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• Row Count Plus Transformation

  As the name suggests we have taken the current Row Count Transform that is provided by Microsoft in the Integration Services toolbox and we have recreated the functionality and extended upon it. There are two things about the current version that we thought could do with cleaning up Lack of a custom UI You have to type the variable name yourself In the Row Count Plus Transformation we solve these issues for you. Another thing we thought was missing is the ability to calculate the time taken between components in the pipeline. An example usage would be that you want to know how many rows flowed between Component A and Component B and how long it took. Again we have solved this issue. Credit must go to Erik Veerman of Solid Quality Learning for the idea behind noting the duration. We were looking at one of his packages and saw that he was doing something very similar but he was using a Script Component as a transformation. Our philosophy is that if you have to write or Copy and Paste the same piece of code more than once then you should be thinking about a custom component and here it is. The Row Count Plus Transformation populates variables with the values returned from; Counting the rows that have flowed through the path Returning the time in seconds between when it first saw a row come down this path and when it saw the final row. It is possible to leave both these boxes blank and the component will still work.   All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, you are not permitted to change or add to the inputs or outputs of this component. Optionally you can set the component to fire an event, which happens during the PostExecute phase of the execution. This can be useful to improve visibility of this information, such that it is captured in package logging, or can be used to drive workflow in the case of an error event. Properties Property Data Type Description OutputRowCountVariable String The name of the variable into which the amount of row read will be passed (Optional). OutputDurationVariable String The name of the variable into which the duration in seconds will be passed. (Optional). EventType RowCountPlusTransform.EventType The type of event to fire during post execute, included in which are the row count and duration values. RowCountPlusTransform.EventType Enumeration Name Value Description None 0 Do not fire any event. Information 1 Fire an Information event. Warning 2 Fire a Warning event. Error 3 Fire an Error event. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. For 2005/2008 Only - Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Row Count Plus Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations, and this component requires a minimum of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Downloads The Row Number Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.5 - SQL Server 2008 release. (15 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.43 - Bug fix for duration. For long running processes the duration second count may have been incorrect. (8 Sep 2006) Version 1.1.0.42 - SP1 Compatibility Testing. Added the ability to raise an event with the count and duration data for easier logging or workflow. (18 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. Made available as general public release. (20 Mar 2006) Screenshot Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you get an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component?

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• Adding a DLL to the GAC in Windows 7

  - by Jim Giercyk

  I recently created a DLL and I wanted to reference it from a project I was developing in Visual Studio.  In previous versions of Windows, doing so was simply a matter of dropping the DLL file in the C:\Windows\assembly folder.  That would add the DLL to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and make it accessible in Visual Studio.  However, as is often the case, Window 7 is different.  Even if you have Administrator privileges on your machine, you still do not have permission to drop a file in the assembly folder.  Undaunted, I thought about using the old DOS command line utility gacutil.exe.  Microsoft developed the tool as part of the .Net framework, and it is available in the Windows SDK Framework Tools.  If you have never used gacutil.exe before, you can find out everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex0ss12c(v=vs.80).aspx .  Unfortunately, if you do not have the Windows SDK loaded on your development machine, you will need to install it to use gacutil, but it is relatively quick and painless, and the framework tools are very useful.  Look here for your latest SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/search.aspx?q=Windows%20SDK .   After installing the SDK, I tried installing my DLL to the GAC by running gacutil from a DOS command line: That’s odd.  Microsoft is shipping a tool that cannot be executed even with Administrator rights?  Let me stop here and say that I am by no means a Windows security expert, so I actually did contact my system administrators, and they were not sure how to fix the problem….there must be a super administrator access level, but it isn’t available to your average developer in my company.  The solution outlined here is working within the boundaries of a normal windows Administrator. So, now the hacker in me bubbles to the surface.  What if I were to create a simple BAT file containing the gacutil command?  It’s so crazy it just might work!  Ugh!  I was starting to think this would never work, but then I realized that simply executing a batch program did not change my level of access.  Typically in Windows 7, you would select the “Run As Administrator” option to temporarily act as an administrator for the purpose of executing a process.  However, that option is not available for BAT files run from the command line.  SOLUTION: Create a desktop shortcut to execute the BAT file, which in turn will execute the line command…..are you still with me?  I created a shortcut and pointed it to my batch file.  Theoretically, all I need to do now is right-click on the shortcut and select “Run As Administrator” and we’re good, right?  Well, kinda.  If you notice the syntax of my BAT file, the name of the DLL is passed in as a parameter.  Therefore, I either have to hard-code the file name in the BAT program (YUCK!!), or I can leave the parameter and drag the DLL file to the shortcut and drop it.  Sweet, drag-and-drop works for me…..but if I use the drag-and-drop method, there is no way for me to right-click and select “Run As Administrator”.  That is not a problem…..I simply have to adjust the properties of the shortcut I created and I am in business.  I Right-clicked on the shortcut and select “Properties”.  Under the “Shortcut” tab there is an “Advanced” button…..I clicked it. All I needed to do was check the “Run As Administrator” box: In summary, what I have done is create a BAT file to execute a command line utility, gacutil.exe.  Then, rather than executing the BAT file from the command line, I created a desktop shortcut to run it and set the shortcut properties to “Run As Administrator”.  This will effectively mean I am executing the command line utility with Administrator privileges.  Pretty sneaky. Now, when I drag the DLL file  over to the shortcut, it starts the BAT file and adds the DLL to the assembly cache.  I created another BAT file to remove a DLL from the GAC in case the need should arise.  The code for that is: Give it a try.  I can’t imagine why updating the GAC has been made into such a chore in Windows 7.  Hopefully there is a service pack in the works that will give developers the functionality they had in Windows XP, but in the meantime, this workaround is extremely useful.

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• Collision Detection on floor tiles Isometric game

  - by Anivrom

  I am having a very hard to time figuring out a bug in my code. It should have taken me 20 minutes but instead I've been working on it for over 12 hours. I am writing a isometric tile based game where the characters can walk freely amongst the tiles, but not be able to cross over to certain tiles that have a collides flag. Sounds easy enough, just check ahead of where the player is going to move using a Screen Coordinates to Tile method and check the tiles array using our returned xy indexes to see if its collidable or not. if its not, then don't move the character. The problem I'm having is my Screen to Tile method isn't spitting out the proper X,Y tile indexes. This method works flawlessly for selecting tiles with the mouse. NOTE: My X tiles go from left to right, and my Y tiles go from up to down. Reversed from some examples on the net. Here's the relevant code: public Vector2 ScreentoTile(Vector2 screenPoint) { //Vector2 is just a object with x and y float properties //camOffsetX,Y are my camera values that I use to shift everything but the //current camera target when the target moves //tilescale = 128, screenheight = 480, the -46 offset is to center // vertically + 16 px for some extra gfx in my tile png Vector2 tileIndex = new Vector2(-1,-1); screenPoint.x -= camOffsetX; screenPoint.y = screenHeight - screenPoint.y - camOffsetY - 46; tileIndex.x = (screenPoint.x / tileScale) + (screenPoint.y / (tileScale / 2)); tileIndex.y = (screenPoint.x / tileScale) - (screenPoint.y / (tileScale / 2)); return tileIndex; } The method that calls this code is: private void checkTileTouched () { if (Gdx.input.justTouched()) { if (last.x >= 0 && last.x < levelWidth && last.y >= 0 && last.y < levelHeight) { if (lastSelectedTile != null) lastSelectedTile.setColor(1, 1, 1, 1); Sprite sprite = levelTiles[(int) last.x][(int) last.y].sprite; sprite.setColor(0, 0.3f, 0, 1); lastSelectedTile = sprite; } } if (touchDown) { float moveX=0,moveY=0; Vector2 pos = new Vector2(); if (player.direction == direction_left) { moveX = -(player.moveSpeed); moveY = -(player.moveSpeed / 2); Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("left")); } else if (player.direction == direction_upleft) { moveX = -(player.moveSpeed); moveY = 0; Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("upleft")); } else if (player.direction == direction_up) { moveX = -(player.moveSpeed); moveY = player.moveSpeed / 2; Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("up")); } else if (player.direction == direction_upright) { moveX = 0; moveY = player.moveSpeed; Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("upright")); } else if (player.direction == direction_right) { moveX = player.moveSpeed; moveY = player.moveSpeed / 2; Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("right")); } else if (player.direction == direction_downright) { moveX = player.moveSpeed; moveY = 0; Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("downright")); } else if (player.direction == direction_down) { moveX = player.moveSpeed; moveY = -(player.moveSpeed / 2); Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("down")); } else if (player.direction == direction_downleft) { moveX = 0; moveY = -(player.moveSpeed); Gdx.app.log("Movement", String.valueOf("downleft")); } //Player.moveSpeed is 1 //tileObjects.x is drawn in the center of the screen (400px,240px) // the sprite width is 64, height is 128 testX = moveX * 10; testY = moveY * 10; testX += tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).x + tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).sprite.getWidth() / 2; testY += tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).y + tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).sprite.getHeight() / 2; moveX += tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).x + tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).sprite.getWidth() / 2; moveY += tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).y + tileObjects.get(player.zIndex).sprite.getHeight() / 2; pos = ScreentoTile(new Vector2(moveX,moveY)); Vector2 pos2 = ScreentoTile(new Vector2(testX,testY)); if (!levelTiles[(int) pos2.x][(int) pos2.y].collides) { Vector2 newPlayerPos = ScreentoTile(new Vector2(moveX,moveY)); CenterOnCoord(moveX,moveY); player.tileX = (int)newPlayerPos.x; player.tileY = (int)newPlayerPos.y; } } } When the player is moving to the left (downleft-ish from the viewers point of view), my Pos2 X values decrease as expected but pos2 isnt checking ahead on the x tiles, it is checking ahead on the Y tiles(as if we were moving DOWN, not left), and vice versa, if the player moves down, it will check ahead on the X values (as if we are moving LEFT, instead of DOWN). instead of the Y values. I understand this is probably the most confusing and horribly written post ever, but I'm confused myself so I'm having a hard time explaining it to others lol. if you need more information please ask!! I'm so frustrated after over 12 hours of working on it I'm about to give up.

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• VB Myth - Case Insensitivity is Awesome!

  - by Damon

  I was reading Andy Brown's article 10 Reasons Why Visual Basic is Better than C# and the first claim is that VB is superior because of case insensitivity.  I think the reasons he outlines are basically as follows: Your fingers get tired finding the shift key (e.g. typing PascalCase and camelCase members) You are much more likely to make mistakes while typing names When you accidentally leave caps lock on, it really matters These three arguments culminate in the conclusion: "It doesn't matter if you disagree with everything else in this article: case-sensitivity alone is sufficient reason to ditch C#!" Righto.  I've been using Visual Basic since version 5.0, I wrote a book about ASP.NET in Visual Basic, so I want everyone to know I'm definitely not a VB.NET hater.  I had to converted to C# because it was the language of preference at the places I've worked, so I'm used to both languages.  I love me some case sensitivity.  So first, let's debunk the claims. First, your fingers do not get tired of finding the shift key unless you are writing code in notepad and compiling everything on the command line.  Visual Studio pretty much takes away the need to use the shift key at all. For the most part, any programmer worth a damn doesn't have to type more than about 3-5 characters of any variable or method name before IntelliSense kicks in to help.  VB or C#, if you are not using the tab key for autocomplete then you are typing too much anyway, regardless of whether the shift key is involved or not.  Also, you've got to be a pretty hard-core candy ass if you're complaining at the end of the day that your little fingers are hurting from hitting the shift key. Second, I cannot logically refute the fact that if there are more stringent rules about case sensitivity it will lead to more mistakes.  As such, know that you will be more prone to mistakes in C#.  However, lets talk about the magnitude of the problem.  If you are using IntelliSense then you have auto-correction built in so you probably won't have much of a problem in the first place.  If you manage to bypass IntelliSense and type something wrong you normally are immediately presented with a red-squiggly to let you know something is amiss.  Normally, a person would look at the problem, figure out what the heck went wrong, and then avoid that problem again in the future.  Granted, I have met people who seem to lack this capability, but their problem is deeper than a decision between VB.NET and C#.  So let's make sure that we're all on the same page about this problem.  If you have two teams of developers, one that uses VB.NET and one that uses C#, do not expect to see the VB.NET team drinking beer at the end of the project in festive revelry while the C# team is crying over what the hell to do because their code is riddled with case-sensitivity problems that nobody can resolve. Lastly, if you leave your caps lock key on, turn it off.  Really, what kind of ass-hat would write an entire VB.NET application ENTIRELY IN CAPS?  I happen to be a fan of case sensitivity because it encourages precision and uniformity.  The last thing I need is a code base that looks like it was ransacked by LeEt HacKors wHo Can uSe wHateVer cASe tHey wanT.  I mean really, if you saw someone write this: PuBLIc Sub MyMethod . End Sub And upon asking them why BL was upper case, they responded "Oh, I accidentally hit the shift key there.  Fortunately for me VB.NET is a case insensitive language so I saved a couple of keystrokes by leaving it in there."  Or if you saw: PUBLIC SUB ANOTHERMETHOD . END SUB And the response to why it was uppercased was "Yeah, I accidentally had caps locks on, fortunately for me VB.NET doesn't care.  Really dodged a bullet there, glad I wasn't using C#."  Would you not think that a bit ridiculous?  If you want to convince C# developers that C# sucks, go for it.  But the case insensitivity argument is crap.

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• When does "proper" programming no longer matter?

  - by Kai Qing

  I've been a full time programmer for about 8 years now. Web based mostly, ranging in weird jobs for clients. Never anything I "want" to do. So my experience is limited to what I've been contracted to do, having no real incentive to master anything in particular. So here's my scenario and ultimately what I wonder about... I've been building an android game in my spare time. It's using the libgdx library so quite a bit of the heavy lifting is done for me. I don't read much of the docs cause unless it's in tutorial format I will just not care, and ultimately most of my questions have already been asked on stackoverflow. I get along fine and my game works as expected... Suspiciously well, even. So much so that I wonder why one should bother to be "proper" when coding if the end result is ultimately the same. To be more specific, I used a hashtable because I wanted something close to an associative array. Human readable key values. In other places to achieve similar things, I use a vector. I know libgdx has vector2 and vector3 classes, but I've never used them. When I come across weird problems and search stackoverflow for help, I see a lot of people just reaming the questions that use a certain datatype when another one is technically "proper." Like using an ArrayList because it does not require defined bounds versus re-defining an int[] with new known boundaries. Or even something trivial like this: for(int i = 0; i < items.length; i ++) { // do something } I know it evaluates item.length on every iteration. I just don't care. I know items will never be more than 15 to 20 items. So why bother caring if I evaluate items.length on every iteration? So I wonder - why does everyone get all up in arms over this? Who cares if I use a less efficient datatype to get the job done? I ran some tests to see how the app performs using the lazy, get it done fast and don't look back method I just described versus the proper, follow the tutorial and use the exact data types suggested by the community. The results: Same thing. Average 45 fps. I opened every app on the phone and galaxy tab. Same deal. No difference. My game is pretty graphic intensive. It's not like it's just a simple thing. I expected it to perform kind of badly since I don't care to optimize image assets or... well, you probably get the idea. I'm making the game for fun. As a joke, really. But in doing so I'm working outside the normal scope of my job, which is to always follow the rules and do it the right way. So to say, I am without bounds here and this has caused me to wonder why I ever really care to be "proper" So I guess my question to you is this: Is there a threshold when it no longer matters to be proper? Is there a lasting, longer term consequence to the lazy, get it done and don't look back route? Is it ok to say - "so long as it gets the job done, I don't care?" Disclaimer: When I program my game, I am almost always drunk. I do it to remember why I got into this stuff to begin with because the monotony of client based web work will make you hate being a programmer. I'm having a blast and my game is not crashing, tests well, performs well, looks good on all devices so far and has no noticeable negative impact on any of my testing devices. I expected failure because I was being so drunkenly careless with my code, but to my surprise, it had no noticeable impact. I am now starting to question the need to be careful. Help me regain the ability to care! ... or explain why it's not a bad thing to not care. Secondary disclaimer: I am aware of the benefits of maintainability. For myself and others. Agreed. But it's not like someone happening across my inefficient int[] loop won't know what it does. As an experienced programmer those kinds of things are just clear on sight. I document the complex stuff for myself knowing I was drunk and will probably need a reminder. Those notes would clarify any confusion for someone who might ever gaze upon my ridiculous game - though the reality is that either I maintain it myself or it fades into time. I'm ok with that. But if it doesn't slow the device down, or crash, then crossing the t's and dotting the i's might actually require more time than it's worth.

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• How do I do JavaScript Array Animation

  - by Henry

  I'm making a game but don't know how to do Array Animation with the png Array and game Surface that I made below. I'm trying to make it so that when the Right arrow key is pressed, the character animates as if it is walking to the right and when the Left arrow key is pressed it animates as if it is walking to the left (kind of like Mario). I put everything on a surface instead of the canvas. Everything is explained in the code below. I couldn't find help on this anywhere. I hope what I got below makes sense. I'm basically a beginner with JavaScript. I'll be back if more is needed: <!doctype html5> <html> <head></head> <script src="graphics.js"></script> <script src="object.js"></script> <body onkeydown ="keyDown(event)" onkeyup ="keyUp(event)" ></body> <script> //"Surface" is where I want to display my animation. It's like the HTML // canvas but it's not that. It's just the surface to where everything in the //game and the game itself will be displayed. var Surface = new Graphics(600, 400, "skyblue"); //here's the array that I want to use for animation var player = new Array("StandsRight.png", "WalksRight.png", "StandsLeft.png","WalksLeft.png" ); //Here is the X coordinate, Y coordinate, the beginning png for the animation, //and the object's name "player." I also turned the array into an object (but //I don't know if I was supposed to do that or not). var player = new Object(50, 100, 40, 115, "StandsRight.png","player"); //When doing animation I know that it requires a "loop", but I don't // know how to connect it so that it works with the arrays so that //it could animate. var loop = 0; //this actually puts "player" on screen. It makes player visible and //it is where I would like the animation to occur. Surface.drawObject(player); //this would be the key that makes "player" animation in the righward direction function keyDown(e) { if (e.keyCode == 39); } //this would be the key that makes "player" animation in the leftward direction function keyUp(e){ if (e.keyCode == 39); } //this is the Mainloop where the game will function MainLoop(); //the mainloop functionized function MainLoop(){ //this is how fast or slow I could want the entire game to go setTimeout(MainLoop, 10); } </script> </html> From here, are the "graphic.js" and the "object.js" files below. In this section is the graphics.js file. This graphics.js part below is linked to the: script src="graphics.js" html script section that I wrote above. Basically, below is a seperate file that I used for Graphics, and to run the code above, make this graphics.js code that I post below here, a separate filed called: graphics.js function Graphics(w,h,c) { document.body.innerHTML += "<table style='position:absolute;font- size:0;top:0;left:0;border-spacing:0;border- width:0;width:"+w+";height:"+h+";background-color:"+c+";' border=1><tr><td> </table>\n"; this.drawRectangle = function(x,y,w,h,c,n) { document.body.innerHTML += "<div style='position:absolute;font-size:0;left:" + x + ";top:" + y + ";width:" + w + ";height:" + h + ";background-color:" + c + ";' id='" + n + "'></div>\n"; } this.drawTexture = function(x,y,w,h,t,n) { document.body.innerHTML += "<img style='position:absolute;font-size:0;left:" + x + ";top:" + y + ";width:" + w + ";height:" + h + ";' id='" + n + "' src='" + t + "'> </img>\n"; } this.drawObject = function(o) { document.body.innerHTML += "<img style='position:absolute;font-size:0;left:" + o.X + ";top:" + o.Y + ";width:" + o.Width + ";height:" + o.Height + ";' id='" + o.Name + "' src='" + o.Sprite + "'></img>\n"; } this.moveGraphic = function(x,y,n) { document.getElementById(n).style.left = x; document.getElementById(n).style.top = y; } this.removeGraphic = function(n){ document.getElementById(n).parentNode.removeChild(document.getElementById(n)); } } Finally, is the object.js file linked to the script src="object.js"" in the html game file above the graphics.js part I just wrote. Basically, this is a separate file too, so thus, in order to run or test the html game code in the very first section I wrote, a person has to also make this code below a separate file called: object.js I hope this helps: function Object(x,y,w,h,t,n) { this.X = x; this.Y = y; this.Velocity_X = 0; this.Velocity_Y = 0; this.Previous_X = 0; this.Previous_Y = 0; this.Width = w; this.Height = h; this.Sprite = t; this.Name = n; this.Exists = true; } In all, this game is made based on a tutorial on youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kUzgFM4lY&feature=relmfu I'm just trying to learn how to add animations with it now. I hope the above helps. If not, let me know. Thanks

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• Collision Detection, player correction

  - by DoomStone

  I am having some problems with collision detection, I have 2 types of objects excluding the player. Tiles and what I call MapObjects. The tiles are all 16x16, where the MapObjects can be any size, but in my case they are all 16x16. When my player runs along the mapobjects or tiles, it get verry jaggy. The player is unable to move right, and will get warped forward when moving left. I have found the problem, and that is my collision detection will move the player left/right if colliding the object from the side, and up/down if collision from up/down. Now imagine that my player is sitting on 2 tiles, at (10,12) and (11,12), and the player is mostly standing on the (11,12) tile. The collision detection will first run on then (10,12) tile, it calculates the collision depth, and finds that is is a collision from the side, and therefore move the object to the right. After, it will do the collision detection with (11,12) and it will move the character up. So the player will not fall down, but are unable to move right. And when moving left, the same problem will make the player warp forward. This problem have been bugging me for a few days now, and I just can't find a solution! Here is my code that does the collision detection. public void ApplyObjectCollision(IPhysicsObject obj, List<IComponent> mapObjects, TileMap map) { PhysicsVariables physicsVars = GetPhysicsVariables(); Rectangle bounds = ((IComponent)obj).GetBound(); int leftTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Left / map.GetTileSize()); int rightTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Right / map.GetTileSize())) - 1; int topTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Top / map.GetTileSize()); int bottomTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Bottom / map.GetTileSize())) - 1; // Reset flag to search for ground collision. obj.IsOnGround = false; // For each potentially colliding tile, for (int y = topTile; y <= bottomTile; ++y) { for (int x = leftTile; x <= rightTile; ++x) { IComponent tile = map.Get(x, y); if (tile != null) { bounds = HandelCollision(obj, tile, bounds, physicsVars); } } } // Handel collision for all Moving objects foreach (IComponent mo in mapObjects) { if (mo == obj) continue; if (mo.GetBound().Intersects(((IComponent)obj).GetBound())) { bounds = HandelCollision(obj, mo, bounds, physicsVars); } } } private Rectangle HandelCollision(IPhysicsObject obj, IComponent objb, Rectangle bounds, PhysicsVaraibales physicsVars) { // If this tile is collidable, SpriteCollision collision = ((IComponent)objb).GetCollisionType(); if (collision != SpriteCollision.Passable) { // Determine collision depth (with direction) and magnitude. Rectangle tileBounds = ((IComponent)objb).GetBound(); Vector2 depth = bounds.GetIntersectionDepth(tileBounds); if (depth != Vector2.Zero) { float absDepthX = Math.Abs(depth.X); float absDepthY = Math.Abs(depth.Y); // Resolve the collision along the shallow axis. if (absDepthY <= absDepthX || collision == SpriteCollision.Platform) { // If we crossed the top of a tile, we are on the ground. if (obj.PreviousBound.Bottom <= tileBounds.Top) obj.IsOnGround = true; // Ignore platforms, unless we are on the ground. if (collision == SpriteCollision.Impassable || obj.IsOnGround) { // Resolve the collision along the Y axis. ((IComponent)obj).Position = new Vector2(((IComponent)obj).Position.X, ((IComponent)obj).Position.Y + depth.Y); // If we hit something about us, remove all velosity upwards if (depth.Y > 0 && obj.IsJumping) { obj.Velocity = new Vector2(obj.Velocity.X, 0); obj.JumpTime = physicsVars.MaxJumpTime; } // Perform further collisions with the new bounds. return ((IComponent)obj).GetBound(); } } else if (collision == SpriteCollision.Impassable) // Ignore platforms. { // Resolve the collision along the X axis. ((IComponent)obj).Position = new Vector2(((IComponent)obj).Position.X + depth.X, ((IComponent)obj).Position.Y); // Perform further collisions with the new bounds. return ((IComponent)obj).GetBound(); } } } return bounds; } Update: I have uploaded the source code, if you want to look that through. I think that my general approach might be wrong when i am working with small tiles, I have also be unable to find any good information on physics and collision detection in Platform games. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3181816/Sogaard.Games.SuperMario.rar

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• Detecting Duplicates Using Oracle Business Rules

  - by joeywong-Oracle

  Recently I was involved with a Business Process Management Proof of Concept (BPM PoC) where we wanted to show how customers could use Oracle Business Rules (OBR) to easily define some rules to detect certain conditions, such as duplicate account numbers, duplicate names, high transaction amounts, etc, in a set of transactions. Traditionally you would have to loop through the transactions and compare each transaction with each other to find matching conditions. This is not particularly nice as it relies on more traditional approaches (coding) and is not the most efficient way. OBR is a great place to house these types’ of rules as it allows users/developers to externalise the rules, in a simpler manner, externalising the rules from the message flows and allows users to change them when required. So I went ahead looking for some examples. After quite a bit of time spent Googling, I did not find much out in the blogosphere. In fact the best example was actually from...... wait for it...... Oracle Documentation! (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28271_01/user.1111/e10228/rules_start.htm#ASRUG228) However, if you followed the link there was not much explanation provided with the example. So the aim of this article is to provide a little more explanation to the example so that it can be better understood. Note: I won’t be covering the BPM parts in great detail. Use case: Payment instruction file is required to be processed. Before instruction file can be processed it needs to be approved by a business user. Before the approval process, it would be useful to run the payment instruction file through OBR to look for transactions of interest. The output of the OBR can then be used to flag the transactions for the approvers to investigate. Example BPM Process So let’s start defining the Business Rules Dictionary. For the input into our rules, we will be passing in an array of payments which contain some basic information for our demo purposes. Input to Business Rules And for our output we want to have an array of rule output messages. Note that the element I am using for the output is only for one rule message element and not an array. We will configure the Business Rules component later to return an array instead. Output from Business Rules Business Rule – Create Dictionary Fill in all the details and click OK. Open the Business Rules component and select Decision Functions from the side. Modify the Decision Function Configuration Select the decision function and click on the edit button (the pencil), don’t worry that JDeveloper indicates that there is an error with the decision function. Then click the Ouputs tab and make sure the checkbox under the List column is checked, this is to tell the Business Rules component that it should return an array of rule message elements. Updating the Decision Service Next we will define the actual rules. Click on Ruleset1 on the side and then the Create Rule in the IF/THEN Rule section. Creating new rule in ruleset Ok, this is where some detailed explanation is required. Remember that the input to this Business Rules dictionary is a list of payments, each of those payments were of the complex type PaymentType. Each of those payments in the Oracle Business Rules engine is treated as a fact in its working memory. Implemented rule So in the IF/THEN rule, the first task is to grab two PaymentType facts from the working memory and assign them to temporary variable names (payment1 and payment2 in our example). Matching facts Once we have them in the temporary variables, we can then start comparing them to each other. For our demonstration we want to find payments where the account numbers were the same but the account name was different. Suspicious payment instruction And to stop the rule from comparing the same facts to each other, over and over again, we have to include the last test. Stop rule from comparing endlessly And that’s it! No for loops, no need to keep track of what you have or have not compared, OBR handles all that for you because everything is done in its working memory. And once all the tests have been satisfied we need to assert a new fact for the output. Assert the output fact Save your Business Rules. Next step is to complete the data association in the BPM process. Pay extra care to use Copy List instead of the default Copy when doing data association at an array level. Input and output data association Deploy and test. Test data Rule matched Parting words: Ideally you would then use the output of the Business Rules component to then display/flag the transactions which triggered the rule so that the approver can investigate. Link: SOA Project Archive [Download]

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• Is this how dynamic language copes with dynamic requirement?

  - by Amumu

  The question is in the title. I want to have my thinking verified by experienced people. You can add more or disregard my opinion, but give me a reason. Here is an example requirement: Suppose you are required to implement a fighting game. Initially, the game only includes fighters, who can attack each other. Each fighter can punch, kick or block incoming attacks. Fighters can have various fighting styles: Karate, Judo, Kung Fu... That's it for the simple universe of the game. In an OO like Java, it can be implemented similar to this way: abstract class Fighter { int hp, attack; void punch(Fighter otherFighter); void kick(Fighter otherFighter); void block(Figther otherFighter); }; class KarateFighter extends Fighter { //...implementation...}; class JudoFighter extends Fighter { //...implementation... }; class KungFuFighter extends Fighter { //...implementation ... }; This is fine if the game stays like this forever. But, somehow the game designers decide to change the theme of the game: instead of a simple fighting game, the game evolves to become a RPG, in which characters can not only fight but perform other activities, i.e. the character can be a priest, an accountant, a scientist etc... At this point, to make it more generic, we have to change the structure of our original design: Fighter is not used to refer to a person anymore; it refers to a profession. The specialized classes of Fighter (KaraterFighter, JudoFighter, KungFuFighter) . Now we have to create a generic class named Person. However, to adapt this change, I have to change the method signatures of the original operations: class Person { int hp, attack; List<Profession> skillSet; }; abstract class Profession {}; class Fighter extends Profession { void punch(Person otherFighter); void kick(Person otherFighter); void block(Person otherFighter); }; class KarateFighter extends Fighter { //...implementation...}; class JudoFighter extends Fighter { //...implementation... }; class KungFuFighter extends Fighter { //...implementation ... }; class Accountant extends Profession { void calculateTax(Person p) { //...implementation...}; void calculateTax(Company c) { //...implementation...}; }; //... more professions... Here are the problems: To adapt to the method changes, I have to fix the places where the changed methods are called (refactoring). Every time a new requirement is introduced, the current structural design has to be broken to adapt the changes. This leads to the first problem. Rigid structure makes it hard for code reuse. A function can only accept the predefined types, but it cannot accept future unknown types. A written function is bound to its current universe and has no way to accommodate to the new types, without modifications or rewrite from scratch. I see Java has a lot of deprecated methods. OO is an extreme case because it has inheritance to add up the complexity, but in general for statically typed language, types are very strict. In contrast, a dynamic language can handle the above case as follow: ;;fighter1 punch fighter2 (defun perform-punch (fighter1 fighter2) ...implementation... ) ;;fighter1 kick fighter2 (defun perform-kick (fighter1 fighter2) ...implementation... ) ;;fighter1 blocks attacks from fighter2 (defun perform-block (fighter1 fighter2) ...implementation... ) fighter1 and fighter2 can be anything as long as it has the required data for calculation; or methods (duck typing). You don't have to change from the type Fighter to Person. In the case of Lisp, because Lisp only has a single data structure: list, it's even easier to adapt to changes. However, other dynamic languages can have similar behaviors as well. I work primarily with static languages (mainly C and Java, but working with Java was a long time ago). I started learning Lisp and some other dynamic languages this year. I can see how it helps improving my productivity.

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• Reading train stop display names from a resource bundle

  - by Frank Nimphius

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} In Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1, you set the display name of a train stop of an ADF bounded task flow train model by using the Oracle JDeveloper Structure Window. To do so Double-click onto the bounded task flow configuration file (XML) located in the Application Navigator so the task flow diagram open In the task flow diagram, select the view activity node for which you want to define the display name. In the Structure Window., expand the view activity node and then the train-stop node therein Add the display name element by using the right-click context menu on the train-stop node, selecting Insert inside train-stop > Display Name Edit the Display Name value with the Property Inspector Following the steps outlined above, you can define static display names – like "PF1" for page fragment 1 shown in the image below - for train stops to show at runtime. In the following, I explain how you can change the static display string to a dynamic string that reads the display label from a resource bundle so train stop labels can be internationalized. There are different strategies available for managing message bundles within an Oracle JDeveloper project. In this blog entry, I decided to build and configure the default properties file as indicated by the projects properties. To learn about the suggested file name and location, open the JDeveloper project properties (use a right mouse click on the project node in the Application Navigator and choose Project Properties. Select the Resource Bundle node to see the suggested name and location for the default message bundle. Note that this is the resource bundle that Oracle JDeveloper would automatically create when you assign a text resource to an ADF Faces component in a page. For the train stop display name, we need to create the message bundle manually as there is no context menu help available in Oracle JDeveloper. For this, use a right mouse click on the JDeveloper project and choose New | General | File from the menu and in the opened dialog. Specify the message bundle file name as the name looked up before in the project properties Resource Bundle option. Also, ensure that the file is saved in a directory structure that matches the package structure shown in the Resource Bundle dialog. For example, you would save the properties file in the View Project's src > adf > sample directory if the package structure was "adf.sample" (adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle). Edit the properties file and define key – values pairs for the train stop component. In the sample, such key value pairs are TrainStop1=Train Stop 1 TrainStop2=Train Stop 2 TrainStop3=Train Stop 3 Next, double click the faces-config.xml file and switch the opened editor to the Overview tab. Select the Application category and press the green plus icon next to the Resource Bundle section. Define the resource bundle Base Name as the package and properties file name, for example adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle Finally, define a variable name for the message bundle so the bundle can be accessed from Expression Language. For this blog example, the name is chosen as "messageBundle". <resource-bundle>   <base-name>adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle</base-name>   <var>messageBundle</var> </resource-bundle> Next, select the display-name element in the train stop node (similar to when creating the display name) and use the Property Inspector to change the static display string to an EL expression referencing the message bundle. For example: #{messageBundle.TrainStop1} At runtime, the train stops now show display names read from a message bundle (the properties file).

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• Easy Made Easier

  - by dragonfly

      How easy is it to deploy a 2 node, fully redundant Oracle RAC cluster? Not very. Unless you use an Oracle Database Appliance. The focus of this member of Oracle's Engineered Systems family is to simplify the configuration, management and maintenance throughout the life of the system, while offering pay-as-you-grow scaling. Getting a 2-node RAC cluster up and running in under 2 hours has been made possible by the Oracle Database Appliance. Don't take my word for it, just check out these blog posts from partners and end users. The Oracle Database Appliance Experience - Zip Zoom Zoom http://www.fuadarshad.com/2012/02/oracle-database-appliance-experience.html Off-the-shelf Oracle database servers http://normanweaver.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/off-the-shelf-oracle-database-servers/ Oracle Database Appliance – Deployment Steps http://marcel.vandewaters.nl/oracle/database-appliance/oracle-database-appliance-deployment-steps     See how easy it is to deploy an Oracle Database Appliance for high availability with RAC? Now for the meat of this post, which is the first in a series of posts describing tips for making the deployment of an ODA even easier. The key to the easy deployment of an Oracle Database Appliance is the Appliance Manager software, which does the actual software deployment and configuration, based on best practices. But in order for it to do that, it needs some basic information first, including system name, IP addresses, etc. That's where the Appliance Manager GUI comes in to play, taking a wizard approach to specifying the information needed.     Using the Appliance Manager GUI is pretty straight forward, stepping through several screens of information to enter data in typical wizard style. Like most configuration tasks, it helps to gather the required information before hand. But before you rush out to a committee meeting on what to use for host names, and rely on whatever IP addresses might be hanging around, make sure you are familiar with some of the auto-fill defaults for the Appliance Manager. I'll step through the key screens below to highlight the results of the auto-fill capability of the Appliance Manager GUI.     Depending on which of the 2 Configuration Types (Config Type screen) you choose, you will get a slightly different set of screens. The Typical configuration assumes certain default configuration choices and has the fewest screens, where as the Custom configuration gives you the most flexibility in what you configure from the start. In the examples below, I have used the Custom config type.     One of the first items you are asked for is the System Name (System Info screen). This is used to identify the system, but also as the base for the default hostnames on following screens. In this screen shot, the System Name is "oda".     When you get to the next screen (Generic Network screen), you enter your domain name, DNS IP address(es), and NTP IP address(es). Next up is the Public Network screen, seen below, where you will see the host name fields are automatically filled in with default host names based on the System Name, in this case "oda". The System Name is also the basis for default host names for the extra ethernet ports available for configuration as part of a Custom configuration, as seen in the 2nd screen shot below (Other Network). There is no requirement to use these host names, as you can easily edit any of the host names. This does make filling in the configuration details easier and less prone to "fat fingers" if you are OK with these host names. Here is a full list of the automatically filled in host names. 1 2 1-vip 2-vip -scan 1-ilom 2-ilom 1-net1 2-net1 1-net2 2-net2 1-net3 2-net3     Another auto-fill feature of the Appliance Manager GUI follows a common practice of deploying IP Addresses for a RAC cluster in sequential order. In the screen shot below, I entered the first IP address (Node1-IP), then hit Tab to move to the next field. As a result, the next 5 IP address fields were automatically filled in with the next 5 IP addresses sequentially from the first one I entered. As with the host names, these are not required, and can be changed to whatever your IP address values are. One note of caution though, if the first IP Address field (Node1-IP) is filled out and you click in that field and back out, the following 5 IP addresses will be set to the sequential default. If you don't use the sequential IP addresses, pay attention to where you click that mouse. :-)     In the screen shot below, by entering the netmask value in the Netmask field, in this case 255.255.255.0, the gateway value was auto-filled into the Gateway field, based on the IP addresses and netmask previously entered. As always, you can change this value.     My last 2 screen shots illustrate that the same sequential IP address autofill and netmask to gateway autofill works when entering the IP configuration details for the Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) for both nodes. The time these auto-fill capabilities save in entering data is nice, but from my perspective not as important as the opportunity to avoid data entry errors. In my next post in this series, I will touch on the benefit of using the network validation capability of the Appliance Manager GUI prior to deploying an Oracle Database Appliance.

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sam Drake

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• Xobni Plus for Outlook [Review]

  - by The Geek

  Overview Xobni Plus is an addin that will bring a sidebar to Outlook which allows you to search through your inbox and contacts a lot easier. It provides the ability to search and keep track of your favorite social networks. Searching with Xobni is a lot more powerful than the default search feature in Outlook. It let’s you drill down your searches to conversations, email, links, and attachments. It now supports Outlook 2010 both 32 & 64-bit versions. Installation & Setup Installation is easy following the wizard. After completing the wizard you can tell you’re friends on Facebook and Twitter that you are now using it. You can also decide to join their Product Improvement Program if you want. After installation when you open Outlook, Xobni appears as a sidebar on the right side. Don’t worry about it always being in the way, as you can hide it if you need more room for other Outlook functions. After Xobni free is installed, you can upgrade to the Plus version at any time. A new window will open up and you can use your Credit Card, PayPal, or redeem a code if you have one. Features & Use Where to begin with the amount of features available in Xobni Plus? It really has an amazing amount of cool features. Of course you’ll have all of the features of the Free Version which we previously covered…and a lot more. After Xobni is installed you’ll notice a section for it on the Ribbon. From here you can search Xobni, show or hide the Sidebar, and change other options. It allows you to easily keep up with various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn… Check out email analytics and contact ranks. Click on the Files Exchanged tab to search for specific attachments. Quickly search links exchanged with your contacts. Hover over a link to get a preview of what it entails. It gives you the ability to index all of your Yahoo mail as well, without the need for purchasing Yahoo Plus! Then your Yahoo messages appear in the Xobni sidebar. When you select a contact you can see related messages from you Yahoo account. Easily index all of your mail…including Yahoo mail for better organization and faster search results. There are several options you can select to change the way Xobni works. From setting up your Yahoo email, Indexing options, and much more. Additional Features of Xobni Plus Advanced Search Capabilities – Filter results, Boolean & Phrase Search, Ability to search Appointments & Tasks, Advanced Search Builder Search unlimited PST data files Xobni contacts in the compose screen Find links exchanged with your contacts View calendar appointments One year premium tech support No Ads! Performance We ran Xobni Plus on Outlook 2010 32-bit on a Dual-Core AMD Athlon system with 4GB of RAM and found it to run quite smoothly. However, we did notice it would sometimes slow down launching Outlook, especially if other apps are running at the same time. Product Support When you buy a license for Xobni Plus you get a full year of premium tech support. They provide a Questions and Answers page on their site where you can run a search query and answers appear instantly. You can contact support directly as a Plus member through their web form and they advise the turn around time is 2 business days. However, when we tested it, we received a response within 24 hours. They also provide FAQ, Community forum, and you can download the Owners Manual in PDF format from the support page. Conclusion Xobni Plus is a very powerful addin for Outlook and includes a lot more features that we didn’t cover in this review. You can download Xobni free edition which includes an 8 day free trial of the Plus version. This provides a good way to start getting familiar with it. Then upgrade to Xobni Plus at any time for $29.95. Once you get started, you’ll find the sidebar is nicely laid out and intuitive to use. If you live out of Outlook during the day, Xobni Plus is a great addition for fast and powerful searches. It provides an easy way to keep all of your contacts and messages well organized and easy to find. Xobni Plus works with XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32 & 64-bit editions) Outlook 2003, 2007 and both 32 & 64-bit editions of Outlook 2010. Download Xobni Plus Download Xobni Free Edition Rating Installation: 8 Ease of Use: 8 Features: 9 Performance: 8 Product Support: 8 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Xobni Free Powers Up Outlook’s Search and ContactsCreate an Email Template in Outlook 2003Add Social Elements to Your Gmail Contacts with RapportiveChange Outlook Startup FolderClear Outlook Searches and MRU (Most Recently Used) Lists 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 10 Superb Firefox Wallpapers OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides

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• Myths about Coding Craftsmanship part 2

  - by tom

  Myth 3: The source of all bad code is inept developers and stupid people When you review code is this what you assume?  Shame on you.  You are probably making assumptions in your code if you are assuming so much already.  Bad code can be the result of any number of causes including but not limited to using dated techniques (like boxing when generics are available), not following standards (“look how he does the spacing between arguments!” or “did he really just name that variable ‘bln_Hello_Cats’?”), being redundant, using properties, methods, or objects in a novel way (like switching on button.Text between “Hello World” and “Hello World “ //clever use of space character… sigh), not following the SOLID principals, hacking around assumptions made in earlier iterations / hacking in features that should be worked into the overall design.  The first two issues, while annoying are pretty easy to spot and can be fixed so easily.  If your coding team is made up of experienced professionals who are passionate about staying current then these shouldn’t be happening.  If you work with a variety of skills, backgrounds, and experience then there will be some of this stuff going on.  If you have an opportunity to mentor such a developer who is receptive to constructive criticism don’t be a jerk; help them and the codebase will improve.  A little patience can improve the codebase, your work environment, and even your perspective. The novelty and redundancy I have encountered has often been the use of creativity when language knowledge was perceived as unavailable or too time consuming.  When developers learn on the job you get a lot of this.  Rather than going to MSDN developers will use what they know.  Depending on the constraints of their assignment hacking together what they know may seem quite practical.  This was not stupid though I often wonder how much time is actually “saved” by hacking.  These issues are often harder to untangle if we ever do.  They can also grow out of control as we write hack after hack to make it work and get back to some development that is satisfying. Hacking upon an existing hack is what I call “feeding the monster”.  Code monsters are anti-patterns and hacks gone wild.  The reason code monsters continue to get bigger is that they keep growing in scope, touching more and more of the application.  This is not the result of dumb developers. It is probably the result of avoiding design, not taking the time to understand the problems or anticipate or communicate the vision of the product.  If our developers don’t understand the purpose of a feature or product how do we expect potential customers to do so? Forethought and organization are often what is missing from bad code.  Developers who do not use the SOLID principals should be encouraged to learn these principals and be given guidance on how to apply them.  The time “saved” by giving hackers room to hack will be made up for and then some. Not as technical debt but as shoddy work that if not replaced will be struggled with again and again.  Bad code is not the result of dumb developers (usually) it is the result of trying to do too much without the proper resources and neglecting the right thing that needs doing with the first thoughtless thing that comes into our heads. Object oriented code is all about relationships between objects.  Coders who believe their coworkers are all fools tend to write objects that are difficult to work with, not eager to explain themselves, and perform erratically and irrationally.  If you constantly find you are surrounded by idiots you may want to ask yourself if you are being unreasonable, if you are being closed minded, of if you have chosen the right profession.  Opening your mind up to the idea that you probably work with rational, well-intentioned people will probably make you a better coder and it might even make you less grumpy.  If you are surrounded by jerks who do not engage in the exchange of ideas who do not care about their customers or the durability of the code you are building together then I suggest you find a new place to work.  Myth 4: Customers don’t care about “beautiful” code Craftsmanship is customer focused because it means that the job was done right, the product will withstand the abuse, modifications, and scrutiny of our customers.  Users can appreciate a predictable timeline for a release, a product delivered on time and on budget, a feature set that does not interfere with the task(s) it is supporting, quick turnarounds on exception messages, self healing issues, and less issues.  These are all hindered by skimping on craftsmanship.  When we write data access and when we write reusable code.   What do you think?  Does bad code come primarily from low IQ individuals?  Do customers care about beautiful code?

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sherry LaMonica

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• NDepend Evaluation: Part 3

  - by Anthony Trudeau

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

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• SQLIO Writes

  - by Grant Fritchey

  SQLIO is a fantastic utility for testing the abilities of the disks in your system. It has a very unfortunate name though, since it's not really a SQL Server testing utility at all. It really is a disk utility. They ought to call it DiskIO because they'd get more people using I think. Anyway, branding is not the point of this blog post. Writes are the point of this blog post. SQLIO works by slamming your disk. It performs as mean reads as it can or it performs as many writes as it can depending on how you've configured your tests. There are much smarter people than me who will get into all the various types of tests you should run. I'd suggest reading a bit of what Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) has to say or wade into Denny Cherry's (blog|twitter) work. They're going to do a better job than I can describing all the benefits and mechanisms around using this excellent piece of software. My concerns are very focused. I needed to set up a series of tests to see how well our product SQL Storage Compress worked. I wanted to know the effects it would have on a system, the disk for sure, but also memory and CPU. How to stress the system? SQLIO of course. But when I set it up and ran it, following the documentation that comes with it, I was seeing better than 99% compression on the files. Don't get me wrong. Our product is magnificent, wonderful, all things great and beautiful, gets you coffee in the morning and is made mostly from bacon. But 99% compression. No, it's not that good. So what's up? Well, it's the configuration. The default mechanism is to load up a file, something large that will overwhelm your disk cache. You're instructed to load the file with a character 0x0. I never got a computer science degree. I went to film school. Because of this, I didn't memorize ASCII tables so when I saw this, I thought it was zero's or something. Nope. It's NULL. That's right, you're making a very large file, but you're filling it with NULL values. That's actually ok when all you're testing is the disk sub-system. But, when you want to test a compression and decompression, that can be an issue. I got around this fairly quickly. Instead of generating a file filled with NULL values, I just copied a database file for my tests. And to test it with SQL Storage Compress, I used a database file that had already been run through compression (about 40% compression on that file if you're interested). Now the reads were taken care of. I am seeing very realistic performance from decompressing the information for reads through SQLIO. But what about writes? Well, the issue is, what does SQLIO write? I don't have access to the code. But I do have access to the results. I did two different tests, just to be sure of what I was seeing. First test, use the .DAT file as described in the documentation. I opened the .DAT file after I was done with SQLIO, using WordPad. Guess what? It's a giant file full of air. SQLIO writes NULL values. What does that do to compression? I did the test again on a copy of an uncompressed database file. Then I ran the original and the SQLIO modified copy through ZIP to see what happened. I got better than 99% compression out of the SQLIO modified file (original file of 624,896kb went to 275,871kb compressed, after SQLIO it went to 608kb compressed). So, what does SQLIO write? It writes air. If you're trying to test it with compression or maybe some other type of file storage mechanism like dedupe, you need to know this because your tests really won't be valid. Should I find some other mechanism for testing? Yeah, if all I'm interested in is establishing performance to my own satisfaction, yes. But, I want to be able to compare my results with other people's results and we all need to be using the same tool in order for that to happen. SQLIO is the common mechanism that most people I know use to establish disk performance behavior. It'd be better if we could get SQLIO to do writes in some other fashion. Oh, and before I go, I get to brag a bit. Measuring IOPS, SQL Storage Compress outperforms my disk alone by about 30%.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 4): Script Configuration

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've had a chance to play around with the Schema Compare for Oracle beta, you may have come across this screen in the synchronization wizard: This screen is one of the few screens that, along with the project configuration form, doesn't come from SQL Compare. This screen was designed to solve a couple of issues that, although aren't specific to Oracle, are much more of a problem than on SQL Server: Datatype conversions and NOT NULL columns. 1. Datatype conversions SQL Server is generally quite forgiving when it comes to datatype conversions using ALTER TABLE. For example, you can convert from a VARCHAR to INT using ALTER TABLE as long as all the character values are parsable as integers. Oracle, on the other hand, only allows ALTER TABLE conversions that don't change the internal data format. Essentially, every change that requires an actual datatype conversion has to be done using a rebuild with a conversion function. That's OK, as we can simply hard-code the various conversion functions for the valid datatype conversions and insert those into the rebuild SELECT list. However, as there always is with Oracle, there's a catch. Have a look at the NUMTODSINTERVAL function. As well as specifying the value (or column) to convert, you have to specify an interval_unit, which tells oracle how to interpret the input number. We can't hardcode a default for this parameter, as it is entirely dependent on the user's data context! So, in order to convert NUMBER to INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND/INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH, we need to have feedback from the user as to what to put in this parameter while we're generating the sync script - this requires a new step in the engine action/script generation to insert these values into the script, as well as new UI to allow the user to specify these values in a sensible fashion. In implementing the engine and UI infrastructure to allow this it made much more sense to implement it for any rebuild datatype conversion, not just NUMBER to INTERVALs. For conversions which we can do, we pre-fill the 'value' box with the appropriate function from the documentation. The user can also type in arbitary SQL expressions, which allows the user to specify optional format parameters for the relevant conversion functions, or indeed call their own functions to convert between values that don't have a built-in conversion defined. As the value gets inserted as-is into the rebuild SELECT list, any expression that is valid in that context can be specified as the conversion value. 2. NOT NULL columns Another problem that is solved by the new step in the sync wizard is adding a NOT NULL column to a table. If the table contains data (as most database tables do), you can't just add a NOT NULL column, as Oracle doesn't know what value to put in the new column for existing rows - the DDL statement will fail. There are actually 3 separate scenarios for this problem that have separate solutions within the engine: Adding a NOT NULL column to a table without a rebuild Here, the workaround is to add a column default with an appropriate value to the column you're adding: ALTER TABLE tbl1 ADD newcol NUMBER DEFAULT <value> NOT NULL; Note, however, there is something to bear in mind about this solution; once specified on a column, a default cannot be removed. To 'remove' a default from a column you change it to have a default of NULL, hence there's code in the engine to treat a NULL default the same as no default at all. Adding a NOT NULL column to a table, where a separate change forced a table rebuild Fortunately, in this case, a column default is not required - we can simply insert the default value into the rebuild SELECT clause. Changing an existing NULL to a NOT NULL column To implement this, we run an UPDATE command before the ALTER TABLE to change all the NULLs in the column to the required default value. For all three, we need some way of allowing the user to specify a default value to use instead of NULL; as this is essentially the same problem as datatype conversion (inserting values into the sync script), we can re-use the UI and engine implementation of datatype conversion values. We also provide the option to alter the new column to allow NULLs, or to ignore the problem completely. Note that there is the same (long-running) problem in SQL Compare, but it is much more of an issue in Oracle as you cannot easily roll back executed DDL statements if the script fails at some point during execution. Furthermore, the engine of SQL Compare is far less conducive to inserting user-supplied values into the generated script. As we're writing the Schema Compare engine from scratch, we used what we learnt from the SQL Compare engine and designed it to be far more modular, which makes inserting procedures like this much easier.

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• Separating text strings into a table of individual words in SQL via XML.

  - by Phil Factor

  p.MsoNormal {margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; } Nearly nine years ago, Mike Rorke of the SQL Server 2005 XML team blogged ‘Querying Over Constructed XML Using Sub-queries’. I remember reading it at the time without being able to think of a use for what he was demonstrating. Just a few weeks ago, whilst preparing my article on searching strings, I got out my trusty function for splitting strings into words and something reminded me of the old blog. I’d been trying to think of a way of using XML to split strings reliably into words. The routine I devised turned out to be slightly slower than the iterative word chop I’ve always used in the past, so I didn’t publish it. It was then I suddenly remembered the old routine. Here is my version of it. I’ve unwrapped it from its obvious home in a function or procedure just so it is easy to appreciate. What it does is to chop a text string into individual words using XQuery and the good old nodes() method. I’ve benchmarked it and it is quicker than any of the SQL ways of doing it that I know about. Obviously, you can’t use the trick I described here to do it, because it is awkward to use REPLACE() on 1…n characters of whitespace. I’ll carry on using my iterative function since it is able to tell me the location of each word as a character-offset from the start, and also because this method leaves punctuation in (removing it takes time!). However, I can see other uses for this in passing lists as input or output parameters, or as return values.   if exists (Select * from sys.xml_schema_collections where name like 'WordList')   drop XML SCHEMA COLLECTION WordList go create xml schema collection WordList as ' <xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xs:element name="words">        <xs:simpleType>               <xs:list itemType="xs:string" />        </xs:simpleType> </xs:element> </xs:schema>'   go   DECLARE @string VARCHAR(MAX) –we'll get some sample data from the great Ogden Nash Select @String='This is a song to celebrate banks, Because they are full of money and you go into them and all you hear is clinks and clanks, Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills, Which is the rustling of the thousand dollar bills. Most bankers dwell in marble halls, Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals, And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it, Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don''t need it. I know you, you cautious conservative banks! If people are worried about their rent it is your duty to deny them the loan of one nickel, yes, even one copper engraving of the martyred son of the late Nancy Hanks; Yes, if they request fifty dollars to pay for a baby you must look at them like Tarzan looking at an uppity ape in the jungle, And tell them what do they think a bank is, anyhow, they had better go get the money from their wife''s aunt or ungle. But suppose people come in and they have a million and they want another million to pile on top of it, Why, you brim with the milk of human kindness and you urge them to accept every drop of it, And you lend them the million so then they have two million and this gives them the idea that they would be better off with four, So they already have two million as security so you have no hesitation in lending them two more, And all the vice-presidents nod their heads in rhythm, And the only question asked is do the borrowers want the money sent or do they want to take it withm. Because I think they deserve our appreciation and thanks, the jackasses who go around saying that health and happi- ness are everything and money isn''t essential, Because as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant money to maintain their health and happiness they starve to death so they can''t go around any more sneering at good old money, which is nothing short of providential. '   –we now turn it into XML declare @xml_data xml(WordList)  set @xml_data='<words>'+ replace(@string,'&', '&amp;')+'</words>'    select T.ref.value('.', 'nvarchar(100)')  from (Select @xml_data.query('                      for $i in data(/words) return                      element li { $i }               '))  A(list) cross apply A.List.nodes('/li') T(ref)     …which gives (truncated, of course)…

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• 2D Particle Explosion

  - by TheBroodian

  I'm developing a 2D action game, and in said game I've given my primary character an ability he can use to throw a fireball. I'm trying to design an effect so that when said fireball collides (be it with terrain or with an enemy) that the fireball will explode. For the explosion effect I've created a particle that once placed into game space will follow random, yet autonomic behavior based on random variables. Here is my question: When I generate my explosion (essentially 90 of these particles) I get one of two behaviors, 1) They are all generated with the same random variables, and don't resemble an explosion at all, more like a large mass of clumped sprites that all follow the same randomly generated path. 2) If I assign each particle a unique seed to its random number generator, they are a little bit -more- spread out, yet clumping is still visible (they seem to fork out into 3 different directions) Does anybody have any tips for producing particle-based 2D explosions? I'll include the code for my particle and the event I'm generating them in. Fire particle class: public FireParticle(xTile.Dimensions.Location StartLocation, ContentManager content) { worldLocation = StartLocation; fireParticleAnimation = new FireParticleAnimation(content); random = new Random(); int rightorleft = random.Next(0, 3); int upordown = random.Next(1, 3); int xVelocity = random.Next(0, 101); int yVelocity = random.Next(0, 101); Vector2 tempVector2 = new Vector2(0,0); if (rightorleft == 1) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(xVelocity, tempVector2.Y); } else if (rightorleft == 2) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(-xVelocity, tempVector2.Y); } if (upordown == 1) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(tempVector2.X, -yVelocity); } else if (upordown == 2) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(tempVector2.X, yVelocity); } velocity = tempVector2; scale = random.Next(1, 11); upwardForce = -10; dead = false; } public FireParticle(xTile.Dimensions.Location StartLocation, ContentManager content, int seed) { worldLocation = StartLocation; fireParticleAnimation = new FireParticleAnimation(content); random = new Random(seed); int rightorleft = random.Next(0, 3); int upordown = random.Next(1, 3); int xVelocity = random.Next(0, 101); int yVelocity = random.Next(0, 101); Vector2 tempVector2 = new Vector2(0, 0); if (rightorleft == 1) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(xVelocity, tempVector2.Y); } else if (rightorleft == 2) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(-xVelocity, tempVector2.Y); } if (upordown == 1) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(tempVector2.X, -yVelocity); } else if (upordown == 2) { tempVector2 = new Vector2(tempVector2.X, yVelocity); } velocity = tempVector2; scale = random.Next(1, 11); upwardForce = -10; dead = false; } #endregion #region Update and Draw public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; fireParticleAnimation.Update(gameTime); Vector2 moveAmount = velocity * elapsed; xTile.Dimensions.Location newPosition = new xTile.Dimensions.Location(worldLocation.X + (int)moveAmount.X, worldLocation.Y + (int)moveAmount.Y); worldLocation = newPosition; velocity.Y += upwardForce; if (fireParticleAnimation.finishedPlaying) { dead = true; } } public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { spriteBatch.Draw( fireParticleAnimation.image.Image, new Rectangle((int)drawLocation.X, (int)drawLocation.Y, scale, scale), fireParticleAnimation.image.SizeAndsource, Color.White * fireParticleAnimation.image.Alpha); } Fireball explosion event: public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { if (enabled) { float elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; foreach (Heart_of_Fire.World_Objects.Particles.FireParticle particle in explosionParticles.ToList()) { particle.Update(gameTime); if (particle.Dead) { explosionParticles.Remove(particle); } } collisionRectangle = new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle((int)wrldPstn.X, (int)wrldPstn.Y, 5, 5); explosionCheck = exploded; if (!exploded) { coreGraphic.Update(gameTime); tailGraphic.Update(gameTime); Vector2 moveAmount = velocity * elapsed; moveAmount = horizontalCollision(moveAmount, layer); moveAmount = verticalCollision(moveAmount, layer); Vector2 newPosition = new Vector2(wrldPstn.X + moveAmount.X, wrldPstn.Y + moveAmount.Y); if (hasCollidedHorizontally || hasCollidedVertically) { exploded = true; } wrldPstn = newPosition; worldLocation = new xTile.Dimensions.Location((int)wrldPstn.X, (int)wrldPstn.Y); } if (explosionCheck != exploded) { for (int i = 0; i < 90; i++) { explosionParticles.Add(new World_Objects.Particles.FireParticle( new Location( collisionRectangle.X + random.Next(0, 6), collisionRectangle.Y + random.Next(0, 6)), contentMgr)); } } if (exploded && explosionParticles.Count() == 0) { //enabled = false; } } }

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• Synergy - easy share of keyboard and mouse between multiple computers

  Did you ever have the urge to share one set of keyboard and mouse between multiple machines? If so, please read on... Using multiple machines Honestly, as a software craftsman it is my daily business to run multiple machines - either physical or virtual - to be able to solve my customers' requirements. Recent hardware equipment allows this very easily. For laptops it's a no-brainer to attach a second or even a third screen in order to extend your native display. This works quite handy and in my case I used to attached two additional screens - one via HD15 connector, the other via HDMI. But... as it's a laptop and therefore a mobile unit there are slight restrictions. Detaching and re-attaching all cables when changing locations is one of them but hardware limitations, too. After all, it's a laptop and not a workstation. I guess, that anyone working in IT (or ICT) has more than one machine at their workplace or their home office and at least I find it quite annoying to have multiple sets of keyboard and mouse conquering my remaining space on my desk. Despite the ugly looks of all those cables and whatsoever 'chaos of distraction' I prefer a more clean solution and working environment. This allows me to actually focus on my work and tasks to do rather than to worry about choosing the right combination of keyboard/mouse. My current workplace is a patch work of various pieces of hardware (approx. 2-3 years): DIY desktop on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, Core2 Duo (E7400, 2.8GHz), 4GB RAM, 2x 250GB HDD, nVidia GPU 512MB Dell Inspiron 1525 on Windows 8 64-bit, 4GB RAM, 200GB HDD HP Compaq 6720s on Windows Vista 32-bit, Core2 Duo (T5670, 1.8GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD Mac mini on Mac OS X 10.7, Core i5 (2.3 GHz), 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD I know... Not the latest and greatest but a decent combination to work with. New system(s) is/are already on the shopping list but I live in the 'wrong' country to buy computer hardware. So, the next trip abroad will provide me with some new stuff. Using multiple operating systems The list of hardware above already names different operating systems, and actually I have only one preference: Linux. But still my job as a software craftsman for Visual FoxPro and .NET development requires other OSes, too. Not a big deal, it's just like this. Additionally to those physical machines, there are a bunch of virtual machines around. Most of them running either Windows XP or Windows 7. Since years I have the practice that each development for one customer is isolated into its own virtual machine and environment. This keeps it clean and version-safe. But as you can easily imagine with that setup there are a couple of constraints referring to keyboard and mouse. Usually, those systems require their own pieces of hardware attached. As stated, I don't like clutter on my desk's surface, so a cross-platform solution has to come in here. In the past, I tried it with various applications, hardware or network protocols like X11, RDP, NX, TeamViewer, RAdmin, KVM switch, etc. but the problem in this case is that they either allow you to remotely connect to the other system or exclusively 'bind' your peripherals to the active system. Not optimal after all. Synergy to the rescue Quote from their website: "Synergy lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk, and it's Free and Open Source. Just move your mouse off the edge of one computer's screen on to another. You can even share all of your clipboards. All you need is a network connection. Synergy is cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)." Yep, that's it! All I need for my setup here... Actually, I couldn't believe it myself that I didn't stumble over synergy earlier but 'Get over it' and there we go. And despite the fact that it is Open Source, no, it's also for free. Donations for the developers are very welcome and recently they introduced Synergy Premium. A possibility to buy so-called premium votes that can be used to put more weight / importance on specific issues or bugs that you would like the developers to look into. Installation and configuration Simply download the installation packages for your systems of choice, run the installer and enter some minor information about your network setup. I chose my desktop machine for the role of the Synergy server and configured my screen setup as follows: The screen setup allows you currently to build or connect up to 15 machines. The number of screens can be higher as those machine might have multiple screens physically attached. Synergy takes this into the overall calculations and simply works as expected. I tried it for fun with a second monitor each connected to both laptops to have a total number of 6 active screens. No flaws after all - stunning! All the other machines are configured as clients like so: Side note: The screenshot was taken on Windows 8 and pasted via clipboard into Gimp running on Ubuntu. Resume Synergy is now definitely in my box of tools for my daily work, and amongst the first pieces of software I install after the operating system. It just simplifies my life and cleans my desk. Never again without Synergy!Now, only waiting for an Android version to integrate my Galaxy Tab 10.1, too. ;-) Please, check out that superb product and enjoy sharing one keyboard, one mouse and one clipboard between your various machines and operating systems.

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• UIView with IrrlichtScene - iOS

  - by user1459024

  i have a UIViewController in a Storyboard and want to draw a IrrlichtScene in this View Controller. My Code: WWSViewController.h #import <UIKit/UIKit.h> @interface WWSViewController : UIViewController { IBOutlet UILabel *errorLabel; } @end WWSViewController.mm #import "WWSViewController.h" #include "../../ressources/irrlicht/include/irrlicht.h" using namespace irr; using namespace core; using namespace scene; using namespace video; using namespace io; using namespace gui; @interface WWSViewController () @end @implementation WWSViewController -(void)awakeFromNib { errorLabel = [[UILabel alloc] init]; errorLabel.text = @""; IrrlichtDevice *device = createDevice( video::EDT_OGLES1, dimension2d<u32>(640, 480), 16, false, false, false, 0); /* Set the caption of the window to some nice text. Note that there is an 'L' in front of the string. The Irrlicht Engine uses wide character strings when displaying text. */ device->setWindowCaption(L"Hello World! - Irrlicht Engine Demo"); /* Get a pointer to the VideoDriver, the SceneManager and the graphical user interface environment, so that we do not always have to write device->getVideoDriver(), device->getSceneManager(), or device->getGUIEnvironment(). */ IVideoDriver* driver = device->getVideoDriver(); ISceneManager* smgr = device->getSceneManager(); IGUIEnvironment* guienv = device->getGUIEnvironment(); /* We add a hello world label to the window, using the GUI environment. The text is placed at the position (10,10) as top left corner and (260,22) as lower right corner. */ guienv->addStaticText(L"Hello World! This is the Irrlicht Software renderer!", rect<s32>(10,10,260,22), true); /* To show something interesting, we load a Quake 2 model and display it. We only have to get the Mesh from the Scene Manager with getMesh() and add a SceneNode to display the mesh with addAnimatedMeshSceneNode(). We check the return value of getMesh() to become aware of loading problems and other errors. Instead of writing the filename sydney.md2, it would also be possible to load a Maya object file (.obj), a complete Quake3 map (.bsp) or any other supported file format. By the way, that cool Quake 2 model called sydney was modelled by Brian Collins. */ IAnimatedMesh* mesh = smgr->getMesh("/Users/dbocksteger/Desktop/test/media/sydney.md2"); if (!mesh) { device->drop(); if (!errorLabel) { errorLabel = [[UILabel alloc] init]; } errorLabel.text = @"Konnte Mesh nicht laden."; return; } IAnimatedMeshSceneNode* node = smgr->addAnimatedMeshSceneNode( mesh ); /* To let the mesh look a little bit nicer, we change its material. We disable lighting because we do not have a dynamic light in here, and the mesh would be totally black otherwise. Then we set the frame loop, such that the predefined STAND animation is used. And last, we apply a texture to the mesh. Without it the mesh would be drawn using only a color. */ if (node) { node->setMaterialFlag(EMF_LIGHTING, false); node->setMD2Animation(scene::EMAT_STAND); node->setMaterialTexture( 0, driver->getTexture("/Users/dbocksteger/Desktop/test/media/sydney.bmp") ); } /* To look at the mesh, we place a camera into 3d space at the position (0, 30, -40). The camera looks from there to (0,5,0), which is approximately the place where our md2 model is. */ smgr->addCameraSceneNode(0, vector3df(0,30,-40), vector3df(0,5,0)); /* Ok, now we have set up the scene, lets draw everything: We run the device in a while() loop, until the device does not want to run any more. This would be when the user closes the window or presses ALT+F4 (or whatever keycode closes a window). */ while(device->run()) { /* Anything can be drawn between a beginScene() and an endScene() call. The beginScene() call clears the screen with a color and the depth buffer, if desired. Then we let the Scene Manager and the GUI Environment draw their content. With the endScene() call everything is presented on the screen. */ driver->beginScene(true, true, SColor(255,100,101,140)); smgr->drawAll(); guienv->drawAll(); driver->endScene(); } /* After we are done with the render loop, we have to delete the Irrlicht Device created before with createDevice(). In the Irrlicht Engine, you have to delete all objects you created with a method or function which starts with 'create'. The object is simply deleted by calling ->drop(). See the documentation at irr::IReferenceCounted::drop() for more information. */ device->drop(); } - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib. } - (void)viewDidUnload { [super viewDidUnload]; // Release any retained subviews of the main view. } - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { return (interfaceOrientation != UIInterfaceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown); } @end Sadly the result is just a black View in the Simulator. :( Hope here is anyone who can explain me how i draw the scene in a UIView. Furthermore I'm getting this Error: Could not load sprite bank because the file does not exist: #DefaultFont How can i fix it ?

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• Are IE9 really good ?

  - by anirudha

  IE9 started a campaign for kill IE6 from the core because they know that IE6 is a big trouble or  problem for them for promote 9 version of IE. so they started a campaign for killing IE6. next time they kill IE 7 , 8,9 whenever they found this old version have a big problem for them to promote next version of IE.   Why they not make a update system who automatically update the browser and tell user to restart and update goes installed in the user system. well IE9 should learn from all other that they have very well design auto-update system who never give user in trouble that your browser goes old. Chrome and Firefox both update themselves and say user restart to enjoy another good version. in IE6 a big problem is that updates. no one sure that they installed new version of IE6 without any hassles and update goes install without any problem because they really know or care about “you need this to install this and this for this” so they thing “why I update IE whenever I am unsure that my browser goes update and I have no problem again” so they do nothing because their work done with no problem because common person used high profile application who work even in IE6. so they do nothing.    IE6 countdown website have designed a banner for warn or force user to upgrade to next version of IE. well there is no good reason for put the banner on website some of reason are:-   Windows 7 comes with pre-installed IE8 and Vista comes with upgrade version them IE6 so that is sure that you force a user who have Windows XP [luna] and if they want to upgrade IE then they can get IE8 not version 9 because IE9 is design for Windows 7 or Vista Service pack 2. so What is the use of update when user still have a outdate version too because IE8 is old version and not have any capability of HTML5 so forcing user by using the banner have no sense. I am not know why they all listed on website put the banner on their own website. it’s good that you offer user what they want instead of giving them a outdate version of IE again. My means to give a user list of browser they can try to enhance their browser experience instead of only IE.   IE9 build upon WPF and they spent more time on using WPF in IE instead of making user experience browser.  many thing is designed wrongly in IE first thing is tabs. the tabs in chrome are bigger and easily to move and same in Firefox even not have smooth tabbing. IE have same tabbing as chrome have but leak a point that it’s too small. if you really  want to move then sometime they create a problem that they going elsewhere from the current instance of IE.   Chrome have a big buttons, tabs and menu to enhance browser experience and Firefox have a good feature that you can make them bigger or small. you can put the icon for add-ons on the toolbar for easily use but IE have no relation with customization so we never can thinking about that.   When chrome provide lot’s of extensions and a  webstore for browser application and same feature in Firefox can be seen then there is no plugin in IE. really you can see their IE addons Website where no plugin listed for web development. even in the category or tag. as a response from many blog there is new for developer that new version of IE9 developer tool. well IE9 have three new tabs a blogger tell on their blog. when I trying them I found many thing but I still unable to edit the Css from the HTML tab and no plugin I found I can get to enhance IE9 web development. something more other provide never IE9 give me like personas , customization , browser extension or any other they used to tell a small thing customization  .   IE9 still have some problem with JavaScript that when I use Firefox and chrome and logout in both then my cookie is deleted but in IE it’s not done. it’s show me that IE9 still have different from other not for good thing even some bad thing too. When I trying to read a article that is written in Hindi using Unicode font I found that they show many thing misspelled. there is three Sha in Hindi but they all goes wrong in IE. the misprint thing is not that the writing  for the articles goes wrong. it’s problem or browser to rendering a font. the Firefox and chrome not give me this problem even opera render the font in italic style by decrease the font-size but all those work perfect.   in Pwn2Own the apple’s safari  and IE9 both are hacked. this is a awesome news for whose who thing that  open-source is lose in  Security and close-source is highly-secured software. well this is not a good parameter for talking about software. it’s should depend how much application tested and used. because more testing and more use of application make them better.   I  appreciate IE to making their new version 9 and good luck for them. there is a another matter that I personally found nothing on them.

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• OIM 11g - Multi Valued attribute reconciliation of a child form

  - by user604275

  This topic gives a brief description on how we can do reconciliation of a child form attribute which is also multi valued from a flat file . The format of the flat file is (an example): ManagementDomain1|Entitlement1|DIRECTORY SERVER,EMAIL ManagementDomain2|Entitlement2|EMAIL PROVIDER INSTANCE - UMS,EMAIL VERIFICATION In OIM there will be a parent form for fields Management domain and Entitlement.Reconciliation will assign Servers ( which are multi valued) to corresponding Management  Domain and Entitlement .In the flat file , multi valued fields are seperated by comma(,). In the design console, Create a form with 'Server Name' as a field and make it a child form . Open the corresponding Resource Object and add this field for reconcilitaion.While adding , choose 'Multivalued' check box. (please find attached screen shot on how to add it , Child Table.docx) Open process definiton and add child form fields for recociliation. Please click on the 'Create Reconcilitaion Profile' buttton on the resource object tab. The API methods used for child form reconciliation are : 1.           reconEventKey =   reconOpsIntf.createReconciliationEvent(resObjName, reconData,                                                            false); ·                                    ‘False’  here tells that we are creating the recon for a child table . 2.               2.       reconOpsIntf.providingAllMultiAttributeData(reconEventKey, RECON_FIELD_IN_RO, true);                RECON_FIELD_IN_RO is the field that we added in the Resource Object while adding for reconciliation, please refer the screen shot) 3.    reconOpsIntf.addDirectBulkMultiAttributeData(reconEventKey,RECON_FIELD_IN_RO, bulkChildDataMapList);                 bulkChildDataMapList  is coded as below :                 List<Map> bulkChildDataMapList = new ArrayList<Map>();                   for (int i = 0; i < stokens.length; i++) {                            Map<String, String> attributeMap = new HashMap<String, String>();                           String serverName = stokens[i].toUpperCase();                           attributeMap.put("Server Name", stokens[i]);                           bulkChildDataMapList.add(attributeMap);                         } 4                  4.       reconOpsIntf.finishReconciliationEvent(reconEventKey); 5.       reconOpsIntf.processReconciliationEvent(reconEventKey); Now, we have to register the plug-in, import metadata into MDS and then create a scheduled job to execute which will run the reconciliation.

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• iOS Support with Windows Azure Mobile Services – now with Push Notifications

  - by ScottGu

  A few weeks ago I posted about a number of improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services. One of these was the addition of an Objective-C client SDK that allows iOS developers to easily use Mobile Services for data and authentication.  Today I'm excited to announce a number of improvement to our iOS SDK and, most significantly, our new support for Push Notifications via APNS (Apple Push Notification Services).  This makes it incredibly easy to fire push notifications to your iOS users from Windows Azure Mobile Service scripts. Push Notifications via APNS We've provided two complete tutorials that take you step-by-step through the provisioning and setup process to enable your Windows Azure Mobile Service application with APNS (Apple Push Notification Services), including all of the steps required to configure your application for push in the Apple iOS provisioning portal: Getting started with Push Notifications - iOS Push notifications to users by using Mobile Services - iOS Once you've configured your application in the Apple iOS provisioning portal and uploaded the APNS push certificate to the Apple provisioning portal, it's just a matter of uploading your APNS push certificate to Mobile Services using the Windows Azure admin portal: Clicking the “upload” within the “Push” tab of your Mobile Service allows you to browse your local file-system and locate/upload your exported certificate.  As part of this you can also select whether you want to use the sandbox (dev) or production (prod) Apple service: Now, the code to send a push notification to your clients from within a Windows Azure Mobile Service is as easy as the code below: push.apns.send(deviceToken, {      alert: 'Toast: A new Mobile Services task.',      sound: 'default' }); This will cause Windows Azure Mobile Services to connect to APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) and send a notification to the iOS device you specified via the deviceToken: Check out our reference documentation for full details on how to use the new Windows Azure Mobile Services apns object to send your push notifications. Feedback Scripts An important part of working with any PNS (Push Notification Service) is handling feedback for expired device tokens and channels. This typically happens when your application is uninstalled from a particular device and can no longer receive your notifications. With Windows Notification Services you get an instant response from the HTTP server.  Apple’s Notification Services works in a slightly different way and provides an additional endpoint you can connect to poll for a list of expired tokens. As with all of the capabilities we integrate with Mobile Services, our goal is to allow developers to focus more on building their app and less on building infrastructure to support their ideas. Therefore we knew we had to provide a simple way for developers to integrate feedback from APNS on a regular basis.  This week’s update now includes a new screen in the portal that allows you to optionally provide a script to process your APNS feedback – and it will be executed by Mobile Services on an ongoing basis: This script is invoked periodically while your service is active. To poll the feedback endpoint you can simply call the apns object's getFeedback method from within this script: push.apns.getFeedback({       success: function(results) {           // results is an array of objects with a deviceToken and time properties      } }); This returns you a list of invalid tokens that can now be removed from your database. iOS Client SDK improvements Over the last month we've continued to work with a number of iOS advisors to make improvements to our Objective-C SDK. The SDK is being developed under an open source license (Apache 2.0) and is available on github. Many of the improvements are behind the scenes to improve performance and memory usage. However, one of the biggest improvements to our iOS Client API is the addition of an even easier login method.  Below is the Objective-C code you can now write to invoke it: [client loginWithProvider:@"twitter"                     onController:self                        animated:YES                      completion:^(MSUser *user, NSError *error) {      // if no error, you are now logged in via twitter }]; This code will automatically present and dismiss our login view controller as a modal dialog on the specified controller.  This does all the hard work for you and makes login via Twitter, Google, Facebook and Microsoft Account identities just a single line of code. My colleague Josh just posted a short video demonstrating these new features which I'd recommend checking out: Summary The above features are all now live in production and are available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using Mobile Services today. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with Mobile Services. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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