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• Silverlight Cream for May 04, 2010 -- #855

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: John Papa, Adam Kinney, Mike Taulty, Kirupa, Gunnar Peipman, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), Jesse Liberty, and Lee. Shoutout: Jeff Wilcox announced Silverlight Unit Test Framework: New version in the April 2010 Silverlight Toolkit From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight TV 23: MVP Q&A with WWW (Wildermuth, Wahlin and Ward) John Papa has Silverlight 23 up which is a panel discussion between Shawn Wildermuth, Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell and John... wow... what a crew! Design-time Resources in Expression Blend 4 RC Adam Kinney reports on the new feature of Expresseion Blend RC to load resources at design time. Adam also has a project available to demonstrate the concepts he's explaining. Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (1 - Overview) Mike Taulty is starting a series on WCF RIA Services. This first one is an overview and looks to be a good series as expected. Introduction to Sample Data - Page 1 Kirupa has a great 5-part post up about sample data in Expression Blend. Windows Phone 7 development: Using WebBrowser control Gunnar Peipman posted about using the web browser control in WP7 to display RSS data. Good stuff, and all the code too. Silverlight Tip of the Day #10 – Converting Client IP to Geographical Location Mike Snow's Tip #10 is about taking an IP address and getting a geographical location from it. Combine this with his Tip #9 that retrieves the IP address. Silverlight Tip of the Day #11 – Deploying Silverlight Applications with WCF web services. Mike Snow's Tip #11 is much bigger than most ... it's almost an end-to-end solution for creating and deploying a WCF service, including resolving problems. Silverlight Tip of the Day #12 – Getting an Images Source File Name Mike Snow also has tip #12 up, and it's a quick one on getting the original source file name for an image you've loaded. Screen Scraping – When All You Have Is A Hammer… Jesse Liberty posted his solution to a self-imposed problem and ended up writing a 'mini tutorial on using Silverlight for creating desk-top utilities' ... all with source. RIA services and combobox lookups Lee has a post up about RIA Services and setting up comboboxes for lookups. Lots of source in the post and full project download. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Ruby Best Practices, de Gregory T Brown, critique par Idelways

  Idelways vous propose la critique du livre "Ruby Best Practices Increase Your Productivity - Write Better Code" [IMG]http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0596523009.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg[/IMG] Citation: Ruby Best Practices is for programmers who want to use Ruby the way Rubyists do. Written by the developer of the Ruby project Prawn (prawn.majesticseacreature.com), this concise book explains how to design beautiful APIs and domain-specific languages, w...

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• What issues tend to arise when working with HL7 messages?

  - by Ethel Evans

  I'm testing a product for health care businesses, and we're working with HL7 messages. I saw people groaning on another question about the issues with HL7 but not mentioning specifics. Can someone give me some ideas of what issues or classes of problems we should specifically be looking for? We are using some well-used libraries for the parsing. If specifics about these or what we're doing would be helpful please let me know in the comments and I'll add to the question if I can.

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• Sites To Download Free eBooks For Kindle

  - by Gopinath

  Amazon Kindle is the top selling gadget of this holiday season and many of you would have received it as a gift. For those who got a Amazon Kindle here are few websites that offer free eBooks to fulfil reading appetite at no cost. 1. Free Kindle Books – Amazon Website – This page on Amazon lists nice collection of free books available for Kindle that includes Serial by Jack Kiborn, The Wild’s Call by Jeri Smith, Star Wars by John Jackson MIller and several other books from a list of 40 books. 2. Project Gutenberg: This site as 33,000 + free books that not work let you read on Kindle but also on iPad, PCs and smart phones.  This site is very popular for free ebooks. 3. Google E-Bookstore: Google’s eBookStore has thousands of free ebooks for Kindle in their free books section. 4. Internet Archive: Here you find millions of rare print works that are especially useful for academic research. Multiple language books are also available for Kindle. 5. Open Library: This site is sort of Wikipedia for eBooks with over 20 million user-contributed books and magazines. They are all Kindle friendly. 6. ManyBooks.net: Nearly 30,000 titles, many of which have been pulled from Project Gutenberg. Has a good collection of little-known Creative Commons works. 7. Freebooks.com – the public domain section of this site contains many free ebooks that are perfect for your Kindle. 8. freecomputerbooks.com, freetechbooks.com and onlinecomputerbooks.com - if you are geek and looking for technology books, this is the site you should visit to grab free books. Image credit: bike/flickr This article titled,Sites To Download Free eBooks For Kindle, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Pitfalls of using MySQL as your database choice?

  - by Sergio

  I've read online on multiple occassions that MySQL is a bad database. The places I've read this include some threads on Reddit, but they never seem to delve in on why it's a poor product. Is there any truth to this claim? I've never used it beyond a very simple CRUD scenario, and that was for a university project during my second year. What pitfalls, if any, are there when choosing MySQL as your database?

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• Chuck Norris Be Thy Name

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Chuck Norris doesn’t program with a keyboard. He stares the computer down until it does what he wants. All things need a name. We’ve tossed around a bunch of names for the framework of tools we’ve been working on, but one we kept coming back to was Chuck Norris. Why did we choose Chuck Norris? Well Chuck Norris sort of chose us. Everything we talked about, the name kept drawing us closer to it. We couldn’t escape Chuck Norris, no matter how hard we tried. So we gave in. Chuck Norris can divide by zero. What is the Chuck Norris Framework? @drusellers and I have been working on a variety of tools: WarmuP - http://github.com/chucknorris/warmup (Template your entire project/solution and create projects ready to code - From Zero to a Solution with everything in seconds. Your templates, your choices.) UppercuT - http://projectuppercut.org (Build with Conventions - Professional Builds in Moments, Not Days!) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/uppercut DropkicK - http://github.com/chucknorris/dropkick (Deploy Fluently) RoundhousE - http://projectroundhouse.org (Professional Database Management with Versioning) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/roundhouse SidePOP - http://sidepop.googlecode.com (Does your application need to check email?) HeadlocK - http://github.com/chucknorris/headlock (Hash a directory so you can later know if anything has changed) Others – still in concept or vaporware People ask why we choose such violent names for each tool of our framework? At first it was about whipping your code into shape, but after awhile the naming became, “How can we relate this to Chuck Norris?” People also ask why we uppercase the last letter of each name. Well, that’s more about making you ask questions…but there are a few reasons for it. Project managers never ask Chuck Norris for estimations…ever. The class object inherits from Chuck Norris Chuck Norris doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick() So what are you waiting for? Join the Google group today, download and play with the tools. And lastly, welcome to Chuck Norris. Or should I say Chuck Norris welcomes you…

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• Ceph: open-source petabyte scale distributed storage

  - by Gregory Burd

  You might want to read this interesting research paper titled "Object Storage on Berkeley DB". The Ceph project is a distributed network file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability... and it uses Oracle Berkeley DB for storage.

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• My "Ah-Ha!" Moment With LINQ

  - by CompiledMonkey

  I'm currently working on a set of web services that will be consumed by iPhone and Android devices. Given how often the web services will be called in a relatively short period of time, the data access for the web services has proven to be a very important aspect of the project. In choosing the technology stack for implementation, I opted for LINQ to SQL as it was something I had dabbled with in the past and wanted to learn more about in a real environment. The query optimization happening behind...(read more)

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• Silverlight Cream for June 06, 2010 -- #876

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Brian Genisio, Michael Washington, Fons Sonnemans , Don Burnett, Xianzhong Zhu, Mike Snow, Jesse Liberty, Victor Gaudioso, David Kelley(-2-), and Matias Bonaventura . Shoutout: Anoop has a good post up: MEF or Managed Extensibility Framework and Lazy – Being Lazy with MEF, Custom Export Attributes etc Jesse Liberty's got a good post up if you are just Getting Started With Silverlight: A Path Through The Learning Material John Papa reports Updates and New Home for Sticky Plugin Tim Heuer announced Silverlight 4 Theme refresh including RIA Services templates From SilverlightCream.com: Adventures in MVVM – ViewModel Location and Creation Brian Genisio has a post up about ViewModels and how he attaches them to his views. Some discssion of MVVMLight, and other external links plus the code for the project. Simplified MEF: Dynamically Loading a Silverlight .xap Michael Washington has a good tutorial up on MEF, Silverlight, and ViewModel. In Michael's words: The goal here is to give you a quick easy win. You will be able to understand this one. You will come away with something you can use, and you will be able to tell your fellow colleagues, "MEF? yeah I'm using that, good stuff Touch Gesture Triggers for Windows Phone 7 projects in Blend 4.0 Fons Sonnemans has a post up about touch gestures for WP7 -- he's got 3 of them implemented using triggers, plus an external link to another, and the source. What the Heck is “MEF” for, and what Silverlight designers need to know about it? Don Burnett is also talking MEF... he does a good job of introducing MEF if you're not acquainted yet, plus some external information. Write Your Custom Effect Components in Silverlight 3 Xianzhong Zhu has a post up walking you through creating your own Custom Effect for Blend and Silverlight 3 ... lots of external links and the source project. Silverlight Tip of the Day #28 – Text Trimming Mike Snow's Tip #28 is about Text Trimming... what it does, and how it differs from WPF Windows Phone 7: Lists, Page Animation and oData Jesse Liberty called this a mini-tutorial, but it's not so mini... great tutorial on WP7, data, lists, and page transitions... oh, and the data is OData too... New Silveright Video Tutorial: How to Do Hit Detection Victor Gaudioso's latest video tutorial is up and he's demonstrating how to do Silverlight HitTesting via code from Andy Beaulieu Dependency Properties Made Easy Need a quick pick-up on Dependency Properties? David Kelley has a short post about them on his blog. Isolated Storage Made Easy David Kelley also has a quick post up about Isolated Storage ... going to keep an eye out for more of these quick "Made Easy" posts from David. Prism 4.0 First Drop – MVVM Matias Bonaventura has a post up about the recent Prism 4.0 drop and highlights a bunch of the features/enhancements in this... some code snippets and a linnk out to the CodePlex drop. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• OP-ED: Software Development from Core to Cosmetics

  Few projects end up having too much time. Successfully completing a project often depends on tackling core, significant, and risky aspects of any custom solution first&mdash;like the long hard march up hill&mdash;and finishing with the trim, or cosmetic work, last.

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• Silverlight Cream for June 16, 2010 -- #884

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Zoltan Arvai, Emiel Jongerius, Charles Petzold, Adam Kinney, Deepesh Mohnani, Timmy Kokke, and Damon Payne. Shoutouts: Andy Beaulieu reported his Coding4Fun: Shuffleboard Game for WP7 has been posted -- Big ol' Tutorial and 6 videos of WP7 goodness Karl Shifflett announced Three New WPF and Silverlight Designer Videos Posted Charles Petzold has a cool Flip-Number Clock in Silverlight posted... cool demo, and the source. From SilverlightCream.com: Data Driven Applications with MVVM Part II: Messaging, Unit Testing, and Live Data Sources Zoltan Arvai has part 2 of his Data-Driven Apps with MVVM up, and this one is also including Messaging, Unit Testing, and Live WCF Data... good tutorial and all the code. Silverlight DataContext Changed Event and Trigger Emiel Jongerius takes a hard swing at the lack of DataContextChanged... his solution involves two attached properties instead of one... check it out and see what you think! Orientation Strategies for Windows Phone 7 Charles Petzold is discussing WP7 Orientation... showing the problems you can get involved in, and how to work through them... and you might be surprised at how he does it :) ... pretty cool as usual, Charles! Debugging the TranslateZoomRotate WPF Behavior in Blend Adam Kinney talks through a bug reported about the WPF TranslateZoomRotate Behavior. Again, it's WPF, but it's in Blend, and ya never know when the solution might apply. I want my app to look like the Zune client Deepesh Mohnani demonstrates using the Cosmopolitan theme to get his app to have the same look as the Zune client. MVVM Project and Item Templates Timmy Kokke is continuing with his cool SilverAmp media player, using it to expand upon the new Blend and Silverlight 4 features. This episode touches very lightly on cranking up a new MVVM project in Blend. Great Features for MVVM Friendly Objects Part 0: Favor Composition Over Inheritance Damon Payne has the first part up of a series he's working on with 'MVVM Friendly' features... he's building out a lot of the infrastructure in this post for the ones that follow... all good stuff. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• XNA Per-Polygon Collision Check

  - by user22985

  I'm working on a project in XNA for WP7 with a low-poly environment, my problem is I need to setup a working per-polygon collision check between 2 or more 3d meshes. I've checked tons of tutorials but all of them use bounding-boxes, bounding-spheres,rays etc., but what I really need is a VERY precise way of checking if the polygons of two distinct models have intersected or not. If you could redirect me to an example or at least give me some pointers I would be grateful.

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• Search and Browse Database Objects with Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  I was tempted to throw in another Dora the Explorer Map reference here, but I came to my senses.Having trouble finding something? Maybe you’re just getting older? I know I am. But still, it’d be nice if my favorite database tool could help me out a bit. Hmmm, what’s this ‘Find Database Object‘ thing over here…sounds like a search mechanism of some sort? You can access this panel from the ‘View‘ menu. It’s a good bit down the screen, so I don’t blame you if you haven’t seen it before. It makes finding ‘stuff’ in your database so much easier. Let’s say I want to find my ‘beer’ objects. I simply need to type my search string and the context (in this case I want it to search EVERYTHING), and hit enter. The search results are listed below and clicking on an object automatically opens it! I know it seems very simple, but I get asked this question a LOT. It will even search through your PL/SQL code! Finding too much? Be sure to toggle off the ‘%’ wildcard check box before doing a search. Working on a Project? I bet you use common column names, or codes, throughout your tables. You could take advantage of this knowledge and use the Find Database Object panel as a substitute connection tree or schema browser. Working on your HR project and want to look at your employee objects? Do a column search for your column ID/key. Sometimes thinking outside the box actually works! Don’t be afraid to tackle a problem from a weird angle, or re-purpose your tools. I do it all the time And I drive the developers nuts trying to do things with the tools they were never designed to do. But I digress. Back to your coding!

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• Alternatives to Google Website Optimizer

  - by yahelc

  What (affordable) alternatives are there to Google Website Optimizer for A/B and multivariate tests? The pro's with GWO are basically that its free and that it integrates with Google Analytics. The cons: The relative high time cost of setting up a test. Some alternatives I've seen so far: Optimizely.com VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com Genetify (wiki.github.com/gregdingle/genetify/) Free, open-source, but seems like there's no developer community committed to the project.

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• Compiling Quake 3 in Snow Leopard

  - by Xap87

  First of all I have Xcode 4 installed in Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I have downloaded the Quake 3 source code 1.32b release but I can't open the Xcode project that is inside the /macosx folder since it is in the old .pbproj format and therefore it throws an "incompatible version" error. Has anyone been able to convert this to a Xcode format or is there any other way to compile the source code in Mac OS X Snow Leopard? Thanks

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• SQL SERVER – Sharing your ETL Resources Across Applications with Ease

  - by pinaldave

  Frequently an organization will find that the same resources are used in multiple ETL applications, for example, the same database, general purpose processing logic, or file system locations.  Creating an easy way to reuse these resources across multiple applications would increase efficiency and reduce errors.  Moreover, not every ETL developer has the same skill set, and it is likely that one developer will be more adept at writing code while another is more comfortable configuring database connections.  Real productivity gains will come when these developers are able to work independently while still making their work available to others assigned to the same project.  These are the benefits of a centralized version control system. Of course, most version control systems could be used to store and serve files, but the real need is to store and serve entire ETL applications so that each developer’s ongoing work can immediately benefit from another developer’s completed work.  In other words, the version control system needs to be tightly integrated with the tools used to develop the ETL application. The following screen shot shows such a tool. Desktop ETL tool that tightly integrates with a central version control system Developers can checkout or commit entire projects or just a single artifact.  Each artifact may be managed independently so if you need to go back to an earlier version of one artifact, changes you may have made to other artifacts are not lost.  By being tightly integrated into the graphical environment used to create and edit the project artifacts, it is extremely easy and straight-forward to move your files to and from the version control system and there is no dependency on another vendor’s version control system.  The built in version control system is optimized for managing the artifacts of ETL applications. It is equally important that the version control system supports all of the actions one typically performs such as rollbacks, locking and unlocking of files, and the ability to resolve conflicts.  Note that this particular ETL tool also has the capability to switch back and forth between multiple version control systems. It also needs to be easy to determine the status of an artifact.  Not just that it has been committed or modified, but when and by whom.  Generally you must query the version control system for this information, but having it displayed within the development environment is more desirable. Who’s ETL tool works in this fashion?  Last month I mentioned the data integration solution offered by expressor software.  The version control features I described in this post are all available in their just released expressor 3.1 Standard Edition through the integration of their expressor Studio development environment with a centralized metadata repository and version control system. You can download their Studio application, which is free, or evaluate the full Standard Edition on your own hardware.  It may be worth your time. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Quote of the Day: Substitutions

  - by BuckWoody

  “Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon, instead of principles, slogans, and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.”  Eric Bently Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• 10 Excellent Icon Sets

  - by Jyoti

  Icons are really useful for web design, application interface and more. Everyone loves good looking icons. In this post you will find 10 fresh new icon packs that you can use for your project. Pixelpress Mixed Icons: Social Media Icons By Studio M6: Now Wooden App Icon: Onebit Icon Pack: Fresh Add On Icon Set: 3D Crystals Icon Pack: Twitter Bird Icon: Wooden RSS Icons: Ganto Vector Icons: Vedro Icon PNG And Vector Pack:

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• Quote of the Day: Substitutions

  - by BuckWoody

  “Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon, instead of principles, slogans, and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.”  Eric Bently Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• ANGLE wined3d in reverse

  <b>Wine-Reviews:</b> "Were happy to announce a new open source project called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE for short. The goal of ANGLE is to layer WebGLs subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls."

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• Simple tips to design a Customer Journey Map

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  “A model can abstract to a level that is comprehensible to humans, without getting lost in details.” -The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Inception using Post-it, StoryBoards, Lego or Mindmaping Techniques The first step in a Customer Experience project is to describe customer interactions creating a customer journey map. Modeling is never easy, so to succeed on this effort, it is very convenient that your CX´s team have some “abstract thinking” skills. Besides is very helpful to consult a Business Service Design offered by an Interactive Agency to lead your inception process. Initially, you may start by a free discussion using post-it cards; storyboards; even lego or any other brainstorming technique you like. This will help you to get your mind into the path followed by the customer to purchase your product or to consume any business service you actually offer to your customers, or plan to offer in the near future. (from www.servicedesigntools.org) Colorful Mind Maps are very useful to document and share meeting ideas. Some Mind Maps software providers as ThinkBuzzan provide trial versions, and you will find more mindmapping options on this post by Mashable. Finally to produce a quick one, I do recommend Wise, an entirely online mindmaping service. On my view the best results in terms of communication will always come for an artistic hand-made drawing. Customer Experience Mind Map Example Making your first Customer Journey Map To add some more formalization to your thoughts, there is a wide offering for designing Customer Journey Maps. A Customer Map can be represented as an oriented graph in which another follows each step. The one below is the most simple Customer Journey you can draw. Nothing more than a couple of pictures, numbers and lines to design the customer steps sequence in the purchase process. Very simple Customer Journey for Social Mobile Shopping There are a lot of Customer Journey templates much more sophisticated available  in the Web using a variety of styles, as per example this one with a focus on underlining emotional experience, or this other worksheet template. Representing different interaction devices on the vertical axis, and touchpoints / requirements and existing gaps horizontally  is today´s most common format for Customer Journeys. From Customer Journey Maps to CX Technology Adoption Plans Once you have your map ready, you can start to identify the IT infrastructure requirements for your CXProject. By analyzing customer problems and improvement opportunities with maps, you will then identify the technology gaps and the new investment requirements in your IT infrastructure. Deeping step by step from the more abstract to the more concrete is the best guarantee to take the right IT investment decisions.  ¡Remember to keep your initial customer journey safe on your pocket in every one of your CX´s project meetings- that´s you map to success!

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• What does your Python development workbench look like?

  - by Fabian Fagerholm

  First, a scene-setter to this question: Several questions on this site have to do with selection and comparison of Python IDEs. (The top one currently is What IDE to use for Python). In the answers you can see that many Python programmers use simple text editors, many use sophisticated text editors, and many use a variety of what I would call "actual" integrated development environments – a single program in which all development is done: managing project files, interfacing with a version control system, writing code, refactoring code, making build configurations, writing and executing tests, "drawing" GUIs, and so on. Through its GUI, an IDE supports different kinds of workflows to accomplish different tasks during the journey of writing a program or making changes to an existing one. The exact features vary, but a good IDE has sensible workflows and automates things to let the programmer concentrate on the creative parts of writing software. The non-IDE way of writing large programs relies on a collection of tools that are typically single-purpose; they do "one thing well" as per the Unix philosophy. This "non-integrated development environment" can be thought of as a workbench, supported by the OS and generic interaction through a text or graphical shell. The programmer creates workflows in their mind (or in a wiki?), automates parts and builds a personal workbench, often gradually and as experience accumulates. The learning curve is often steeper than with an IDE, but those who have taken the time to do this can often claim deeper understanding of their tools. (Whether they are better programmers is not part of this question.) With advanced editor-platforms like Emacs, the pieces can be integrated into a whole, while with simpler editors like gedit or TextMate, the shell/terminal is typically the "command center" to drive the workbench. Sometimes people extend an existing IDE to suit their needs. What does your Python development workbench look like? What workflows have you developed and how do they work? For the first question, please give the main "driving" program – the one that you use to control the rest (Emacs, shell, etc.) the "small tools" -- the programs you reach for when doing different tasks For the second question, please describe what the goal of the workflow is (eg. "set up a new project" or "doing initial code design" or "adding a feature" or "executing tests") what steps are in the workflow and what commands you run for each step (eg. in the shell or in Emacs) Also, please describe the context of your work: do you write small one-off scripts, do you do web development (with what framework?), do you write data-munching applications (what kind of data and for what purpose), do you do scientific computing, desktop apps, or something else? Note: A good answer addresses the perspectives above – it doesn't just list a bunch of tools. It will typically be a long answer, not a short one, and will take some thinking to produce; maybe even observing yourself working.

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• Should you ever re-estimate user stories?

  - by f1dave

  My current project is having a 'discussion' which is split down the middle- "this story is more complex than we originally thought, we should re-estimate" vs "you should never re-estimate as you only ever estimate up and never down". Can anyone shed some light on whether you ever should re-estimate? IMHO I'd imagine you could bring up an entirely new card for a new requirement or story, but going back and re-estimating on backlog items seems to skew the concept of relative sizing and will only ever 'inflate' your backlog.

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• techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

  - by Adam M.

  I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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• Static class vs Singleton class in C# [closed]

  - by Floradu88

  Possible Duplicate: What is the difference between all-static-methods and applying a singleton pattern? I need to make a decision for a project I'm working of whether to use static or singleton. After reading an article like this I am inclined to use singleton. What is better to use static class or singleton? Edit 1 : Client Server Desktop Application. Please provide code oriented solutions.

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