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• Arquillian - Weld SE - getting NullPointerException

  - by Walter White

  I am new to Arquillian and want to get some basic testing working (inject a bean and assert it does something). Exception: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test set: com.walterjwhite.test.TestCase ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 1, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 1.231 sec <<< FAILURE! test(com.walterjwhite.test.TestCase) Time elapsed: 0.02 sec <<< ERROR! java.lang.RuntimeException: Could not inject members at org.jboss.arquillian.testenricher.cdi.CDIInjectionEnricher.injectClass(CDIInjectionEnricher.java:113) at org.jboss.arquillian.testenricher.cdi.CDIInjectionEnricher.enrich(CDIInjectionEnricher.java:61) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.enricher.ClientTestEnricher.enrich(ClientTestEnricher.java:61) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.ObserverImpl.invoke(ObserverImpl.java:90) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.EventContextImpl.invokeObservers(EventContextImpl.java:98) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.EventContextImpl.proceed(EventContextImpl.java:80) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.client.ContainerDeploymentContextHandler.createContext(ContainerDeploymentContextHandler.java:133) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.client.ContainerDeploymentContextHandler.createBeforeContext(ContainerDeploymentContextHandler.java:115) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.ObserverImpl.invoke(ObserverImpl.java:90) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.EventContextImpl.proceed(EventContextImpl.java:87) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.TestContextHandler.createTestContext(TestContextHandler.java:82) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.ObserverImpl.invoke(ObserverImpl.java:90) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.EventContextImpl.proceed(EventContextImpl.java:87) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.TestContextHandler.createClassContext(TestContextHandler.java:68) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.ObserverImpl.invoke(ObserverImpl.java:90) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.EventContextImpl.proceed(EventContextImpl.java:87) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.TestContextHandler.createSuiteContext(TestContextHandler.java:54) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.ObserverImpl.invoke(ObserverImpl.java:90) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.EventContextImpl.proceed(EventContextImpl.java:87) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.ManagerImpl.fire(ManagerImpl.java:126) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.core.ManagerImpl.fire(ManagerImpl.java:106) at org.jboss.arquillian.impl.EventTestRunnerAdaptor.before(EventTestRunnerAdaptor.java:85) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian$4.evaluate(Arquillian.java:210) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian.multiExecute(Arquillian.java:303) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian.access$300(Arquillian.java:45) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian$5.evaluate(Arquillian.java:228) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runNotIgnored(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:79) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:71) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:49) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$3.run(ParentRunner.java:193) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$1.schedule(ParentRunner.java:52) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.runChildren(ParentRunner.java:191) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.access$000(ParentRunner.java:42) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$2.evaluate(ParentRunner.java:184) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian$2.evaluate(Arquillian.java:173) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian.multiExecute(Arquillian.java:303) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian.access$300(Arquillian.java:45) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian$3.evaluate(Arquillian.java:187) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.run(ParentRunner.java:236) at org.jboss.arquillian.junit.Arquillian.run(Arquillian.java:127) at org.apache.maven.surefire.junit4.JUnit4TestSet.execute(JUnit4TestSet.java:35) at org.apache.maven.surefire.junit4.JUnit4Provider.executeTestSet(JUnit4Provider.java:115) at org.apache.maven.surefire.junit4.JUnit4Provider.invoke(JUnit4Provider.java:97) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616) at org.apache.maven.surefire.booter.ProviderFactory$ClassLoaderProxy.invoke(ProviderFactory.java:103) at $Proxy0.invoke(Unknown Source) at org.apache.maven.surefire.booter.SurefireStarter.invokeProvider(SurefireStarter.java:150) at org.apache.maven.surefire.booter.SurefireStarter.runSuitesInProcess(SurefireStarter.java:91) at org.apache.maven.surefire.booter.ForkedBooter.main(ForkedBooter.java:69) Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException at org.jboss.arquillian.testenricher.cdi.CDIInjectionEnricher.getBeanManager(CDIInjectionEnricher.java:51) at org.jboss.arquillian.testenricher.cdi.CDIInjectionEnricher.injectClass(CDIInjectionEnricher.java:100) ... 71 more TestCase class @RunWith(Arquillian.class) public class TestCase { @Deployment public static JavaArchive createDeployment() { return ShrinkWrap.create(JavaArchive.class).addClasses(TestEntity.class, Implementation.class) .addAsManifestResource(EmptyAsset.INSTANCE, ArchivePaths.create("beans.xml")); } @Inject Implementation implementation; @Test public void test() throws Exception { final TestEntity testEntity = implementation.create(); Assert.assertNotNull(testEntity); } } When I run this, I get a NullPointerException, the bean manager is null. It looks like I am missing a step, but from the examples, it looks like this is all I should need. Any ideas? Walter

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• Event bubbling with img tags?

  - by Kenny Bones

  I did some googling and figured I'm probably experiencing so called "event bubbling" that I've never heard of but are not surprised by it's existance. I want it to fire only once and I'm wondering how to fix this. Basically, I have this small code snippet: $('.bggallery_images').click(function () { alert('test'); }); This is supposed to fire once from a php snippet that basically adds an image of each image from a specific folder. It then outputs an echo string where each image has the class of "bggallery_images". PHP snippet looks like this: <?php $dirname = "img"; $images = scandir($dirname); $ignore = Array(".", ".."); foreach($images as $file) { if(!in_array($file, $ignore)) { echo "<img class=\"bggallery_images\" src=\"$dirname/$file\" />"; }; } ?> This all generates the html markup that looks like this for each image: <img src="img/WhitePattern6.gif" class="bggallery_images"> What is happening here? Here's the rendered output from FireBug: <div id="gallery_lightbox" style="height: 215px; z-index: 4; display: block;"> <div id="close"></div> <h2><cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="Velg " style="width: 39px; height: 20px;"><canvas width="49" height="23" style="width: 49px; height: 23px; top: -4px; left: 0px;"></canvas><cufontext>Velg </cufontext></cufon><cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="bakgrunnsbilde" style="width: 123px; height: 20px;"><canvas width="129" height="23" style="width: 129px; height: 23px; top: -4px; left: 0px;"></canvas><cufontext>bakgrunnsbilde</cufontext></cufon></h2> <div class="bggallery_images">testererererer</div> <img src="img/Bakgrunner/4462-v4.jpg" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/5922.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/BluePattern.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/Brown1.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/Brown2Pattern.jpg" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/BrownPattern.jpg" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/Brownn.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/GrayPattern.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/GreenPattern3.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/OrangePattern.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/PurplePattern.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/PurplePattern2.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/RedPattern3.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/RedPattern4.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/RedPattern5.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/Tiled_Wallpaper__Green_Texture_by_knitetgantt.png" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/WhitePattern4.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/WhitePattern5.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/WhitePattern6.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/WhitePattern7.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/WhitePurple.jpg" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/YellowPattern.gif" class="bggallery_images"><img src="img/Bakgrunner/vintage-wallpaper.jpg" class="bggallery_images"> </div>

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• JSTL c:forEach causes @ViewScoped bean to invoke @PostConstruct on every request

  - by Nitesh Panchal

  Hello, Again i see that the @PostConstruct is firing every time even though no binding attribute is used. See this code :- <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets" xmlns:c="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"> <h:head> <title>Facelet Title</title> </h:head> <h:body> <h:form> <c:forEach var="item" items="#{TestBean.listItems}"> <h:outputText value="#{item}"/> </c:forEach> <h:commandButton value="Click" actionListener="#{TestBean.actionListener}"/> </h:form> </h:body> </html> And this is the simplest possible bean in JSF :- package managedBeans; import java.io.Serializable; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import javax.annotation.PostConstruct; import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean; import javax.faces.bean.ViewScoped; @ManagedBean(name="TestBean") @ViewScoped public class TestBean implements Serializable { private List<String> listItems; public List<String> getListItems() { return listItems; } public void setListItems(List<String> listItems) { this.listItems = listItems; } public TestBean() { } @PostConstruct public void init(){ System.out.println("Post Construct fired!"); listItems = new ArrayList<String>(); listItems.add("Mango"); listItems.add("Apple"); listItems.add("Banana"); } public void actionListener(){ System.out.println("Action Listener fired!"); } } Do you see any behaviour that should cause postconstruct callback to fire each time? I think JSF 2.0 is highly unstable. If it has to fire PostConstruct each and every time what purpose does @ViewScoped serve. Why not to use @RequestScoped only? I thought i have made some mistake in my application. But when i created this simplest possible in JSF, i still get this error. Am i not understanding the scopes of JSF? or are they not testing it properly? Further, if you remove c:forEach and replace it with ui:repeat, then it works fine. Waiting for replies to confirm whether it is bug or it is intentional to stop the programmers from using jstl?

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• Yet another bug of JSF?

  - by Nitesh Panchal

  Hello, Again i see that the @PostConstruct is firing every time even though no binding attribute is used. See this code :- <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets" xmlns:c="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"> <h:head> <title>Facelet Title</title> </h:head> <h:body> <h:form> <c:forEach var="item" items="#{TestBean.listItems}"> <h:outputText value="#{item}"/> </c:forEach> <h:commandButton value="Click" actionListener="#{TestBean.actionListener}"/> </h:form> </h:body> </html> And this is the simplest possible bean in JSF :- package managedBeans; import java.io.Serializable; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import javax.annotation.PostConstruct; import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean; import javax.faces.bean.ViewScoped; @ManagedBean(name="TestBean") @ViewScoped public class TestBean implements Serializable { private List<String> listItems; public List<String> getListItems() { return listItems; } public void setListItems(List<String> listItems) { this.listItems = listItems; } public TestBean() { } @PostConstruct public void init(){ System.out.println("Post Construct fired!"); listItems = new ArrayList<String>(); listItems.add("Mango"); listItems.add("Apple"); listItems.add("Banana"); } public void actionListener(){ System.out.println("Action Listener fired!"); } } Do you see any behaviour that should cause postconstruct callback to fire each time? I think JSF 2.0 is highly unstable. If it has to fire PostConstruct each and every time what purpose does @ViewScoped serve. Why not to use @RequestScoped only? I thought i have made some mistake in my application. But when i created this simplest possible in JSF, i still get this error. Am i not understanding the scopes of JSF? or are they not testing it properly? Further, if you remove c:forEach and replace it with ui:repeat, then it works fine. Waiting for replies to confirm whether it is bug or it is intentional to stop the programmers from using jstl?

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• How to organize pictures on website using css? [on hold]

  - by user3624023

  Here is my website without any CSS: http://www.wmcicompsci.ca/cs20/students/theglowcloud/Bare%20bones%20website/classics_bare.html I am new to CSS and I would like to organize pictures these pictures in this fashion: http://css-tricks.com/examples/SlideinCaptions/ I would just like this layout for the pictures but I do not need the sliding of the captions(although I would like to but it does not work my browser). I would like the captions to be like titles on top of the pictures. Here is my current html code: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title> My favourite Fantasy books</title> <meta charset = "utf-8"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css.css"> </head> <body> <nav id="main_nav"> <ul> <li><a href = " homepage_css.html"> Homepage</a></li> <li><a href="science_fiction_css.html">Science Fiction</a></li> <li><a href="classics_css.html">Classics</a></li> <li><a href="fantasy_css.html">Fantasy</a></li> </ul> </nav> <h1> Fantasy Genre</h1> <p> Here are my favourites:</p> <ul> <li> Goblet of Fire by J.K Rowling (4th book in the Harry Potter Series) </li> <li><img class= displayed src="pics/fantasy/goblet_of_fire.jpg" width="200" alt="Goblet of Fire book cover"></li> <li> Graceling by Kristan Cashore </li> <li><img src="pics/fantasy/graceling.jpg" width="200" alt = " Graceling book cover"></li> <li> Serpent's Shadow by Rick Riordan (3rd book in the Kane Chronicles) </li> <li><img src="pics/fantasy/serpents_shadow.jpg" width="200" alt="Serpent's Shadow book cover"></li> <li> The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein </li> <li><img src="pics/fantasy/the_hobbit.jpg" width="200" alt="The Hobbit book cover"></li> <li> The False Prince by Jennifer Neilson (1st book in the Ascendance Triology) </li> <li><img src="pics/fantasy/the_false_prince.jpg" width="200" alt="The False Prince book cover"></li> </ul>

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• Calling Web Service Functions Asynchronously from a Web Page

  - by SGWellens

  Over on the Asp.Net forums where I moderate, a user had a problem calling a Web Service from a web page asynchronously. I tried his code on my machine and was able to reproduce the problem. I was able to solve his problem, but only after taking the long scenic route through some of the more perplexing nuances of Web Services and Proxies. Here is the fascinating story of that journey. Start with a simple Web Service     public class Service1 : System.Web.Services.WebService    {        [WebMethod]        public string HelloWorld()        {            // sleep 10 seconds            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10 * 1000);            return "Hello World";        }    } The 10 second delay is added to make calling an asynchronous function more apparent. If you don't call the function asynchronously, it takes about 10 seconds for the page to be rendered back to the client. If the call is made from a Windows Forms application, the application freezes for about 10 seconds. Add the web service to a web site. Right-click the project and select "Add Web Reference…" Next, create a web page to call the Web Service. Note: An asp.net web page that calls an 'Async' method must have the Async property set to true in the page's header: <%@ Page Language="C#"          AutoEventWireup="true"          CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs"          Inherits="_Default"           Async='true'  %> Here is the code to create the Web Service proxy and connect the event handler. Shrewdly, we make the proxy object a member of the Page class so it remains instantiated between the various events. public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page {    localhost.Service1 MyService;  // web service proxy     // ---- Page_Load ---------------------------------     protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyService = new localhost.Service1();        MyService.HelloWorldCompleted += EventHandler;          } Here is the code to invoke the web service and handle the event:     // ---- Async and EventHandler (delayed render) --------------------------     protected void ButtonHelloWorldAsync_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        // blocks        ODS("Pre HelloWorldAsync...");        MyService.HelloWorldAsync();        ODS("Post HelloWorldAsync");    }    public void EventHandler(object sender, localhost.HelloWorldCompletedEventArgs e)    {        ODS("EventHandler");        ODS("    " + e.Result);    }     // ---- ODS ------------------------------------------------    //    // Helper function: Output Debug String     public static void ODS(string Msg)    {        String Out = String.Format("{0}  {1}", DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss.ff"), Msg);        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(Out);    } I added a utility function I use a lot: ODS (Output Debug String). Rather than include the library it is part of, I included it in the source file to keep this example simple. Fire up the project, open up a debug output window, press the button and we get this in the debug output window: 11:29:37.94 Pre HelloWorldAsync... 11:29:37.94 Post HelloWorldAsync 11:29:48.94 EventHandler 11:29:48.94 Hello World   Sweet. The asynchronous call was made and returned immediately. About 10 seconds later, the event handler fires and we get the result. Perfect….right? Not so fast cowboy. Watch the browser during the call: What the heck? The page is waiting for 10 seconds. Even though the asynchronous call returned immediately, Asp.Net is waiting for the event to fire before it renders the page. This is NOT what we wanted. I experimented with several techniques to work around this issue. Some may erroneously describe my behavior as 'hacking' but, since no ingesting of Twinkies was involved, I do not believe hacking is the appropriate term. If you examine the proxy that was automatically created, you will find a synchronous call to HelloWorld along with an additional set of methods to make asynchronous calls. I tried the other asynchronous method supplied in the proxy:     // ---- Begin and CallBack ----------------------------------     protected void ButtonBeginHelloWorld_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        ODS("Pre BeginHelloWorld...");        MyService.BeginHelloWorld(AsyncCallback, null);        ODS("Post BeginHelloWorld");    }    public void AsyncCallback(IAsyncResult ar)    {        String Result = MyService.EndHelloWorld(ar);         ODS("AsyncCallback");        ODS("    " + Result);    } The BeginHelloWorld function in the proxy requires a callback function as a parameter. I tested it and the debug output window looked like this: 04:40:58.57 Pre BeginHelloWorld... 04:40:58.57 Post BeginHelloWorld 04:41:08.58 AsyncCallback 04:41:08.58 Hello World It works the same as before except for one critical difference: The page rendered immediately after the function call. I was worried the page object would be disposed after rendering the page but the system was smart enough to keep the page object in memory to handle the callback. Both techniques have a use: Delayed Render: Say you want to verify a credit card, look up shipping costs and confirm if an item is in stock. You could have three web service calls running in parallel and not render the page until all were finished. Nice. You can send information back to the client as part of the rendered page when all the services are finished. Immediate Render: Say you just want to start a service running and return to the client. You can do that too. However, the page gets sent to the client before the service has finished running so you will not be able to update parts of the page when the service finishes running. Summary: YourFunctionAsync() and an EventHandler will not render the page until the handler fires. BeginYourFunction() and a CallBack function will render the page as soon as possible. I found all this to be quite interesting and did a lot of searching and researching for documentation on this subject….but there isn't a lot out there. The biggest clues are the parameters that can be sent to the WSDL.exe program: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7h3ystb6(VS.100).aspx Two parameters are oldAsync and newAsync. OldAsync will create the Begin/End functions; newAsync will create the Async/Event functions. Caveat: I haven't tried this but it was stated in this article. I'll leave confirming this as an exercise for the student J. Included Code: I'm including the complete test project I created to verify the findings. The project was created with VS 2008 SP1. There is a solution file with 3 projects, the 3 projects are: Web Service Asp.Net Application Windows Forms Application To decide which program runs, you right-click a project and select "Set as Startup Project". I created and played with the Windows Forms application to see if it would reveal any secrets. I found that in the Windows Forms application, the generated proxy did NOT include the Begin/Callback functions. Those functions are only generated for Asp.Net pages. Probably for the reasons discussed earlier. Maybe those Microsoft boys and girls know what they are doing. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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• Friday Fun: Omega Crisis

  - by Mysticgeek

  Friday is here once again and it’s time to play a fun flash game on company time. Today we take a look at the space shooter Omega Crisis. Omega Crisis At the start of the game you’re given the basic story of the game, defending the space outpost, and instructions on how to play. Controls are easy, just target the enemy and use the left mouse button to fire. After each level you’re shown the results and how many Tech Points you’ve earned. The more Tech Points you earn, you have a better chance of upgrading your weapons and base defense before the next level.   You can also go into Manage Mode by hitting the Space bar, and select gunners and other types of weapons to help defend the outpost. Choose your mission from the timeline after successfully completing a mission. You can also use A,W,D,S to move around the map and see exactly where the enemy ships are coming from. This makes it easier to destroy them before they get too close to your base. This game is a lot of fun and is similar to different “Desktop Defense” type games. If you’re looking for a fun way to waste the afternoon, and not look at TPS reports, Omega Crisis can get you though until the whistle blows. Play Omega Crisis Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Portal, the Flash VersionFriday Fun: Play Bubble QuodFriday Fun: Gravitee 2Friday Fun: Wake Up the BoxFriday Fun: Compulse TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals

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• The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better

  - by The Geek

  We’re big fans of hacking the Windows Registry around here, and we’ve got one of the biggest collections of registry hacks you’ll find. Don’t believe us? Here’s a list of the top 50 registry hacks that we’ve covered. It’s important to note that you should never hack the registry if you don’t know what you’re doing, because your computer will light on fire and some squirrels may be injured. Also, you should create a System Restore point before doing so. Otherwise, keep reading Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox The Mystic Underground Tunnel Wallpaper Ubunchu! – The Ubuntu Manga Available in Multiple Languages Breathe New Life into Your PlayStation 2 Peripherals by Hooking Them Up to Your Computer Move the Window Control Buttons to the Left Side in Windows Fun and Colorful Firefox Theme for Windows 7

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• Do’s and Don’ts Building SharePoint Applications

  - by Bil Simser

  SharePoint is a great platform for building quick LOB applications. Simple things from employee time trackers to server and software inventory to full blown Help Desks can be crafted up using SharePoint from just customizing Lists. No programming necessary. However there are a few tricks I’ve painfully learned over the years that you can use for your own solutions. DO What’s In A Name? When you create a new list, column, or view you’ll commonly name it something like “Expense Reports”. However this has the ugly effect of creating a url to the list as “Expense%20Reports”. Or worse, an internal field name of “Expense_x0x0020_Reports” which is not only cryptic but hard to remember when you’re trying to find the column by internal name. While “Expense Reports 2011” is user friendly, “ExpenseReports2011” is not (unless you’re a programmer). So that’s not the solution. Well, not entirely. Instead when you create your column or list or view use the scrunched up name (I can’t think of the technical term for it right now) of “ExpenseReports2011”, “WomenAtTheOfficeThatAreMen” or “KoalaMeatIsGoodWhenBroiled”. After you’ve created it, go back and change the name to the more friendly “Silly Expense Reports That Nobody Reads”. The original internal name will be the url and code friendly one without spaces while the one used on data entry forms and view headers will be the human version. Smart Columns When building a view include columns that make sense. By default when you add a column the “Add to default view” is checked. Resist the urge to be lazy and leave it checked. Uncheck that puppy and decide consciously what columns should be included in the view. Pick columns that make sense to what the user is trying to do. This means you have to talk to the user. Yes, I know. That can be trying at times and even painful. Go ahead, talk to them. You might learn something. Find out what’s important to them and why. If they’re doing something repetitively as part of their job, try to make their life easier by including what’s most important to them. Do they really need to see the Created *and* Modified date of a document or do they just need the title and author? You’ll only find out after talking to them (or getting them drunk in a bar and leaving them in the back alley handcuffed to a garbage bin, don’t ask). Gotta Keep it Separated Hey, views are there for a reason. Use them. While “All Items” is a fine way to present a list of well, all items, it’s hardly sufficient to present a list of servers built before the Y2K bug hit. You’ll be scrolling the list for hours finally arriving at Page 387 of 12,591 and cursing that SharePoint guy for convincing you that putting your hardware into a list would be of any use to anyone. Next to collecting the data, presenting it is just as important. Views are often overlooked and many times ignored or misused. They’re the way you can slice and dice the data up so that you’re not trying to consume 3,000 years of human evolution on a single web page. Remember views can be filtered so feel free to create a view for each status or one for each operating system or one for each species of Information Worker you might be putting in that list or document library. Not only will it reduce the number of items someone sees at one time, it’ll also make the information that much more relevant. Also remember that each view is a separate page. Use it in navigation by creating a menu on the Quick Launch to each view. The discoverability of the Views menu isn’t overly obvious and if you violate the rule of columns (see Horizontally Scrolling below) the view menu doesn’t even show up until you shuffle the scroll bar to the left. Navigation links, big giant buttons, a screaming flashing “CLICK ME NOW” will help your users find their way. Sort It! Views are great so we’re building nice, rich views for the user. Awesomesauce. However sort is not very discoverable by the user. For example when you’re looking at a view how do you know if it’s ascending or descending and what is it sorted on. Maybe it’s sorted using two fields so what’s that all about? Help your users by letting them know the information they’re looking at is sorted. Maybe you name the view something appropriate like “Bogus Expense Claims Sorted By Deadbeats”. If you use the naming strategy just make sure you keep the name consistent with the description. In the previous example their better be a Deadbeat column so I can see the sort in action. Having a “Loser” column, while equally correct, is a little obtuse to the average Information Worker. Remember, they usually don’t use acronyms and even if they knew how to, it’s not immediately obvious to them that’s what you’re trying to convey. Another option is to simply drop a Content Editor Web Part above the list and explain exactly the view they’re looking at. Each view is it’s own page so one CEWP won’t be used across the board. Be descriptive in what the user is seeing but try to keep it brief. Dumping the first chapter of I, Claudius might be informative to the data but can gobble up screen real estate and miss the point of having the list. DO NOT Useless Attachments The attachments column is, in a word, useless. For the most part. Sure it indicates there’s an attachment on the list item but in the grand scheme of things that’s not overly informative. Maybe it is and by all means, if it makes sense to you include it. Colour it. Make it shine and stand like the Return of Clippy on every SharePoint list. Without it being functional it can be boring. EndUserSharePoint.com has an article to make the son of Clippy that much more useful so feel free to head over and check out this blog post by Paul Grenier on the task (Warning code ahead! Danger Will Robinson!) In any case, I would suggest you remove it from your views. Again if it’s important then include it but consider the jQuery solution above to make it functional. It’s added by default to views and one of things that people forget to clean up. Horizontal Scrolling Screen real estate is premium so building a list that contains 8,000 columns and stretches horizontally across 15 screens probably isn’t the most user friendly experience. Most users can’t figure out how to scroll vertically let alone horizontally so don’t make it even that more confusing for them. Take the Steve Krug approach in your view designs and try not to make the user think. Again views are your friend. Consider splitting up the data into views where one view contains 10 columns and other view contains the other 10. Okay, maybe your information doesn’t work that way but humans can only process 7 pieces of data at a time, 10 at most (then their heads explode and you don’t want to clean that mess up, especially on a Friday night before the big dance). It drives me batshit crazy when I see a view with 80 columns of data. I often ask the user “So what do you do with all this information”. The response is usually “With this data [the first 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to fire everyone, and with this data [the next 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to set the building on fire and collect the insurance”. It’s at that point I show them how to create two new views “People Who Are About To Get The Axe” and “Beach Time For The Executives”. Again, talk to your users and try to reason with them on cutting down the number of columns they see at once. Vertical Scrolling Another big faux pas I find is the use of multi-line comment fields in views. It’s not so bad when you have a statement like this in your view: “I really like, oh my god, thought I was going to scream when I saw this turtle then I decided what I was going to have for dinner and frankly I hate having to work late so when I was talking to the customer I thought, oh my god, what if the customer has turtles and then it appeared to me that I really was hungry so I'm going to have lunch now.” It’s fine if that’s the only column along with two or three others, but once you slap those 20 columns of data into the list, the comment field wraps and forms a new multi-page novel that takes up your entire screen. Do everyone a favour and just avoid adding the column to views. Train the user to just click through to the item if they need to see the contents. Duplicate Information Duplication is never good. Views and great as you can group data together. For example create a view of project status reports grouped by author. Then you can see what project manager is being a dip and not submitting their report. However if you group by author do you really need the Created By field as well in the view? Or if the view is grouped by Project then Author do you need both. Horizontal real estate is always at a premium so try not to clutter up the view with duplicate data like this. Oh  yeah, if you’re scratching your head saying “But Bil, if I don’t include the Project name in the view and I have a lot of items then how do I know which one I’m looking at”. That’s a hint that your grouping is too vague or you have too much data in the view based on that criteria. Filter it down a notch, create some views, and try to keep the group down to a single screen where you can see the group header at the top of the page. Again it’s just managing the information you have. Redundant, See Redundant This partially relates to duplicate information and smart columns but basically remember to not include the obvious in a view. Remember, don’t make me think. If you’ve gone to the trouble (and it was a lot of trouble wasn’t it?) to create separate views of your data by creating a “September Zombie Brain Sales”, “October Zombie Brain Sales”, etc. then please for the love of all that is holy do not include the Month and Product columns in your view. Similarly if you create a “My” view of anything (“My Favourite Brands of Spandex”, “My Co-Workers I Find The Urge To Disinfect”) then again, do not include the owner or author field (or whatever field you use to identify “My”). That’s just silly. Hope that helps! Happy customizing!

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• Extending ASP.NET Output Caching

  One of the most sure-fire ways to improve a web application's performance is to employ caching. Caching takes some expensive operation and stores its results in a quickly accessible location. Since it's inception, ASP.NET has offered two flavors of caching: Output Caching - caches the entire rendered markup of an ASP.NET page or User Control for a specified duration.Data Caching - a API for caching objects. Using the data cache you can write code to add, remove, and retrieve items from the cache.Until recently, the underlying functionality of these two caching mechanisms was fixed - both cached data in the web server's memory. This has its drawbacks. In some cases, developers may want to save output cache content to disk. When using the data cache you may want to cache items to the cloud or to a distributed caching architecture like memcached. The good news is that with ASP.NET 4 and the .NET Framework 4, the output caching and data caching options are now much more extensible. Both caching features are now based upon the provider model, meaning that you can create your own output cache and data cache providers (or download and use a third-party or open source provider) and plug them into a new or existing ASP.NET 4 application. This article focuses on extending the output caching feature. We'll walk through how to create a custom output cache provider that caches a page or User Control's rendered output to disk (as opposed to memory) and then see how to plug the provider into an ASP.NET application. A complete working example, available in both VB and C#, is available for download at the end of this article. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• Extending ASP.NET Output Caching

  One of the most sure-fire ways to improve a web application's performance is to employ caching. Caching takes some expensive operation and stores its results in a quickly accessible location. Since it's inception, ASP.NET has offered two flavors of caching: Output Caching - caches the entire rendered markup of an ASP.NET page or User Control for a specified duration.Data Caching - a API for caching objects. Using the data cache you can write code to add, remove, and retrieve items from the cache.Until recently, the underlying functionality of these two caching mechanisms was fixed - both cached data in the web server's memory. This has its drawbacks. In some cases, developers may want to save output cache content to disk. When using the data cache you may want to cache items to the cloud or to a distributed caching architecture like memcached. The good news is that with ASP.NET 4 and the .NET Framework 4, the output caching and data caching options are now much more extensible. Both caching features are now based upon the provider model, meaning that you can create your own output cache and data cache providers (or download and use a third-party or open source provider) and plug them into a new or existing ASP.NET 4 application. This article focuses on extending the output caching feature. We'll walk through how to create a custom output cache provider that caches a page or User Control's rendered output to disk (as opposed to memory) and then see how to plug the provider into an ASP.NET application. A complete working example, available in both VB and C#, is available for download at the end of this article. Read on to learn more! Read More >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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• Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

  - by Manesh Karunakaran

  It’s been more than a month since SharePoint 2010 RTMed. And a lot of people have downloaded and set up their very own SharePoint 2010 development rigs. And quite a few people have written blogs about setting up good development environments, there is even an MSDN article on it. Two of the blogs worth noting are from MVPs Sahil Malik and Wictor Wilén. Make sure that you check these out as well. Part of the bad side-effects of being a geek is the need to do the technical stuff the best way possible (pragmatic or otherwise), but the problem with this is that what is considered “best” is relative. Precisely the reason why you are reading this post now. Most of the posts that I read are out dated/need updations or are using the wrong OS’es or virtualization solutions (again, opinions vary) or using them the wrong way. Here’s a developer’s view of Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Rig. If you are a sales guy, it’s time to close this window. Confusion 1: Which Host Operating System and Virtualization Solution to use? This point has been beaten to death in numerous blog posts in the past, if you have time to invest, read this excellent post by our very own SharePoint Joel on this subject. But if you are planning to build the Ultimate Development Rig, then Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the option that you should be looking at. I have been using this as my primary OS for about 6-7 months now, and I haven’t had any Driver issue or Application compatibility issue. In my experience all the Windows 7 drivers work fine with WIN2008 R2 also. You can enable Aero for eye candy (and the Windows 7 look and feel) and except for a few things like the Hibernation support (which a can be enabled if you really want it), Windows Server 2008 R2, is the best Workstation OS that I have used till date. But frankly the answer to this question of which OS to use depends primarily on one question - Are you willing to change your primary OS? If the answer to that is ‘Yes’, then Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the best option, if not look at vmWare or VirtualBox, both are equally good. Those who are familiar with a Virtual PC background might prefer Sun VirtualBox. Besides, these provide support for running 64 bit guest machines on 32 bit hosts if the underlying hardware is truly 64 bit. See my earlier post on this. Since we are going to make the ultimate rig, we will use Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, for reasons mentioned above. Confusion 2: Should I use a multi-(virtual) server set up? A lot of people use multiple servers for their development environments - like Wictor Wilén is suggesting - one server hosting the Active directory, one hosting SharePoint Server and another one for SQL Server. True, this mimics the production environment the best possible way, but as somebody who has fallen for this set up earlier, I can tell you that you don’t really get anything by doing this. Microsoft has done well to ensure that if you can do it on one machine, you can do it in a farm environment as well. Besides, when you run multiple Server class machine instances in parallel, there are a lot of unwanted processor cycles wasted for no good use. In my personal experience, as somebody who needs to switch between MOSS 2007/SharePoint 2010 environments from time to time, the best possible solution is to Make the host Windows Server 2008 R2 machine your Domain Controller (AD Server) Make all your Virtual Guest OS’es join this domain. Have each Individual Guest OS Image have it’s own local SQL Server instance. The advantages are that you can reuse the users and groups in each of the Guest operating systems, you can manage the users in one place, AD is light weight and doesn't take too much resources on your host machine and also having separate SQL instances for each of the Development images gives you maximum flexibility in terms of configuration, for example your SharePoint rigs can have simpler DB configurations, compared to your MS BI blast pits. Confusion 3: Which Operating System should I use to run SharePoint 2010 Now that’s a no brainer. Use Windows 2008 R2 as your Guest OS. When you are building the ultimate rig, why compromise? If you are planning to run Windows Server 2008 as your Guest OS, there are a few patches that you need to install at different times during the installation, for that follow the steps mentioned here Okay now that we have made our choices, let’s get to the interesting part of building the rig, Step 1: Prepare the host machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on your best Desktop/Laptop. If you have read this far, I am quite sure that you are somebody who can install an OS on your own, so go ahead and do that. Make sure that you run the compatibility wizard before you go ahead and nuke your current OS. There are plenty of blogs telling you how to make a good Windows 2008 R2 Workstation that feels and behaves like a Windows 7 machine, follow one and once you are done, head to Step 2. Step 2: Configure the host machine as a Domain Controller Before we begin this, let me tell you, this step is completely optional, you don’t really need to do this, you can simply use the local users on the Guest machines instead, but if this is a much cleaner approach to manage users and groups if you run multiple guest operating systems.  This post neatly explains how to configure your Windows Server 2008 R2 host machine as a Domain Controller. Follow those simple steps and you are good to go. If you are not able to get it to work, try this. Step 3: Prepare the guest machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Open Hyper-V Manager Choose to Create a new Guest Operating system Allocate at least 2 GB of Memory to the Guest OS Choose the Windows 2008 R2 Installation Media Start the Virtual Machine to commence installation. Once the Installation is done, Activate the OS. Step 4: Make the Guest operating systems Join the Domain This step is quite simple, just follow these steps below, Fire up Hyper-V Manager, open your Guest OS Click on Start, and Right click on ‘Computer’ and choose ‘Properties’ On the window that pops-up, click on ‘Change Settings’ On the ‘System Properties’ Window that comes up, Click on the ‘Change’ button Now a window named ‘Computer Name/Domain Changes’ opens up, In the text box titled Domain, type in the Domain name from Step 2. Click Ok and windows will show you the welcome to domain message and ask you to restart the machine, click OK to restart. If the addition to domain fails, that means that you have not set up networking in Hyper-V for the Guest OS to communicate with the Host. To enable it, follow the steps I had mentioned in this post earlier. Step 5: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 on the Guest Machine SQL Server 2008 R2 gets installed with out hassle on Windows Server 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 needs SP2 to work properly on WIN2008 R2. Also SQL Server 2008 R2 allows you to directly add PowerPivot support to SharePoint. Choose to install in SharePoint Integrated Mode in Reporting Server Configuration. Step 6: Install KB971831 and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites Now install the WCF Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB971831) from this location, and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites from the SP2010 Installation media. Step 7: Install and Configure SharePoint 2010 Install SharePoint 2010 from the installation media, after the installation is complete, you are prompted to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. If you are using a local instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, install the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 before starting the wizard. If your development environment uses a remote instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or if it has a pre-existing installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on which KB 970315 x64 has already been applied, this step is not necessary. With the wizard open, do the following: Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64. After the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 installation is finished, complete the wizard. Alternatively, you can choose not to run the wizard by clearing the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard check box and closing the completed installation dialog box. Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64, and then manually start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard by opening a Command Prompt window and executing the following command: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared Debug\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\psconfigui.exe The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard may fail if you are using a computer that is joined to a domain but that is not connected to a domain controller. Step 8: Install Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 SDK Install Visual Studio 2010 Download and Install the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK Step 9: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint and Configure Reporting Services Pop-In the SQLServer 2008 R2 installation media once again and install PowerPivot for SharePoint. This will get added as another instance named POWERPIVOT. Configure Reporting Services by following the steps mentioned here, if you need to get down to the details on how the integration between SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 works, see Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010 an excellent article by Alan Le Marquand Step 10: Download and Install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 SharePoint 2010 comes with a lot of cool stuff like PerformancePoint Services and BCS, if you need to try these out, you need to have data in your databases. So if you want to save yourself the trouble of creating sample data for your PerformancePoint and BCS experiments, download and install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 from CodePlex. And you are done! Fire up your Visual Studio 2010 and Start Coding away!!

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• Don’t Sleep Keeps Your Windows Machine Awake

  - by ETC

  Don’t Sleep is an ultra lightweight and portable application that fills a niche need perfect: sometimes you need to temporarily keep your Windows machine from shutting down or power saving without making any permanent changes to your power profile. Fire up portable Don’t Sleep and tell it how long you want it to stop your computer from shutting down, going to sleep (standby/hibernation), and/or keeping the monitor on. At the end of the monitoring period you can have it turn itself off, stay on but stop blocking, or shut down your computer. It’s a great application for those times you need to alter how your computer handles hibernation mode, activating the screensaver, or other automated tasks without making any permanent changes to your power profile or other settings. Hit up the link below to read more and grab a copy. Don’t Sleep is freeware, Windows only. Don’t Sleep [via The Portable Freeware Collection] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 Access the Options for Your Favorite Extensions Easier in Firefox Don’t Sleep Keeps Your Windows Machine Awake DropSpace Syncs Android Files to Dropbox Field of Poppies Wallpaper The History Of Operating Systems [Infographic] DriveSafe.ly Reads Your Text Messages Aloud

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• What's new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012 - part 1

  - by nikolaosk

  I have downloaded .Net framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 since it was released to MSDN subscribers on the 15th of August.For people that do not know about that yet please have a look at Jason Zander's excellent blog post .Since then I have been investigating the many new features that have been introduced in this release.In this post I will be looking into new features available in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012.In order to follow along this post you must have Visual Studio 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 installed in your machine.Download and install VS 2012 using this link.My machine runs on Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 works just fine. Please find all my posts regarding VS 2012, here .Well I have not exactly kept my promise for writing short blog posts, so I will try to keep this one short. 1) Launch VS 2012 and create a new Web Forms application by going to File - >New Web Site - > ASP.Net Web Forms Site.2) Choose an appropriate name for your web site.3) Build and run your site (CTRL+F5). Then go to View - > Source to see the HTML markup (Javascript e.t.c) that is rendered through the browser.You will see that the ASP.Net team has done a good job to make the markup cleaner and more readable. The ViewState size is significantly smaller compared to its size to earlier versions.Have a look at the picture below 4) Another thing that you must notice is that the new template makes good use of HTML 5 elements.When you view the application through the browser and then go to View Page Source you will see HTML 5 elements like nav,header,section.Have a look at the picture below  5) In VS 2012 we can browse with multiple browsers. There is a very handy dropdown that shows all the browsers available for viewing the website.Have a look at the picture below When I select the option Browse With... I see another window and I can select any of the installed browsers I want and also set the default browser. Have a look at the picture below  When I click Browse, all the selected browsers fire up and I can view the website in all of them.Have a look at the picture below There will be more posts soon looking into new features of ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012Hope it helps!!!

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• eBay Leads Mobile Commerce

  - by David Dorf

  For the first time, more smartphones where shipped than PCs. This important milestone helps reinforce that retailers need a strong mobile commerce strategy. IDC reported that for the 4th quarter of 2010, manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices versus 92.1 million PCs shipped. One early adopter for the retail industry is eBay, the popular online auction and shopping site. In July 2008 they released their first mobile app and have increased investments ever since. In 2002 they bought PayPal for use with its online channel, but its becoming a force in the mobile world as well. In June 2010 they acquired RedLaser, the popular barcode scanning mobile app. Both pieces of technology enhance the mobile experience, and are available to other retailers as well. More recently, in December 2010 they acquired Critical Path Software, the developer of their eBay, StubHub, and Shopping.com mobile applications. Taking their mobile development in-house was a clear signal that mobile commerce is important to their strategy. Pop on over the eBay Inc's mobile commerce stats page to see just how well they are doing. You can use the animated map to see where people are using the app on any given day, and you can compare sales of the different categories. eBay's hottest category is Cars & Trucks, garnering 16.5% of the total $2B (yes, billion) in mobile sales in 2010. To understand why that category is so large, let's look at the top 10 most expensive cars sold on eBay mobile in 2010: $240,001 Mercedes-Benz: SLR McLaren $209,888 Lamborghini: Gallardo $208,500 Ferrari: 430 $199,900 Lamborghini: Gallardo $189,000 Lamborghini: Murcielago $185,000 Ferrari: 430 $175,000 Porsche: 911 $170,000 Ferrari: 550 $160,000 Bentley: Continental, GT $159,900 Lamborghini: Gallardo eBay claims they sell 3-4 Ferraris on their mobile app each month. Yes, mobile commerce is not limited to small items. While I would wait to get home and fire up the PC, the current generation that has grown up with mobile phones has no issue satisfying their impulses. Dave Sikora of Digby told me he's seen people buy furniture sets, mattresses, and diamonds via their mobile phones. I guess mobile commerce is rapidly becoming the norm.

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• In Which We Demystify A Few Docupresentment Settings And Learn the Ethos of the Author

  - by Andy Little

  It's no secret that Docupresentment (part of the Oracle Documaker suite) is powerful tool for integrating on-demand and interactive applications for publishing with the Oracle Documaker framework.  It's also no secret there are are many details with respect to the configuration of Docupresentment that can elude even the most erudite of of techies.  To be sure, Docupresentment will work for you right out of the box, and in most cases will suit your needs without toying with a configuration file.  But, where's the adventure in that?   With this inaugural post to That's The Way, I'm going to introduce myself, and what my aim is with this blog.  If you didn't figure it out already by checking out my profile, my name is Andy and I've been with Oracle (nee Skywire Software nee Docucorp nee Formmaker) since the formative years of 1998.  Strangely, it doesn't seem that long ago, but it's certainly a lifetime in the age of technology.  I recall running a BBS from my parent's basement on a 1200 baud modem, and the trepidation and sweaty-palmed excitement of upgrading to the power and speed of 2400 baud!  Fine, I'll admit that perhaps I'm inflating the experience a bit, but I was kid!  This is the stuff of War Games and King's Quest I and the demise of TI-99 4/A.  Exciting times.  So fast-forward a bit and I'm 12 years into a career in the world of document automation and publishing working for the best (IMHO) software company on the planet.  With That's The Way I hope to shed a little light and peek under the covers of some of the more interesting aspects of implementations involving the tech space within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit (IGBU), which includes Oracle Documaker, Rating & Underwriting, and Policy Administration to name a few.  I may delve off course a bit, and you'll likely get a dose of humor (at least in my mind) but I hope you'll glean at least a tidbit of usefulness with each post.  Feel free to comment as I'm a fairly conversant guy and happy to talk -- it's stopping the talking that's the hard part... So, back to our regularly-scheduled post, already in progress.  By this time you've visited Oracle's E-Delivery site and acquired your properly-licensed version of Oracle Documaker.  Wait -- you didn't find it?  Understandable -- navigating the voluminous download library within Oracle can be a daunting task.  It's pretty simple once you’ve done it a few times.  Login to the e-delivery site, and accept the license terms and restrictions.  Then, you’ll be able to select the Oracle Insurance Applications product pack and your appropriate platform. Click Go and you’ll see a list of applicable products, and you’ll click on Oracle Documaker Media Pack (as I went to press with this article the version is 11.4): Finally, click the Download button next to Docupresentment (again, version at press time is 2.2 p5). This should give you a ZIP file that contains the installation packages for the Docupresentment Server and Client, cryptically named IDSServer22P05W32.exe and IDSClient22P05W32.exe. At this time, I’d like to take a little detour and explain that the world of Oracle, like most technical companies, is rife with acronyms.  One of the reasons Skywire Software was a appealing to Oracle was our use of many acronyms, including the occasional use of multiple acronyms with the same meaning.  I apologize in advance and will try to point these out along the way.  Here’s your first sticky note to go along with that: IDS = Internet Document Server = Docupresentment Once you’ve completed the installation, you’ll have a shiny new Docupresentment server and client, and if you installed the default location it will be living in c:\docserv. Unix users, I’m one of you!  You’ll find it by default in  ~/docupresentment/docserv.  Forging onward with the meat of this post is learning about some special configuration options.  By now you’ve read the documentation included with the download (specifically ids_book.pdf) which goes into some detail of the rubric of the configuration file and in fact there’s even a handy utility that provides an interface to the configuration file (see Running IDSConfig in the documentation).  But who wants to deal with a configuration utility when we have the tools and technology to edit the file <gasp> by hand! I shall now proceed with the standard Information Technology Under the Hood Disclaimer: Please remember to back up any files before you make changes.  I am not responsible for any havoc you may wreak! Go to your installation directory, and locate your docserv.xml file.  Open it in your favorite XML editor.  I happen to be fond of Notepad++ with the XML Tools plugin.  Almost immediately you will behold the splendor of the configuration file.  Just take a moment and let that sink in.  Ok – moving on.  If you reviewed the documentation you know that inside the root <configuration> node there are multiple <section> nodes, each containing a specific group of settings.  Let’s take a look at <section name=”DocumentServer”>: There are a few entries I’d like to discuss.  First, <entry name=”StartCommand”>. This should be pretty self-explanatory; it’s the name of the executable that’s run when you fire up Docupresentment.  Immediately following that is <entry name=”StartArguments”> and as you might imagine these are the arguments passed to the executable.  A few things to point out: The –Dids.configuration=docserv.xml parameter specifies the name of your configuration file. The –Dlogging.configuration=logconf.xml parameter specifies the name of your logging configuration file (this uses log4j so bone up on that before you delve here). The -Djava.endorsed.dirs=lib/endorsed parameter specifies the path where 3rd party Java libraries can be located for use with Docupresentment.  More on that in another post. The <entry name=”Instances”> allows you to specify the number of instances of Docupresentment that will be started.  By default this is two, and generally two instances per CPU is adequate, however you will always need to perform load testing to determine the sweet spot based on your hardware and types of transactions.  You may have many, many more instances than 2. Time for a sidebar on instances.  An instance is nothing more than a separate process of Docupresentment.  The Docupresentment service that you fire up with docserver.bat or docserver.sh actually starts a watchdog process, which is then responsible for starting up the actual Docupresentment processes.  Each of these act independently from one another, so if one crashes, it does not affect any others.  In the case of a crashed process, the watchdog will start up another instance so the number of configured instances are always running.  Bottom line: instance = Docupresentment process. And now, finally, to the settings which gave me pause on an not-too-long-ago implementation!  Docupresentment includes a feature that watches configuration files (such as docserv.xml and logconf.xml) and will automatically restart its instances to load the changes.  You can configure the time that Docupresentment waits to check these files using the setting <entry name=”FileWatchTimeMillis”>.  By default the number is 12000ms, or 12 seconds.  You can save yourself a few CPU cycles by extending this time, or by disabling  the check altogether by setting the value to 0.  This may or may not be appropriate for your environment; if you have 100% uptime requirements then you probably don’t want to bring down an entire set of processes just to accept a new configuration value, so it’s best to leave this somewhere between 12 seconds to a few minutes.  Another point to keep in mind: if you are using Documaker real-time processing under Docupresentment the Master Resource Library (MRL) files and INI options are cached, and if you need to affect a change, you’ll have to “restart” Docupresentment.  Touching the docserv.xml file is an easy way to do this (other methods including using the RSS request, but that’s another post). The next item up: <entry name=”FilePurgeTimeSeconds”>.  You may already know that the Docupresentment system can generate many temporary files based on certain request types that are processed through the system.  What you may not know is how those files are cleaned up.  There are many rules in Docupresentment that cause the creation of temporary files.  When these files are created, Docupresentment writes an entry into a properties file called the file cache.  This file contains the name, creation date, and expiration time of each temporary file created by each instance of Docupresentment.  Periodically Docupresentment will check the file cache to determine if there are files that are past the expiration time, not unlike that block of cheese festering away in the back of my refrigerator.  However, unlike my ‘fridge cleaning tendencies, Docupresentment is quick to remove files that are past their expiration time.  You, my friend, have the power to control how often Docupresentment inspects the file cache.  Simply set the value for <entry name=”FilePurgeTimeSeconds”> to the number of seconds appropriate for your requirements and you’re set.  Note that file purging happens on a separate thread from normal request processing, so this shouldn’t interfere with response times unless the CPU happens to be really taxed at the point of cache processing.  Finally, after all of this, we get to the final setting I’m going to address in this post: <entry name=”FilePurgeList”>.  The default is “filecache.properties”.  This establishes the root name for the Docupresentment file cache that I mentioned previously.  Docupresentment creates a separate cache file for each instance based on this setting.  If you have two instances, you’ll see two files created: filecache.properties.1 and filecache.properties.2.  Feel free to open these up and check them out. I hope you’ve enjoyed this first foray into the configuration file of Docupresentment.  If you did enjoy it, feel free to drop a comment, I welcome feedback.  If you have ideas for other posts you’d like to see, please do let me know.  You can reach me at [email protected]. ‘Til next time! ###

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• ADF Bounded Taskflow Activation

  - by Vijay Mohan

  hey guys, It's really been a while since I last blogged. Just came across a hard-to-debug scenario, so thought of sharing it for the benefit of ADF developers.I had a page fragment(jsff) wrapped inside a  bounded taskflow, for which the activation was conditional and was based on a requestScope property (be it a requestScope variable or a property coming from a requestScope bean). As soon as the taskflow activates and page renders the requestScope parameters life span ends. After that, when you raise an event inside the page (click of commandLink, moseHover, valueChange event etc) then for the first time the event gets fired but it fails to affect the change in the page, moreover, for the subsequent times the event itself doesn't get fired. Any guesses as to what could be the culprit..?I guess, I already gave the reason in the initial paragraph. For the first time when the event gets fired, the fwk sees that the page is already lying in inactivate state, so it fails to affect the change and for subsequent times it doesn't even fire the event because it already knew that the page/region is inactive. So, in such a scenario we must use either a pageFlowScope property or transientVO property which could exist till the page's life span.

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• Reminder: True WCF Asynchronous Operation

  - by Sean Feldman

  A true asynchronous service operation is not the one that returns void, but the one that is marked as IsOneWay=true using BeginX/EndX asynchronous operations (thanks Krzysztof). To support this sort of fire-and-forget invocation, Windows Communication Foundation offers one-way operations. After the client issues the call, Windows Communication Foundation generates a request message, but no correlated reply message will ever return to the client. As a result, one-way operations can't return values, and any exception thrown on the service side will not make its way to the client. One-way calls do not equate to asynchronous calls. When one-way calls reach the service, they may not be dispatched all at once and may be queued up on the service side to be dispatched one at a time, all according to the service configured concurrency mode behavior and session mode. How many messages (whether one-way or request-reply) the service is willing to queue up is a product of the configured channel and the reliability mode. If the number of queued messages has exceeded the queue's capacity, then the client will block, even when issuing a one-way call. However, once the call is queued, the client is unblocked and can continue executing while the service processes the operation in the background. This usually gives the appearance of asynchronous calls.

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• Routing to a Controller with no View in Angular

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've finally had some time to put Angular to use this week in a small project I'm working on for fun. Angular's routing is great and makes it real easy to map URL routes to controllers and model data into views. But what if you don't actually need a view, if you effectively need a headless controller that just runs code, but doesn't render a view?Preserve the ViewWhen Angular navigates a route and and presents a new view, it loads the controller and then renders the view from scratch. Views are not cached or stored, but displayed and then removed. So if you have routes configured like this:'use strict'; // Declare app level module which depends on filters, and services window.myApp = angular.module('myApp', ['myApp.filters', 'myApp.services', 'myApp.directives', 'myApp.controllers']). config(['$routeProvider', function($routeProvider) { $routeProvider.when('/map', { template: "partials/map.html ", controller: 'mapController', reloadOnSearch: false, animation: 'slide' }); … $routeProvider.otherwise({redirectTo: '/map'}); }]); Angular routes to the mapController and then re-renders the map.html template with the new data from the $scope filled in.But, but… I don't want a new View!Now in most cases this works just fine. If I'm rendering plain DOM content, or textboxes in a form interface that is all fine and dandy - it's perfectly fine to completely re-render the UI.But in some cases, the UI that's being managed has state and shouldn't be redrawn. In this case the main page in question has a Google Map on it. The map is  going to be manipulated throughout the lifetime of the application and the rest of the pages. In my application I have a toolbar on the bottom and the rest of the content is replaced/switched out by the Angular Views:The problem is that the map shouldn't be redrawn each time the Location view is activated. It should maintain its state, such as the current position selected (which can move), and shouldn't redraw due to the overhead of re-rendering the initial map.Originally I set up the map, exactly like all my other views - as a partial, that is rendered with a separate file, but that didn't work.The Workaround - Controller Only RoutesThe workaround for this goes decidedly against Angular's way of doing things:Setting up a Template-less RouteIn-lining the map view directly into the main pageHiding and showing the map view manuallyLet's see how this works.Controller Only RouteThe template-less route is basically a route that doesn't have any template to render. This is not directly supported by Angular, but thankfully easy to fake. The end goal here is that I want to simply have the Controller fire and then have the controller manage the display of the already active view by hiding and showing the map and any other view content, in effect bypassing Angular's view display management.In short - I want a controller action, but no view rendering.The controller-only or template-less route looks like this: $routeProvider.when('/map', { template: " ", // just fire controller controller: 'mapController', animation: 'slide' });Notice I'm using the template property rather than templateUrl (used in the first example above), which allows specifying a string template, and leaving it blank. The template property basically allows you to provide a templated string using Angular's HandleBar like binding syntax which can be useful at times. You can use plain strings or strings with template code in the template, or as I'm doing here a blank string to essentially fake 'just clear the view'. In-lined ViewSo if there's no view where does the HTML go? Because I don't want Angular to manage the view the map markup is in-lined directly into the page. So instead of rendering the map into the Angular view container, the content is simply set up as inline HTML to display as a sibling to the view container.<div id="MapContent" data-icon="LocationIcon" ng-controller="mapController" style="display:none"> <div class="headerbar"> <div class="right-header" style="float:right"> <a id="btnShowSaveLocationDialog" class="iconbutton btn btn-sm" href="#/saveLocation" style="margin-right: 2px;"> <i class="icon-ok icon-2x" style="color: lightgreen; "></i> Save Location </a> </div> <div class="left-header">GeoCrumbs</div> </div> <div class="clearfix"></div> <div id="Message"> <i id="MessageIcon"></i> <span id="MessageText"></span> </div> <div id="Map" class="content-area"> </div> </div> <div id="ViewPlaceholder" ng-view></div>Note that there's the #MapContent element and the #ViewPlaceHolder. The #MapContent is my static map view that is always 'live' and is initially hidden. It is initially hidden and doesn't get made visible until the MapController controller activates it which does the initial rendering of the map. After that the element is persisted with the map data already loaded and any future access only updates the map with new locations/pins etc.Note that default route is assigned to the mapController, which means that the mapController is fired right as the page loads, which is actually a good thing in this case, as the map is the cornerstone of this app that is manipulated by some of the other controllers/views.The Controller handles some UISince there's effectively no view activation with the template-less route, the controller unfortunately has to take over some UI interaction directly. Specifically it has to swap the hidden state between the map and any of the other views.Here's what the controller looks like:myApp.controller('mapController', ["$scope", "$routeParams", "locationData", function($scope, $routeParams, locationData) { $scope.locationData = locationData.location; $scope.locationHistory = locationData.locationHistory; if ($routeParams.mode == "currentLocation") { bc.getCurrentLocation(false); } bc.showMap(false,"#LocationIcon"); }]);bc.showMap is responsible for a couple of display tasks that hide/show the views/map and for activating/deactivating icons. The code looks like this:this.showMap = function (hide,selActiveIcon) { if (!hide) $("#MapContent").show(); else { $("#MapContent").hide(); } self.fitContent(); if (selActiveIcon) { $(".iconbutton").removeClass("active"); $(selActiveIcon).addClass("active"); } };Each of the other controllers in the app also call this function when they are activated to basically hide the map and make the View Content area visible. The map controller makes the map.This is UI code and calling this sort of thing from controllers is generally not recommended, but I couldn't figure out a way using directives to make this work any more easily than this. It'd be easy to hide and show the map and view container using a flag an ng-show, but it gets tricky because of scoping of the $scope. I would have to resort to storing this setting on the $rootscope which I try to avoid. The same issues exists with the icons.It sure would be nice if Angular had a way to explicitly specify that a View shouldn't be destroyed when another view is activated, so currently this workaround is required. Searching around, I saw a number of whacky hacks to get around this, but this solution I'm using here seems much easier than any of that I could dig up even if it doesn't quite fit the 'Angular way'.Angular nice, until it's notOverall I really like Angular and the way it works although it took me a bit of time to get my head around how all the pieces fit together. Once I got the idea how the app/routes, the controllers and views snap together, putting together Angular pages becomes fairly straightforward. You can get quite a bit done never going beyond those basics. For most common things Angular's default routing and view presentation works very well.But, when you do something a bit more complex, where there are multiple dependencies or as in this case where Angular doesn't appear to support a feature that's absolutely necessary, you're on your own. Finding information on more advanced topics is not trivial especially since versions are changing so rapidly and the low level behaviors are changing frequently so finding something that works is often an exercise in trial and error. Not that this is surprising. Angular is a complex piece of kit as are all the frameworks that try to hack JavaScript into submission to do something that it was really never designed to. After all everything about a framework like Angular is an elaborate hack. A lot of shit has to happen to make this all work together and at that Angular (and Ember, Durandel etc.) are pretty amazing pieces of JavaScript code. So no harm, no foul, but I just can't help feeling like working in toy sandbox at times :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Angular  JavaScript   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Google+ Hangouts API v1.2

  Google+ Hangouts API v1.2 We just launched v1.2 of the Hangouts API. Join Jonathan Beri and Jenny Murphy as they discuss the improvements and new features included in this release. After that, they'll answer your questions about the Hangouts API. 0:44 - Introductions 2:04 - What's new in Hangouts API v1.2 - developers.google.com 7:39 - Why can't I use the same URL for multiple ImageResources? 12:20 - The YouTube live ID in the Hangouts API 13:59 - Does onYouTubeLiveIdReady fire when new participants join? 15:10 - Can the 18+ flag be exposed in the Hangouts API? 15:50 - Can I use the share button or +1 button to target my Hangout App? 18:20 - When will Google+ pages be able to launch apps in their hangouts? 19:00 - Allen has been using the history API to log use of his Hangout Apps. 19:51 - Will this hangout be archived? - Google+ Platform YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com 20:20 - Is there a way for a user to remove a plugin from their hangout? 21:44 - Why is the self view in hangouts mirrored? 23:45 - Can hangouts support multiple cameras and control them via the API? Can take snapshots? 26:37 - It would be really cool if the hangout button could specify the invitation list. - Google+ issue tracker: code.google.com 28:40 - Can the REST API expose hangout metadata? From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 1350 43 ratings Time: 31:35 More in Science & Technology

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• Craftsmanship is ALL that Matters

  - by Wayne Molina

  Today, I'm going to talk about a touchy subject: the notion of working in a company that doesn't use the prescribed "best practices" in its software development endeavours.  Over the years I have, using a variety of pseudonyms, asked this question on popular programming forums.  Although I always add in some minor variation of the story to avoid suspicion that it's the same person posting, the crux of the tale remains the same: A Programmer’s Tale A junior software developer has just started a new job at an average company, creating average line-of-business applications for internal use (the most typical scenario programmers find themselves in).  This hypothetical newbie has spent a lot of time reading up on the "theory" of software development, devouring books, blogs and screencasts from well-known and respected software developers in the community in order to broaden his knowledge and "do what the pros do".  He begins his new job, eager to apply what he's learned on a real-world project only to discover that his new teammates doesn't use any of those concepts and techniques.  They hack their way through development, or in a best-case scenario use some homebrew, thrown-together semblance of a framework for their applications that follows not one of the best practices suggested by the “elite” in the software community - things like TDD (TDD as a "best practice" is the only subjective part of this post, but it's included here due to a very large following of respected developers who consider it one), the SOLID principles, well-known and venerable tools, even version control in a worst case and truly nightmarish scenario.  Our protagonist is frustrated that he isn't doing things the "proper" way - a way he's spent personal time digesting and learning about and, more importantly, a way that some of the top developers in the industry advocate - and turns to a forum to ask the advice of his peers. Invariably the answer I, in the guise of the concerned newbie, will receive is that A) I don't know anything and should just shut my mouth and sling code the bad way like everybody else on the team, and B) These "best practices" are fade or a joke, and the only thing that matters is shipping software to your customers. I am here today to say that anyone who says this, or anything like it, is not only full of crap but indicative of exactly the type of “developer” that has helped to give our industry a bad name.  Here is why: One Who Knows Nothing, Understands Nothing On one hand, you have the cognoscenti of the .NET development world.  Guys like James Avery, Jeremy Miller, Ayende Rahien and Rob Conery; all well-respected and noted programmers that are pretty much our version of celebrities.  These guys write blogs, books, and post videos outlining the "correct" way of writing software to make sure it not only works but is maintainable and extensible and a joy to work with.  They tout the virtues of the SOLID principles, or of using TDD/BDD, or using a mature ORM like NHibernate, Subsonic or even Entity Framework. On the other hand, you have Joe Everyman, Lead Software Developer at Initrode Corporation - in our hypothetical story Joe is the junior developer's new boss.  Joe's been with Initrode for 10 years, starting as the company’s very first programmer and over the years building up a little fiefdom of his own until at the present he’s in charge of all Initrode’s software development.  Joe writes code the same way he always has, without bothering to learn much, if anything.  He looked at NHibernate once and found it was "too hard", so he uses a primitive implementation of the TableDataGateway pattern as a wrapper around SqlClient.SqlConnection and SqlClient.SqlCommand instead of an actual ORM (or, in a better case scenario, has created his own ORM); the thought of using LINQ or Entity Framework or really anything other than his own hastily homebrew solution has never occurred to him.  He doesn't understand TDD and considers “testing” to be using the .NET debugger to step through code, or simply loading up an app and entering some values to see if it works.  He doesn't really understand SOLID, and he doesn't care to.  He's worked as a programmer for years, and that's all that counts.  Right?  WRONG. Who would you rather trust?  Someone with years of experience and who writes books, creates well-known software and is akin to a celebrity, or someone with no credibility outside their own minute environment who throws around their clout and company seniority as the "proof" of their ability?  Joe Everyman may have years of experience at Initrode as a programmer, and says to do things "his way" but someone like Jeremy Miller or Ayende Rahien have years of experience at companies just like Initrode, THEY know ten times more than Joe Everyman knows or could ever hope to know, and THEY say to do things "this way". Here's another way of thinking about it: If you wanted to get into politics and needed advice on the best way to do it, would you rather listen to the mayor of Hicktown, USA or Barack Obama?  One is a small-time nobody while the other is very well-known and, as such, would probably have much more accurate and beneficial advice. NOTE: The selection of Barack Obama as an example in no way, shape, or form suggests a political affiliation or political bent to this post or blog, and no political innuendo should be mistakenly read from it; the intent was merely to compare a small-time persona with a well-known persona in a non-software field.  Feel free to replace the name "Barack Obama" with any well-known Congressman, Senator or US President of your choice. DIY Considered Harmful I will say right now that the homebrew development environment is the WORST one for an aspiring programmer, because it relies on nothing outside it's own little box - no useful skill outside of the small pond.  If you are forced to use some half-baked, homebrew ORM created by your Director of Software, you are not learning anything valuable you can take with you in the future; now, if you plan to stay at Initrode for 10 years like Joe Everyman, this is fine and dandy.  However if, like most of us, you want to advance your career outside a very narrow space you will do more harm than good by sticking it out in an environment where you, to be frank, know better than everybody else because you are aware of alternative and, in almost most cases, better tools for the job.  A junior developer who understands why the SOLID principles are good to follow, or why TDD is beneficial, or who knows that it's better to use NHibernate/Subsonic/EF/LINQ/well-known ORM versus some in-house one knows better than a senior developer with 20 years experience who doesn't understand any of that, plain and simple.  Anyone who disagrees is either a liar, or someone who, just like Joe Everyman, Lead Developer, relies on seniority and tenure rather than adapting their knowledge as things evolve. In many cases, the Joe Everymans of the world act this way out of fear - they cannot possibly fathom that a “junior” could know more than them; after all, they’ve spent 10 or more years in the same company, doing the same job, cranking out the same shoddy software.  And here comes a newbie who hasn’t spent 10+ years doing the same things, with a fresh and often radical take on the craft, and Joe Everyman is afraid he might have to put some real effort into his career again instead of just pointing to his 10 years of service at Initrode as “proof” that he’s good, or that he might have to learn something new to improve; in most cases the problem is Joe Everyman, and by extension Initrode itself, has a mentality of just being “good enough”, and mediocrity is the rule of the day. A Thorn Bush is No Place for a Phoenix My advice is that if you work on a team where they don't use the best practices that some of the most famous developers in our field say is the "right" way to do things (and have legions of people who agree), and YOU are aware of these practices and can see why they work, then LEAVE the company.  Find a company where they DO care about quality, and craftsmanship, otherwise you will never be happy.  There is no point in "dumbing" yourself down to the level of your co-workers and slinging code without care to craftsmanship.  In 95% of these situations there will be no point in bringing it to the attention of Joe Everyman because he won't listen; he might even get upset that someone is trying to "upstage" him and fire the newbie, and replace someone with loads of untapped potential with a drone that will just nod affirmatively and grind out the tasks assigned without question. Find a company that has people smart enough to listen to the "best and brightest", and be happy.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste away in a job working for ignorant people.  At the end of the day software development IS a craft, and a level of craftsmanship is REQUIRED for any serious professional.  When you have knowledgeable people with the credibility to back it up saying one thing, and small-time people who are, to put it bluntly, nobodies in the field saying and doing something totally different because they can't comprehend it, leave the nobodies to their own devices to fade into obscurity.  Work for a company that uses REAL software engineering techniques and really cares about craftsmanship.  The biggest issue affecting our career, and the reason software development has never been the respected, white-collar career it was meant to be, is because hacks and charlatans can pass themselves off as professional programmers without following a lick of good advice from programmers much better at the craft than they are.  These modern day snake-oil salesmen entrench themselves in companies by hoodwinking non-technical businesspeople and customers with their shoddy wares, end up in senior/lead/executive positions, and push their lack of knowledge on everybody unfortunate enough to work with/for/under them, crushing any dissent or voices of reason and change under their tyrannical heel and leaving behind a trail of dismayed and, often, unemployed junior developers who were made examples of to keep up the facade and avoid the shadow of doubt being cast upon them. To sum this up another way: If you surround yourself with learned people, you will learn.  Surround yourself with ignorant people who can't, as the saying goes, see the forest through the trees, and you'll learn nothing of any real value.  There is more to software development than just writing code, and the end goal should not be just "shipping software", it should be shipping software that is extensible, maintainable, and above all else software whose creation has broadened your knowledge in some capacity, even if a minor one.  An eager newbie who knows theory and thirsts for knowledge can easily be moulded and taught the advanced topics, but the same can't be said of someone who only cares about the finish line.  This industry needs more people espousing the benefits of software craftsmanship and proper software engineering techniques, and less Joe Everymans who are unwilling to adapt or foster new ways of thinking. Conclusion - I Cast “Protection from Fire” I am fairly certain this post will spark some controversy and might even invite the flames.  Please keep in mind these are opinions and nothing more.  A little healthy rant and subsequent flamewar can be good for the soul once in a while.  To paraphrase The Godfather: It helps to get rid of the bad blood.

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• Trying to get MythTV working in Kubuntu 10.10

  - by user4109

  I'm trying to get MythTV working in Kubuntu. Unfortunately I've got the following problem: If I fire up the MythTV Frontend and select "Watch TV" a "Please wait..." label appears and after a while the screen falls back to the home screen. tail -f /var/log/mythtv/mythfrontend.log prints out the following: 2010-10-14 19:22:18.809 MythContext: Connecting to backend server: 127.0.0.1:6543 (try 1 of 1) 2010-10-14 19:22:18.811 Using protocol version 23056 2010-10-14 19:22:22.641 TV: Attempting to change from None to WatchingLiveTV 2010-10-14 19:22:22.641 MythContext: Connecting to backend server: 127.0.0.1:6543 (try 1 of 1) 2010-10-14 19:22:22.642 Using protocol version 23056 2010-10-14 19:22:22.715 Spawning LiveTV Recorder -- begin 2010-10-14 19:22:26.563 Spawning LiveTV Recorder -- end 2010-10-14 19:22:26.565 ProgramInfo(): Updated pathname '':'' -> '1005_20101014192226.mpg' 2010-10-14 19:22:26.569 We have a playbackURL(/var/lib/mythtv/livetv/1005_20101014192226.mpg) & cardtype(MPEG) 2010-10-14 19:22:33.070 RingBuf(/var/lib/mythtv/livetv/1005_20101014192226.mpg): Invalid file (fd -1) when opening '/var/lib/mythtv/livetv/1005_20101014192226.mpg'. 2010-10-14 19:22:33.072 We have a RingBuffer Then there is a whole bunch of those... 2010-10-14 19:22:33.186 RingBuf(/var/lib/mythtv/livetv/1005_20101014192226.mpg) error: Invalid file descriptor in 'safe_read()' ... before it falls back to the main menu. I've got a MSI TV@Anywhere Plus Tuner Card (Philips Semiconductors SAA7131/SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder). Any idea what could be the problem?

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for December 11, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Good To Know - Conflicting View Objects and Shared Entity | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares his thoughts—and a sample application—dealing with an "interesting ADF behavior" encountered over the weekend. Patching Oracle Exalogic - Updating Linux on the Compute Nodes - Part 1 | Jos Nijhoff Jos Nijhoff launches a series of posts the deal with "patching the operating system on the modified Sun Fire X4170 M2 servers...dubbed compute nodes in Exalogic terminology." Expanding on requestaudit - Tracing who is doing what...and for how long | Kyle Hatlestad "One of the most helpful tracing sections in WebCenter Content (and one that is on by default) is the requestaudit tracing," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Kyle Hatlestad. Get up close and technical in his post. Oracle Data Integrator Presentation from NYOUG Webinar | Gurcan Orhan Oracle ACE Director and award-winning data warehouse architect Gurcan Orhan shares his presentation from the recent NYOUG LI SIG. SOA 11g Technology Adapters – ECID Propagation | Greg Mally "Many SOA Suite 11g deployments include the use of the technology adapters for various activities including integration with FTP, database, and files to name a few," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Greg Mally. "Although the integrations with these adapters are easy and feature rich, there can be some challenges from the operations perspective." Greg's post focuses on technical tips for dealing with one of these challenges. Missing Duties for RUP3 upgrade in Fusion Applications Richard from the Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team explains how to safely apply policy store changes in thirteen easy steps. Thought for the Day "Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• OpenFilesView Displays All Open and Locked Files to Help Resolve In-Use Errors

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Windows: You go to move a file and Windows throws up an “In Use” error. OpenFilesView shows you what application or system process is locking up the files you’re trying to move. Sometimes the culprit is obvious; if you go to move your media folder and you’ve got your media player open watching South Park then shutting down the media player is the obvious solution. Other times the culprit is less obvious; sometimes Windows processes and less-than-obvious applications are accessing your files in ways that aren’t apparent. The screenshot below showcases the “In Use” error: This is where OpenFilesView comes into play. Fire up the application to see a list of all active files on your system. The master list is a bit overwhelming (on our test system there were over 1200 open files) but you use the find command to drill down to specific file or folder names. Once you’ve found the locked file you can close the file handle, kill the process, or bring the process to the front (so you can examine the program, if possible, before terminating it). It’s much more efficient than rebooting in an attempt to shake the In-Use error. OpenFilesView is freeware and works on Windows XP through Windows 7. HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Defrag Your PC? Use Amazon’s Barcode Scanner to Easily Buy Anything from Your Phone How To Migrate Windows 7 to a Solid State Drive

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• 1.5 million Windows 7 phone’s sold…

  - by Boonei

  Microsoft announced that it has sold over 1.5 million windows 7 phone devices. Windows 7 is a new generation of OS. Mobile operators/users/device programmers need to adopt the same. Its not going to be a easy transition because it’s not an advanced/next version of win 6.x for mobile. We have heard that development from Microsoft side for Win 6.x devices will not continue after sometime. Don’t know how long will get the support! Everything in it s quite new, like OS, User interface, XBox sync, and also requires mobile phone companies to run the OS on high end chips, meaning atleast 1GHz. So the user segment occupied by phones like HTC Wild Fire are not the ones targeted.   Hey ! There an is a catch with this magic number 1.5 million…. It depicts only the number of units sold to mobile operators and retailers. It’s not the number of actual units held in consumers hands and activated. The number could improve significantly in 2011 where Sprint and Verizon join the party in United States. Atleast dozen phone models are in line up now in the rest of the world running Win 7 OS. One good things that customers can rejoice is that Microsoft will direly push software updates to all its consumers. Operator will not interfere. We can expect strong sales going forward with just this important point where Google’s Android lacks the same. [Img Credit: Microsoft] This article titled,1.5 million Windows 7 phone’s sold…, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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