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• Infinite detail inside Perlin noise procedural mapping

  - by Dave Jellison

  I am very new to game development but I was able to scour the internet to figure out Perlin noise enough to implement a very simple 2D tile infinite procedural world. Here's the question and it's more conceptual than code-based in answer, I think. I understand the concept of "I plug in (x, y) and get back from Perlin noise p" (I'll call it p). P will always be the same value for the same (x, y) (as long as the Perlin algorithm parameters haven't changed, like altering number of octaves, et cetera). What I want to do is be able to zoom into a square and be able to generate smaller squares inside of the already generated overhead tile of terrain. Let's say I have a jungle tile for overhead terrain but I want to zoom in and maybe see a small river tile that would only be a creek and not large enough to be a full "big tile" of water in the overhead. Of course, I want the same net effect as a Perlin equation inside a Perlin equation if that makes sense? (aka. I want two people playing the game with the same settings to get the same terrain and details every time). I can conceptually wrap my head around the large tile being based on an "zoomed out" coordinate leaving enough room to drill into but this approach doesn't make sense in my head (maybe I'm wrong). I'm guessing with this approach my overhead terrain would lose all of the cohesiveness delivered by the Perlin. Imagine I calculate (0, 0) as overhead tile 1 and then to the east of that I plug in (50, 0). OK, great, I now have 49 pixels of detail I could then "drill down" into. The issue I have in my head with this approach (without attempting it) is that there's no guarantee from my Perlin noise that (0,0) would be a good neighbor to (50,0) as they could have wildly different "elevations" or p/resultant values returning from the Perlin equation when I generate the overhead map. I think I can conceive of using the Perlin noise for the overhead tile to then reuse the p value as a seed for the "detail" level of noise once I zoom in. That would ensure my detail Perlin is always the same configuration for (0,0), (1,0), etc. ad nauseam but I'm not sure if there are better approaches out there or if this is a sound approach at all.

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• Rendering another screen on top of main game screen in fullscreen mode

  - by wolf

  my game runs in fullscreen mode and uses active rendering. The graphics are drawn on the fullscreen window in each game loop: public void render() { Window w = screen.getFullScreenWindow(); Graphics2D g = screen.getGraphics(); renderer.render(g, level, w.getWidth(), w.getHeight()); g.dispose(); screen.update(); } This is the screen.update() method: public void update(){ Window w = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if(w != null){ BufferStrategy s = w.getBufferStrategy(); if(!s.contentsLost()){ s.show(); } } } I want to display another screen on my main game screen (menu, inventory etc). Lets say I have a JPanel inventory, which has a grid of inventory cells (manually drawn) and some Swing components like JPopupMenu. So i tried adding that to my window and repainting it in the game loop, which worked okay most of the time... but sometimes the panel wouldn't get displayed. Blindly moving things around in the inventory worked, but it just didn't display. When i alt-tabbed out and back again, it displayed properly. I also tried drawing the rest of the inventory on my full screen window and using a JPanel to display only the buttons and popupmenus. The inventory displayed properly, but the Swing components keep flickering. I'm guessing this is because I don't know how to combine active and passive rendering. public void render() { Graphics2D g = screen.getGraphics(); invManager.render(g); g.dispose(); screen.update(); invPanel.repaint(); } Should i use something else instead of a JPanel? I don't really need active rendering for these screens, but I don't understand why they sometimes just don't display. Or maybe I should just make my own custom components instead of using Swing? I also read somewhere that using multiple panels/frames in a game is bad practice so should I draw everything on one window/frame/panel? If I CAN use JPanels for this, should I add and remove them every time the inventory is toggled? Or just change their visibility?

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• IDC Analyst Report Touts Oracle–Accenture Strategic Initiative

  - by kristin.jellison

  Hi there, partners! Oracle Engineered Systems have been getting some love lately, and we want to share it with you! The market intelligence and advisory firm IDC recently released a report lauding Oracle and Accenture’s strategic initiative to route the performance and flexibility of Oracle Engineered Systems to clients. The report, "Oracle and Accenture Strategic Alliance Places Big Bet on Engineered Systems,” by Steve White, reflects a largely positive analysis of the relationship. White notes that the alliance is “one of the largest in the industry.” Under the relationship, Accenture has incorporated Oracle Engineered Systems—including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle SuperCluster, and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine—into its leading datacenter transformation consulting services. Together, the two companies have also created bespoke platforms, such as the Accenture Foundation Platform for Oracle, which helps clients accelerate deployments on Oracle Fusion Middleware, running Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Oracle Engineered Systems deliver a single, engineered platform—including server to storage and networking. This makes it easier and cheaper for Accenture clients around the world to prepare their datacenters for managing, processing and analyzing the massive amounts of data they (rightly) anticipate seeing in the next decade. The new solutions can help reduce the effort and cost to migrate any vendor database to an Oracle Engineered Systems platform, which can lower the cost of ownership by up to 50 percent. For its part, Accenture has built a team of 300 consultants to implement and increase the flexibility and stability of client datacenters. This move further expands one of the fastest-growing full-service Oracle Enterprise solutions. Over 52,000 Accenture consultants are qualified to implement, upgrade and outsource the Oracle product suite. Accenture is a Diamond-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). For Oracle Partners, this update should give you at least two things to walk away with. First, this initiative is showing signs of success. As Marty Cole, group chief executive for Accenture’s Technology growth platform, put it, “We are seeing an increasing number of clients recognizing the value of consolidating their databases and taking advantage of the cost and performance benefits delivered by these solutions.” The pipeline is there—and not just for Accenture. Use this example to show your clients that investments in Oracle Engineered Systems are on the rise. Second, recognize that Oracle Engineered Systems represent one of the biggest platforms for growth that Oracle has to offer partners. As part of the agreement, Accenture is able to provide: Platform Readiness Assessments Platform Implementation App Rationalization Database Rationalization Managed Services These are all enablement opportunities you can offer customers under Oracle’s partner programs —to continue building the value of their investments, and the value of your relationship with Oracle. Take a read through the IDC report. To learn more about the partnership, see this press release. Happy selling! The OPN Communications Team

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• PTLQueue : a scalable bounded-capacity MPMC queue

  - by Dave

  Title: Fast concurrent MPMC queue -- I've used the following concurrent queue algorithm enough that it warrants a blog entry. I'll sketch out the design of a fast and scalable multiple-producer multiple-consumer (MPSC) concurrent queue called PTLQueue. The queue has bounded capacity and is implemented via a circular array. Bounded capacity can be a useful property if there's a mismatch between producer rates and consumer rates where an unbounded queue might otherwise result in excessive memory consumption by virtue of the container nodes that -- in some queue implementations -- are used to hold values. A bounded-capacity queue can provide flow control between components. Beware, however, that bounded collections can also result in resource deadlock if abused. The put() and take() operators are partial and wait for the collection to become non-full or non-empty, respectively. Put() and take() do not allocate memory, and are not vulnerable to the ABA pathologies. The PTLQueue algorithm can be implemented equally well in C/C++ and Java. Partial operators are often more convenient than total methods. In many use cases if the preconditions aren't met, there's nothing else useful the thread can do, so it may as well wait via a partial method. An exception is in the case of work-stealing queues where a thief might scan a set of queues from which it could potentially steal. Total methods return ASAP with a success-failure indication. (It's tempting to describe a queue or API as blocking or non-blocking instead of partial or total, but non-blocking is already an overloaded concurrency term. Perhaps waiting/non-waiting or patient/impatient might be better terms). It's also trivial to construct partial operators by busy-waiting via total operators, but such constructs may be less efficient than an operator explicitly and intentionally designed to wait. A PTLQueue instance contains an array of slots, where each slot has volatile Turn and MailBox fields. The array has power-of-two length allowing mod/div operations to be replaced by masking. We assume sensible padding and alignment to reduce the impact of false sharing. (On x86 I recommend 128-byte alignment and padding because of the adjacent-sector prefetch facility). Each queue also has PutCursor and TakeCursor cursor variables, each of which should be sequestered as the sole occupant of a cache line or sector. You can opt to use 64-bit integers if concerned about wrap-around aliasing in the cursor variables. Put(null) is considered illegal, but the caller or implementation can easily check for and convert null to a distinguished non-null proxy value if null happens to be a value you'd like to pass. Take() will accordingly convert the proxy value back to null. An advantage of PTLQueue is that you can use atomic fetch-and-increment for the partial methods. We initialize each slot at index I with (Turn=I, MailBox=null). Both cursors are initially 0. All shared variables are considered "volatile" and atomics such as CAS and AtomicFetchAndIncrement are presumed to have bidirectional fence semantics. Finally T is the templated type. I've sketched out a total tryTake() method below that allows the caller to poll the queue. tryPut() has an analogous construction. Zebra stripping : alternating row colors for nice-looking code listings. See also google code "prettify" : https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ Prettify is a javascript module that yields the HTML/CSS/JS equivalent of pretty-print. -- pre:nth-child(odd) { background-color:#ff0000; } pre:nth-child(even) { background-color:#0000ff; } border-left: 11px solid #ccc; margin: 1.7em 0 1.7em 0.3em; background-color:#BFB; font-size:12px; line-height:65%; " // PTLQueue : Put(v) : // producer : partial method - waits as necessary assert v != null assert Mask = 1 && (Mask & (Mask+1)) == 0 // Document invariants // doorway step // Obtain a sequence number -- ticket // As a practical concern the ticket value is temporally unique // The ticket also identifies and selects a slot auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&PutCursor, 1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // waiting phase : // wait for slot's generation to match the tkt value assigned to this put() invocation. // The "generation" is implicitly encoded as the upper bits in the cursor // above those used to specify the index : tkt div (Mask+1) // The generation serves as an epoch number to identify a cohort of threads // accessing disjoint slots while s-Turn != tkt : Pause assert s-MailBox == null s-MailBox = v // deposit and pass message Take() : // consumer : partial method - waits as necessary auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&TakeCursor,1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // 2-stage waiting : // First wait for turn for our generation // Acquire exclusive "take" access to slot's MailBox field // Then wait for the slot to become occupied while s-Turn != tkt : Pause // Concurrency in this section of code is now reduced to just 1 producer thread // vs 1 consumer thread. // For a given queue and slot, there will be most one Take() operation running // in this section. // Consumer waits for producer to arrive and make slot non-empty // Extract message; clear mailbox; advance Turn indicator // We have an obvious happens-before relation : // Put(m) happens-before corresponding Take() that returns that same "m" for T v = s-MailBox if v != null : s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 // unlock slot to admit next producer and consumer return v Pause tryTake() : // total method - returns ASAP with failure indication for auto tkt = TakeCursor slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] if s-Turn != tkt : return null T v = s-MailBox // presumptive return value if v == null : return null // ratify tkt and v values and commit by advancing cursor if CAS (&TakeCursor, tkt, tkt+1) != tkt : continue s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 return v The basic idea derives from the Partitioned Ticket Lock "PTL" (US20120240126-A1) and the MultiLane Concurrent Bag (US8689237). The latter is essentially a circular ring-buffer where the elements themselves are queues or concurrent collections. You can think of the PTLQueue as a partitioned ticket lock "PTL" augmented to pass values from lock to unlock via the slots. Alternatively, you could conceptualize of PTLQueue as a degenerate MultiLane bag where each slot or "lane" consists of a simple single-word MailBox instead of a general queue. Each lane in PTLQueue also has a private Turn field which acts like the Turn (Grant) variables found in PTL. Turn enforces strict FIFO ordering and restricts concurrency on the slot mailbox field to at most one simultaneous put() and take() operation. PTL uses a single "ticket" variable and per-slot Turn (grant) fields while MultiLane has distinct PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors and abstract per-slot sub-queues. Both PTL and MultiLane advance their cursor and ticket variables with atomic fetch-and-increment. PTLQueue borrows from both PTL and MultiLane and has distinct put and take cursors and per-slot Turn fields. Instead of a per-slot queues, PTLQueue uses a simple single-word MailBox field. PutCursor and TakeCursor act like a pair of ticket locks, conferring "put" and "take" access to a given slot. PutCursor, for instance, assigns an incoming put() request to a slot and serves as a PTL "Ticket" to acquire "put" permission to that slot's MailBox field. To better explain the operation of PTLQueue we deconstruct the operation of put() and take() as follows. Put() first increments PutCursor obtaining a new unique ticket. That ticket value also identifies a slot. Put() next waits for that slot's Turn field to match that ticket value. This is tantamount to using a PTL to acquire "put" permission on the slot's MailBox field. Finally, having obtained exclusive "put" permission on the slot, put() stores the message value into the slot's MailBox. Take() similarly advances TakeCursor, identifying a slot, and then acquires and secures "take" permission on a slot by waiting for Turn. Take() then waits for the slot's MailBox to become non-empty, extracts the message, and clears MailBox. Finally, take() advances the slot's Turn field, which releases both "put" and "take" access to the slot's MailBox. Note the asymmetry : put() acquires "put" access to the slot, but take() releases that lock. At any given time, for a given slot in a PTLQueue, at most one thread has "put" access and at most one thread has "take" access. This restricts concurrency from general MPMC to 1-vs-1. We have 2 ticket locks -- one for put() and one for take() -- each with its own "ticket" variable in the form of the corresponding cursor, but they share a single "Grant" egress variable in the form of the slot's Turn variable. Advancing the PutCursor, for instance, serves two purposes. First, we obtain a unique ticket which identifies a slot. Second, incrementing the cursor is the doorway protocol step to acquire the per-slot mutual exclusion "put" lock. The cursors and operations to increment those cursors serve double-duty : slot-selection and ticket assignment for locking the slot's MailBox field. At any given time a slot MailBox field can be in one of the following states: empty with no pending operations -- neutral state; empty with one or more waiting take() operations pending -- deficit; occupied with no pending operations; occupied with one or more waiting put() operations -- surplus; empty with a pending put() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional; or occupied with a pending take() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional. The partial put() and take() operators can be implemented with an atomic fetch-and-increment operation, which may confer a performance advantage over a CAS-based loop. In addition we have independent PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors. Critically, a put() operation modifies PutCursor but does not access the TakeCursor and a take() operation modifies the TakeCursor cursor but does not access the PutCursor. This acts to reduce coherence traffic relative to some other queue designs. It's worth noting that slow threads or obstruction in one slot (or "lane") does not impede or obstruct operations in other slots -- this gives us some degree of obstruction isolation. PTLQueue is not lock-free, however. The implementation above is expressed with polite busy-waiting (Pause) but it's trivial to implement per-slot parking and unparking to deschedule waiting threads. It's also easy to convert the queue to a more general deque by replacing the PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors with Left/Front and Right/Back cursors that can move either direction. Specifically, to push and pop from the "left" side of the deque we would decrement and increment the Left cursor, respectively, and to push and pop from the "right" side of the deque we would increment and decrement the Right cursor, respectively. We used a variation of PTLQueue for message passing in our recent OPODIS 2013 paper. ul { list-style:none; padding-left:0; padding:0; margin:0; margin-left:0; } ul#myTagID { padding: 0px; margin: 0px; list-style:none; margin-left:0;} -- -- There's quite a bit of related literature in this area. I'll call out a few relevant references: Wilson's NYU Courant Institute UltraComputer dissertation from 1988 is classic and the canonical starting point : Operating System Data Structures for Shared-Memory MIMD Machines with Fetch-and-Add. Regarding provenance and priority, I think PTLQueue or queues effectively equivalent to PTLQueue have been independently rediscovered a number of times. See CB-Queue and BNPBV, below, for instance. But Wilson's dissertation anticipates the basic idea and seems to predate all the others. Gottlieb et al : Basic Techniques for the Efficient Coordination of Very Large Numbers of Cooperating Sequential Processors Orozco et al : CB-Queue in Toward high-throughput algorithms on many-core architectures which appeared in TACO 2012. Meneghin et al : BNPVB family in Performance evaluation of inter-thread communication mechanisms on multicore/multithreaded architecture Dmitry Vyukov : bounded MPMC queue (highly recommended) Alex Otenko : US8607249 (highly related). John Mellor-Crummey : Concurrent queues: Practical fetch-and-phi algorithms. Technical Report 229, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester Thomasson : FIFO Distributed Bakery Algorithm (very similar to PTLQueue). Scott and Scherer : Dual Data Structures I'll propose an optimization left as an exercise for the reader. Say we wanted to reduce memory usage by eliminating inter-slot padding. Such padding is usually "dark" memory and otherwise unused and wasted. But eliminating the padding leaves us at risk of increased false sharing. Furthermore lets say it was usually the case that the PutCursor and TakeCursor were numerically close to each other. (That's true in some use cases). We might still reduce false sharing by incrementing the cursors by some value other than 1 that is not trivially small and is coprime with the number of slots. Alternatively, we might increment the cursor by one and mask as usual, resulting in a logical index. We then use that logical index value to index into a permutation table, yielding an effective index for use in the slot array. The permutation table would be constructed so that nearby logical indices would map to more distant effective indices. (Open question: what should that permutation look like? Possibly some perversion of a Gray code or De Bruijn sequence might be suitable). As an aside, say we need to busy-wait for some condition as follows : "while C == 0 : Pause". Lets say that C is usually non-zero, so we typically don't wait. But when C happens to be 0 we'll have to spin for some period, possibly brief. We can arrange for the code to be more machine-friendly with respect to the branch predictors by transforming the loop into : "if C == 0 : for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }". Critically, we want to restructure the loop so there's one branch that controls entry and another that controls loop exit. A concern is that your compiler or JIT might be clever enough to transform this back to "while C == 0 : Pause". You can sometimes avoid this by inserting a call to a some type of very cheap "opaque" method that the compiler can't elide or reorder. On Solaris, for instance, you could use :"if C == 0 : { gethrtime(); for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }}". It's worth noting the obvious duality between locks and queues. If you have strict FIFO lock implementation with local spinning and succession by direct handoff such as MCS or CLH,then you can usually transform that lock into a queue. Hidden commentary and annotations - invisible : * And of course there's a well-known duality between queues and locks, but I'll leave that topic for another blog post. * Compare and contrast : PTLQ vs PTL and MultiLane * Equivalent : Turn; seq; sequence; pos; position; ticket * Put = Lock; Deposit Take = identify and reserve slot; wait; extract & clear; unlock * conceptualize : Distinct PutLock and TakeLock implemented as ticket lock or PTL Distinct arrival cursors but share per-slot "Turn" variable provides exclusive role-based access to slot's mailbox field put() acquires exclusive access to a slot for purposes of "deposit" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires deposit access rights/perms to that slot take() acquires exclusive access to slot for purposes of "withdrawal" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires withdrawal access rights/perms to that slot At any given time, only one thread can have withdrawal access to a slot at any given time, only one thread can have deposit access to a slot Permissible for T1 to have deposit access and T2 to simultaneously have withdrawal access * round-robin for the purposes of; role-based; access mode; access role mailslot; mailbox; allocate/assign/identify slot rights; permission; license; access permission; * PTL/Ticket hybrid Asymmetric usage ; owner oblivious lock-unlock pairing K-exclusion add Grant cursor pass message m from lock to unlock via Slots[] array Cursor performs 2 functions : + PTL ticket + Assigns request to slot in round-robin fashion Deconstruct protocol : explication put() : allocate slot in round-robin fashion acquire PTL for "put" access store message into slot associated with PTL index take() : Acquire PTL for "take" access // doorway step seq = fetchAdd (&Grant, 1) s = &Slots[seq & Mask] // waiting phase while s-Turn != seq : pause Extract : wait for s-mailbox to be full v = s-mailbox s-mailbox = null Release PTL for both "put" and "take" access s-Turn = seq + Mask + 1 * Slot round-robin assignment and lock "doorway" protocol leverage the same cursor and FetchAdd operation on that cursor FetchAdd (&Cursor,1) + round-robin slot assignment and dispersal + PTL/ticket lock "doorway" step waiting phase is via "Turn" field in slot * PTLQueue uses 2 cursors -- put and take. Acquire "put" access to slot via PTL-like lock Acquire "take" access to slot via PTL-like lock 2 locks : put and take -- at most one thread can access slot's mailbox Both locks use same "turn" field Like multilane : 2 cursors : put and take slot is simple 1-capacity mailbox instead of queue Borrow per-slot turn/grant from PTL Provides strict FIFO Lock slot : put-vs-put take-vs-take at most one put accesses slot at any one time at most one put accesses take at any one time reduction to 1-vs-1 instead of N-vs-M concurrency Per slot locks for put/take Release put/take by advancing turn * is instrumental in ... * P-V Semaphore vs lock vs K-exclusion * See also : FastQueues-excerpt.java dice-etc/queue-mpmc-bounded-blocking-circular-xadd/ * PTLQueue is the same as PTLQB - identical * Expedient return; ASAP; prompt; immediately * Lamport's Bakery algorithm : doorway step then waiting phase Threads arriving at doorway obtain a unique ticket number Threads enter in ticket order * In the terminology of Reed and Kanodia a ticket lock corresponds to the busy-wait implementation of a semaphore using an eventcount and a sequencer It can also be thought of as an optimization of Lamport's bakery lock was designed for fault-tolerance rather than performance Instead of spinning on the release counter, processors using a bakery lock repeatedly examine the tickets of their peers --

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• Getting Internet Explorer to Open Different Sets of Tabs Based on the Day of the Week

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  If you have to use Internet Explorer for work and need to open a different set of work-specific tabs every day, is there a quick and easy way to do it instead of opening each one individually? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader bobSmith1432 is looking for a quick and easy way to open different daily sets of tabs in Internet Explorer for his work: When I open Internet Explorer on different days of the week, I want different tabs to be opened automatically. I have to run different reports for work each day of the week and it takes a lot of time to open the 5-10 tabs I use to run the reports. It would be a lot faster if, when I open Internet Explorer, the tabs I needed would automatically load and be ready. Is there a way to open 5-10 different tabs in Internet Explorer depending on the day of the week? Example: Monday – 6 Accounting Pages Tuesday – 7 Billing Pages Wednesday – 5 HR Pages Thursday – 10 Schedule Pages Friday – 8 Work Summary/Order Pages Is there an easier way for Bob to get all those tabs to load and be ready to go each day instead of opening them individually every time? The Answer SuperUser contributor Julian Knight has a simple, non-script solution for us: Rather than trying the brute force method, how about a work around? Open up each set of tabs either in different windows, or one set at a time, and save all tabs to bookmark folders. Put the folders on the bookmark toolbar for ease of access. Each day, right-click on the appropriate folder and click on ‘Open in tab group’ to open all the tabs. You could put all the day folders into a top-level folder to save space if you want, but at the expense of an extra click to get to them. If you really must go further, you need to write a program or script to drive Internet Explorer. The easiest way is probably writing a PowerShell script. Special Note: There are various scripts shared on the discussion page as well, so the solution shown above is just one possibility out of many. If you love the idea of using scripts for a function like this, then make sure to browse on over to the discussion page to see the various ones SuperUser members have shared! Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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• The best Bar on the globe is ... in Seoul/Korea

  - by Mike Dietrich

  As you know already sometimes I write about things which really don't have to do anything with a database upgrade. So if you are looking for tips and tricks and articles about that topic please stop reading now Actually I'm not a lets-go-to-a-bar person. I enjoy good food and a fine dessert wine afterwards. But last week in Seoul/Korea Ryan, our local host, did ask us after a wonderful dinner at a Korean Barbecue place if we'd like to visit a bar. I was really tired as I flew into Seoul overnight from Sunday to Monday arriving Monday early morning, getting shower, breakfast - and then a full day of very good and productive customer meetings. But one thing Ryan mentioned catched my immediate attention: The owner of the bar collects records and has a huge tube amp stereo system - and you can ask him to play your favorite songs. The bar is called "Peter, Paul and Mary" - honestly not my favorite style of music. And I even coulnd't find a webpage or an address - only that little piece of information on Facebook. But after stepping down the stairs to the cellar my eyes almost poped out of my head. This is the audio system: Enourmus huge corner horn loudspeakers from Western Electric. Pretty old I'd suppose but delivering an incredible present dynamics into the room. And plenty of tube equipment from Jadis, NSA Labs and Shindo Laboratories Western Electric 300B Limited amps from Tokyo. And the owner (I was so amazed I had simply forgotten to ask for his name) collects records since 40 years. And we had many wishes that night. Actually when we did enter Peter, Paul and Mary he played an old Helloween song. That must have been destiny. A German entering a bar in Korea and the owner is playing an old song by one of Germany's best heavy metal bands ever. And it went on with the Doors, Rainbow's Stargazer, Scorpions, later Deep Purple's Perfect Strangers, a bit of Santana, Carly Simon, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie ...Ronnie James Dio's Holy Diver, Gary Moore, Peter Gabriel's San Jacinto ... and many many more great songs ... Of course we were the last guests leaving the place at 2am in the morning - and I've never ever had a better night in a bar before ... I could have stayed days listening to so many records  ... Thanks Ryan, that was a phantastic night! -Mike

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• Easy Scaling in XAML (WPF)

  - by Robert May

  Ran into a problem that needed solving that was kind of fun.  I’m not a XAML guru, and I’m sure there are better solutions, but I thought I’d share mine. The problem was this:  Our designer had, appropriately, designed the system for a 1920 x 1080 screen resolution.  This is for a full screen, touch screen device (think Kiosk), which has that resolution, but we also wanted to demo the device on a tablet (currently using the AWESOME Samsung tablet given out at Microsoft Build).  When you’d run it on that tablet, things were ugly because it was at a lower resolution than the target device. Enter scaling.  I did some research and found out that I probably just need to monkey with the LayoutTransform of some grid somewhere.  This project is using MVVM and has a navigation container that we built that lives on a single root view.  User controls are then loaded into that view as navigation occurs. In the parent grid of the root view, I added the following XAML: <Grid.LayoutTransform> <ScaleTransform ScaleX="{Binding ScaleWidth}" ScaleY="{Binding ScaleHeight}" /> </Grid.LayoutTransform> And then in the root View Model, I added the following code: /// <summary> /// The required design width /// </summary> private const double RequiredWidth = 1920; /// <summary> /// The required design height /// </summary> private const double RequiredHeight = 1080; /// <summary>Gets the ActualHeight</summary> public double ActualHeight { get { return this.View.ActualHeight; } } /// <summary>Gets the ActualWidth</summary> public double ActualWidth { get { return this.View.ActualWidth; } } /// <summary> /// Gets the scale for the height. /// </summary> public double ScaleHeight { get { return this.ActualHeight / RequiredHeight; } } /// <summary> /// Gets the scale for the width. /// </summary> public double ScaleWidth { get { return this.ActualWidth / RequiredWidth; } } Note that View.ActualWidth and View.ActualHeight are just pointing directly at FrameworkElement.ActualWidth and FrameworkElement.ActualHeight. That’s it.  Just calculate the ratio and bind the scale transform to it. Hopefully you’ll find this useful. Technorati Tags: WPF,XAML

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 22, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 22, 2011Popular ReleasesDeveloper Team Article System Management: DTASM v1.3: ?? ??? ???? 3 ????? ???? ???? ????? ??? : - ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??? ? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? . - ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? ????? ???? ???? ?? ????? , ?????? ????? ????? ?? ??? . - ??? ??????? ??? ??? ???? ?? ????? ????? ????? .VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.22: The new version contains Silverlight 5 library: Vlc.DotNet.Silverlight. A sample could be tested here The new version add and correct many features : Correction : Reinitialize some variables Deprecate : Logging API, since VLC 1.2 (08/20/2011) Add subitem in LocationMedia (for Youtube videos, ...) Update Wpf sample to use Youtube videos Many others correctionsSharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...SharePoint 2010 Education Demo Project: Release SharePoint SP1 for Education Solutions: This release includes updates to the Content Packs for SharePoint SP1. All Content Packs have been updated to install successfully under SharePoint SP1SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportBugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Anno 2070 Assistant: v0.1.0 (STABLE): Version 0.1.0 Features Production Chains Eco Production Chains (Complete) Tycoon Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Supply (Disabled - Incomplete) Calculator (Disabled - Incomplete) Building Layouts Eco Building Layouts (Complete) Tycoon Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Credits (Complete)Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.30: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Back in stock notifications. • Product special price support. • Catalog mode (based on customer role) To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).WPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...Delta Engine: Delta Engine Beta Preview v0.9.1: v0.9.1 beta release with lots of refactoring, fixes, new samples and support for iOS, Android and WP7 (you need a Marketplace account however). If you want a binary release for the games (like v0.9.0), just say so in the Forum or here and we will quickly prepare one. It is just not much different from v0.9.0, so I left it out this time. See http://DeltaEngine.net/Wiki.Roadmap for details.SharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLR: SharpMap-0.9-AnyCPU-Trunk-2011.11.17: This is a build of SharpMap from the 0.9 development trunk as per 2011-11-17 For most applications the AnyCPU release is the recommended, but in case you need an x86 build that is included to. For some dataproviders (GDAL/OGR, SqLite, PostGis) you need to also referense the SharpMap.Extensions assembly For SqlServer Spatial you need to reference the SharpMap.SqlServerSpatial assemblyAJAX Control Toolkit: November 2011 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - November 2011 Release Version 51116November 2011 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found h...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.36: Fix for issue #16908: string literals containing ASP.NET replacement syntax fail if the ASP.NET code contains the same character as the string literal delimiter. Also, we shouldn't be changing the delimiter for those literals or combining them with other literals; the developer may have specifically chosen the delimiter used because of possible content inserted by ASP.NET code. This logic is normally off; turn it on via the -aspnet command-line flag (or the Code.Settings.AllowEmbeddedAspNetBl...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.5: Added: Now the DateRanteAttribute accepts complex expressions containing "Now" and "Today" as static minimum and maximum. Menu, MenuFor helpers capable of handling a "currently selected element". The developer can choose between using a standard nested menu based on a standard SimpleMenuItem class or specifying an item template based on a custom class. Added also helpers to build the tree structure containing all data items the menu takes infos from. Improved the pager. Now the developer ...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.7: Reworked API to be more consistent. See Supported formats table. Added some more helper methods - e.g. OpenEntryStream (RarArchive/RarReader does not support this) Fixed up testsSilverlight Toolkit: Windows Phone Toolkit - Nov 2011 (7.1 SDK): This release is coming soon! What's new ListPicker once again works in a ScrollViewer LongListSelector bug fixes around OutOfRange exceptions, wrong ordering of items, grouping issues, and scrolling events. ItemTuple is now refactored to be the public type LongListSelectorItem to provide users better access to the values in selection changed handlers. PerformanceProgressBar binding fix for IsIndeterminate (item 9767 and others) There is no longer a GestureListener dependency with the C...New ProjectsAndrecorder: Andrecorder???Android???????,???????????????????,????????????????,????????!Android Tree Bulletin: Android bulletin reader in tree format.Bài t?p l?p môn HCI: Name: Ph?n m?m qu?n lý thu h?c phí tru?ng d?i h?c Công Nghi?p Hà N?i Basic Grid Collision sample in XNA: This project shows how to implement a basic grid collision in XNA. The project uses the XNA 4.0 framework and C#Club Manager: Club Manager is a web site for managing sport clubs / teams.Create email with encrypt text implement TEA encryption and Web Service: RahaTEA Mail is an application to send messages in secret. These applications implement TEA encryption and web serviceCRM 2011 Layers: Several .net layers to customize CRM 2011CTEF: China Tomorrow Education Foundation websitedns?????: ??c#???dns?????。????????，???????，??????。EAF: Extensibility Application FrameworkEnergy SBA: In order to compete with large companies for Federal contracts, small business need information. This application seeks to show standard methods of using remote APIs to integrate information into a Metro interface using services provided by the Small Business Administration (SBA)EPiOptimiser - Scan your EPiServer configuration to optimise start up times: EPiScanner scans your EPiServer configuration to optimise start ups by generating a recommended exclude list of assemblies to include in EPiServer framework config. It can be used on command line, as a custom build task or integrated into Visual Studio as an external tool.FreeIDS - Free Intrusion Detection System: Don't want someone to use your computer? Don't want to use a system password? Want to see when someone accessed your computer? Time/Date? FreeIDS is it!FtpServerAdministrator: FtpServerAdministrator makes it easier to administer some ftp server by code, although it can only be used for FileZilla server now. It's developed in C#.GreenPoint Online: Tools and components that help you customize an Office 365 / SharePoint Online Environment.HCC C# Workshop: This project contains the code for the exercises of the HCC C# WorkshopKsigDo - Real time view model syncing across user screens: KsigDo show real time view model syncing across user screens - using ASP.NET, Knockout and SignalR. Real time data syncing across user views *was* hard, especially in web applications. Most of the time, the second user needs to refresh the screen, to see the changes made by first user, or we need to implement some long polling that fetches the data and does the update manually. Now, with SignalR and Knockout, ASP.NET developers can take advantage of view model syncing across users, that...lineseven: ???????????????。Mail Size Labeler for GMail: A small utility that labels large e-mails on your gmail account. This utility scan you gmail account, and adds labels to large e-mail so you can clean your mailbox and free space. The labels this utility adds are: Size 1M-2M Size 2M-5M Size 5M-10M Size 10M-15M Size 15M plus Note: a single e-mail thread may get multiple labels if different e-mails of the thread fit different filters.MathService: Complex digits, standart class extentions etc.MyGameProject: gamesMySQL Connect 2 ASP.NET: Example project to show how to connect MySQL database to ASP.NET web project. IDE: Visual Studio 2010 Pro Programming language: C# Detailed information in the article here: http://epavlov.net/blog/2011/11/13/connect-to-mysql-in-visual-studio/ nl: Nutri Leaf Devomr.event.js: Simple js event injecterPastebin4DotNet: This project is an example of how to consume an API, in this case I consummed the Pastebin API.Pomelo: Pomelo is a website example.QuickDevFrameWork: ????????,??,??,????,ioc ?????postsharp?aopReadable Passphrase Generator: Generates passphrases which are (mostly) grammatically correct but nonsensical. These are easy to remember but difficult to guess (for humans or computers). Developed in C# with a KeePass plugin, console app and public API.Rosyama.ru for Windows Phone 7: ?????????? Windows Phone 7 ??? ???????? ???????? ?? ???? rosyama.ru. ?????????? ??????? ?????????? ? ???????? ????????? ???????. SimpleBatch: As the name suggests, this is a simple batch framework allowing you to define batch jobs in XML format. Thus far, contains a basic selection of processors such as the following; File Email SQL (SQL Server Client) SharePoint Document Library Custom ProcessorSite de Notícias: Projeto de faculdade que consiste na criação de um site de notícias.SPWikiProvisioning: Create update and delete SharePoint wiki pages using feature activation and deactivation handlers.SVN Automated Control With C#: I Created this libaray because I need to control Tortoise SVN automactically with out an interface for my own build server and could not find any resuilts on google to achive this task so I went about creating this libaray which dos most of the task's that I needed. I round that you could control SVN by command line so using that as my basic idear I went about coding the most common commands for SVN most of the commads are done but not all. if you like this libaray then please use it we...TremplinCMS: TremplinCMS is a CMS framework for ASP .NET 4.vlu0206sms: SMSMaker by team0206 developingWCF DataService RequestStream Access on webInvoke HTTP POST: This library provides access to the message body request stream of a WCF Data Service (formerly ADO.NET Data Service), which is not possible with the original WCF Data Service class. You are enabled passing data (e.g. Json, files) via HTTP POST to the request body. It uses the operation context (DbContext) provided by the DataService<T> class to get access to the resquest stream.WebOS: Welcome to join us to build our os projectWp7StarterDantas: Iniciando com Wp7WpfCollaborative3D: WpfCollaborative3DXNA Content Preprocessor: The XNA Content Preprocessor allows you to compile all of your XNA assets outside of your normal XNA project. This means more time building your game or app instead of your content.

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• Mysql 5.5 server not working

  - by rajesh

  I had Ubuntu 14.04 installed on my system. I recently updated ubuntu and now my mysql does not start and workbench says that mysql server has been stopped. And when i try to start it gives me the following error 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Checking server status... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Trying to connect to MySQL... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (111) (2003) 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Assuming server is not running 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Server start done. 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Checking server status... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Trying to connect to MySQL... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (111) (2003) 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Assuming server is not running And also when i try to login using terminal (mysql -u root -p <password>) i get the following error: ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) I have also tried to reinstall Ubuntu but i am unable to do so. Gives me the following error: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done mysql-server-5.5 is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded. I have data which i have not taken backup of as i am unable to log into the server. I am a newbie please help me resolve this issue without losing my data. Awaiting for your earliest response. Below is the error message from cat /var/log/mysql/error.log 140813 21:22:50 [Warning] Using unique option prefix myisam-recover instead of myisam-recover-options is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the full name instead. 140813 21:22:50 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.8 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda. 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start 140813 21:22:51 InnoDB: 5.5.38 started; log sequence number 80726593570 140813 21:22:51 [Note] Server hostname (bind-address): '127.0.0.1'; port: 3306 140813 21:22:51 [Note] - '127.0.0.1' resolves to '127.0.0.1'; 140813 21:22:51 [Note] Server socket created on IP: '127.0.0.1'. 140813 21:22:51 [ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Incorrect file format 'user'

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• Andengine put bullet to pull, when it leaves screen

  - by Ashot

  i'm creating a bullet with physics body. Bullet class (extends Sprite class) has die() method, which unregister physics connector, hide sprite and put it in pull public void die() { Log.d("bulletDie", "See you in hell!"); if (this.isVisible()) { this.setVisible(false); mPhysicsWorld.unregisterPhysicsConnector(physicsConnector); physicsConnector.setUpdatePosition(false); body.setActive(false); this.setIgnoreUpdate(true); bulletsPool.recyclePoolItem(this); } } in onUpdate method of PhysicsConnector i executes die method, when sprite leaves screen physicsConnector = new PhysicsConnector(this,body,true,false) { @Override public void onUpdate(final float pSecondsElapsed) { super.onUpdate(pSecondsElapsed); if (!camera.isRectangularShapeVisible(_bullet)) { Log.d("bulletDie","Dead?"); _bullet.die(); } } }; it works as i expected, but _bullet.die() executes TWICE. what i`m doing wrong and is it right way to hide sprites? here is full code of Bullet class (it is inner class of class that represents player) private class Bullet extends Sprite implements PhysicsConstants { private final Body body; private final PhysicsConnector physicsConnector; private final Bullet _bullet; private int id; public Bullet(float x, float y, ITextureRegion texture, VertexBufferObjectManager vertexBufferObjectManager) { super(x,y,texture,vertexBufferObjectManager); _bullet = this; id = bulletId++; body = PhysicsFactory.createCircleBody(mPhysicsWorld, this, BodyDef.BodyType.DynamicBody, bulletFixture); physicsConnector = new PhysicsConnector(this,body,true,false) { @Override public void onUpdate(final float pSecondsElapsed) { super.onUpdate(pSecondsElapsed); if (!camera.isRectangularShapeVisible(_bullet)) { Log.d("bulletDie","Dead?"); Log.d("bulletDie",id+""); _bullet.die(); } } }; mPhysicsWorld.registerPhysicsConnector(physicsConnector); $this.getParent().attachChild(this); } public void reset() { final float angle = canon.getRotation(); final float x = (float) ((Math.cos(MathUtils.degToRad(angle))*radius) + centerX) / PIXEL_TO_METER_RATIO_DEFAULT; final float y = (float) ((Math.sin(MathUtils.degToRad(angle))*radius) + centerY) / PIXEL_TO_METER_RATIO_DEFAULT; this.setVisible(true); this.setIgnoreUpdate(false); body.setActive(true); mPhysicsWorld.registerPhysicsConnector(physicsConnector); body.setTransform(new Vector2(x,y),0); } public Body getBody() { return body; } public void setLinearVelocity(Vector2 velocity) { body.setLinearVelocity(velocity); } public void die() { Log.d("bulletDie", "See you in hell!"); if (this.isVisible()) { this.setVisible(false); mPhysicsWorld.unregisterPhysicsConnector(physicsConnector); physicsConnector.setUpdatePosition(false); body.setActive(false); this.setIgnoreUpdate(true); bulletsPool.recyclePoolItem(this); } } }

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• links for 2011-03-08

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Empowered Business "Someone needs to be the enterprise parent that asks the question, “do you really need that?” It may be a shiny new thing, but does it make a difference in the ability to accomplish the strategy and goals?" - Enterprise Architect Todd Biske (tags: enterprisearchitecture) Knowledge Workers in the British Raj "While we’ve used technology to change business, business has also evolved to the point that it’s changing how we think about and use technology." - Peter Evans Greenwood (tags: enterprisearchitecture enterprise2.0) Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: OTN Developer Day Boston 2011 - Slides & Trip Report Arun Gupta shares slides from his Developer Day presentations. (tags: oracle otn java) Use WLST to Delete All JMS Messages From a Destination (James Bayer's Blog) James Bayer responds to a question. (tags: oracle otn weblogic jms) Triangle Circle Square: Apex in the Amazon Cloud Scott Wesley shares several links to resources covering Oracle Apex on an Amazon EC2 instance. (tags: oracle apex ec2 amazon cloud) William Vambenepe: Reading IBM's proposed standard for Cloud Architecture The always entertaining William Vambenepe gives IBM's proposed Cloud standards the full Ebert. (tags: oracle cloud ibm standards) Government Information Group Cloud Computing Research Study "The twin pressures of reduced budgets and the need for greater efficiency have led the federal government to strongly promote cloud computing as a solution whenever possible." (tags: cloudcomputing cloud) The Ron Batra Blog: Technology Whispers: Top 10 Reasons to go ExaData "Continuing my exploration of ExaData, I thought I'd take a minute to consolidate my thoughts into key reasons for which Oracle ExaData could be a good fit for your needs." - Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra (tags: oracle oracleace exadata) Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups (Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blog) "The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups." (tags: oracle webcenter enterprise2.0) Antonio Romero: Great Discussion of ETL and ELT Tooling in TDWI Linkedin Group Antonio says: "There’s a great discussion of ETL and ELT tooling going on in the official TDWI Linkedin group, under the heading 'How Sustainable is SQL for ETL?' It delves into a wide range of topics." (tags: oracle linkedin etl elt) YouTube - Bunny Inc. - Episode 1. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Executive Manager Yes, it's a commercial. But it's well done and it's funny. (tags: e20 enterprise2.0 webcenter) Markus Eisele: Both Weblogic and Glassfish are strategic products for Oracle Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele shares selected quotes pulled from the recent TechCast Live interview with Oracle's Anil Gaur and Adam Leftik (tags: oracle java weblogic glassfish) How to become an Oracle SOA expert? (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jurgan Kress shares info and links for those interested in capitalizing on SOA. (tags: oracle soa)

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• Mathemagics - 3 consecutive number

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Three Consecutive numbers When I was young and handsome (OK, OK, just young), my father used to challenge us with riddles and tricks involving Logic, Math and general knowledge. Most of the time, at least after reaching the ripe age of 10, I would see thru his tricks in no time. This one is a bit more subtle. I had to think about it for close to an hour and then when I had the ‘AHA!’ effect, I could not understand why it had taken me so long. So here it is. You select a volunteer from the audience (or a shill, but that would be cheating!) and ask him to select three consecutive numbers, all of them 1 or 2 digits. So {1, 2, 3} would be good, albeit trivial set, as would {8, 9, 10} or {97, 98, 99} but not {99, 99, 100} (why?!). Now, using a calculator – and these days almost every phone has a built in calculator – he is to perform these steps: 1.      Select a single digit 2.      Multiply it by 3 and write it down 3.      Add the 3 consecutive numbers 4.      Add the number from step 2 5.      Multiply the sum by 67 6.      Now tell me the last 2 digits of the result and also the number you wrote down in step 2 I will tell you which numbers you selected. How do I do this? I’ll give you the mechanical answer, but because I like you to have the pleasure of an ‘AHA!’ effect, I will not really explain the ‘why’. So let’s you selected 30, 31, and 32 and also that your 3 multiple was 24, so here is what you get 30 + 31 + 32 = 93 93 + 24 = 117 117 x 67 = 7839, last 2 digits are 39, so you say “the last 2 digits are 39, and the other number is 24.” Now, I divide 24 by 3 getting 8. I subtract 8 from 39 and get 31. I then subtract 1 from this getting 30, and say: “You selected 30, 31, and 32.” This is the ‘how’. I leave the ‘why’ to you! That’s all folks! PS do you really want to know why? Post a feedback below. When 11 people or more will have asked for it, I’ll add a link to the full explanation.

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• Finding the XPath with the node name

  - by julien.schneider(at)oracle.com

  A function that i find missing is to get the Xpath expression of a node. For example, suppose i only know the node name <theNode>, i'd like to get its complete path /Where/is/theNode.   Using this rather simple Xquery you can easily get the path to your node. declare namespace orcl = "http://www.oracle.com/weblogic_soa_and_more"; declare function orcl:findXpath($path as element()*) as xs:string { if(local-name($path/..)='') then local-name($path) else concat(orcl:findXpath($path/..),'/',local-name($path)) }; declare function orcl:PathFinder($inputRecord as element(), $path as element()) as element(*) { { for $index in $inputRecord//*[local-name()=$path/text()] return orcl:findXpath($index) } }; declare variable $inputRecord as element() external; declare variable $path as element() external; orcl:PathFinder($inputRecord, $path)   With a path         <myNode>nodeName</myNode>  and a message         <node1><node2><nodeName>test</nodeName></node2></node1>  the result will be         node1/node2/nodeName   This is particularly useful when you use the Validate action of OSB because Validate only returns the xml node which is in error and not the full location itself. The following OSB project reuses this Xquery to reformat the result of the Validate Action. Just send an invalid xml like <myElem http://blogs.oracle.com/weblogic_soa_and_more"http://blogs.oracle.com/weblogic_soa_and_more">      <mySubElem>      </mySubElem></myElem>   you'll get as nice <MessageIsNotValid> <ErrorDetail  nbr="1"> <dataElementhPath>Body/myElem/mySubElem</dataElementhPath> <message> Expected element 'Subelem1@http://blogs.oracle.com/weblogic_soa_and_more' before the end of the content in element mySubElem@http://blogs.oracle.com/weblogic_soa_and_more </message> </ErrorDetail> </MessageIsNotValid>   Download the OSB project : sbconfig_xpath.jar   Enjoy.            

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• Database Developer - October 2013 issue: Download Database 12c and related products

  - by Javier Puerta

  The October issue of the Database Application Developer  newsletter is now available. The focus of this issue is on downloads of Database 12c and related products. (Full newsletter here) Get Ready to Download, Deploy and Develop for Oracle Database 12c This month we're focused on downloads. We've rounded up the top developer releases (both early adopter and BETA releases) and the articles that will help you do more with Oracle 12c. See the technical content that will help you get started. If you're ready...Away we go! — Laura Ramsey, Database and Developer Community, Oracle Technology Network Team FEATURED DOWNLOADS Download: Oracle Database 12c According Tom Kyte, the Oracle 12c version has some of the biggest enhancements to the core database since version 6 - Check it out for yourself. Download: Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 Early Adopter 2 is Here Oracle SQL Developer is a free IDE that simplifies the development and management of Oracle Database. It is a complete end-to-end development platform for your PL/SQL applications that features a worksheet for running queries and scripts, a DBA console for managing the database, a reports interface, a complete data modeling solution and a migration platform for moving your 3rd party databases to Oracle.  If you are interested in checking out this new early adopter version,Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 EA is the place to go. Download: Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application -BETA- The -BETA- is here. The Multitenant self provisioning Application is an easy and productive way for DBAs and Developers to get familiar with powerful PDB features including create, clone, plug and unplug.   No better time to start playing with PDBs. Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application. Download: New! Updates to Oracle Data Integration Portfolio Oracle GoldenGate 12c and Oracle Data Integrator 12c is now available. From Real-Time data integration, transactional change data capture, data replication, transformations....to hi-volume, high-performance batch loads, event-driven, trickle-feed integration process..its now available. Go here all the details and links to downloads...and Congratulations Data Integration Team!. Download: Oracle VM Templates for Oracle 12c Features Support for Single Instance, Oracle Restart and Oracle RAC Support for all current Oracle Database 11.2 versions as well as Oracle 12c on Oracle Linux 5 Update 9 & Oracle Linux 6 Update 4. The Oracle 12c templates allow end-to-end automation for Flex Cluster, Flex ASM and PDBs. See how the Deploycluster tool was updated to support Single Instance and the new Oracle 12c features. Oracle VM Templates for Oracle Database. Download: Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA 3 If you're looking for a datamodeling and database design tool that provides an environment for capturing, modeling, managing and exploiting metadata, it's time to check out Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA V3 is here.

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• Database Developer - October 2013 issue: Download Database 12c and related products

  - by Javier Puerta

  The October issue of the Database Application Developer  newsletter is now available. The focus of this issue is on downloads of Database 12c and related products. (Full newsletter here) Get Ready to Download, Deploy and Develop for Oracle Database 12c This month we're focused on downloads. We've rounded up the top developer releases (both early adopter and BETA releases) and the articles that will help you do more with Oracle 12c. See the technical content that will help you get started. If you're ready...Away we go! — Laura Ramsey, Database and Developer Community, Oracle Technology Network Team FEATURED DOWNLOADS Download: Oracle Database 12c According Tom Kyte, the Oracle 12c version has some of the biggest enhancements to the core database since version 6 - Check it out for yourself. Download: Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 Early Adopter 2 is Here Oracle SQL Developer is a free IDE that simplifies the development and management of Oracle Database. It is a complete end-to-end development platform for your PL/SQL applications that features a worksheet for running queries and scripts, a DBA console for managing the database, a reports interface, a complete data modeling solution and a migration platform for moving your 3rd party databases to Oracle.  If you are interested in checking out this new early adopter version,Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 EA is the place to go. Download: Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application -BETA- The -BETA- is here. The Multitenant self provisioning Application is an easy and productive way for DBAs and Developers to get familiar with powerful PDB features including create, clone, plug and unplug.   No better time to start playing with PDBs. Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application. Download: New! Updates to Oracle Data Integration Portfolio Oracle GoldenGate 12c and Oracle Data Integrator 12c is now available. From Real-Time data integration, transactional change data capture, data replication, transformations....to hi-volume, high-performance batch loads, event-driven, trickle-feed integration process..its now available. Go here all the details and links to downloads...and Congratulations Data Integration Team!. Download: Oracle VM Templates for Oracle 12c Features Support for Single Instance, Oracle Restart and Oracle RAC Support for all current Oracle Database 11.2 versions as well as Oracle 12c on Oracle Linux 5 Update 9 & Oracle Linux 6 Update 4. The Oracle 12c templates allow end-to-end automation for Flex Cluster, Flex ASM and PDBs. See how the Deploycluster tool was updated to support Single Instance and the new Oracle 12c features. Oracle VM Templates for Oracle Database. Download: Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA 3 If you're looking for a datamodeling and database design tool that provides an environment for capturing, modeling, managing and exploiting metadata, it's time to check out Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA V3 is here.

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• Textures do not render on ATI graphics cards?

  - by Mathias Lykkegaard Lorenzen

  I'm rendering textured quads to an orthographic view in XNA through hardware instancing. On Nvidia graphics cards, this all works, tested on 3 machines. On ATI cards, it doesn't work at all, tested on 2 machines. How come? Culling perhaps? My orthographic view is set up like this: Matrix projection = Matrix.CreateOrthographicOffCenter(0, graphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, -graphicsDevice.Viewport.Height, 0, 0, 1); And my elements are rendered with the Z-coordinate 0. Edit: I just figured out something weird. If I do not call this spritebatch code above doing my textured quad rendering code, then it won't work on Nvidia cards either. Could that be due to culling information or something like that? Batch.Instance.SpriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Immediate, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.LinearClamp, DepthStencilState.Default, RasterizerState.CullNone); ... spriteBatch.End(); Edit 2: Here's the full code for my instancing call. public void DrawTextures() { Batch.Instance.SpriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Texture, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.LinearClamp, DepthStencilState.Default, RasterizerState.CullNone, textureEffect); while (texturesToDraw.Count > 0) { TextureJob texture = texturesToDraw.Dequeue(); spriteBatch.Draw(texture.Texture, texture.DestinationRectangle, texture.TintingColor); } spriteBatch.End(); #if !NOTEXTUREINSTANCING // no work to do if (positionInBufferTextured > 0) { device.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; textureEffect.CurrentTechnique = textureEffect.Techniques["Technique1"]; textureEffect.Parameters["Texture"].SetValue(darkTexture); textureEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); if ((textureInstanceBuffer == null) || (positionInBufferTextured > textureInstanceBuffer.VertexCount)) { if (textureInstanceBuffer != null) textureInstanceBuffer.Dispose(); textureInstanceBuffer = new DynamicVertexBuffer(device, texturedInstanceVertexDeclaration, positionInBufferTextured, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); } if (positionInBufferTextured > 0) { textureInstanceBuffer.SetData(texturedInstances, 0, positionInBufferTextured, SetDataOptions.Discard); } device.Indices = textureIndexBuffer; device.SetVertexBuffers(textureGeometryBuffer, new VertexBufferBinding(textureInstanceBuffer, 0, 1)); device.DrawInstancedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleStrip, 0, 0, textureGeometryBuffer.VertexCount, 0, 2, positionInBufferTextured); // now that we've drawn, it's ok to reset positionInBuffer back to zero, // and write over any vertices that may have been set previously. positionInBufferTextured = 0; } #endif }

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• Workaround: XNA 4 importing only part of 3d model from FBX

  - by Vitus

  Recently I found a problem with importing 3D models from FBX files: it sometimes imported partly. That is when you draw a 3D model, loaded from FBX file, processed by content pipeline, you got only part of meshes. “Sometimes” means that you got this error only for some files. Results of my research below. For example, I have 10Mb binary FBX file with a model, looks like: And when I load it, result Model instance contains only part of meshes and looks like: Because models from other files imported normally, I think that it’s a “bad format” file. When you add FBX file to your XNA Content project and build it, imported file processing by XNA Fbx Importer & Processor. On MSDN I found that FbxImporter designed to work with 2006.11 version of FBX format. My file is FBX 2012 format. Ok, I need to convert it to 2006 format. It can be done by using Autodesk FBX Converter 2012.1. I tried to convert it to other versions of FBX formats, but without success. And I also tried to import my FBX file to 3D MAX, and it imported correctly. Then I export model using 3D MAX, and it generate me other FBX, which I add to my XNA project. After that I got full model, that rendered well! So, internal data structure of FBX file is more important for right XNA import, than it version! Unfortunately, Autodesk FBX is not an open file format. If you want to work with FBX, you should use Autodesk FBX SDK. This way you can manually read content of FBX file, and use it everyway. Then I tried to convert my source FBX file to DAE Collada, and result DAE file back to FBX, using FBX Converter (FBX –> DAE –> FBX). The result FBX file can be imported normally.   Conclusion: XNA FbxImporter correct work doesn't depend on version (2006, 2011, etc) and form (binary, ascii) of FBX file. Internal FBX data structure much more important. To make FBX "readable" for XNA Importer you can use double conversion like FBX -> Collada -> FBX You also can use FBX SDK to manually load data from FBX P.S. Autodesk FBX Converter 2012 is more, than simple converter. It provide you tools like: FBX Explorer, which show you structure of FBX file; FBX Viewer, which render content of FBX and provide basic intercation like model move and zoom; FBX Take Manager, which allow to work with embedded animations

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• Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

  - by Rick Strahl

  originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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• Am I experienced enough to learn and develop immediately using Ruby on Rails?

  - by acheong87

  General Question I understand that discussions revolving around questions of this form run the risk of becoming too specific to help others. So, perhaps a better, general question would be: What kind of experience, if any, translates easily to Ruby on Rails; and if none, then what's the learning curve like, in comparison to other popular languages? Background I have the opportunity to build a website using whatever technologies I wish to use. It's a fairly simple website, for listing products, taking payments, managing customer data, providing a back-end portal for employees to manage data, possibly hooking in flight information (the products are travel related), possibly integrating a blog and all the social-networking goodies. Specific Problem I have to let the client know by tonight whether I'm interested in taking up this project, before he talks to other potential developers, but I'm on the fence. I already work a full-time C++ development job, so the money doesn't do it for me. It's the opportunity to (be paid to) learn some new technologies and to have a real, running product in the end. I've heard and read great things about Ruby, and am really intrigued. I zipped through some introductory Ruby tutorials, no sweat. However I found the Rails tutorials a little overwhelming, especially not being able to try it out anywhere. And researching Rails hosts like Heroku and EngineYard makes me think that maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into. The ship's leaving port! I wish I had more time to learn, better yet play with the language, but I have to decide soon! Should I venture or pass? Additional Details My experiences are in C/C++/Tcl/Perl/PHP/jQuery, and basic knowledge of Java/C#. I didn't study C.S. formally so I wasn't exposed to design principles, programming paradigms, etc., which is my greatest concern. Will my lack of understanding in this realm make RoR frustrating to learn? Will it be so incompatible with a C++ "way" of thinking that I'll wish I never started? Am I putting my client at risk by attempting this? If it helps, I'm quick to learn new things (self-taught so far) and care a great deal about correctness, using things for their intended purposes, and so on. I've read numerous recommendations of Agile Development with Rails and would love to read it (though perhaps, while developing in parallel, for shortness of time). Worse comes to worst, I'd give up and do the standard LAMP gig, of course, not charging the client for wasted time. But I'm hoping to avoid the project altogether if it's gonna come down to that! Thanks in advance for any tips, insights, votes of confidence, votes of discouragement (for the better), and such.

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• Excel Solver vs Solver Foundation

  - by JoshReuben

  I recently read a book http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Engineering-Cookbook-Cookbooks-OReilly/dp/0596008791/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296593374&sr=8-1 - the Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook.     The 2 main tools that this book leveraged were the Data Analysis Pack and Excel Solver. I had previously been aquanted with Microsoft Solver Foundation - this is a full fledged API for solving optimization problems, and went beyond being a mere Excel plugin - it exposed a C# programmatic interface for in process and a web service interface for out of process integration. were they the same? apparently not!   2 different solver frameworks for Excel: http://www.solver.com/index.html http://www.solverfoundation.com/ I contacted both vendors to get their perspectives.   Heres what the Excel Solver guys had to say:   "The Solver Foundation requires you to learn and use a very specific modeling language (OML). The Excel solver allows you to formulate your optimization problems without learning any new language simply by entering the formulas into cells on the Excel spreadsheet, something that nearly everyone is already familiar with doing.   The Excel Solver also allows you to seamlessly upgrade to products that combine Monte Carlo Simulation capabilities (our Risk Solver Premium and Risk Solver Platform products) which allow you to include uncertainty into your models when appropriate.   Our advanced Excel Solver Products also have a number of built in reporting tools for advanced analysis of the your model and it's results"           And Heres what the Microsoft Solver Foundation guys had to say:   "  With the release of Solver Foundation 3.0, Solver Foundation has the same kinds of solvers (plus a few more) than what is found in Excel Solver. I think there are two main differences:   1.      Problems are described differently. In Excel Solver the goals and constraints are specified inside the spreadsheet, in formulas. In Solver Foundation they are described either in .Net code that uses the Solver Foundation Services API, or using the OML modeling language in Excel. 2.      Solver Foundation’s primary strength is on solving large linear, mixed integer, and constraint models. That is, models that contain arbitrary nonlinear functions (such as trig functions, IF(), powers, etc) are handled a bit better by the Excel Solver at this point. "

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• Silverlight Cream for November 26, 2011 -- #1175

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Manas Patnaik, Jeff Blankenburg, Doug Mair, Jon Galloway, Richard Bartholomew, Peter Bromberg, Joel Reyes, Zeben Chen, Navneet Gupta, and Cathy Sullivan. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using ASP.NET PageMethods With Silverlight" Peter Bromberg WP7: "Leveraging Background Services and Agents in Windows Phone 7 (Mango)" Jon Galloway Metro/WinRT/Windows8: "Debugging Contracts using Windows Simulator" Cathy Sullivan LightSwitch: "LightSwitch: It Is About The Money (It Is Always About The Money)" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com:LightSwitch: It Is About The Money (It Is Always About The Money)Michael Washington has a very nice post up about LightSwitch apps in general and his opinion about the future use... based on what he and I have been up to, I tend to agree on all counts!Accessing Controls from DataGrid ColumnHeader – SilverlightManas Patnaik's latest post is about using the VisualTreeHelper class to iterate through the visual tree to find the controls you need ... including sample code31 Days of Mango | Day #18: Using Sample DataJeff Blankenburg's Day 18 in his 31-Day Mango quest is on Sample Data using Expression Blend, and he begins with great links to his other Blend posts followed by a nice sample data tutorial and source31 Days of Mango | Day #19: Tilt EffectsDoug Mair returns to the reigns of Jeff's 31-Days series with number 19 which is all about Tilt Effects ... as seen in the Phone application when you select a user... Doug shows how to add this effect to your appLeveraging Background Services and Agents in Windows Phone 7 (Mango)Jon Galloway has a WP7 post up discussing Background Services and how they all fit together... he's got a great diagram of that as an overview then really nice discussion of each followed up by his slides from DevConnections, and codeNetflix on Windows 8This one isn't C#/XAML, but Richard Bartholomew has a Netflix on Windows 8 app running that bears noticeUsing ASP.NET PageMethods With SilverlightPeter Bromberg has a post up demonstrating calling PageMethods from a Silverlight app using the ScriptManager controlAWESOME Windows Phone Power ToolJoel Reyes announced the release of a full-featured tool for side-loading apps to your WP7 device... available at codeplexMicrosoft Windows Simulator Rotation and Resolution EmulationZeben Chen discusses the Windows 8 Simulator a bit deeper with this code-laden post showing how to look at roation and orientation-aware apps and resolution.First look at Windows SimulatorNavneet Gupta has a great into post to using the simulator in VS2011 for Windows 8 apps. Four things you really need this for: Touch Emulation, Rotation, Different target resolutions, and ContractsDebugging Contracts using Windows SimulatorCathy Sullivan shows how to debug W8 Contracts in VS2011... why you ask? because when you hit one in the debugger, the target app disappears.. but enter the simulator... check it outStay in the 'Light!Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCreamJoin me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User GroupTechnorati Tags:Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows PhoneMIX10

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• Projected Results: Sound project management practices, combined with a complete technology platform, have an immediate and lasting impact on an organization’s bottom line.

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Article By: Alan Joch, is a business and technology writer who specializes in enterprise applications, cloud computing, mobile computing, and the Web. It’s no secret that complex, large-scale projects need close management controls to ensure that they’re delivered on time and on budget. But now there’s growing evidence that failing to meet these goals can have far-reaching consequences, not only for the reputations and value of individual organizations but also for the tenure of their top executives. Government watchdogs forced one large contractor to suspend a multibillion-dollar defense program—and delay payment receipts—until a better management system was launched to more accurately track spending, project milestones, and other fundamental metrics. Significant delays in the opening of the £4.3 billion Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport impaired an airline’s operations and contributed to a drop in its share prices. These real-world examples are noteworthy because of the huge financial risks they created. They’re also far from being isolated cases. Research by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that only 11 percent of companies claimed they delivered expected ROI on major capital projects 90 percent of the time or more. In addition, 12 percent of respondents said they achieved planned ROI less than half the time. According to Phil Thornton, lead consultant at the analyst firm Clarity Economics, the numbers demonstrate obvious challenges related to managing risks, accurately predicting ROI, and consistently delivering bottom-line growth for major capital investments “Portfolio management is a path to improve your organization’s competitive advantage. It helps make sure your organization is investing in the right things and not spending its time on things that are not delivering the intended results for the firm.” Read the full article here

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• How to Assign a Default Signature in Outlook 2013

  - by Lori Kaufman

  If you sign most of your emails the same way, you can easily specify a default signature to automatically insert into new email messages and replies and forwards. This can be done directly in the Signature editor in Outlook 2013. We recently showed you how to create a new signature. You can also create multiple signatures for each email account and define a different default signature for each account. When you change your sending account when composing a new email message, the signature would change automatically as well. NOTE: To have a signature added automatically to new email messages and replies and forwards, you must have a default signature assigned in each email account. If you don’t want a signature in every account, you can create a signature with just a space, a full stop, dashes, or other generic characters. To assign a default signature, open Outlook and click the File tab. Click Options in the menu list on the left side of the Account Information screen. On the Outlook Options dialog box, click Mail in the list of options on the left side of the dialog box. On the Mail screen, click Signatures in the Compose messages section. To change the default signature for an email account, select the account from the E-mail account drop-down list on the top, right side of the dialog box under Choose default signature. Then, select the signature you want to use by default for New messages and for Replies/forwards from the other two drop-down lists. Click OK to accept your changes and close the dialog box. Click OK on the Outlook Options dialog box to close it. You can also access the Signatures and Stationery dialog box from the Message window for new emails and drafts. Click New Email on the Home tab or double-click an email in the Drafts folder to access the Message window. Click Signature in the Include section of the New Mail Message window and select Signatures from the drop-down menu. In the next few days, we will be covering how to use the features of the signature editor next, and then how to insert and change signatures manually, backup and restore your signatures, and modify a signature for use in plain text emails.     

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• Qt's future in the light of Nokia-Microsoft partnership

  - by Shinnok

  In case you missed it, a lot has happened in the last two day that could potentially impact the Qt framework, for the worse. :-( It will impact the mobile sector in several and probably not currently acknowledged ways, for sure. It started yesterday with Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop internal letter depicting Nokia sitting on a burning platform and the need for a big and aggressive shift in business. A day later, at the Nokia World conference, Nokia announced the partnership with Microsoft , which at the moment resumes to Nokia adopting the Windows Phone 7 platform and development environment, dumping Symbian along the road and tagging Meego as R&D(a pretty dangerous keyword if you ask me), as for Maemo/N900 series i guess it's bye bye for good. I know what you're thinking but no, Qt is not going to be ported to the Window Phone platform. And i'm also scared about this. You can watch the Elop & Ballmer joint press release here. Now after reading this huge thread on the Qt-interest mailing list i can't help but wonder, what is the future of Qt at Nokia, now that they aren't focused(at all?) on Qt anymore(remember the full focus switch on Qt as main development framework for all Nokia products(including Symbian, yes) back in October?). I love Qt, in my opinion it is the only true cross-platform application development framework and one of the few to make C++ development a joy(to the extent possible) and good things has happened to the framework and considerable momentum while under Nokia, thus i am wondering, what are the chances that Qt might suffer a slow death at Nokia after this? Yes i know about KDE.org and the fact that Qt is easily spawnable, but i still feel uneasy. It also must be horrible for all of the efforts either by Nokia employees or third parties that have gone into Symbian and all of the Ovi Store Symbian/Qt content and business and why not, Maemo/Meego. There are also massive layouts planned, i suspect Symbian techs and Qt? I'd love to hear your input on this? Is Qt future safe&proof? LE: The question as been gradually revised, improved and better referenced, thus you might want to throw a quick re-read to see what you might have missed.

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• Cool Enhancements Everyone Can Enjoy

  - by Ruth

  With Release 17, we have a few visual and functional enhancements that make using CRM On Demand that much better for us all. I'll mention a few here, but to get the full outline of these upgrades, I recommend taking 10 minutes to view the Release 17 Usability Transfer of Information course. First and foremost, I find the ability to customize your theme (or skin) pretty cool, but I've said that before. Take a look at the Selecting Your Theme and the Themes - Create Your CRM Style blog articles for more information. My next favorite is the resizeable user interface (UI). CRM On Demand will dynamically fit the device and screen resolution you're using, which includes the resizing of fields, field editors and pop-ups. If you have a wide screen like me, you should appreciate that one very much. To make it easier to see that resized UI, the detail pages got a little face lift. New horizontal lines and other subtle changes make those pages easier to read. Also, those things you need to know, like error messages and inline help are highlighted with a little icon to show the message type. You may not think every change to the detail pages are particularly exciting, but I'm sure you'll enjoy the new Head Up Display, which saves you scrolling time by adding links to related information sections. I like that the head up display travels with me as I move up and down the page...it's like a little friend that takes me where I want to go as fast as possible. You may also really like the fact that the copy record feature is now available for all record types from both detail pages and lists. Your company administrator can choose which fields get copied, so you can maximize your efficiency when creating new records. Lists also got a face lift. Alternating colors in rows make it easier to see your data. Also, the Favorite Lists icon is now on the list itself, so you can save your most useful lists with one click. If you've ever tried to create a new list with 10 columns or more, you'll be happy to hear that the maximum number of columns in a list has increased from 9 to 20. This is great news, but doesn't mean you should include the kitchen sink in your list...excess columns can slow list performance. So choose your columns wisely. Again, these are just a few of my favorite things. Let us know what you think about the new usability features. What are your favorite things?

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