Search Results

Search found 11734 results on 470 pages for 'refer to itself'.

Page 445/470 | < Previous Page | 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452  | Next Page >

• Using Lightbox with _Screen

  Although, I have to admit that I discovered Bernard Bout's ideas and concepts about implementing a lightbox in Visual FoxPro quite a while ago, there was no "spare" time in active projects that allowed me to have a closer look into his solution(s). Luckily, these days I received a demand to focus a little bit more on this. This article describes the steps about how to integrate and make use of Bernard's lightbox class in combination with _Screen in Visual FoxPro. The requirement in this project was to be able to visually lock the whole application (_Screen area) and guide the user to an information that should not be ignored easily. Depending on the importance any current user activity should be interrupted and focus put onto the notification. Getting the "meat", eh, source code Please check out Bernard's blog on Foxite directly in order to get the latest and greatest version. As time of writing this article I use version 6.0 as described in this blog entry: The Fastest Lightbox Ever The Lightbox class is sub-classed from the imgCanvas class from the GdiPlusX project on VFPx and therefore you need to have the source code of GdiPlusX as well, and integrate it into your development environment. The version I use is available here: Release GDIPlusX 1.20 As soon as you open the bbGdiLightbox class the first it, VFP might ask you to update the reference to the gdiplusx.vcx. As we have the sources, no problem and you have access to Bernard's code. The class itself is pretty easy to understand, some properties that you do not need to change and three methods: Setup(), ShowLightbox() and BeforeDraw() The challenge - _Screen or not? Reading Bernard's article about the fastest lightbox ever, he states the following: "The class will only work on a form. It will not support any other containers" Really? And what about _Screen? Isn't that a form class, too? Yes, of course it is but nonetheless trying to use _Screen directly will fail. Well, let's have look at the code to see why: WITH This .Left = 0 .Top = 0 .Height = ThisForm.Height .Width = ThisForm.Width .ZOrder(0) .Visible = .F.ENDWITH During the setup of the lightbox as well as while capturing the image as replacement for your forms and controls, the object reference Thisform is used. Which is a little bit restrictive to my opinion but let's continue. The second issue lies in the method ShowLightbox() and introduced by the call of .Bitmap.FromScreen(): Lparameters tlVisiblilty* tlVisiblilty - show or hide (T/F)* grab a screen dump with controlsIF tlVisiblilty Local loCaptureBmp As xfcBitmap Local lnTitleHeight, lnLeftBorder, lnTopBorder, lcImage, loImage lnTitleHeight = IIF(ThisForm.TitleBar = 1,Sysmetric(9),0) lnLeftBorder = IIF(ThisForm.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(3)) lnTopBorder = IIF(ThisForm.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(4)) With _Screen.System.Drawing loCaptureBmp = .Bitmap.FromScreen(ThisForm.HWnd,; lnLeftBorder,; lnTopBorder+lnTitleHeight,; ThisForm.Width ,; ThisForm.Height) ENDWITH * save it to a property This.capturebmp = loCaptureBmp ThisForm.SetAll("Visible",.F.) This.DraW() This.Visible = .T.ELSE ThisForm.SetAll("Visible",.T.) This.Visible = .F.ENDIF My first trials in using the class ended in an exception - GdiPlusError:OutOfMemory - thrown by the Bitmap object. Frankly speaking, this happened mainly because of my lack of knowledge about GdiPlusX. After reading some documentation, especially about the FromScreen() method I experimented a little bit. Capturing the visible area of _Screen actually was not the real problem but the dimensions I specified for the bitmap. The modifications - step by step First of all, it is to get rid of restrictive object references on Thisform and to change them into either This.Parent or more generic into This.oForm (even better: This.oControl). The Lightbox.Setup() method now sets the necessary object reference like so: *====================================================================* Initial setup* Default value: This.oControl = "This.Parent"* Alternative: This.oControl = "_Screen"*====================================================================With This .oControl = Evaluate(.oControl) If Vartype(.oControl) == T_OBJECT .Anchor = 0 .Left = 0 .Top = 0 .Width = .oControl.Width .Height = .oControl.Height .Anchor = 15 .ZOrder(0) .Visible = .F. EndIfEndwith Also, based on other developers' comments in Bernard articles on his lightbox concept and evolution I found the source code to handle the differences between a form and _Screen and goes into Lightbox.ShowLightbox() like this: *====================================================================* tlVisibility - show or hide (T/F)* grab a screen dump with controls*====================================================================Lparameters tlVisibility Local loControl m.loControl = This.oControl If m.tlVisibility Local loCaptureBmp As xfcBitmap Local lnTitleHeight, lnLeftBorder, lnTopBorder, lcImage, loImage lnTitleHeight = Iif(m.loControl.TitleBar = 1,Sysmetric(9),0) lnLeftBorder = Iif(m.loControl.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(3)) lnTopBorder = Iif(m.loControl.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(4)) With _Screen.System.Drawing If Upper(m.loControl.Name) == Upper("Screen") loCaptureBmp = .Bitmap.FromScreen(m.loControl.HWnd) Else loCaptureBmp = .Bitmap.FromScreen(m.loControl.HWnd,; lnLeftBorder,; lnTopBorder+lnTitleHeight,; m.loControl.Width ,; m.loControl.Height) EndIf Endwith * save it to a property This.CaptureBmp = loCaptureBmp m.loControl.SetAll("Visible",.F.) This.Draw() This.Visible = .T. Else This.CaptureBmp = .Null. m.loControl.SetAll("Visible",.T.) This.Visible = .F. Endif {loadposition content_adsense} Are we done? Almost... Although, Bernard says it clearly in his article: "Just drop the class on a form and call it as shown." It did not come clear to my mind in the first place with _Screen, but, yeah, he is right. Dropping the class on a form provides a permanent link between those two classes, it creates a valid This.Parent object reference. Bearing in mind that the lightbox class can not be "dropped" on the _Screen, we have to create the same type of binding during runtime execution like so: *====================================================================* Create global lightbox component*==================================================================== Local llOk, loException As Exception m.llOk = .F. m.loException = .Null. If Not Vartype(_Screen.Lightbox) == "O" Try _Screen.AddObject("Lightbox", "bbGdiLightbox") Catch To m.loException Assert .F. Message m.loException.Message EndTry EndIf m.llOk = (Vartype(_Screen.Lightbox) == "O")Return m.llOk Through runtime instantiation we create a valid binding to This.Parent in the lightbox object and the code works as expected with _Screen. Ease your life: Use properties instead of constants Having a closer look at the BeforeDraw() method might wet your appetite to simplify the code a little bit. Looking at the sample screenshots in Bernard's article you see several forms in different colors. This got me to modify the code like so: *====================================================================* Apply the actual lightbox effect on the captured bitmap.*====================================================================If Vartype(This.CaptureBmp) == T_OBJECT Local loGfx As xfcGraphics loGfx = This.oGfx With _Screen.System.Drawing loGfx.DrawImage(This.CaptureBmp,This.Rectangle,This.Rectangle,.GraphicsUnit.Pixel) * change the colours as needed here * possible colours are (220,128,0,0),(220,0,0,128) etc. loBrush = .SolidBrush.New(.Color.FromArgb( ; This.Opacity, .Color.FromRGB(This.BorderColor))) loGfx.FillRectangle(loBrush,This.Rectangle) EndwithEndif Create an additional property Opacity to specify the grade of translucency you would like to have without the need to change the code in each instance of the class. This way you only need to change the values of Opacity and BorderColor to tweak the appearance of your lightbox. This could be quite helpful to signalize different levels of importance (ie. green, yellow, orange, red, etc...) of notifications to the users of the application. Final thoughts Using the lightbox concept in combination with _Screen instead of forms is possible. Already Jim Wiggins comments in Bernard's article to loop through the _Screen.Forms collection in order to cascade the lightbox visibility to all active forms. Good idea. But honestly, I believe that instead of looping all forms one could use _Screen.SetAll("ShowLightbox", .T./.F., "Form") with Form.ShowLightbox_Access method to gain more speed. The modifications described above might provide even more features to your applications while consuming less resources and performance. Additionally, the restrictions to capture only forms does not exist anymore. Using _Screen you are able to capture and cover anything. The captured area of _Screen does not include any toolbars, docked windows, or menus. Therefore, it is advised to take this concept on a higher level and to combine it with additional classes that handle the state of toolbars, docked windows and menus. Which I did for the customer's project.

  Read the article

• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

  Read the article

• Documenting C# Library using GhostDoc and SandCastle

  - by sreejukg

  Documentation is an essential part of any IT project, especially when you are creating reusable components that will be used by other developers (such as class libraries). Without documentation re-using a class library is almost impossible. Just think of coding .net applications without MSDN documentation (Ooops I can’t think of it). Normally developers, who know the bits and pieces of their classes, see this as a boring work to write details again to generate the documentation. Also the amount of work to make this and manage it changes made the process of manual creation of Documentation impossible or tedious. So what is the effective solution? Let me divide this into two steps 1. Generate comments for your code while you are writing the code. 2. Create documentation file using these comments. Now I am going to examine these processes. Step 1: Generate XML Comments automatically Most of the developers write comments for their code. The best thing is that the comments will be entered during the development process. Additionally comments give a good reference to the code, make your code more manageable/readable. Later these comments can be converted into documentation, along with your source code by identifying properties and methods I found an add-in for visual studio, GhostDoc that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. The add-in is available in Visual Studio Gallery at MSDN. You can download this from the url http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/46A20578-F0D5-4B1E-B55D-F001A6345748. I downloaded the free version from the above url. The free version suits my requirement. There is a professional version (you need to pay some $ for this) available that gives you some more features. I found the free version itself suits my requirements. The installation process is straight forward. A couple of clicks will do the work for you. The best thing with GhostDoc is that it supports multiple versions of visual studio such as 2005, 2008 and 2010. After Installing GhostDoc, when you start Visual studio, the GhostDoc configuration dialog will appear. The first screen asks you to assign a hot key, pressing this hotkey will enter the comment to your code file with the necessary structure required by GhostDoc. Click Assign to go to the next step where you configure the rules for generating the documentation from the code file. Click Create to start creating the rules. Click finish button to close this wizard. Now you performed the necessary configuration required by GhostDoc. Now In Visual Studio tools menu you can find the GhostDoc that gives you some options. Now let us examine how GhostDoc generate comments for a method. I have write the below code in my code behind file. public Char GetChar(string str, int pos) { return str[pos]; } Now I need to generate the comments for this function. Select the function and enter the hot key assigned during the configuration. GhostDoc will generate the comments as follows. /// <summary> /// Gets the char. /// </summary> /// <param name="str">The STR.</param> /// <param name="pos">The pos.</param> /// <returns></returns> public Char GetChar(string str, int pos) { return str[pos]; } So this is a very handy tool that helps developers writing comments easily. You can generate the xml documentation file separately while compiling the project. This will be done by the C# compiler. You can enable the xml documentation creation option (checkbox) under Project properties -> Build tab. Now when you compile, the xml file will created under the bin folder. Step 2: Generate the documentation from the XML file Now you have generated the xml file documentation. Sandcastle is the tool from Microsoft that generates MSDN style documentation from the compiler produced XML file. The project is available in codeplex http://sandcastle.codeplex.com/. Download and install Sandcastle to your computer. Sandcastle is a command line tool that doesn’t have a rich GUI. If you want to automate the documentation generation, definitely you will be using the command line tools. Since I want to generate the documentation from the xml file generated in the previous step, I was expecting a GUI where I can see the options. There is a GUI available for Sandcastle called Sandcastle Help File Builder. See the link to the project in codeplex. http://www.codeplex.com/wikipage?ProjectName=SHFB. You need to install Sandcastle and then the Sandcastle Help file builder. From here I assume that you have installed both sandcastle and Sandcastle help file builder successfully. Once you installed the help file builder, it will be available in your all programs list. Click on the Sandcastle Help File Builder GUI, will launch application. First you need to create a project. Click on File -> New project The New project dialog will appear. Choose a folder to store your project file and give a name for your documentation project. Click the save button. Now you will see your project properties. Now from the Project explorer, right click on the Documentation Sources, Click on the Add Documentation Source link. A documentation source is a file such as an assembly or a Visual Studio solution or project from which information will be extracted to produce API documentation. From the Add Documentation source dialog, I have selected the XML file generated by my project. Once you add the xml file to the project, you will see the dll file automatically added by the help file builder. Now click on the build button. Now the application will generate the help file. The Build window gives to the result of each steps. Once the process completed successfully, you will have the following output in the build window. Now navigate to your Help Project (I have selected the folder My Documents\Documentation), inside help folder, you can find the chm file. Open the chm file will give you MSDN like documentation. Documentation is an important part of development life cycle. Sandcastle with GhostDoc make this process easier so that developers can implement the documentation in the projects with simple to use steps.

  Read the article

• Using the BAM Interceptor with Continuation

  - by Charles Young

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2014/06/02/using-the-bam-interceptor-with-continuation.aspxI’ve recently been resurrecting some code written several years ago that makes extensive use of the BAM Interceptor provided as part of BizTalk Server’s BAM event observation library.  In doing this, I noticed an issue with continuations.  Essentially, whenever I tried to configure one or more continuations for an activity, the BAM Interceptor failed to complete the activity correctly.   Careful inspection of my code confirmed that I was initializing and invoking the BAM interceptor correctly, so I was mystified.  However, I eventually found the problem.  It is a logical error in the BAM Interceptor code itself. The BAM Interceptor provides a useful mechanism for implementing dynamic tracking.  It supports configurable ‘track points’.  These are grouped into named ‘locations’.  BAM uses the term ‘step’ as a synonym for ‘location’.   Each track point defines a BAM action such as starting an activity, extracting a data item, enabling a continuation, etc.  Each step defines a collection of track points. Understanding Steps The BAM Interceptor provides an abstract model for handling configuration of steps.  It doesn’t, however, define any specific configuration mechanism (e.g., config files, SSO, etc.)  It is up to the developer to decide how to store, manage and retrieve configuration data.  At run time, this configuration is used to register track points which then drive the BAM Interceptor. The full semantics of a step are not immediately clear from Microsoft’s documentation.  They represent a point in a business activity where BAM tracking occurs.  They are named locations in the code.  What is less obvious is that they always represent either the full tracking work for a given activity or a discrete fragment of that work which commences with the start of a new activity or the continuation of an existing activity.  The BAM Interceptor enforces this by throwing an error if no ‘start new’ or ‘continue’ track point is registered for a named location. This constraint implies that each step must marked with an ‘end activity’ track point.  One of the peculiarities of BAM semantics is that when an activity is continued under a correlated ID, you must first mark the current activity as ‘ended’ in order to ensure the right housekeeping is done in the database.  If you re-start an ended activity under the same ID, you will leave the BAM import tables in an inconsistent state.  A step, therefore, always represents an entire unit of work for a given activity or continuation ID.  For activities with continuation, each unit of work is termed a ‘fragment’. Instance and Fragment State Internally, the BAM Interceptor maintains state data at two levels.  First, it represents the overall state of the activity using a ‘trace instance’ token.  This token contains the name and ID of the activity together with a couple of state flags.  The second level of state represents a ‘trace fragment’.   As we have seen, a fragment of an activity corresponds directly to the notion of a ‘step’.  It is the unit of work done at a named location, and it must be bounded by start and end, or continue and end, actions. When handling continuations, the BAM Interceptor differentiates between ‘root’ fragments and other fragments.  Very simply, a root fragment represents the start of an activity.  Other fragments represent continuations.  This is where the logic breaks down.  The BAM Interceptor loses state integrity for root fragments when continuations are defined. Initialization Microsoft’s BAM Interceptor code supports the initialization of BAM Interceptors from track point configuration data.  The process starts by populating an Activity Interceptor Configuration object with an array of track points.  These can belong to different steps (aka ‘locations’) and can be registered in any order.  Once it is populated with track points, the Activity Interceptor Configuration is used to initialise the BAM Interceptor.  The BAM Interceptor sets up a hash table of array lists.  Each step is represented by an array list, and each array list contains an ordered set of track points.  The BAM Interceptor represents track points as ‘executable’ components.  When the OnStep method of the BAM Interceptor is called for a given step, the corresponding list of track points is retrieved and each track point is executed in turn.  Each track point retrieves any required data using a call back mechanism and then serializes a BAM trace fragment object representing a specific action (e.g., start, update, enable continuation, stop, etc.).  The serialised trace fragment is then handed off to a BAM event stream (buffered or direct) which takes the appropriate action. The Root of the Problem The logic breaks down in the Activity Interceptor Configuration.  Each Activity Interceptor Configuration is initialised with an instance of a ‘trace instance’ token.  This provides the basic metadata for the activity as a whole.  It contains the activity name and ID together with state flags indicating if the activity ID is a root (i.e., not a continuation fragment) and if it is completed.  This single token is then shared by all trace actions for all steps registered with the Activity Interceptor Configuration. Each trace instance token is automatically initialised to represent a root fragment.  However, if you subsequently register a ‘continuation’ step with the Activity Interceptor Configuration, the ‘root’ flag is set to false at the point the ‘continue’ track point is registered for that step.   If you use a ‘reflector’ tool to inspect the code for the ActivityInterceptorConfiguration class, you can see the flag being set in one of the overloads of the RegisterContinue method.    This makes no sense.  The trace instance token is shared across all the track points registered with the Activity Interceptor Configuration.  The Activity Interceptor Configuration is designed to hold track points for multiple steps.  The ‘root’ flag is clearly meant to be initialised to ‘true’ for the preliminary root fragment and then subsequently set to false at the point that a continuation step is processed.  Instead, if the Activity Interceptor Configuration contains a continuation step, it is changed to ‘false’ before the root fragment is processed.  This is clearly an error in logic. The problem causes havoc when the BAM Interceptor is used with continuation.  Effectively the root step is no longer processed correctly, and the ultimate effect is that the continued activity never completes!   This has nothing to do with the root and the continuation being in the same process.  It is due to a fundamental mistake of setting the ‘root’ flag to false for a continuation before the root fragment is processed. The Workaround Fortunately, it is easy to work around the bug.  The trick is to ensure that you create a new Activity Interceptor Configuration object for each individual step.  This may mean filtering your configuration data to extract the track points for a single step or grouping the configured track points into individual steps and the creating a separate Activity Interceptor Configuration for each group.  In my case, the first approach was required.  Here is what the amended code looks like: // Because of a logic error in Microsoft's code, a separate ActivityInterceptorConfiguration must be used // for each location. The following code extracts only those track points for a given step name (location). var trackPointGroup = from ResolutionService.TrackPoint tp in bamActivity.TrackPoints                       where (string)tp.Location == bamStepName                       select tp; var bamActivityInterceptorConfig =     new Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation.ActivityInterceptorConfiguration(activityName); foreach (var trackPoint in trackPointGroup) {     switch (trackPoint.Type)     {         case TrackPointType.Start:             bamActivityInterceptorConfig.RegisterStartNew(trackPoint.Location, trackPoint.ExtractionInfo);             break; etc… I’m using LINQ to filter a list of track points for those entries that correspond to a given step and then registering only those track points on a new instance of the ActivityInterceptorConfiguration class.   As soon as I re-wrote the code to do this, activities with continuations started to complete correctly.

  Read the article

• Process.Start() and ShellExecute() fails with URLs on Windows 8

  - by Rick Strahl

  Since I installed Windows 8 I've noticed that a number of my applications appear to have problems opening URLs. That is when I click on a link inside of a Windows application, either nothing happens or there's an error that occurs. It's happening both to my own applications and a host of Windows applications I'm running. At first I thought this was an issue with my default browser (Chrome) but after switching the default browser to a few others and experimenting a bit I noticed that the errors occur - oddly enough - only when I run an application as an Administrator. I also tried switching to FireFox and Opera as my default browser and saw exactly the same behavior. The scenario for this is a bit bizarre: Running on Windows 8 Call Process.Start() (or ShellExecute() in Win32 API) with a URL or an HTML file Run 'As Administrator' (works fine under non-elevated user account!) or with UAC off A browser other than Internet Explorer is set as your Default Web Browser Talk about a weird scenario: Something that doesn't work when you run as an Administrator which is supposed to have rights to everything on the system! Instead running under an Admin account - either elevated with a User Account Control prompt or even when running as a full Administrator fails. It appears that this problem does not occur for everyone, but when I looked for a solution to this, I saw quite a few posts in relation to this with no clear resolutions. I have three Windows 8 machines running here in the office and all three of them showed this behavior. Lest you think this is just a programmer's problem - this can affect any software running on your system that needs to run under administrative rights. Try it out Now, in order for this next example to fail, any browser but Internet Explorer has to be your default browser and even then it may not fail depending on how you installed your browser. To see if this is a problem create a small Console application and call Process.Start() with a URL in it:namespace Win8ShellBugConsole { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Launching Url..."); Process.Start("http://microsoft.com"); Console.Write("Press any key to continue..."); Console.ReadKey(); Console.WriteLine("\r\n\r\nLaunching image..."); Process.Start(Path.GetFullPath(@"..\..\sailbig.jpg")); Console.Write("Press any key to continue..."); Console.ReadKey(); } } } Compile this code. Then execute the code from Explorer (not from Visual Studio because that may change the permissions). If you simply run the EXE and you're not running as an administrator, you'll see the Web page pop up in the browser as well as the image loading. Now run the same thing with Run As Administrator: Now when you run it you get a nice error when Process.Start() is fired: The same happens if you are running with User Account Control off altogether - ie. you are running as a full admin account. Now if you comment out the URL in the code above and just fire the image display - that works just fine in any user mode. As does opening any other local file type or even starting a new EXE locally (ie. Process.Start("c:\windows\notepad.exe"). All that works, EXCEPT for URLs. The code above uses Process.Start() in .NET but the same happens in Win32 Applications that use the ShellExecute API. In some of my older Fox apps ShellExecute returns an error code of 31 - which is No Shell Association found. What's the Deal? It turns out the problem has to do with the way browsers are registering themselves on Windows. Internet Explorer - being a built-in application in Windows 8 - apparently does this correctly, but other browsers possibly don't or at least didn't at the time I installed them. So even Chrome, which continually updates itself, has a recent version that apparently has this registration issue fixed, I was unable to simply set IE as my default browser then use Chrome to 'Set as Default Browser'. It still didn't work. Neither did using the Set Program Associations dialog which lets you assign what extensions are mapped to by a given application. Each application provides a set of extension/moniker mappings that it supports and this dialog lets you associate them on a system wide basis. This also did not work for Chrome or any of the other browsers at first. However, after repeated retries here eventually I did manage to get FireFox to work, but not any of the others. What Works? Reinstall the Browser In the end I decided on the hard core pull the plug solution: Totally uninstall and re-install Chrome in this case. And lo and behold, after reinstall everything was working fine. Now even removing the association for Chrome, switching to IE as the default browser and then back to Chrome works. But, even though the version of Chrome I was running before uninstalling and reinstalling is the same as I'm running now after the reinstall now it works. Of course I had to find out the hard way, before Richard commented with a note regarding what the issue is with Chrome at least: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=156400 As expected the issue is a registration issue - with keys not being registered at the machine level. Reading this I'm still not sure why this should be a problem - an elevated account still runs under the same user account (ie. I'm still rickstrahl even if I Run As Administrator), so why shouldn't an app be able to read my Current User registry hive? And also that doesn't quite explain why if I register the extensions using Run As Administrator in Chrome when using Set as Default Browser). But in the end it works… Not so fast It's now a couple of days later and still there are some oddball problems although this time they appear to be purely Chrome issues. After the reinstall Chrome seems to pop up properly with ShellExecute() calls both in regular user and Admin mode. However, it now looks like Chrome is actually running two completely separate user profiles for each. For example, when I run Visual Studio in Admin mode and go to View in browser, Chrome complains that it was installed in Admin mode and can't launch (WTF?). Then you retry a few times later and it ends up working. When launched that way some of the plug-ins installed don't show up with the effect that sometimes they're visible sometimes they're not. Also Chrome seems to loose my configuration and Google sign in between sessions now, presumably when switching user modes. Add-ins installed in admin mode don't show up in user mode and vice versa. Ah, this is lovely. Did I mention that I freaking hate UAC precisely because of this kind of bullshit. You can never tell exactly what account your app is running under, and apparently apps also have a hard time trying to put data into the right place that works for both scenarios. And as my recent post on using Windows Live accounts shows it's yet another level of abstraction ontop of the underlying system identity that can cause all sort of small side effect headaches like this. Hopefully, most of you are skirting this issue altogether - having installed more recent versions of your favorite browsers. If not, hopefully this post will take you straight to reinstallation to fix this annoying issue.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• Thank You for a Great Welcome for Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2

  - by Irem Radzik

  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Yesterday morning we had two launch webcasts for Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2. I had the pleasure to present, as well as moderate the Q&A panels in both of these webcasts. Both events had hundreds of live attendees, sending us over 150 questions. Even though we left 30 minutes for Q&A, it was not nearly enough time to address for all the insightful questions our audience sent. Our product management team and I really appreciate the interaction we had yesterday and we are starting to respond back with outstanding questions today. Oracle GoldenGate’s new release launch also had great welcome from the media. You can find the links for various articles on the new release below: ITBusinessEdge Oracle Embraces Cross-Platform Data Integration Information Week: Oracle Real-Time Advance Taps Compressed Data Integration Developer News, Oracle GoldenGate Adds Deeper Oracle Integration, Extends Real-Time Performance CIO, Oracle GoldenGate Buddies Up with Sibling Software DBTA, Real-Time Data Integration: Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 Now Available CBR Oracle unveils GoldenGate 11g Release 2 real-time data integration application In this blog, I want to address some of the frequently asked questions that came up during the webcasts. You can find the top questions and their answers along with related resources below. We will continue to address frequently asked questions via future blogs. Q: Will the new Integrated Capture for Oracle Database replace the Classic Capture? If not, which one do I use when? A: No, Classic Capture will be around for long time. Core platform specific features, bug fixes, and patches will be available for both Capture processes.Oracle Database specific features will be only available in the Integrated Capture. The Integrated Capture for Oracle Database is an option for users that need to capture data from compressed tables or need support for XML data types, XA on RAC. Users who don’t leverage these features should continue to use our Classic Capture. For more information on Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 I recommend to check out the White paper: Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 New Features as well as other technical white papers we have on OTN.                                                         For those of you coming to OpenWorld, please attend the related session: Extracting Data in Oracle GoldenGate Integrated Capture Mode, Monday Oct 1st 1:45pm Moscone South – 102 to learn more about this new feature. Q: What is new in Conflict Detection and Resolution? And how does it work? A: There are now pre-built functions to identify the conditions under which an error occurs and how to handle the record when the condition occurs. Error conditions handled include inserts into a target table where the row already exists, updates or deletes to target table rows that exist, but the original source data (before columns) do not match the existing data in the target row, and updates or deletes where the row does not exist in the target database table.Foreach of these conditions a method to handle the error is specified.  Please check out our recent blog on this topic and the White paper: Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 New Features white paper.  Also, for those attending OpenWorld please attend the session: Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active-  Wednesday Oct 3rd  3:30pm Mascone 3000 Q: Does Oracle GoldenGate Veridata and the Management Pack require additional licenses, or is it incorporated with the GoldenGate license? A: Oracle GoldenGate Veridata and Oracle Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate are additional products and require separate licenses. Please check out Oracle's price list here. Q: Does GoldenGate - Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in require additional license? A: Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in is included in the Oracle Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate license, which is separate from Oracle GoldenGate license. There is no separate license for the Enterprise Manager Plug-in by itself. Oracle GoldenGate Monitor, Oracle GoldenGate Director, and Enterprise Manager Plug-in are included in the Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate license. Please check out Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate data sheet for more info on this product bundle. Q: Is Oracle GoldenGate replacing Oracle Streams product? A: Oracle GoldenGate is the strategic data replication product. Therefore, Oracle Streams will continue to be supported, but will not be actively enhanced. Rather, the best elements of Oracle Streams will be added to Oracle GoldenGate. Conflict management is one of them and with the latest release Oracle GoldenGate has a more advanced conflict management offering. Current customers depending on Oracle Streams will continue to be fully supported. Q: How is Oracle GoldenGate different than Oracle Data Integrator? A: Oracle Data Integrator is designed for fast bulk data movement and transformation between heterogeneous systems, while GoldenGate is designed for real-time movement of transactions between heterogeneous systems. These two products are completely complementary where GoldenGate provides low-impact real-time change data capture and delivery to a staging area on the target. And Oracle Data Integrator transforms this data and loads the DW tables. In fact, Oracle Data Integrator integrates with GoldenGate to use GoldenGate’s Capture process as one option for its CDC mechanism. We have several customers that deployed GoldenGate and ODI together to feed real-time data to their data warehousing solutions. Please also check out Oracle Data Integrator Changed Data Capture with Oracle GoldenGate Data Sheet (PDF). Thank you again very much for welcoming Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 and stay in touch with us for more exciting news, updates, and events.

  Read the article

• Segfault when iterating over a map<string, string> and drawing its contents using SDL_TTF

  - by Michael Stahre

  I'm not entirely sure this question belongs on gamedev.stackexchange, but I'm technically working on a game and working with SDL, so it might not be entirely offtopic. I've written a class called DebugText. The point of the class is to have a nice way of printing values of variables to the game screen. The idea is to call SetDebugText() with the variables in question every time they change or, as is currently the case, every time the game's Update() is called. The issue is that when iterating over the map that contains my variables and their latest updated values, I get segfaults. See the comments in DrawDebugText() below, it specifies where the error happens. I've tried splitting the calls to it-first and it-second into separate lines and found that the problem doesn't always happen when calling it-first. It alters between it-first and it-second. I can't find a pattern. It doesn't fail on every call to DrawDebugText() either. It might fail on the third time DrawDebugText() is called, or it might fail on the fourth. Class header: #ifndef CLIENT_DEBUGTEXT_H #define CLIENT_DEBUGTEXT_H #include <Map> #include <Math.h> #include <sstream> #include <SDL.h> #include <SDL_ttf.h> #include "vector2.h" using std::string; using std::stringstream; using std::map; using std::pair; using game::Vector2; namespace game { class DebugText { private: TTF_Font* debug_text_font; map<string, string>* debug_text_list; public: void SetDebugText(string var, bool value); void SetDebugText(string var, float value); void SetDebugText(string var, int value); void SetDebugText(string var, Vector2 value); void SetDebugText(string var, string value); int DrawDebugText(SDL_Surface*, SDL_Rect*); void InitDebugText(); void Clear(); }; } #endif Class source file: #include "debugtext.h" namespace game { // Copypasta function for handling the toString conversion template <class T> inline string to_string (const T& t) { stringstream ss (stringstream::in | stringstream::out); ss << t; return ss.str(); } // Initializes SDL_TTF and sets its font void DebugText::InitDebugText() { if(TTF_WasInit()) TTF_Quit(); TTF_Init(); debug_text_font = TTF_OpenFont("LiberationSans-Regular.ttf", 16); TTF_SetFontStyle(debug_text_font, TTF_STYLE_NORMAL); } // Iterates over the current debug_text_list and draws every element on the screen. // After drawing with SDL you need to get a rect specifying the area on the screen that was changed and tell SDL that this part of the screen needs to be updated. this is done in the game's Draw() function // This function sets rects_to_update to the new list of rects provided by all of the surfaces and returns the number of rects in the list. These two parameters are used in Draw() when calling on SDL_UpdateRects(), which takes an SDL_Rect* and a list length int DebugText::DrawDebugText(SDL_Surface* screen, SDL_Rect* rects_to_update) { if(debug_text_list == NULL) return 0; if(!TTF_WasInit()) InitDebugText(); rects_to_update = NULL; // Specifying the font color SDL_Color font_color = {0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00}; // r, g, b, unused int row_count = 0; string line; // The iterator variable map<string, string>::iterator it; // Gets the iterator and iterates over it for(it = debug_text_list->begin(); it != debug_text_list->end(); it++) { // Takes the first value (the name of the variable) and the second value (the value of the parameter in string form) //---------THIS LINE GIVES ME SEGFAULTS----- line = it->first + ": " + it->second; //------------------------------------------ // Creates a surface with the text on it that in turn can be rendered to the screen itself later SDL_Surface* debug_surface = TTF_RenderText_Solid(debug_text_font, line.c_str(), font_color); if(debug_surface == NULL) { // A standard check for errors fprintf(stderr, "Error: %s", TTF_GetError()); return NULL; } else { // If SDL_TTF did its job right, then we now set a destination rect row_count++; SDL_Rect dstrect = {5, 5, 0, 0}; // x, y, w, h dstrect.x = 20; dstrect.y = 20*row_count; // Draws the surface with the text on it to the screen int res = SDL_BlitSurface(debug_surface,NULL,screen,&dstrect); if(res != 0) { //Just an error check fprintf(stderr, "Error: %s", SDL_GetError()); return NULL; } // Creates a new rect to specify the area that needs to be updated with SDL_Rect* new_rect_to_update = (SDL_Rect*) malloc(sizeof(SDL_Rect)); new_rect_to_update->h = debug_surface->h; new_rect_to_update->w = debug_surface->w; new_rect_to_update->x = dstrect.x; new_rect_to_update->y = dstrect.y; // Just freeing the surface since it isn't necessary anymore SDL_FreeSurface(debug_surface); // Creates a new list of rects with room for the new rect SDL_Rect* newtemp = (SDL_Rect*) malloc(row_count*sizeof(SDL_Rect)); // Copies the data from the old list of rects to the new one memcpy(newtemp, rects_to_update, (row_count-1)*sizeof(SDL_Rect)); // Adds the new rect to the new list newtemp[row_count-1] = *new_rect_to_update; // Frees the memory used by the old list free(rects_to_update); // And finally redirects the pointer to the old list to the new list rects_to_update = newtemp; newtemp = NULL; } } // When the entire map has been iterated over, return the number of lines that were drawn, ie. the number of rects in the returned rect list return row_count; } // The SetDebugText used by all the SetDebugText overloads // Takes two strings, inserts them into the map as a pair void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, string value) { if (debug_text_list == NULL) { debug_text_list = new map<string, string>(); } debug_text_list->erase(var); debug_text_list->insert(pair<string, string>(var, value)); } // Writes the bool to a string and calls SetDebugText(string, string) void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, bool value) { string result; if (value) result = "True"; else result = "False"; SetDebugText(var, result); } // Does the same thing, but uses to_string() to convert the float void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, float value) { SetDebugText(var, to_string(value)); } // Same as above, but int void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, int value) { SetDebugText(var, to_string(value)); } // Vector2 is a struct of my own making. It contains the two float vars x and y void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, Vector2 value) { SetDebugText(var + ".x", to_string(value.x)); SetDebugText(var + ".y", to_string(value.y)); } // Empties the list. I don't actually use this in my code. Shame on me for writing something I don't use. void DebugText::Clear() { if(debug_text_list != NULL) debug_text_list->clear(); } }

  Read the article

• How to configure VPN in Windows XP

  - by SAMIR BHOGAYTA

  VPN Overview A VPN is a private network created over a public one. It’s done with encryption, this way, your data is encapsulated and secure in transit – this creates the ‘virtual’ tunnel. A VPN is a method of connecting to a private network by a public network like the Internet. An internet connection in a company is common. An Internet connection in a Home is common too. With both of these, you could create an encrypted tunnel between them and pass traffic, safely - securely. If you want to create a VPN connection you will have to use encryption to make sure that others cannot intercept the data in transit while traversing the Internet. Windows XP provides a certain level of security by using Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) or Layer Two Tunneling Protocol (L2TP). They are both considered tunneling protocols – simply because they create that virtual tunnel just discussed, by applying encryption. Configure a VPN with XP If you want to configure a VPN connection from a Windows XP client computer you only need what comes with the Operating System itself, it's all built right in. To set up a connection to a VPN, do the following: 1. On the computer that is running Windows XP, confirm that the connection to the Internet is correctly configured. • You can try to browse the internet • Ping a known host on the Internet, like yahoo.com, something that isn’t blocking ICMP 2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel. 3. In Control Panel, double click Network Connections 4. Click Create a new connection in the Network Tasks task pad 5. In the Network Connection Wizard, click Next. 6. Click Connect to the network at my workplace, and then click Next. 7. Click Virtual Private Network connection, and then click Next. 8. If you are prompted, you need to select whether you will use a dialup connection or if you have a dedicated connection to the Internet either via Cable, DSL, T1, Satellite, etc. Click Next. 9. Type a host name, IP or any other description you would like to appear in the Network Connections area. You can change this later if you want. Click Next. 10. Type the host name or the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer that you want to connect to, and then click Next. 11. You may be asked if you want to use a Smart Card or not. 12. You are just about done, the rest of the screens just verify your connection, click Next. 13. Click to select the Add a shortcut to this connection to my desktop check box if you want one, if not, then leave it unchecked and click finish. 14. You are now done making your connection, but by default, it may try to connect. You can either try the connection now if you know its valid, if not, then just close it down for now. 15. In the Network Connections window, right-click the new connection and select properties. Let’s take a look at how you can customize this connection before it’s used. 16. The first tab you will see if the General Tab. This only covers the name of the connection, which you can also rename from the Network Connection dialog box by right clicking the connection and selecting to rename it. You can also configure a First connect, which means that Windows can connect the public network (like the Internet) before starting to attempt the ‘VPN’ connection. This is a perfect example as to when you would have configured the dialup connection; this would have been the first thing that you would have to do. It's simple, you have to be connected to the Internet first before you can encrypt and send data over it. This setting makes sure that this is a reality for you. 17. The next tab is the Options Tab. It is The Options tab has a lot you can configure in it. For one, you have the option to connect to a Windows Domain, if you select this check box (unchecked by default), then your VPN client will request Windows logon domain information while starting to work up the VPN connection. Also, you have options here for redialing. Redial attempts are configured here if you are using a dial up connection to get to the Internet. It is very handy to redial if the line is dropped as dropped lines are very common. 18. The next tab is the Security Tab. This is where you would configure basic security for the VPN client. This is where you would set any advanced IPSec configurations other security protocols as well as requiring encryption and credentials. 19. The next tab is the Networking Tab. This is where you can select what networking items are used by this VPN connection. 20. The Last tab is the Advanced Tab. This is where you can configure options for configuring a firewall, and/or sharing. Connecting to Corporate Now that you have your XP VPN client all set up and ready, the next step is to attempt a connection to the Remote Access or VPN server set up at the corporate office. To use the connection follow these simple steps. To open the client again, go back to the Network Connections dialog box. 1. One you are in the Network Connection dialog box, double-click, or right click and select ‘Connect’ from the menu – this will initiate the connection to the corporate office. 2. Type your user name and password, and then click Connect. Properties bring you back to what we just discussed in this article, all the global settings for the VPN client you are using. 3. To disconnect from a VPN connection, right-click the icon for the connection, and then click “Disconnect” Summary In this article we covered the basics of building a VPN connection using Windows XP. This is very handy when you have a VPN device but don’t have the ‘client’ that may come with it. If the VPN Server doesn’t use highly proprietary protocols, then you can use the XP client to connect with. In a future article I will get into the nuts and bolts of both IPSec and more detail on how to configure the advanced options in the Security tab of this client. 678: The remote computer did not respond. 930: The authentication server did not respond to authentication requests in a timely fashion. 800: Unable to establish the VPN connection. 623: The system could not find the phone book entry for this connection. 720: A connection to the remote computer could not be established. More on : http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Configure-VPN-Connection-Windows-XP.html

  Read the article

• Handling HumanTask attachments in Oracle BPM 11g PS4FP+ (I)

  - by ccasares

  Adding attachments to a HumanTask is a feature that exists in Oracle HWF (Human Workflow) since 10g. However, in 11g there have been many improvements on this feature and this entry will try to summarize them. Oracle BPM 11g 11.1.1.5.1 (aka PS4 Feature Pack or PS4FP) introduced two great features: Ability to link attachments at a Task scope or at a Process scope: "Task" attachments are only visible within the scope (lifetime) of a task. This means that, initially, any member of the assignment pattern of the Human Task will be able to handle (add, review or remove) attachments. However, once the task is completed, subsequent human tasks will not have access to them. This does not mean those attachments got lost. Once the human task is completed, attachments can be retrieved in order to, i.e., check them in to a Content Server or to inject them to a new and different human task. Aside note: a "re-initiated" human task will inherit comments and attachments, along with history and -optionally- payload. See here for more info. "Process" attachments are visible within the scope of the process. This means that subsequent human tasks in the same process instance will have access to them. Ability to use Oracle WebCenter Content (previously known as "Oracle UCM") as the backend for the attachments instead of using HWF database backend. This feature adds all content server document lifecycle capabilities to HWF attachments (versioning, RBAC, metadata management, etc). As of today, only Oracle WCC is supported. However, Oracle BPM Suite does include a license of Oracle WCC for the solely usage of document management within BPM scope. Here are some code samples that leverage the above features. Retrieving uploaded attachments -Non UCM- Non UCM attachments (default ones or those that have existed from 10g, and are stored "as-is" in HWK database backend) can be retrieved after the completion of the Human Task. Firstly, we need to know whether any attachment has been effectively uploaded to the human task. There are two ways to find it out: Through an XPath function: Checking the execData/attachment[] structure. For example: Once we are sure one ore more attachments were uploaded to the Human Task, we want to get them. In this example, by "get" I mean to get the attachment name and the payload of the file. Aside note: Oracle HWF lets you to upload two kind of [non-UCM] attachments: a desktop document and a Web URL. This example focuses just on the desktop document one. In order to "retrieve" an uploaded Web URL, you can get it directly from the execData/attachment[] structure. Attachment content (payload) is retrieved through the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function: This example shows how to retrieve as many attachments as those had been uploaded to the Human Task and write them to the server using the File Adapter service. The sample process excerpt is as follows:  A dummy UserTask using "HumanTask1" Human Task followed by a Embedded Subprocess that will retrieve the attachments (we're assuming at least one attachment is uploaded): and once retrieved, we will write each of them back to a file in the server using a File Adapter service: In detail: We've defined an XSD structure that will hold the attachments (both name and payload): Then, we can create a BusinessObject based on such element (attachmentCollection) and create a variable (named attachmentBPM) of such BusinessObject type. We will also need to keep a copy of the HumanTask output's execData structure. Therefore we need to create a variable of type TaskExecutionData... ...and copy the HumanTask output execData to it: Now we get into the embedded subprocess that will retrieve the attachments' payload. First, and using an XSLT transformation, we feed the attachmentBPM variable with the name of each attachment and setting an empty value to the payload: Please note that we're using the XSLT for-each node to create as many target structures as necessary. Also note that we're setting an Empty text to the payload variable. The reason for this is to make sure the <payload></payload> tag gets created. This is needed when we map the payload to the XML variable later. Aside note: We are assuming that we're retrieving non-UCM attachments. However in real life you might want to check the type of attachment you're handling. The execData/attachment[]/storageType contains the values "UCM" for UCM type attachments, "TASK" for non-UCM ones or "URL" for Web URL ones. Those values are part of the "Ext.Com.Oracle.Xmlns.Bpel.Workflow.Task.StorageTypeEnum" enumeration. Once we have fed the attachmentsBPM structure and so it now contains the name of each of the attachments, it is time to iterate through it and get the payload. Therefore we will use a new embedded subprocess of type MultiInstance, that will iterate over the attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: In every iteration we will use a Script activity to map the corresponding payload element with the result of the XPath function getTaskAttachmentContents(). Please, note how the target array element is indexed with the loopCounter predefined variable, so that we make sure we're feeding the right element during the array iteration:  The XPath function used looks as follows: hwf:getTaskAttachmentContents(bpmn:getDataObject('UserTask1LocalExecData')/ns1:systemAttributes/ns1:taskId, bpmn:getDataObject('attachmentsBPM')/ns:attachment[bpmn:getActivityInstanceAttribute('SUBPROCESS3067107484296', 'loopCounter')]/ns:fileName)  where the input parameters are: taskId of the just completed Human Task attachment name we're retrieving the payload from array index (loopCounter predefined variable)  Aside note: The reason whereby we're iterating the execData/attachment[] structure through embedded subprocess and not, i.e., using XSLT and for-each nodes, is mostly because the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function is currently not available in XSLT mappings. So all this example might be considered as a workaround until this gets fixed/enhanced in future releases. Once this embedded subprocess ends, we will have all attachments (name + payload) in the attachmentsBPM variable, which is the main goal of this sample. But in order to test everything runs fine, we finish the sample writing each attachment to a file. To that end we include a final embedded subprocess to concurrently iterate through each attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: On each iteration we will use a Service activity that invokes a File Adapter write service. In here we have two important parameters to set. First, the payload itself. The file adapter awaits binary data in base64 format (string). We have to map it using XPath (Simple mapping doesn't recognize a String as a base64-binary valid target):  Second, we must set the target filename using the Service Properties dialog box:  Again, note how we're making use of the loopCounter index variable to get the right element within the embedded subprocess iteration. Handling UCM attachments will be part of a different and upcoming blog entry. Once I finish will all posts on this matter, I will upload the whole sample project to java.net.

  Read the article

• Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

  - by Roger Hart

  Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

  Read the article

• Of C# Iterators and Performance

  - by James Michael Hare

  Some of you reading this will be wondering, "what is an iterator" and think I'm locked in the world of C++.  Nope, I'm talking C# iterators.  No, not enumerators, iterators.   So, for those of you who do not know what iterators are in C#, I will explain it in summary, and for those of you who know what iterators are but are curious of the performance impacts, I will explore that as well.   Iterators have been around for a bit now, and there are still a bunch of people who don't know what they are or what they do.  I don't know how many times at work I've had a code review on my code and have someone ask me, "what's that yield word do?"   Basically, this post came to me as I was writing some extension methods to extend IEnumerable<T> -- I'll post some of the fun ones in a later post.  Since I was filtering the resulting list down, I was using the standard C# iterator concept; but that got me wondering: what are the performance implications of using an iterator versus returning a new enumeration?   So, to begin, let's look at a couple of methods.  This is a new (albeit contrived) method called Every(...).  The goal of this method is to access and enumeration and return every nth item in the enumeration (including the first).  So Every(2) would return items 0, 2, 4, 6, etc.   Now, if you wanted to write this in the traditional way, you may come up with something like this:       public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval)     {         List<T> newList = new List<T>();         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if ((count++ % interval) == 0)             {                 newList.Add(i);             }         }           return newList;     }     So basically this method takes any IEnumerable<T> and returns a new IEnumerable<T> that contains every nth item.  Pretty straight forward.   The problem?  Well, Every<T>(...) will construct a list containing every nth item whether or not you care.  What happens if you were searching this result for a certain item and find that item after five tries?  You would have generated the rest of the list for nothing.   Enter iterators.  This C# construct uses the yield keyword to effectively defer evaluation of the next item until it is asked for.  This can be very handy if the evaluation itself is expensive or if there's a fair chance you'll never want to fully evaluate a list.   We see this all the time in Linq, where many expressions are chained together to do complex processing on a list.  This would be very expensive if each of these expressions evaluated their entire possible result set on call.    Let's look at the same example function, this time using an iterator:       public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval)     {         int count = 0;         foreach (var i in list)         {             if ((count++ % interval) == 0)             {                 yield return i;             }         }     }   Notice it does not create a new return value explicitly, the only evidence of a return is the "yield return" statement.  What this means is that when an item is requested from the enumeration, it will enter this method and evaluate until it either hits a yield return (in which case that item is returned) or until it exits the method or hits a yield break (in which case the iteration ends.   Behind the scenes, this is all done with a class that the CLR creates behind the scenes that keeps track of the state of the iteration, so that every time the next item is asked for, it finds that item and then updates the current position so it knows where to start at next time.   It doesn't seem like a big deal, does it?  But keep in mind the key point here: it only returns items as they are requested. Thus if there's a good chance you will only process a portion of the return list and/or if the evaluation of each item is expensive, an iterator may be of benefit.   This is especially true if you intend your methods to be chainable similar to the way Linq methods can be chained.    For example, perhaps you have a List<int> and you want to take every tenth one until you find one greater than 10.  We could write that as:       List<int> someList = new List<int>();         // fill list here         someList.Every(10).TakeWhile(i => i <= 10);     Now is the difference more apparent?  If we use the first form of Every that makes a copy of the list.  It's going to copy the entire list whether we will need those items or not, that can be costly!    With the iterator version, however, it will only take items from the list until it finds one that is > 10, at which point no further items in the list are evaluated.   So, sounds neat eh?  But what's the cost is what you're probably wondering.  So I ran some tests using the two forms of Every above on lists varying from 5 to 500,000 integers and tried various things.    Now, iteration isn't free.  If you are more likely than not to iterate the entire collection every time, iterator has some very slight overhead:   Copy vs Iterator on 100% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 5 Copy 5 5 5 Iterator 5 50 50 Copy 28 50 50 Iterator 27 500 500 Copy 227 500 500 Iterator 247 5000 5000 Copy 2266 5000 5000 Iterator 2444 50,000 50,000 Copy 24,443 50,000 50,000 Iterator 24,719 500,000 500,000 Copy 250,024 500,000 500,000 Iterator 251,521   Notice that when iterating over the entire produced list, the times for the iterator are a little better for smaller lists, then getting just a slight bit worse for larger lists.  In reality, given the number of items and iterations, the result is near negligible, but just to show that iterators come at a price.  However, it should also be noted that the form of Every that returns a copy will have a left-over collection to garbage collect.   However, if we only partially evaluate less and less through the list, the savings start to show and make it well worth the overhead.  Let's look at what happens if you stop looking after 80% of the list:   Copy vs Iterator on 80% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 4 Copy 5 5 4 Iterator 5 50 40 Copy 27 50 40 Iterator 23 500 400 Copy 215 500 400 Iterator 200 5000 4000 Copy 2099 5000 4000 Iterator 1962 50,000 40,000 Copy 22,385 50,000 40,000 Iterator 19,599 500,000 400,000 Copy 236,427 500,000 400,000 Iterator 196,010       Notice that the iterator form is now operating quite a bit faster.  But the savings really add up if you stop on average at 50% (which most searches would typically do):     Copy vs Iterator on 50% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 2 Copy 5 5 2 Iterator 4 50 25 Copy 25 50 25 Iterator 16 500 250 Copy 188 500 250 Iterator 126 5000 2500 Copy 1854 5000 2500 Iterator 1226 50,000 25,000 Copy 19,839 50,000 25,000 Iterator 12,233 500,000 250,000 Copy 208,667 500,000 250,000 Iterator 122,336   Now we see that if we only expect to go on average 50% into the results, we tend to shave off around 40% of the time.  And this is only for one level deep.  If we are using this in a chain of query expressions it only adds to the savings.   So my recommendation?  If you have a resonable expectation that someone may only want to partially consume your enumerable result, I would always tend to favor an iterator.  The cost if they iterate the whole thing does not add much at all -- and if they consume only partially, you reap some really good performance gains.   Next time I'll discuss some of my favorite extensions I've created to make development life a little easier and maintainability a little better.

  Read the article

• Diagnosing ADF Mobile iOS deployment problems

  - by Chris Muir

  From time to time I encounter customers who have taken possession of a brand new Apple Mac, have that excited "I've just spent more on a computer then I ever wanted to but it's okay" crazy gleam in their eye, but on pre-loading all the necessary software for Oracle's ADF Mobile to start their mobile campaign, following Oracle's setup instructions and deploying their first app to Apple's XCode iPhone Simulator they hit this error message in the JDeveloper Log-Deployment window: [01:36:46 PM] Deployment cancelled. [01:36:46 PM] ----  Deployment incomplete  ----. [01:36:46 PM] Failed to build the iOS application bundle. [01:36:46 PM] Deployment failed due to one or more errors returned by '/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/xcodebuild'.  The following is a summary of the returned error(s): Command-line execution failed (Return code: 69) "Oh, return code 69, I know that well" I hear you say.  Admittedly the error code is less than useful besides drawing some titters from the peanut gallery. Before explaining what's gone wrong, I think it's useful to teach customers how to diagnose these issues themselves.  When ADF Mobile commences a deployment, be it to Apple's iOS or Google's Android platforms, JDeveloper and ADF Mobile do a good job in the Log window of showing you what the deployment process entails.  In the case of deploying to iOS the log window will literally include the XCode commands executed to complete the deployment cycle. As example here's the log output that was produced before the error message was raised.... take the opportunity to read this line by line and note the command line calls highlighted in blue: (Note some of the following lines have been split over multiple lines to suit reading on this blog, each original line is preceded by a timestamp. Ensure to check the exact commands from JDev) [01:36:33 PM] Target platform is (iOS). [01:36:33 PM] Beginning deployment of ADF Mobile application 'LayoutDemo' to iOS using profile 'IOS_MOBILE_NATIVE_archive1'. [01:36:34 PM] Command-line executed: [/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/xcodebuild, -version] [01:36:34 PM] Command-line execution succeeded. [01:36:34 PM] Running dependency analysis... [01:36:34 PM] Building... [01:36:34 PM] Deploying 3 profiles... [01:36:35 PM] Wrote Archive Module to /Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/ oracle.adf.mobile/Samples/PublicSamples/LayoutDemo/ApplicationController/ deploy/ApplicationController.jar [01:36:35 PM] WARNING: No Resource Catalog enabled ADF components found to package [01:36:36 PM] Wrote Archive Module to /Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/ oracle.adf.mobile/Samples/PublicSamples/LayoutDemo/ViewController/ deploy/ViewController.jar [01:36:36 PM] Verifying existence of the .adf source directory of the ADF Mobile application... [01:36:36 PM] Verifying Application Controller project exists... [01:36:36 PM] Verifying application dependencies... [01:36:36 PM] The application may not function correctly because the following dependent libraries are missing: /Users/chris/jdev/jdeveloper/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/ lib/adfmf.springboard.jar [01:36:36 PM] Verifying project dependencies... [01:36:36 PM] Validating application XML files... [01:36:36 PM] Validating XML files in project ApplicationController... [01:36:36 PM] Validating XML files in project ViewController... [01:36:40 PM] Copying common javascript files... [01:36:41 PM] Copying FARs to the ADF Mobile Framework application... [01:36:41 PM] Extracting Feature Archive file, "ApplicationController.jar" to deployment folder, "ApplicationController". [01:36:42 PM] Extracting Feature Archive file, "ViewController.jar" to deployment folder, "ViewController". [01:36:42 PM] Deploying skinning files... [01:36:43 PM] Copying the CVM SDK files built for the x86 processor... [01:36:43 PM] Copying the CVM JDK files built for the x86 processor... [01:36:43 PM] Command-line executed: [cp, -R, -p, /Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/iOS/jvmti/x86/, /Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/ Samples/PublicSamples/ LayoutDemo/deploy/IOS_MOBILE_NATIVE_archive1/temporary_xcode_project/lib] [01:36:43 PM] Command-line execution succeeded. [01:36:43 PM] Command-line executed: [cp, -R, -p, /Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/iOS/jvmti/jar/, /Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/Samples/ PublicSamples/LayoutDemo/deploy/IOS_MOBILE_NATIVE_archive1/ temporary_xcode_project/lib] [01:36:43 PM] Command-line execution succeeded. [01:36:43 PM] Copying security related files to the ADF Mobile Framework application... [01:36:44 PM] Command-line executed from path: /Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/Samples/ PublicSamples/LayoutDemo/deploy/IOS_MOBILE_NATIVE_archive1/temporary_xcode_project/ [01:36:44 PM] Command-line executed: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/xcodebuild clean install -configuration Debug -sdk /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/ Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator6.1.sdk DSTROOT=/Users/chris/fmw/jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/Samples/ PublicSamples/LayoutDemo/deploy/IOS_MOBILE_NATIVE_archive1/Destination_Root/ IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=5.0 TARGETED_DEVICE_FAMILY=1,2 PRODUCT_NAME=LayoutDemo ADD_SETTINGS_BUNDLE=NO As you can see when we move from JDeveloper undertaking its work, it then passes the code off in the last few lines for Apple's XCode to assemble and deploy the required .ipa file.  From the original error message which followed this complaining about xcodebuild failing with return code 69, we can quickly see the exact command line used to call xcodebuild. As this is the exact command line call with all its options, you're free to open a Terminal window in Mac OSX and execute the same command by simply copying and pasting the command line. And via this you'll then find out what return code actually 69 means.  Unfortunately it's not that exciting. For Macs that have just been installed and configured with XCode, XCode (and for that matter iTunes) which is required by ADF Mobile to deploy must have been run at least once before hand on your brand new Mac (to be clear that's once ever, not once every restart). On doing so you will be presented with a license agreement from Apple that you must accept. Only once you've done this will the command line calls work.  They're currently failing as you haven't accepted the legal terms and conditions. (arguably you an also accept the terms and conditions from the command line too, but ADF Mobile cannot do this on your behalf, so it's just easier to open the tools and confirm the legal requirements that way). Putting aside the error code and its meaning, watching the log window, watching what commands are executed, learning what they do, this will assist you to diagnose issues yourself and solve these sort of issues more relatively quickly.  From my perspective as an Oracle Product Manager, it allows me to say "this is the stuff you don't need to worry about when you use ADF Mobile when it's configured correctly" .... as you can see my salesman qualities shine through. For anyone who is happily using ADF Mobile on a Mac and wondering why you didn't hit these issues, it's quite likely that you already accepted the license conditions before deploying via ADF Mobile.  For instance, though I'm not a fan of iTunes itself, iTunes was one of the first things I loaded on my Mac to access my Justin Bieber albums. Image courtesy of winnond / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

  Read the article

• SQL University: Database testing and refactoring tools and examples

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Database testing and refactoring tools and examples This is the third and last part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at tools we can test and refactor with plus some an example of the both. Tools of the trade First a few thoughts about how to go about testing a database. I'm firmily against any testing tools that go into the database itself or need an extra database. Unit tests for the database and applications using the database should all be in one place using the same technology. By using database specific frameworks we fragment our tests into many places and increase test system complexity. Let’s take a look at some testing tools. 1. NUnit, xUnit, MbUnit All three are .Net testing frameworks meant to unit test .Net application. But we can test databases with them just fine. I use NUnit because I’ve always used it for work and personal projects. One day this might change. So the thing to remember is to be flexible if something better comes along. All three are quite similar and you should be able to switch between them without much problem. 2. TSQLUnit As much as this framework is helpful for the non-C# savvy folks I don’t like it for the reason I stated above. It lives in the database and thus fragments the testing infrastructure. Also it appears that it’s not being actively developed anymore. 3. DbFit I haven’t had the pleasure of trying this tool just yet but it’s on my to-do list. From what I’ve read and heard Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic on Twitter) has done a remarkable job with it. 4. Redgate SQL Refactor and Apex SQL Refactor Neither of these refactoring tools are free, however if you have hardcore refactoring planned they are worth while looking into. I’ve only used the Red Gate’s Refactor and was quite impressed with it. 5. Reverting the database state I’ve talked before about ways to revert a database to pre-test state after unit testing. This still holds and I haven’t changed my mind. Also make sure to read the comments as they are quite informative. I especially like the idea of setting up and tearing down the schema for each test group with NHibernate. Testing and refactoring example We’ll take a look at the simple schema and data test for a view and refactoring the SELECT * in that view. We’ll use a single table PhoneNumbers with ID and Phone columns. Then we’ll refactor the Phone column into 3 columns Prefix, Number and Suffix. Lastly we’ll remove the original Phone column. Then we’ll check how the view behaves with tests in NUnit. The comments in code explain the problem so be sure to read them. I’m assuming you know NUnit and C#. T-SQL Code C# test code USE tempdbGOCREATE TABLE PhoneNumbers( ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Phone VARCHAR(20))GOINSERT INTO PhoneNumbers(Phone)SELECT '111 222333 444' UNION ALLSELECT '555 666777 888'GO-- notice we don't have WITH SCHEMABINDINGCREATE VIEW vPhoneNumbersAS SELECT * FROM PhoneNumbersGO-- Let's take a look at what the view returns -- If we add a new columns and rows both tests will failSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers GO -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- refactor to split Phone column into 3 partsALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Prefix VARCHAR(3)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Number VARCHAR(6)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Suffix VARCHAR(3)GO-- update the new columnsUPDATE PhoneNumbers SET Prefix = LEFT(Phone, 3), Number = SUBSTRING(Phone, 5, 6), Suffix = RIGHT(Phone, 3)GO-- remove the old columnALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers DROP COLUMN PhoneGO-- This returns unexpected results!-- it returns 2 columns ID and Phone even though -- we don't have a Phone column anymore.-- Notice that the data is from the Prefix column-- This is a danger of SELECT *SELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- for a fix we have to call sp_refreshview -- to refresh the view definitionEXEC sp_refreshview 'vPhoneNumbers'-- after the refresh the view returns 4 columns-- this breaks the input/output behavior of the database-- which refactoring MUST NOT doSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will FAIL -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- to fix the input/output behavior change problem -- we have to concat the 3 columns into one named PhoneALTER VIEW vPhoneNumbersASSELECT ID, Prefix + ' ' + Number + ' ' + Suffix AS PhoneFROM PhoneNumbersGO-- now it works as expectedSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- clean upDROP VIEW vPhoneNumbersDROP TABLE PhoneNumbers [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCoorectColumns(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb // note the SET FMTONLY ON with which we return only schema and no data using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SET FMTONLY ON; SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned schema: number of columns, column names and data types Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].Caption, "ID"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].DataType, typeof(int)); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].Caption, "Phone"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].DataType, typeof(string)); }} [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCorrectData(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned data: number of rows and their values Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["ID"], 1); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["Phone"], "111 222333 444"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["ID"], 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["Phone"], "555 666777 888"); }}   With this simple example we’ve seen how a very simple schema can cause a lot of problems in the whole application/database system if it doesn’t have tests. Imagine what would happen if some outside process would depend on that view. It would get wrong data and propagate it silently throughout the system. And that is not good. So have tests at least for the crucial parts of your systems. And with that we conclude the Database Testing and Refactoring week at SQL University. Hope you learned something new and enjoy the learning weeks to come. Have fun!

  Read the article

• C#: Does an IDisposable in a Halted Iterator Dispose?

  - by James Michael Hare

  If that sounds confusing, let me give you an example. Let's say you expose a method to read a database of products, and instead of returning a List<Product> you return an IEnumerable<Product> in iterator form (yield return). This accomplishes several good things: The IDataReader is not passed out of the Data Access Layer which prevents abstraction leak and resource leak potentials. You don't need to construct a full List<Product> in memory (which could be very big) if you just want to forward iterate once. If you only want to consume up to a certain point in the list, you won't incur the database cost of looking up the other items. This could give us an example like: 1: // a sample data access object class to do standard CRUD operations. 2: public class ProductDao 3: { 4: private DbProviderFactory _factory = SqlClientFactory.Instance 5:  6: // a method that would retrieve all available products 7: public IEnumerable<Product> GetAvailableProducts() 8: { 9: // must create the connection 10: using (var con = _factory.CreateConnection()) 11: { 12: con.ConnectionString = _productsConnectionString; 13: con.Open(); 14:  15: // create the command 16: using (var cmd = _factory.CreateCommand()) 17: { 18: cmd.Connection = con; 19: cmd.CommandText = _getAllProductsStoredProc; 20: cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; 21:  22: // get a reader and pass back all results 23: using (var reader = cmd.ExecuteReader()) 24: { 25: while(reader.Read()) 26: { 27: yield return new Product 28: { 29: Name = reader["product_name"].ToString(), 30: ... 31: }; 32: } 33: } 34: } 35: } 36: } 37: } The database details themselves are irrelevant. I will say, though, that I'm a big fan of using the System.Data.Common classes instead of your provider specific counterparts directly (SqlCommand, OracleCommand, etc). This lets you mock your data sources easily in unit testing and also allows you to swap out your provider in one line of code. In fact, one of the shared components I'm most proud of implementing was our group's DatabaseUtility library that simplifies all the database access above into one line of code in a thread-safe and provider-neutral way. I went with my own flavor instead of the EL due to the fact I didn't want to force internal company consumers to use the EL if they didn't want to, and it made it easy to allow them to mock their database for unit testing by providing a MockCommand, MockConnection, etc that followed the System.Data.Common model. One of these days I'll blog on that if anyone's interested. Regardless, you often have situations like the above where you are consuming and iterating through a resource that must be closed once you are finished iterating. For the reasons stated above, I didn't want to return IDataReader (that would force them to remember to Dispose it), and I didn't want to return List<Product> (that would force them to hold all products in memory) -- but the first time I wrote this, I was worried. What if you never consume the last item and exit the loop? Are the reader, command, and connection all disposed correctly? Of course, I was 99.999999% sure the creators of C# had already thought of this and taken care of it, but inspection in Reflector was difficult due to the nature of the state machines yield return generates, so I decided to try a quick example program to verify whether or not Dispose() will be called when an iterator is broken from outside the iterator itself -- i.e. before the iterator reports there are no more items. So I wrote a quick Sequencer class with a Dispose() method and an iterator for it. Yes, it is COMPLETELY contrived: 1: // A disposable sequence of int -- yes this is completely contrived... 2: internal class Sequencer : IDisposable 3: { 4: private int _i = 0; 5: private readonly object _mutex = new object(); 6:  7: // Constructs an int sequence. 8: public Sequencer(int start) 9: { 10: _i = start; 11: } 12:  13: // Gets the next integer 14: public int GetNext() 15: { 16: lock (_mutex) 17: { 18: return _i++; 19: } 20: } 21:  22: // Dispose the sequence of integers. 23: public void Dispose() 24: { 25: // force output immediately (flush the buffer) 26: Console.WriteLine("Disposed with last sequence number of {0}!", _i); 27: Console.Out.Flush(); 28: } 29: } And then I created a generator (infinite-loop iterator) that did the using block for auto-Disposal: 1: // simply defines an extension method off of an int to start a sequence 2: public static class SequencerExtensions 3: { 4: // generates an infinite sequence starting at the specified number 5: public static IEnumerable<int> GetSequence(this int starter) 6: { 7: // note the using here, will call Dispose() when block terminated. 8: using (var seq = new Sequencer(starter)) 9: { 10: // infinite loop on this generator, means must be bounded by caller! 11: while(true) 12: { 13: yield return seq.GetNext(); 14: } 15: } 16: } 17: } This is really the same conundrum as the database problem originally posed. Here we are using iteration (yield return) over a large collection (infinite sequence of integers). If we cut the sequence short by breaking iteration, will that using block exit and hence, Dispose be called? Well, let's see: 1: // The test program class 2: public class IteratorTest 3: { 4: // The main test method. 5: public static void Main() 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Going to consume 10 of infinite items"); 8: Console.Out.Flush(); 9:  10: foreach(var i in 0.GetSequence()) 11: { 12: // could use TakeWhile, but wanted to output right at break... 13: if(i >= 10) 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Breaking now!"); 16: Console.Out.Flush(); 17: break; 18: } 19:  20: Console.WriteLine(i); 21: Console.Out.Flush(); 22: } 23:  24: Console.WriteLine("Done with loop."); 25: Console.Out.Flush(); 26: } 27: } So, what do we see? Do we see the "Disposed" message from our dispose, or did the Dispose get skipped because from an "eyeball" perspective we should be locked in that infinite generator loop? Here's the results: 1: Going to consume 10 of infinite items 2: 0 3: 1 4: 2 5: 3 6: 4 7: 5 8: 6 9: 7 10: 8 11: 9 12: Breaking now! 13: Disposed with last sequence number of 11! 14: Done with loop. Yes indeed, when we break the loop, the state machine that C# generates for yield iterate exits the iteration through the using blocks and auto-disposes the IDisposable correctly. I must admit, though, the first time I wrote one, I began to wonder and that led to this test. If you've never seen iterators before (I wrote a previous entry here) the infinite loop may throw you, but you have to keep in mind it is not a linear piece of code, that every time you hit a "yield return" it cedes control back to the state machine generated for the iterator. And this state machine, I'm happy to say, is smart enough to clean up the using blocks correctly. I suspected those wily guys and gals at Microsoft engineered it well, and I wasn't disappointed. But, I've been bitten by assumptions before, so it's good to test and see. Yes, maybe you knew it would or figured it would, but isn't it nice to know? And as those campy 80s G.I. Joe cartoon public service reminders always taught us, "Knowing is half the battle...". Technorati Tags: C#,.NET

  Read the article

• How to check if a Webcam is broken?

  - by user84812

  I just bought an Acer Aspire 3830TG, it comes with an integrated 1.3M HD Webcam. Before buying it i tried with a bootable Lubuntu usb stick, everything worked well except for the webcam, which i thought I had to tweak. The thing is that it seems the camera should work with no problems in ubuntu. The driver is detected, I try dmesg | grep uvcvideo and the output is [ 12.226174] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device 1.3M HD WebCam (058f:b002) [ 12.245553] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo I've also tried using different software (guvcview is black when camera output is MJPG and turns to funny colors when YU12 or YV12, cheese is always black, camorama is always with funny colors...). I should have checked that it was working properly with the default os (windows) but now it's too late for that. I even booted with a official Ubuntu Quantal distro from the usb pen, and the results are the same. so, my question is: is there any way to check that the camera is righmt or broken? So, if it's broken, at least i can go to the shop, show them that it's really broken and get an external webcam for free, or st like that. cheers. UPDATE 1 Thanks, jrp. I run sudo lsinput, and the output info about my video is the following: /dev/input/event6 bustype : BUS_USB vendor : 0x58f product : 0xb002 version : 2 name : "1.3M HD WebCam" phys : "usb-0000:00:1a.0-1.3/button" bits ev : EV_SYN EV_KEY /dev/input/event7 bustype : BUS_HOST vendor : 0x0 product : 0x6 version : 0 name : "Video Bus" phys : "LNXVIDEO/video/input0" bits ev : EV_SYN EV_KEY With this info, i'm not pretty sure about running the luvcview command. If I run luvcview -d /dev/video0 -L, the output is the following: SDL information: Video driver: x11 A window manager is available Device information: Device path: /dev/video0 { pixelformat = 'YUYV', description = 'YUV 4:2:2 (YUYV)' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'MJPG', description = 'MJPEG' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'RGB3', description = 'RGB3' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'BGR3', description = 'BGR3' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'YU12', description = 'YU12' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'YV12', description = 'YV12' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, if i run luvcview by itself, the image is funny (blue and red colors, mainly, with myself in negative state). tx

  Read the article

• .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

  - by RobertChipperfield

  One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #052

  - by Pinal Dave

  Let us continue with the final episode of the Memory Lane Series. Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Set Server Level FILLFACTOR Using T-SQL Script Specifies a percentage that indicates how full the Database Engine should make the leaf level of each index page during index creation or alteration. fillfactor must be an integer value from 1 to 100. The default is 0. Limitation of Online Index Rebuld Operation Online operation means when online operations are happening in the database are in normal operational condition, the processes which are participating in online operations does not require exclusive access to the database. Get Permissions of My Username / Userlogin on Server / Database A few days ago, I was invited to one of the largest database company. I was asked to review database schema and propose changes to it. There was special username or user logic was created for me, so I can review their database. I was very much interested to know what kind of permissions I was assigned per server level and database level. I did not feel like asking Sr. DBA the question about permissions. Simple Example of WHILE Loop With CONTINUE and BREAK Keywords This question is one of those questions which is very simple and most of the users get it correct, however few users find it confusing for the first time. I have tried to explain the usage of simple WHILE loop in the first example. BREAK keyword will exit the stop the while loop and control is moved to the next statement after the while loop. CONTINUE keyword skips all the statement after its execution and control is sent to the first statement of while loop. Forced Parameterization and Simple Parameterization – T-SQL and SSMS When the PARAMETERIZATION option is set to FORCED, any literal value that appears in a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement is converted to a parameter during query compilation. When the PARAMETERIZATION database option is SET to SIMPLE, the SQL Server query optimizer may choose to parameterize the queries. 2008 Transaction and Local Variables – Swap Variables – Update All At Once Concept Summary : Transaction have no effect over memory variables. When UPDATE statement is applied over any table (physical or memory) all the updates are applied at one time together when the statement is committed. First of all I suggest that you read the article listed above about the effect of transaction on local variant. As seen there local variables are independent of any transaction effect. Simulate INNER JOIN using LEFT JOIN statement – Performance Analysis Just a day ago, while I was working with JOINs I find one interesting observation, which has prompted me to create following example. Before we continue further let me make very clear that INNER JOIN should be used where it cannot be used and simulating INNER JOIN using any other JOINs will degrade the performance. If there are scopes to convert any OUTER JOIN to INNER JOIN it should be done with priority. 2009 Introduction to Business Intelligence – Important Terms & Definitions Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data from various data sources, thus providing enterprise users with reliable and timely information and analysis for improved decision making. Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key Candidate Key – A Candidate Key can be any column or a combination of columns that can qualify as unique key in database. There can be multiple Candidate Keys in one table. Each Candidate Key can qualify as Primary Key. Primary Key – A Primary Key is a column or a combination of columns that uniquely identify a record. Only one Candidate Key can be Primary Key. 2010 Taking Multiple Backup of Database in Single Command – Mirrored Database Backup I recently had a very interesting experience. In one of my recent consultancy works, I was told by our client that they are going to take the backup of the database and will also a copy of it at the same time. I expressed that it was surely possible if they were going to use a mirror command. In addition, they told me that whenever they take two copies of the database, the size of the database, is always reduced. Now this was something not clear to me, I said it was not possible and so I asked them to show me the script. Corrupted Backup File and Unsuccessful Restore The CTO, who was also present at the location, got very upset with this situation. He then asked when the last successful restore test was done. As expected, the answer was NEVER.There were no successful restore tests done before. During that time, I was present and I could clearly see the stress, confusion, carelessness and anger around me. I did not appreciate the feeling and I was pretty sure that no one in there wanted the atmosphere like me. 2011 TRACEWRITE – Wait Type – Wait Related to Buffer and Resolution SQL Trace is a SQL Server database engine technology which monitors specific events generated when various actions occur in the database engine. When any event is fired it goes through various stages as well various routes. One of the routes is Trace I/O Provider, which sends data to its final destination either as a file or rowset. DATEDIFF – Accuracy of Various Dateparts If you want to have accuracy in seconds, you need to use a different approach. In the first example, the accurate method is to find the number of seconds first and then divide it by 60 to convert it in minutes. Dedicated Access Control for SQL Server Express Edition http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Book Signing at SQLPASS 2012 Who I Am And How I Got Here – True Story as Blog Post If there was a shortcut to success – I want to know. I learnt SQL Server hard way and I am still learning. There are so many things, I have to learn. There is not enough time to learn everything which we want to learn. I am constantly working on it every day. I welcome you to join my journey as well. Please join me in my journey to learn SQL Server – more the merrier. Vacation, Travel and Study – A New Concept Even those who have advanced degrees and went to college for years, or even decades, find studying hard.  There is a difference between studying for a career and studying for a certification.  At least to get a degree there is a variety of subjects, with labs, exams, and practice problems to make things more interesting. Order By Numeric Values Formatted as String We have a table which has a column containing alphanumeric data. The data always has first as an integer and later part as a string. The business need is to order the data based on the first part of the alphanumeric data which is an integer. Now the problem is that no matter how we use ORDER BY the result is not produced as expected. Let us understand this with an example. Resolving SQL Server Connection Errors – SQL in Sixty Seconds #030 – Video One of the most famous errors related to SQL Server is about connecting to SQL Server itself. Here is how it goes, most of the time developers have worked with SQL Server and knows pretty much every error which they face during development language. However, hardly they install fresh SQL Server. As the installation of the SQL Server is a rare occasion unless you are a DBA who is responsible for such an instance – the error faced during installations are pretty rare as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• My Code Kata–A Solution Kata

  - by Glav

  There are many developers and coders out there who like to do code Kata’s to keep their coding ability up to scratch and to practice their skills. I think it is a good idea. While I like the concept, I find them dead boring and of minimal purpose. Yes, they serve to hone your skills but that’s about it. They are often quite abstract, in that they usually focus on a small problem set requiring specific solutions. It is fair enough as that is how they are designed but again, I find them quite boring. What I personally like to do is go for something a little larger and a little more fun. It takes a little more time and is not as easily executed as a kata though, but it services the same purposes from a practice perspective and allows me to continue to solve some problems that are not directly part of the initial goal. This means I can cover a broader learning range and have a bit more fun. If I am lucky, sometimes they even end up being useful tools. With that in mind, I thought I’d share my current ‘kata’. It is not really a code kata as it is too big. I prefer to think of it as a ‘solution kata’. The code is on bitbucket here. What I wanted to do was create a kind of simplistic virtual world where I can create a player, or a class, stuff it into the world, and see if it survives, and can navigate its way to the exit. Requirements were pretty simple: Must be able to define a map to describe the world using simple X,Y co-ordinates. Z co-ordinates as well if you feel like getting clever. Should have the concept of entrances, exists, solid blocks, and potentially other materials (again if you want to get clever). A coder should be able to easily write a class which will act as an inhabitant of the world. An inhabitant will receive stimulus from the world in the form of surrounding environment and be able to make a decision on action which it passes back to the ‘world’ for processing. At a minimum, an inhabitant will have sight and speed characteristics which determine how far they can ‘see’ in the world, and how fast they can move. Coders who write a really bad ‘inhabitant’ should not adversely affect the rest of world. Should allow multiple inhabitants in the world. So that was the solution I set out to act as a practice solution and a little bit of fun. It had some interesting problems to solve and I figured, if it turned out ok, I could potentially use this as a ‘developer test’ for interviews. Ask a potential coder to write a class for an inhabitant. Show the coder the map they will navigate, but also mention that we will use their code to navigate a map they have not yet seen and a little more complex. I have been playing with solution for a short time now and have it working in basic concepts. Below is a screen shot using a very basic console visualiser that shows the map, boundaries, blocks, entrance, exit and players/inhabitants. The yellow asterisks ‘*’ are the players, green ‘O’ the entrance, purple ‘^’ the exit, maroon/browny ‘#’ are solid blocks. The players can move around at different speeds, knock into each others, and make directional movement decisions based on what they see and who is around them. It has been quite fun to write and it is also quite fun to develop different players to inject into the world. The code below shows a really simple implementation of an inhabitant that can work out what to do based on stimulus from the world. It is pretty simple and just tries to move in some direction if there is nothing blocking the path. public class TestPlayer:LivingEntity { public TestPlayer() { Name = "Beta Boy"; LifeKey = Guid.NewGuid(); } public override ActionResult DecideActionToPerform(EcoDev.Core.Common.Actions.ActionContext actionContext) { try { var action = new MovementAction(); // move forward if we can if (actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Forward; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Left; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Back; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Right; return action; } } return action; } catch (Exception ex) { World.WriteDebugInformation("Player: "+ Name, string.Format("Player Generated exception: {0}",ex.Message)); throw ex; } } private bool CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(MapBlock block) { if (block == null || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowEntry || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowExit || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowPotentialEntry) { return true; } return false; } } It is simple and it seems to work well. The world implementation itself decides the stimulus context that is passed to he inhabitant to make an action decision. All movement is carried out on separate threads and timed appropriately to be as fair as possible and to cater for additional skills such as speed, and eventually maybe stamina, strength, with actions like fighting. It is pretty fun to make up random maps and see how your inhabitant does. You can download the code from here. Along the way I have played with parallel extensions to make the compute intensive stuff spread across all cores, had to heavily factor in visibility of methods and properties so design of classes was paramount, work out movement algorithms that play fairly in the world and properly favour the players with higher abilities, as well as a host of other issues. So that is my ‘solution kata’. If I keep going with it, I may develop a web interface for it where people can upload assemblies and watch their player within a web browser visualiser and maybe even a map designer. What do you do to keep the fires burning?

  Read the article

• Share and Deliver BI Publisher Reports in Multiple Languages

  - by kanichiro.nishida

  When you share your reports with someone who speak and read in different languages you want your reports to be shown in their language, right ? Well, translating reports with BI Publisher is not only easy but also reduces the maintenance cost a lot. Many of us in the BI Publisher product development team used to work in Globalization and Multi Lingual support, which enables Oracle products and applications to be used in many different languages and countries and territories.  And we have a lot of experience in this area. In fact, being a strategic reporting platform for Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and many other Oracle application products, our customers from all over the world are generating thousands of thousands of reports, including out-of-the-box pre-developed reports from Oracle and customer created or customized reports, in their own local language everyday as they operate and manage their business. Today, I’m going to talk about this very topic, how to translate my reports with BI Publisher 11G. Translation Grows, not the Numbers of the Reports Most of the reporting tools, regardless if it’s traditional or new, always take this translation on the back burner. They require their users to copy an original report and translate the whole thing. So when you want to support additional10 languages you will need to have 10 copies of the original. Imagine when you have 50 reports then you will end up having 500 reports (50 x 10) ! Now you need to maintain these 500 reports, whenever you need to make a change in a report you need to apply the same change to the other 10 reports. And as you imagine this is not only a nightmare for IT managements but not acceptable especially for the applications like Oracle EBS that supports over 30 languages. So first thing we did was, very simple, we separated the translation out of the report and marry it to the report only at the report generation. This means, regardless of how many languages you need to support you need to have only one report and translation files for the 10 languages, which would contain the translated letters and words. So let’s say you have 50 reports and need to support 10 languages for those reports you still have only 50 reports and each report now has 10 language translation files. Yes, translation is the one should grow as you add more languages to support, not the report itself! And second, we provide the translation files in XLIFF format, which is an international standard XML based format to exchange and maintain translation strings. So once you generate the XLIFF files for your reports with BI Publisher then you can work with any translation vendors in the world to make a mass translation or you can translate the XML files by yourself by manually updating the translatable strings presented in this text file. Lastly, we made it easier to manage the translation process starting from generating the XLIFF files to uploading the translated XLIFF files back to the BI Publisher server. You can generate, download, upload the XLIFF files from the BI Publisher’s Web interface with your browser and you can see the translated reports right away without needing to shutdown or restart your server. While the translated reports are displayed based on your language preference setting you can also specify a different language when you schedule or deliver the reports so that they can be generated in your customer’s preferred language. What Can I Translate? When it comes to translation there are three things. First, report content translation. When you receive a report you like to see the content like report title, section title, comments, annotation, table column header, and anything that are static and embedded in the report. in your preferred language. We call this Reports Content translation. Second, when you open a report online you might want to see not only the report content being translated but also the report UI, such as report name, parameter name, layout name, and anything that would help you to navigate around the reports, to be translated in your language. We call this Reports UI translation. And this separation of the Reports Content and Reports UI translation makes it very useful especially when you want to navigate through the reports in your preferred language UI but want to generate the reports in your customer’s preferred language. Imagine you are English native speaker and need to generate and send a report to your customers in China. You like to see the report name, parameter name in English so that you can comfortably navigate to the report and generate the report output, but like to see the report generated in Chinese so that the your customers in China can understand the report when they receive it. And lastly, you might want to see even the data presented in the report to be translated. For example, you might want to see product names in an Order Status report to be translated based on the report viewer’s language preference. We call this Reporting Data translation. Since this Reporting Data translation is maintained at the data source level such as Database tables along with the main data, you need to prepare the translation at the data source level first. Then, you want to make sure that your query is switched accordingly based on the language preference setting so that the translated data will be retrieved. How to Translate BI Publisher Reports? Now when it comes to ‘how to translate BI Publisher reports?’ the main focus here is about the translation for the Report Content and Report UI. And I just created this video to show you how to create and manage the translation with BI Publisher 11G. Please take a look at the clip below.   In today’s business world, customers and suppliers are from all over the world regardless of the size of the company or organization. Supporting multiple languages for your reports is no longer something ‘nice to have’, it’s mandatory. BI Publisher is designed to support multi lingual reports from the beginning without any extra hidden cost of license or configuration like other reporting tools such as Crystal Reports. You can support additional languages translation at any time with the very simple steps shown in the video above. Happy translation! Please share your translation experience with us! 

  Read the article

• Does Test Driven Development (TDD) improve Quality and Correctness? (Part 1)

  - by David V. Corbin

  Since the dawn of the computer age, various methodologies have been introduced to improve quality and reduce cost. In this posting, I will by sharing my experiences with Test Driven Development; both its benefits and limitations. To start this topic, we need to agree on what TDD is. The first is to define each of the three words as used in this context. Test - An item or action which measures something in some quantifiable form. Driven - The primary motivation or focus of a series of activities (process) Development - All phases of a software project/product from concept through delivery. The above are very simple definitions that result in the following: "TDD is a process where the primary focus is on measuring and quantifying all aspects of the creation of a (software) product." There are many places where TDD is used outside of software development, even though it is not known by this name. Consider the (conventional) education process that most of us grew up on. The focus was to get the best grades as measured by different tests. Many of these tests measured rote memorization and not understanding of the subject matter. The result of this that many people graduated with high scores but without "quality and correctness" in their ability to utilize the subject matter (of course, the flip side is true where certain people DID understand the material but were not very good at taking this type of test). Returning to software development, let us look at some common scenarios. While these items are generally applicable regardless of platform, language and tools; the remainder of this post will utilize Microsoft Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) for examples. It should be realized that everyone does at least some aspect of TDD. At the most rudimentary level, getting a program to compile involves a "pass/fail" measurement (is the syntax valid) that drives their ability to proceed further (run the program). Other developers may create "Unit Tests" in the belief that having a test for every method/property of a class and good code coverage is the goal of TDD. These items may be helpful and even important, but really only address a small aspect of the overall effort. To see TDD in a bigger view, lets identify the various activities that are part of the Software Development LifeCycle. These are going to be presented in a Waterfall style for simplicity, but each item also occurs within Iterative methodologies such as Agile/Scrum. the key ones here are: Requirements Gathering Architecture Design Implementation Quality Assurance Can each of these items be subjected to a process which establishes metrics (quantified metrics) that reflect both the quality and correctness of each item? It should be clear that conventional Unit Tests do not apply to all of these items; at best they can verify that a local aspect (e.g. a Class/Method) of implementation matches the (test writers perspective of) the appropriate design document. So what can we do? For each of area, the goal is to create tests that are quantifiable and durable. The ability to quantify the measurements (beyond a simple pass/fail) is critical to tracking progress(eventually measuring the level of success that has been achieved) and for providing clear information on what items need to be addressed (along with the appropriate time to address them - in varying levels of detail) . Durability is important so that the test can be reapplied (ideally in an automated fashion) over the entire cycle. Returning for a moment back to our "education example", one must also be careful of how the tests are organized and how the measurements are taken. If a test is in a multiple choice format, there is a significant statistical probability that a correct answer might be the result of a random guess. Also, in many situations, having the student simply provide a final answer can obscure many important elements. For example, on a math test, having the student simply provide a numeric answer (rather than showing the methodology) may result in a complete mismatch between the process and the result. It is hard to determine which is worse: The student who makes a simple arithmetric error at one step of a long process (resulting in a wrong answer) or The student who (without providing the "workflow") uses a completely invalid approach, yet still comes up with the right number. The "Wrong Process"/"Right Answer" is probably the single biggest problem in software development. Even very simple items can suffer from this. As an example consider the following code for a "straight line" calculation....Is it correct? (for Integral Points)         int Solve(int m, int b, int x) { return m * x + b; }   Most people would respond "Yes". But let's take the question one step further... Is it correct for all possible values of m,b,x??? (no fair if you cheated by being focused on the bolded text!)  Without additional information regarding constrains on "the possible values of m,b,x" the answer must be NO, there is the risk of overflow/wraparound that will produce an incorrect result! To properly answer this question (i.e. Test the Code), one MUST be able to backtrack from the implementation through the design, and architecture all the way back to the requirements. And the requirement itself must be tested against the stakeholder(s). It is only when the bounding conditions are defined that it is possible to determine if the code is "Correct" and has "Quality". Yet, how many of us (myself included) have written such code without even thinking about it. In many canses we (think we) "know" what the bounds are, and that the code will be correct. As we all know, requirements change, "code reuse" causes implementations to be applied to different scenarios, etc. This leads directly to the types of system failures that plague so many projects. This approach to TDD is much more holistic than ones which start by focusing on the details. The fundamental concepts still apply: Each item should be tested. The test should be defined/implemented before (or concurrent with) the definition/implementation of the actual item. We also add concepts that expand the scope and alter the style by recognizing: There are many things beside "lines of code" that benefit from testing (measuring/evaluating in a formal way) Correctness and Quality can not be solely measured by "correct results" In the future parts, we will examine in greater detail some of the techniques that can be applied to each of these areas....

  Read the article

• At most how many customized P3 attributes could be added into Agile?

  - by Jie Chen

  I have one customer/Oracle Partner Consultant asking me such question: how many customized attributes can be allowed to add to Agile's subclass Page Three? I never did research against this because Agile User Guide never says this and theoretically Agile supports unlimited amount of customized attributes, unless the browser itself cannot handle them in allocated memory. However my customers says when to add almost 1000 attributes, the browser (Web Client) will not show any Page Three attributes, including all the out-of-box attributes. Let's see why. Analysis It is horrible to add 1000 attributes manually. Let's do it by a batch SQL like below to add them to Item's subclass Page Three tab. Do not execute below SQL because it will not take effect due to your different node id. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE createP3Text(v_name IN VARCHAR2) IS v_nid NUMBER; v_pid NUMBER; BEGIN select SEQNODETABLE.nextval into v_nid from dual; Insert Into nodeTable ( id,parentID,description,objType,inherit,helpID,version,name ) values ( v_nid,2473003, v_name ,1,0,0,0, v_name); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,925, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,1,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,2,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,2,0,1,3,'50'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,5, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,2,0,1,6,'50'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,2,0,0,7,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,8,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,9,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,1,10,v_name); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,11,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,11743,1,14,'2'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,30, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,38, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,59,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,60,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,724,0,61, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,0,232,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,233,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,12239,1,415,'13307'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,0,605,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,610,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,716,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,795,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,2000008821,1,864,'2'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,923,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,0,719,'0'); Insert Into tableInfo ( tabID,tableID,classID,att,ordering ) values ( 2473005,1501,2473002,v_nid,9999); commit; END createP3Text; / BEGIN FOR i in 1..1000 LOOP createP3Text('MyText' || i); END LOOP; END; / DROP PROCEDURE createP3Text; COMMIT; Now restart Agile Server and check the Server's log, we noticed below: ***** Node Created : 85625 ***** Property Created : 184579 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + Agile PLM Server Starting Up... + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ However the previously log before batch SQL is ***** Node Created : 84625 ***** Property Created : 157579 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + Agile PLM Server Starting Up... + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Obviously we successfully imported 1000 (85625-84625) attributes. Now go to JavaClient and confirm if we have them or not. Theoretically we are able to open such item object and see all these 1000 attributes and their values, but we get below error. We have no error tips in server log. But never mind we have the Java Console for JavaClient. If to open the same item in JavaClient we get a clear error and detailed trace in Java Console. ORA-01795: maximum number of expressions in a list is 1000 java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01795: maximum number of expressions in a list is 1000 at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:125) ... ... at weblogic.jdbc.wrapper.PreparedStatement.executeQuery(PreparedStatement.java:128) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.AgileFlexUtil.setFlexValuesForOneRowTable(AgileFlexUtil.java:1104) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.BaseFlexTableDAO.loadExtraFlexAttValues(BaseFlexTableDAO.java:111) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.BasePageThreeDAO.loadTable(BasePageThreeDAO.java:108) If you are interested in the background of the problem, you may de-compile the class com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.AgileFlexUtil.setFlexValuesForOneRowTable and find the root cause that Agile happens to hit Oracle Database's limitation that more than 1000 values in the "IN" clause. Check here http://ora-01795.ora-code.com If you need Oracle Agile's final solution, please contact Oracle Agile Support. Performance Below two screenshot are jvm heap usage from before-SQL and after-SQL. We can see there is no big memory gap between two cases. So definitely there is no performance impact to Agile Application Server unless you have more than 1000 attributes for EACH of your dozens of  subclasses. And for client, 1000 attributes should not impact the browser's performance because in HTML we only use dt and dd for each attribute's pair: label and value. It is quite lightweight.

  Read the article

• A Good Developer is So Hard to Find

  - by James Michael Hare

  Let me start out by saying I want to damn the writers of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever – 2. It is eating every last shred of my free time! But as I've been churning through each puzzle and marvelling at the brain teasers and trivia within, I began to think about interviewing developers and why it seems to be so hard to find good ones.  The problem is, it seems like no matter how hard we try to find the perfect way to separate the chaff from the wheat, inevitably someone will get hired who falls far short of expectations or someone will get passed over for missing a piece of trivia or a tricky brain teaser that could have been an excellent team member.   In shops that are primarily software-producing businesses or other heavily IT-oriented businesses (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) there often exists a much tighter bond between HR and the hiring development staff because development is their life-blood. Unfortunately, many of us work in places where IT is viewed as a cost or just a means to an end. In these shops, too often, HR and development staff may work against each other due to differences in opinion as to what a good developer is or what one is worth.  It seems that if you ask two different people what makes a good developer, often you will get three different opinions.   With the exception of those shops that are purely development-centric (you guys have it much easier!), most other shops have management who have very little knowledge about the development process.  Their view can often be that development is simply a skill that one learns and then once aquired, that developer can produce widgets as good as the next like workers on an assembly-line floor.  On the other side, you have many developers that feel that software development is an art unto itself and that the ability to create the most pure design or know the most obscure of keywords or write the shortest-possible obfuscated piece of code is a good coder.  So is it a skill?  An Art?  Or something entirely in between?   Saying that software is merely a skill and one just needs to learn the syntax and tools would be akin to saying anyone who knows English and can use Word can write a 300 page book that is accurate, meaningful, and stays true to the point.  This just isn't so.  It takes more than mere skill to take words and form a sentence, join those sentences into paragraphs, and those paragraphs into a document.  I've interviewed candidates who could answer obscure syntax and keyword questions and once they were hired could not code effectively at all.  So development must be more than a skill.   But on the other end, we have art.  Is development an art?  Is our end result to produce art?  I can marvel at a piece of code -- see it as concise and beautiful -- and yet that code most perform some stated function with accuracy and efficiency and maintainability.  None of these three things have anything to do with art, per se.  Art is beauty for its own sake and is a wonderful thing.  But if you apply that same though to development it just doesn't hold.  I've had developers tell me that all that matters is the end result and how you code it is entirely part of the art and I couldn't disagree more.  Yes, the end result, the accuracy, is the prime criteria to be met.  But if code is not maintainable and efficient, it would be just as useless as a beautiful car that breaks down once a week or that gets 2 miles to the gallon.  Yes, it may work in that it moves you from point A to point B and is pretty as hell, but if it can't be maintained or is not efficient, it's not a good solution.  So development must be something less than art.   In the end, I think I feel like development is a matter of craftsmanship.  We use our tools and we use our skills and set about to construct something that satisfies a purpose and yet is also elegant and efficient.  There is skill involved, and there is an art, but really it boils down to being able to craft code.  Crafting code is far more than writing code.  Anyone can write code if they know the syntax, but so few people can actually craft code that solves a purpose and craft it well.  So this is what I want to find, I want to find code craftsman!  But how?   I used to ask coding-trivia questions a long time ago and many people still fall back on this.  The thought is that if you ask the candidate some piece of coding trivia and they know the answer it must follow that they can craft good code.  For example:   What C++ keyword can be applied to a class/struct field to allow it to be changed even from a const-instance of that class/struct?  (answer: mutable)   So what do we prove if a candidate can answer this?  Only that they know what mutable means.  One would hope that this would infer that they'd know how to use it, and more importantly when and if it should ever be used!  But it rarely does!  The problem with triva questions is that you will either: Approve a really good developer who knows what some obscure keyword is (good) Reject a really good developer who never needed to use that keyword or is too inexperienced to know how to use it (bad) Approve a really bad developer who googled "C++ Interview Questions" and studied like hell but can't craft (very bad) Many HR departments love these kind of tests because they are short and easy to defend if a legal issue arrises on hiring decisions.  After all it's easy to say a person wasn't hired because they scored 30 out of 100 on some trivia test.  But unfortunately, you've eliminated a large part of your potential developer pool and possibly hired a few duds.  There are times I've hired candidates who knew every trivia question I could throw out them and couldn't craft.  And then there are times I've interviewed candidates who failed all my trivia but who I took a chance on who were my best finds ever.    So if not trivia, then what?  Brain teasers?  The thought is, these type of questions measure the thinking power of a candidate.  The problem is, once again, you will either: Approve a good candidate who has never heard the problem and can solve it (good) Reject a good candidate who just happens not to see the "catch" because they're nervous or it may be really obscure (bad) Approve a candidate who has studied enough interview brain teasers (once again, you can google em) to recognize the "catch" or knows the answer already (bad). Once again, you're eliminating good candidates and possibly accepting bad candidates.  In these cases, I think testing someone with brain teasers only tests their ability to answer brain teasers, not the ability to craft code. So how do we measure someone's ability to craft code?  Here's a novel idea: have them code!  Give them a computer and a compiler, or a whiteboard and a pen, or paper and pencil and have them construct a piece of code.  It just makes sense that if we're going to hire someone to code we should actually watch them code.  When they're done, we can judge them on several criteria: Correctness - does the candidate's solution accurately solve the problem proposed? Accuracy - is the candidate's solution reasonably syntactically correct? Efficiency - did the candidate write or use the more efficient data structures or algorithms for the job? Maintainability - was the candidate's code free of obfuscation and clever tricks that diminish readability? Persona - are they eager and willing or aloof and egotistical?  Will they work well within your team? It may sound simple, or it may sound crazy, but when I'm looking to hire a developer, I want to see them actually develop well-crafted code.

  Read the article

• Applications: How to create a custom dialog box for Windows Mobile 6 (native)

  - by TechTwaddle

  Ashraf, on the MSDN forum, asks, “Is there a way to make a default choice for the messagebox that happens after a period of time if the user doesn't choose (Clicked ) Yes or No buttons.” To elaborate, the requirement is to show a message box to the user with certain options to select, and if the user does not respond within a predefined time limit (say 8 seconds) then the message box must dismiss itself and select a default option. Now such a functionality is not available with the MessageBox() api, you will have to write your own custom dialog box. Surely, creating a dialog box is quite a simple task using the DialogBox() api, and we have been creating full screen dialog boxes all the while. So how will this custom message box be any different? It’s not much different from a regular dialog box except for a few changes in its properties. First, it has a title bar but no buttons on the title bar (no ‘x’ or ‘ok’ button on the title bar), it doesn’t occupy full screen and it contains the controls that you put into it, thus justifying the title ‘custom’. So in this post we create a custom dialog box with two buttons, ‘Black’ and ‘White’. The user is given 8 seconds to select one of those colours, if the user doesn’t make a selection in 8 seconds, the default option ‘Black’ is selected. Before going into the implementation here is a video of how the dialog box works; Custom dialog box To start off, add a new dialog resource into your application, size it appropriately and add whatever controls you need to the dialog. In my case, I added two static text labels and two buttons, as below; Now we need to write up the window procedure for this dialog, here is the complete function; BOOL CALLBACK CustomDialogProc(HWND hDlg, UINT uMessage, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) {     int wmID, wmEvent;     PAINTSTRUCT ps;     HDC hdc;     static int timeCount = 0;     switch(uMessage)     {         case WM_INITDIALOG:             {                 SHINITDLGINFO shidi;                 memset(&shidi, 0, sizeof(shidi));                 shidi.dwMask = SHIDIM_FLAGS;                 //shidi.dwFlags = SHIDIF_DONEBUTTON | SHIDIF_SIPDOWN | SHIDIF_SIZEDLGFULLSCREEN | SHIDIF_EMPTYMENU;                 shidi.dwFlags = SHIDIF_SIPDOWN | SHIDIF_EMPTYMENU;                 shidi.hDlg = hDlg;                 SHInitDialog(&shidi);                 SHDoneButton(hDlg, SHDB_HIDE);                 timeCount = 0;                 SetWindowText(GetDlgItem(hDlg, IDC_STATIC_TIME_REMAINING), L"Time remaining: 8 second(s)");                 SetTimer(hDlg, MY_TIMER, 1000, NULL);             }             return TRUE;         case WM_COMMAND:             {                 wmID = LOWORD(wParam);                 wmEvent = HIWORD(wParam);                 switch(wmID)                 {                     case IDC_BUTTON_BLACK:                         KillTimer(hDlg, MY_TIMER);                         EndDialog(hDlg, IDC_BUTTON_BLACK);                         break;                     case IDC_BUTTON_WHITE:                         KillTimer(hDlg, MY_TIMER);                         EndDialog(hDlg, IDC_BUTTON_WHITE);                         break;                 }             }             break;         case WM_TIMER:             {                 if (wParam == MY_TIMER)                 {                     WCHAR wszText[128];                     memset(&wszText, 0, sizeof(wszText));                     timeCount++;                     //8 seconds are over, dismiss the dialog, select def value                     if (timeCount >= 8)                     {                         KillTimer(hDlg, MY_TIMER);                         EndDialog(hDlg, IDC_BUTTON_BLACK_DEF);                     }                     wsprintf(wszText, L"Time remaining: %d second(s)", 8-timeCount);                     SetWindowText(GetDlgItem(hDlg, IDC_STATIC_TIME_REMAINING), wszText);                     UpdateWindow(GetDlgItem(hDlg, IDC_STATIC_TIME_REMAINING));                 }             }             break;         case WM_PAINT:             {                 hdc = BeginPaint(hDlg, &ps);                 EndPaint(hDlg, &ps);             }             break;     }     return FALSE; } The MSDN documentation mentions that you need to specify the flag WS_NONAVDONEBUTTON, but I got an error saying that the value could not be found, so we can ignore this for now. Next up, while calling SHInitDialog() for your custom dialog, make sure that you don’t specify SHDIF_DONEBUTTON in the dwFlags member of the SHINITDIALOG structure, this member makes the ‘ok’ button appear on the dialog title bar. Finally, we need to call SHDoneButton() with SHDB_HIDE flag to, well, hide the Done button. The ‘Done’ button is the same as the ‘ok’ button, so this step might seem redundant, and the dialog works fine without calling SHDoneButton() too, but it’s better to stick with the documentation (; So you can see that we have followed all these steps above, under WM_INITDIALOG. We also setup a few things like a variable to keep track of the time, and setting off a one second timer. Every time the timer fires, we receive a WM_TIMER message. We then update the static label displaying the amount of time left to the user. If 8 seconds go by without the user selecting any option, we kill the timer and end the dialog with IDC_BUTTON_BLACK_DEF. This is just a #define’d integer value, make sure it’s unique. You’ll see why this is important. If the user makes a selection, either Black or White, we kill the timer and end the dialog with corresponding selection the user made, that is, either IDC_BUTTON_BLACK or IDC_BUTTON_WHITE. Ok, so now our custom dialog is ready to be used. I invoke the custom dialog from a menu entry in the main windows as below, case IDM_MENU_CUSTOMDLG:     {         int ret = DialogBox(g_hInst, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDD_CUSTOM_DIALOG), hWnd, CustomDialogProc);         switch(ret)         {             case IDC_BUTTON_BLACK_DEF:                 SetWindowText(g_hStaticSelection, L"You Selected: Black (default)");                 break;             case IDC_BUTTON_BLACK:                 SetWindowText(g_hStaticSelection, L"You Selected: Black");                 break;             case IDC_BUTTON_WHITE:                 SetWindowText(g_hStaticSelection, L"You Selected: White");                 break;         }         UpdateWindow(g_hStaticSelection);     }     break; So you see why ending the dialog with the corresponding value was important, that’s what the DialogBox() api returns with. And in the main window I update a static text label to show which option was selected. I cranked this out in about an hour, and unfortunately don’t have time for a managed C# version. That will have to be another post, if I manage to get it working that is (;

  Read the article

• Fun with Declarative Components

  - by [email protected]

  Use case background I have been asked on a number of occasions if our selectOneChoice component could allow random text to be entered, as well as having a list of selections available. Unfortunately, the selectOneChoice component only allows entry via the dropdown selection list and doesn't allow text entry. I was thinking of possible solutions and thought that this might make a good example for using a declarative component.My initial idea My first thought was to use an af:inputText to allow the text entry, and an af:selectOneChoice with mode="compact" for the selections. To get it to layout horizontally, we would want to use an af:panelGroupLayout with layout="horizontal". To get the label for this to line up correctly, we'll need to wrap the af:panelGroupLayout with an af:panelLabelAndMessage. This is the basic structure: <af:panelLabelAndMessage> <af:panelGroupLayout layout="horizontal"> <af:inputText/> <af:selectOneChoice mode="compact"/> </af:panelgroupLayout></af:panelLabelAndMessage> Make it into a declarative component One of the steps to making a declarative component is deciding what attributes we want to be able to specify. To keep this example simple, let's just have: 'label' (the label of our declarative component)'value' (what we want to bind to the value of the input text)'items' (the select items in our dropdown) Here is the initial declarative component code (saved as file "inputTextWithChoice.jsff"): <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><!-- Copyright (c) 2008, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. --><jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page" version="2.1" xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich"> <jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html;charset=utf-8"/> <af:componentDef var="attrs" componentVar="comp"> <af:xmlContent> <component xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich/component"> <description>Input text with choice component.</description> <attribute> <description>Label</description> <attribute-name>label</attribute-name> <attribute-class>java.lang.String</attribute-class> </attribute> <attribute> <description>Value</description> <attribute-name>value</attribute-name> <attribute-class>java.lang.Object</attribute-class> </attribute> <attribute> <description>Choice Select Items Value</description> <attribute-name>items</attribute-name> <attribute-class>[[Ljavax.faces.model.SelectItem;</attribute-class> </attribute> </component> </af:xmlContent> <af:panelLabelAndMessage id="myPlm" label="#{attrs.label}" for="myIt"> <af:panelGroupLayout id="myPgl" layout="horizontal"> <af:inputText id="myIt" value="#{attrs.value}" partialTriggers="mySoc" label="myIt" simple="true" /> <af:selectOneChoice id="mySoc" label="mySoc" simple="true" mode="compact" value="#{attrs.value}" autoSubmit="true"> <f:selectItems id="mySIs" value="#{attrs.items}" /> </af:selectOneChoice> </af:panelGroupLayout> </af:panelLabelAndMessage> </af:componentDef></jsp:root> By having af:inputText and af:selectOneChoice both have the same value, then (assuming that this passed in as an EL expression) selecting something in the selectOneChoice will update the value in the af:inputText. To use this declarative component in a jspx page: <af:declarativeComponent id="myItwc" viewId="inputTextWithChoice.jsff" label="InputText with Choice" value="#{demoInput.choiceValue}" items="#{demoInput.selectItems}" /> Some problems arise At first glace, this seems to be functioning like we want it to. However, there is a side effect to having the af:inputText and af:selectOneChoice share a value, if one changes, so does the other. The problem here is that when we update the af:inputText to something that doesn't match one of the selections in the af:selectOneChoice, the af:selectOneChoice will set itself to null (since the value doesn't match one of the selections) and the next time the page is submitted, it will submit the null value and the af:inputText will be empty. Oops, we don't want that. Hmm, what to do. Okay, how about if we make sure that the current value is always available in the selection list. But, lets not render it if the value is empty. We also need to add a partialTriggers attribute so that this gets updated when the af:inputText is changed. Plus, we really don't want to select this item so let's disable it. <af:selectOneChoice id="mySoc" partialTriggers="myIt" label="mySoc" simple="true" mode="compact" value="#{attrs.value}" autoSubmit="true"> <af:selectItem id="mySI" label="Selected:#{attrs.value}" value="#{attrs.value}" disabled="true" rendered="#{!empty attrs.value}"/> <af:separator id="mySp" /> <f:selectItems id="mySIs" value="#{attrs.items}" /></af:selectOneChoice> That seems to be working pretty good. One minor issue that we probably can't do anything about is that when you enter something in the inputText and then click on the selectOneChoice, the popup is displayed, but then goes away because it has been replaced via PPR because we told it to with the partialTriggers="myIt". This is not that big a deal, since if you are entering something manually, you probably don't want to select something from the list right afterwards. Making it look like a single component. Now, let's play around a bit with the contentStyle of the af:inputText and the af:selectOneChoice so that the compact icon will layout inside the af:inputText, making it look more like an af:selectManyChoice. We need to add some padding-right to the af;inputText so there is space for the icon. These adjustments were for the Fusion FX skin. <af:inputText id="myIt" partialTriggers="mySoc" autoSubmit="true" contentStyle="padding-right: 15px;" value="#{attrs.value}" label="myIt" simple="true" /><af:selectOneChoice id="mySoc" partialTriggers="myIt" contentStyle="position: relative; top: -2px; left: -19px;" label="mySoc" simple="true" mode="compact" value="#{attrs.value}" autoSubmit="true"> <af:selectItem id="mySI" label="Selected:#{attrs.value}" value="#{attrs.value}" disabled="true" rendered="#{!empty attrs.value}"/> <af:separator id="mySp" /> <f:selectItems id="mySIs" value="#{attrs.items}" /></af:selectOneChoice> There you have it, a declarative component that allows for suggested selections, but also allows arbitrary text to be entered. This could be used for search field, where the 'items' attribute could be populated with popular searches. Lines of java code written: 0

  Read the article

• Collide with rotation of the object

  - by Lahiru

  I'm developing a mirror for lazer beam(Ball sprite). There I'm trying to redirect the laze beam according to the ration degree of the mirror(Rectangle). How can I collide the ball to the correct angle if the colliding object is with some angle(45 deg) rather than colliding back. here is an screen shot of my work here is my code using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; namespace collision { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Texture2D ballTexture; Rectangle ballBounds; Vector2 ballPosition; Vector2 ballVelocity; float ballSpeed = 30f; Texture2D blockTexture; Rectangle blockBounds; Vector2 blockPosition; private Vector2 origin; KeyboardState keyboardState; //Font SpriteFont Font1; Vector2 FontPos; private String displayText; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here ballPosition = new Vector2(this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width / 2, this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height * 0.25f); blockPosition = new Vector2(this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width / 2, this.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height /2); ballVelocity = new Vector2(0, 1); base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); ballTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("ball"); blockTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("mirror"); //create rectangles based off the size of the textures ballBounds = new Rectangle((int)(ballPosition.X - ballTexture.Width / 2), (int)(ballPosition.Y - ballTexture.Height / 2), ballTexture.Width, ballTexture.Height); blockBounds = new Rectangle((int)(blockPosition.X - blockTexture.Width / 2), (int)(blockPosition.Y - blockTexture.Height / 2), blockTexture.Width, blockTexture.Height); origin.X = blockTexture.Width / 2; origin.Y = blockTexture.Height / 2; // TODO: use this.Content to load your game content here Font1 = Content.Load<SpriteFont>("SpriteFont1"); FontPos = new Vector2(graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width - 100, 20); } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> /// private float RotationAngle; float circle = MathHelper.Pi * 2; float angle; protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // TODO: Add your update logic here //check for collision between the ball and the block, or if the ball is outside the bounds of the screen if (ballBounds.Intersects(blockBounds) || !GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Bounds.Contains(ballBounds)) { //we have a simple collision! //if it has hit, swap the direction of the ball, and update it's position ballVelocity = -ballVelocity; ballPosition += ballVelocity * ballSpeed; } else { //move the ball a bit ballPosition += ballVelocity * ballSpeed; } //update bounding boxes ballBounds.X = (int)ballPosition.X; ballBounds.Y = (int)ballPosition.Y; blockBounds.X = (int)blockPosition.X; blockBounds.Y = (int)blockPosition.Y; keyboardState = Keyboard.GetState(); float val = 1.568017f/90; if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space)) RotationAngle = RotationAngle + (float)Math.PI; if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) RotationAngle = RotationAngle - val; angle = (float)Math.PI / 4.0f; // 90 degrees RotationAngle = angle; // RotationAngle = RotationAngle % circle; displayText = RotationAngle.ToString(); base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); // TODO: Add your drawing code here spriteBatch.Begin(); // Find the center of the string Vector2 FontOrigin = Font1.MeasureString(displayText) / 2; spriteBatch.DrawString(Font1, displayText, FontPos, Color.White, 0, FontOrigin, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0.5f); spriteBatch.Draw(ballTexture, ballPosition, Color.White); spriteBatch.Draw(blockTexture, blockPosition,null, Color.White, RotationAngle,origin, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0f); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } } }

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452  | Next Page >