriers Holding Your OS Updates Hostage

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/10/10/carriers-holding-your-os-updates-hostage.aspx Just a small rant here.  Today the Windows Phone 8 GDR2 update finally became available for Nokia handset users.  Now I’m not sure that it is AT&T fault entirely that Samsung and HTC users got their updates two months ago and we are just finally seeing it.  It may have something to do with the Nokia Amber update.  But every Windows Phone update on AT&T from 7.1 on seems to have been delayed.  How is it that the premiere Windows Phone carrier is always the last one to release updates? Smart phone ecosystems are a partnership between the OS provider, the hardware manufacturer and the carriers.  If any one of those partners does not hold up its responsibilities then everyone gets a black eye.  The goal for all involved should be to release updates as early as possible with reasonable assurance of stability.  This ensures the satisfaction of consumers and increases the likelihood of future sales. From what I have seen so far AT&T has been the one breaking the consumer’s trust in the Windows Phone ecosystem.  Aside from voicing our dissatisfaction we may need to start voting with our feet until they realize that they being a poor citizen has consequences. Technorati Tags: ATT,Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Microsoft,Nokia,GDR2

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• Files backup utility with incremental backups that would keep backup device clean

  - by Wojtek

  I've tested a few of backup utilities and still haven't found one that would satisfy me. Almost every one of them has two options: - full backup - not an option to use frequently - incremental backup - seems right, but there's one thing about it: Incremental backup builds on a base of a full backup, backing up only those files, that were created/changed. The thing is, that after some time you've got a lot of unwanted files from the old backups bloating your backup device. Also, if you'd accidentally delete your full (first) backup file, then the differential backups would be corrupted (you wouldn't be able to restore them). The thing I'm looking for is a program, that would backup files simply by copying them. It would check the backup device whether it contains the file (unchanged): - if yes, it should proceed to the next file (we've got current version backed up) - if no, it would copy the file to the backup device - if the device contains a file that is no longer on our disk, the program would delete it from the backup device Is there any such utility, that would work this way? If not, do you have any hints on how to backup fairly big amounts of data (around 20gb) quite frequently with incremental backups and not be exposed to those unwanted effects of backup size puffing up?

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• WCF/webservice architecture question

  - by M.R.

  I have a requirement to create a webservice to expose certain items from a CMS as a web service, and I need some suggestions - the structure of the items is as such: item - field 1 - field 2 - field 3 - field 4 So, one would think that the class for this will be: public class MyItem { public string ItemName { get; set; } public List<MyField> Fields { get; set; } } public class MyField { public string FieldName { get; set; } public string FieldValue { get; set; } //they are always string (except - see below) } This works for when its always one level deep, but sometimes, one of the fields is actually a point to ANOTHER item (MyItem) or multiple MyItem (List<MyItem>), so I thought I would change the structure of MyField as follows, to make FieldValue as object; public class MyField { public string FieldName { get; set; } public object FieldValue { get; set; } //changed to object } So, now, I can put whatever I want in there. This is great in theory, but how will clients consume this? I suspect that when users make a reference to this web service, they won't know which object is being returned in that field? This seems like a not-so-good design. Is there a better approach to this?

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• Expression Studio 4 Community Launch Event

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Event On June 7th Expression Studio 4 will be launched at the Internet Week in New York. One day later, on June 8th, the Dutch Silverlight and Expression User Group SIXIN organizes the Dutch Community Launch in collaboration with Microsoft and Centric at Centric's office in IJsselstein. To celebrate the 4 Expression release we have two interesting speakers. In addition, we give three packages Expression Studio and more great gifts away.   Program The preliminary program for the evening is as follows: 5:45 p.m. - Food, drinks and networking 6:45 p.m. - Reception and Introduction by Koen Zwikstra, co-founder of SIXIN and Silverlight MVP 7:00 p.m. - Phone 7 Building a Windows application using the new features of Expression Blend by Loek van den Ouweland, founder and web designer for Magic Studio 8:00 p.m. - Break 8:30 p.m. - Tour Encoder and Expression Web by Antoni Dol, senior designer at Macaw 9:30 p.m. - Networking while enjoying a drink   Ask your question to one of the speakers If you have a question to one of the speakers, then you can by email ([email protected]) or thru Twitter. Send an email with subject # expression4 or send a tweet @ sixinUG and use it to hashtag # expression4.   Register To register for this event or to get more information you can go to the SIXIN meetings page here.   Special thanks to our sponsors:

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