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• What is the best free or low-cost Java reporting library (e.g. BIRT, JasperReports, etc.) for making

  - by Max3000

  I want to print, email and write to PDF very simple reports. The reports are basically a list of items, divided in various sections/columns. The sections are not necessarily identical. Think newspaper. I just wasted a solid 2 days of work trying to make this kind of reports using JasperReports. I find that Jasper is great for outputing "normalized" data. The kind that would come out of a database for instance, each row neatly describing an item and each item printed on a line. I'm simplifying a bit but that's the idea. However, given what I want to do I always ended up completely lost. Data not being displayed for no apparent reason, columns of texts never the correct size, column positioning always ending up incorrect, pagination not sanely possible (I was never able to figure it out; the FAQ gives an obscure workaround), etc. I came to the conclusion that Jasper is really not built to make the kind of reports I want. Am I missing something? I'm ready to pay for a tool, as long as the price is reasonable. By reasonable I mean a few $100s. Thanks. EDIT: To answer cetus, here is more information about the report I made in Jasper. What I want is something like this: text text text text ------------------- text | text text |---------- text | text text | text --------| text text |---------- text | text What I made in jasper is this: (detail band) subreport | subreport ------------------------------------ subreport | subreport ------------------------------------ subreport | subreport The subreports are all the same actual report. This report has one field (called "field") and basically just prints this field in a detail band. Hence, running a single subreport simply lists all items from the datasource. The datasource itself is a simple custom JRDatasource containing a collection of strings in the field "field". The datasource iterates over the collection until there are no more strings. Each subreport has its own datasource. I tried many different variations of the above, with all sorts of different properties for the report, subreports, etc. IMO, this is fairly simple stuff. However, the problems I encounter are as follows: Subreports starting from the 3rd don't show up when their position type is 'float'. They do show up when they have 'fix relative to top'. However, I don't want to do this because the first two subreports can be of any length. I can't make each subreport to stretch according to its own length. Instead, they either don't stretch at all (which is not desirable because they have different lenghts) or they stretch according to the longest subreport. This makes a weird layout for sure. Pagination doesn't happen. If some subreports fall outside the page, they simple don't show. One alternative is to increase the 'page height' considerably and the 'detail band height' accordingly. However, in this case it is not really possibly to know the total height in advance. So I'm stuck with calculating/guessing it myself, before the report is even generated. More importantly, long reports end up on one page and this is not acceptable (the printout text is too small, it's ugly/non-professional to have different reports with different PDF page lengths, etc.). BTW, I used iReport so it's possibly limitations of iReport I'm listing here and not of Jasper itself. That's one of the things I'm trying to find out asking this question here. One alternative would be to generate the jrxml myself with just static text but I'm afraid I'll encounter the very same limitations. Anyway, I just generally wasted so much time getting anything done with Jasper that I can't help thinking its not the right tool for the job. (Not to say that Jasper doesn't excel in what it's good at).

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• CRM 2011 Plugin for CREATE (post-operational): Why is the value of "baseamount" zero in post entity image and target?

  - by Olli

  REFORMULATED QUESTION (Apr 24): I am using the CRM Developer Toolkit for VS2012 to create a CRM2011 plugin. The plugin is registered for the CREATE message of the "Invoice Product" entity. Pipeline-Stage is post-operational, execution is synchronous. I register for a post image that contains baseamount. The toolkit creates an execute function that looks like this: protected void ExecutePostInvoiceProductCreate(LocalPluginContext localContext) { if (localContext == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("localContext"); } IPluginExecutionContext context = localContext.PluginExecutionContext; Entity postImageEntity = (context.PostEntityImages != null && context.PostEntityImages.Contains(this.postImageAlias)) ? context.PostEntityImages[this.postImageAlias] : null; } Since we are in post operational stage, the value of baseamount in postImageEntity should already be calculated from the user input, right? However, the value of baseamountin the postImageEntity is zero. The same holds true for the value of baseamount in the target entity that I get using the following code: Entity targetEntity = (context.InputParameters != null && context.InputParameters.Contains("Target")) ? (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"] : null; Using a retrieve request like the one below, I am getting the correct value of baseamount: Entity newlyCreated = service.Retrieve("invoicedetail", targetEntity.Id, new ColumnSet(true)); decimal baseAmount = newlyCreated.GetAttributeValue<Money>("baseamount").Value; The issue does not appear in post operational stage of an update event. I'd be glad to hear your ideas/explanations/suggestions on why this is the case... (Further information: Remote debugging, no isolation mode, plugin stored in database) Original Question: I am working on a plugin for CRM 2011 that is supposed to calculate the amount of tax to be paid when an invoice detail is created. To this end I am trying to get the baseamount of the newly created invoicedetail entity from the post entity image in post operational stage. As far as I understood it, the post entity image is a snapshot of the entity in the database after the new invoice detail has been created. Thus it should contain all properties of the newly created invoice detail. I am getting a "postentityimages" property of the IPluginExecutionContext that contains an entity with the alias I registered ("postImage"). This "postImage" entity contains a key for "baseamount" but its value is 0. Can anybody help me understand why this is the case and what I can do about it? (I also noticed that the postImage does not contain all but only a subset of the entities I registered for.) Here is what the code looks like: protected void ExecutePostInvoiceProductCreate(LocalPluginContext localContext) { if (localContext == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("localContext"); } // Get PluginExecutionContext to obtain PostEntityImages IPluginExecutionContext context = localContext.PluginExecutionContext; // This works: I get a postImage that is not null. Entity postImage = (context.PostEntityImages != null && context.PostEntityImages.Contains(this.postImageAlias)) ? context.PostEntityImages[this.postImageAlias] : null; // Here is the problem: There is a "baseamount" key in the postImage // but its value is zero! decimal baseAmount = ((Money)postImage["baseamount"]).Value; } ADDITION: Pre and post images for post operational update contain non-zero values for baseamount.

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• C++ pimpl idiom wastes an instruction vs. C style?

  - by Rob

  (Yes, I know that one machine instruction usually doesn't matter. I'm asking this question because I want to understand the pimpl idiom, and use it in the best possible way; and because sometimes I do care about one machine instruction.) In the sample code below, there are two classes, Thing and OtherThing. Users would include "thing.hh". Thing uses the pimpl idiom to hide it's implementation. OtherThing uses a C style – non-member functions that return and take pointers. This style produces slightly better machine code. I'm wondering: is there a way to use C++ style – ie, make the functions into member functions – and yet still save the machine instruction. I like this style because it doesn't pollute the namespace outside the class. Note: I'm only looking at calling member functions (in this case, calc). I'm not looking at object allocation. Below are the files, commands, and the machine code, on my Mac. thing.hh: class ThingImpl; class Thing { ThingImpl *impl; public: Thing(); int calc(); }; class OtherThing; OtherThing *make_other(); int calc(OtherThing *); thing.cc: #include "thing.hh" struct ThingImpl { int x; }; Thing::Thing() { impl = new ThingImpl; impl->x = 5; } int Thing::calc() { return impl->x + 1; } struct OtherThing { int x; }; OtherThing *make_other() { OtherThing *t = new OtherThing; t->x = 5; } int calc(OtherThing *t) { return t->x + 1; } main.cc (just to test the code actually works...) #include "thing.hh" #include <cstdio> int main() { Thing *t = new Thing; printf("calc: %d\n", t->calc()); OtherThing *t2 = make_other(); printf("calc: %d\n", calc(t2)); } Makefile: all: main thing.o : thing.cc thing.hh g++ -fomit-frame-pointer -O2 -c thing.cc main.o : main.cc thing.hh g++ -fomit-frame-pointer -O2 -c main.cc main: main.o thing.o g++ -O2 -o $@ $^ clean: rm *.o rm main Run make and then look at the machine code. On the mac I use otool -tv thing.o | c++filt. On linux I think it's objdump -d thing.o. Here is the relevant output: Thing::calc(): 0000000000000000 movq (%rdi),%rax 0000000000000003 movl (%rax),%eax 0000000000000005 incl %eax 0000000000000007 ret calc(OtherThing*): 0000000000000010 movl (%rdi),%eax 0000000000000012 incl %eax 0000000000000014 ret Notice the extra instruction because of the pointer indirection. The first function looks up two fields (impl, then x), while the second only needs to get x. What can be done?

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• connection between two android phones

  - by user1770346

  I m not able to connect my android device to other device(either android or non-android)via bluetooth.After detecting the devices from my android phone,i m not able to connect it to selected device from the list.The main problem is it not showing connectivity conformation message in selected device from list.How can i recover from this problem. please help me.Thanks My code for searching device is:(BluetoothSearchActivity.java) public class BluetoothSearchActivity extends Activity { ArrayAdapter<String> btArrayAdapter; BluetoothAdapter mBluetoothAdapter; TextView stateBluetooth; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); ImageView BluetoothSearchImageView=new ImageView(this); BluetoothSearchImageView.setImageResource(R.drawable.inner1); setContentView(BluetoothSearchImageView); setContentView(R.layout.activity_bluetooth_search); mBluetoothAdapter=BluetoothAdapter.getDefaultAdapter(); ListView listDevicesFound=(ListView) findViewById(R.id.myList); btArrayAdapter=new ArrayAdapter<String> (BluetoothSearchActivity.this,android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1); listDevicesFound.setAdapter(btArrayAdapter); registerReceiver(ActionFoundReceiver,new IntentFilter(BluetoothDevice.ACTION_FOUND)); btArrayAdapter.clear(); mBluetoothAdapter.startDiscovery(); listDevicesFound.setOnItemClickListener(new OnItemClickListener() { public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> parent,View view,int position,long id) { Intent i6=new Intent(getApplicationContext(),AcceptThread.class); startActivity(i6); } }); } private final BroadcastReceiver ActionFoundReceiver=new BroadcastReceiver() { @Override public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub String action=intent.getAction(); if(BluetoothDevice.ACTION_FOUND.equals(action)) { BluetoothDevice device=intent.getParcelableExtra(BluetoothDevice.EXTRA_DEVICE); btArrayAdapter.add(device.getName()+"\n"+device.getAddress()); btArrayAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged(); Log.d("BluetoothSearchActivity",device.getName()+"\n"+device.getAddress()); } } }; @Override protected void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); unregisterReceiver(ActionFoundReceiver); } @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.activity_bluetooth_search, menu); return true; } } and my connectivity code is:(AcceptThread.java) class ConnectThread extends Thread { private static final UUID MY_UUID=UUID.fromString("fa87c0d0-afac-11de-8a39-0800200c9a66"); private static final String ConnectThread = null; BluetoothSocket mSocket; BluetoothDevice mDevice; BluetoothAdapter mBluetoothAdapter; public ConnectThread(BluetoothDevice device) { BluetoothSocket temp=null; mDevice=device; try{ temp=mDevice.createRfcommSocketToServiceRecord(MY_UUID); }catch(IOException e) { } mSocket=temp; } public void run() { mBluetoothAdapter.cancelDiscovery(); try{ Log.i(ConnectThread,"starting to connect"); mSocket.connect(); }catch(IOException connectException) { Log.e(ConnectThread,"connection Failed"); try{ mSocket.close(); }catch(IOException closeException){ } return; } } public void cancel() { try{ mSocket.close(); }catch(IOException e) { } } } public class AcceptThread extends Thread{ private static final String NAME="BluetoothAcceptThread"; private static final UUID MY_UUID=UUID.fromString("fa87c0d0-afac-11de-8a39-0800200c9a66"); BluetoothServerSocket mServerSocket; BluetoothAdapter mBluetoothAdapter; public AcceptThread() { BluetoothServerSocket temp=null; try{ temp=mBluetoothAdapter.listenUsingRfcommWithServiceRecord(NAME,MY_UUID); }catch(IOException e){ } mServerSocket=temp; } public void run() { BluetoothSocket socket=null; while(true) { try{ socket=mServerSocket.accept(); }catch(IOException e) { break; } if(socket!=null) { try { mServerSocket.close(); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } break; } } } public void cancel() { try{ mServerSocket.close(); }catch(IOException e) { } } }

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• C# : Console.Read() does not get the "right" input

  - by Daemonfire3002nd

  Hi there, I have the following code: The actual problem is the "non-quoted" code. I want to get the player amount (max = 4), but when I ask via Console.Read() and I enter any Int from 1 to 4 I get as value: 48 + Console.Read(). They only thing how I can get the "real" input is using Console.ReadLine(), but this does not give me an Integer, no it returns a string, and actually do not know how to convert String (Numbers) to Integers in C#, because I am new, and because I only found ToString() and not ToNumber. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace eve_calc_tool { class Program { int players; int units; int active_units; int inactive_units; int finished_units; int lastDiceNumber = 0; bool game_state; public static void Main(string[] args) { int count_game = 0; //Console.Title = "Mensch ärger dich nicht"; //Console.WriteLine("\tNeues Spiel wird"); //Console.WriteLine("\t...geladen"); //System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(5000); //Console.Clear(); //Console.WriteLine("Neues Spiel wird gestartet, bitte haben sie etwas Geduld"); //Console.Title = "Spiel " + count_game.ToString(); //Console.Clear(); //string prevText = "Anzahl der Spieler: "; //Console.WriteLine(prevText); string read = Console.ReadLine(); /*Program game = new Program(); game.players = read; game.setPlayers(game.players); if (game.players > 0 && 5 > game.players) { game.firstRound(); }*/ string readagain = read; Console.ReadLine(); } /* bool setPlayers(int amount) { players = amount; if (players > 0) { return true; } else { return false; } } bool createGame() { inactive_units = units = getPlayers() * 4; active_units = 0; finished_units = 0; game_state = true; if (game_state == true) { return true; } else { return false; } } int getPlayers() { return players; } private static readonly Random random = new Random(); private static readonly object syncLock = new object(); public static int RandomNumber(int min, int max) { lock (syncLock) { // synchronize return random.Next(min, max); } } int rollDice() { lastDiceNumber = RandomNumber(1,6); return lastDiceNumber; } int firstRound() { int[] results = new int[getPlayers()]; for (int i = 0; i < getPlayers(); i++) { results[i] = rollDice(); } Array.Sort(results); return results[3]; } */ } }

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• SOAP and NHibernate Session in C#

  - by Anonymous Coward

  In a set of SOAP web services the user is authenticated with custom SOAP header (username/password). Each time the user call a WS the following Auth method is called to authenticate and retrieve User object from NHibernate session: [...] public Services : Base { private User user; [...] public string myWS(string username, string password) { if( Auth(username, password) ) { [...] } } } public Base : WebService { protected static ISessionFactory sesFactory; protected static ISession session; static Base { Configuration conf = new Configuration(); [...] sesFactory = conf.BuildSessionFactory(); } private bool Auth(...) { session = sesFactory.OpenSession(); MembershipUser user = null; if (UserCredentials != null && Membership.ValidateUser(username, password)) { luser = Membership.GetUser(username); } ... try { user = (User)session.Get(typeof(User), luser.ProviderUserKey.ToString()); } catch { user = null; throw new [...] } return user != null; } } When the WS work is done the session is cleaned up nicely and everything works: the WSs create, modify and change objects and Nhibernate save them in the DB. The problems come when an user (same username/password) calls the same WS at same time from different clients (machines). The state of the saved objects are inconsistent. How do I manage the session correctly to avoid this? I searched and the documentation about Session management in NHibernate is really vast. Should I Lock over user object? Should I set up a "session share" management between WS calls from same user? Should I use Transaction in some savvy way? Thanks Update1 Yes, mSession is 'session'. Update2 Even with a non-static session object the data saved in the DB are inconsistent. The pattern I use to insert/save object is the following: var return_value = [...]; try { using(ITransaction tx = session.Transaction) { tx.Begin(); MyType obj = new MyType(); user.field = user.field - obj.field; // The fields names are i.e. but this is actually what happens. session.Save(user); session.Save(obj); tx.Commit(); return_value = obj.another_field; } } catch ([...]) { // Handling exceptions... } finally { // Clean up session.Flush(); session.Close(); } return return_value; All new objects (MyType) are correctly saved but the user.field status is not as I would expect. Even obj.another_field is correct (the field is an ID with generated=on-save policy). It is like 'user.field = user.field - obj.field;' is executed more times then necessary.

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• Gap between Navbar and Jumbotron

  - by DDK

  I am building I suppose you could call a template for the site I am going to build however I am still pretty new to bootstrap and thus have trouble figuring which CSS rules are affecting elements etc. The problem I am having is I cannot get the Jumbotron unit to sit flush with the bottom of the navbar. I have found a few questions on here about the same problem but the solutions did not work. Here is my code </head> <body> <div class="row"> <div> <img src="http://placehold.it/1600x300" width="100%"> </div> <!-- Static navbar --> <div class="navbar navbar-default navbar-static-top" role="navigation"> <div class="container"> <div class="navbar-header"> <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".navbar-collapse"> <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> </button> </div> <div class="navbar-collapse collapse"> <ul class="nav nav-justified" id="myNav"> <li class="active"><a href="#">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#about">About</a></li> <li><a href="#contact">Contact</a></li> <li><a href="#contact">Services</a></li> </ul> </div><!--/.nav-collapse --> </div> </div> <div class="jumbotron" id="openingtext"> This is where the opening sale text will go </div> <div class="container"> <!-- Example row of columns --> <div class="row"> <div class="col-md-4"> <h2>Heading</h2> <p>Donec id elit non mi porta gravida at eget metus. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo, tortor mauris condimentum nibh, ut fermentum massa justo sit amet risus. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod. Donec sed odio dui. </p> <p><a class="btn btn-default" href="#" role="button">View details &raquo;</a></p> </div> <div class="col-md-4"> <h2>Heading</h2> I would provide the css but as it is all being pulled from an unchanged version of bootstrap and my stylesheet.css has nothing relating to any of these ids etc it seems pointless to do so. I look forward to hearing your solutions guys and girls

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• Problems with Asynchronous UDP Sockets

  - by ihatenetworkcoding

  Hi, I'm struggling a bit with socket programming (something I'm not at all familiar with) and I can't find anything which helps from google or MSDN (awful). Apologies for the length of this. Basically I have an existing service which recieves and responds to requests over UDP. I can't change this at all. I also have a client within my webapp which dispatches and listens for responses to that service. The existing client I've been given is a singleton which creates a socket and an array of response slots, and then creates a background thread with an infinite looping method that makes "sock.Receive()" calls and pushes the data received into the slot array. All kinds of things about this seem wrong to me and the infinite thread breaks my unit testing so I'm trying to replace this service with one which makes it's it's send/receives asynchronously instead. Point 1: Is this the right approach? I want a non-blocking, scalable, thread-safe service. My first attempt is roughly like this, which sort of worked but the data I got back was always shorter than expected (i.e. the buffer did not have the number of bytes requested) and seemed to throw exceptions when processed. private Socket MyPreConfiguredSocket; public object Query() { //build a request this.MyPreConfiguredSocket.SendTo(MYREQUEST, packet.Length, SocketFlags.Multicast, this._target); IAsyncResult h = this._sock.BeginReceiveFrom(response, 0, BUFFER_SIZE, SocketFlags.None, ref this._target, new AsyncCallback(ARecieve), this._sock); if (!h.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(TIMEOUT)) { throw new Exception("Timed out"); } //process response data (always shortened) } private void ARecieve (IAsyncResult result) { int bytesreceived = (result as Socket).EndReceiveFrom(result, ref this._target); } My second attempt was based on more google trawling and this recursive pattern I frequently saw, but this version always times out! It never gets to ARecieve. public object Query() { //build a request this.MyPreConfiguredSocket.SendTo(MYREQUEST, packet.Length, SocketFlags.Multicast, this._target); State s = new State(this.MyPreConfiguredSocket); this.MyPreConfiguredSocket.BeginReceiveFrom(s.Buffer, 0, BUFFER_SIZE, SocketFlags.None, ref this._target, new AsyncCallback(ARecieve), s); if (!s.Flag.WaitOne(10000)) { throw new Exception("Timed out"); } //always thrown //process response data } private void ARecieve (IAsyncResult result) { //never gets here! State s = (result as State); int bytesreceived = s.Sock.EndReceiveFrom(result, ref this._target); if (bytesreceived > 0) { s.Received += bytesreceived; this._sock.BeginReceiveFrom(s.Buffer, s.Received, BUFFER_SIZE, SocketFlags.None, ref this._target, new AsyncCallback(ARecieve), s); } else { s.Flag.Set(); } } private class State { public State(Socket sock) { this._sock = sock; this._buffer = new byte[BUFFER_SIZE]; this._buffer.Initialize(); } public Socket Sock; public byte[] Buffer; public ManualResetEvent Flag = new ManualResetEvent(false); public int Received = 0; } Point 2: So clearly I'm getting something quite wrong. Point 3: I'm not sure if I'm going about this right. How does the data coming from the remote service even get to the right listening thread? Do I need to create a socket per request? Out of my comfort zone here. Need help.

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• How to reserve public API to internal usage in .NET?

  - by mark

  Dear ladies and sirs. Let me first present the case, which will explain my question. This is going to be a bit long, so I apologize in advance :-). I have objects and collections, which should support the Merge API (it is my custom API, the signature of which is immaterial for this question). This API must be internal, meaning only my framework should be allowed to invoke it. However, derived types should be able to override the basic implementation. The natural way to implement this pattern as I see it, is this: The Merge API is declared as part of some internal interface, let us say IMergeable. Because the interface is internal, derived types would not be able to implement it directly. Rather they must inherit it from a common base type. So, a common base type is introduced, which would implement the IMergeable interface explicitly, where the interface methods delegate to respective protected virtual methods, providing the default implementation. This way the API is only callable by my framework, but derived types may override the default implementation. The following code snippet demonstrates the concept: internal interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } void IMergeable.Merge(object obj) { Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } All is fine, provided a single common base type suffices, which is usually true for non collection types. The thing is that collections must be mergeable as well. Collections do not play nicely with the presented concept, because developers do not develop collections from the scratch. There are predefined implementations - observable, filtered, compound, read-only, remove-only, ordered, god-knows-what, ... They may be developed from scratch in-house, but once finished, they serve wide range of products and should never be tailored to some specific product. Which means, that either: they do not implement the IMergeable interface at all, because it is internal to some product the scope of the IMergeable interface is raised to public and the API becomes open and callable by all. Let us refer to these collections as standard collections. Anyway, the first option screws my framework, because now each possible standard collection type has to be paired with the respective framework version, augmenting the standard with the IMergeable interface implementation - this is so bad, I am not even considering it. The second option breaks the framework as well, because the IMergeable interface should be internal for a reason (whatever it is) and now this interface has to open to all. So what to do? My solution is this. make IMergeable public API, but add an extra parameter to the Merge method, I call it a security token. The interface implementation may check that the token references some internal object, which is never exposed to the outside. If this is the case, then the method was called from within the framework, otherwise - some outside API consumer attempted to invoke it and so the implementation can blow up with a SecurityException. Here is the modified code snippet demonstrating this concept: internal static class InternalApi { internal static readonly object Token = new object(); } public interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj, object token); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } public void Merge(object obj, object token) { if (!object.ReferenceEquals(token, InternalApi.Token)) { throw new SecurityException("bla bla bla"); } Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } Of course, this is less explicit than having an internally scoped interface and the check is moved from the compile time to run time, yet this is the best I could come up with. Now, I have a gut feeling that there is a better way to solve the problem I have presented. I do not know, may be using some standard Code Access Security features? I have only vague understanding of it, but can LinkDemand attribute be somehow related to it? Anyway, I would like to hear other opinions. Thanks.

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• Setup database for Unit tests with Spring, Hibernate and Spring Transaction Support

  - by Michael Bulla

  I want to test integration of dao-layer with my service-layer in a unit-test. So I need to setup some data in my database (hsql). For this setup I need an own transaction at the begining of my testcase to ensure that all my setup is really commited to database before starting my testcase. So here's what I want to achieve: // NotTranactional public void doTest { // transaction begins setup database // commit transaction service.doStuff() // doStuff is annotated @Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED) } Here is my not working code: @RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @ContextConfiguration(locations={"/asynchUnit.xml"}) @DirtiesContext(classMode=ClassMode.AFTER_EACH_TEST_METHOD) public class ReceiptServiceTest implements ApplicationContextAware { @Autowired(required=true) private UserHome userHome; private ApplicationContext context; @Before @Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED) public void init() throws Exception { User user = InitialCreator.createUser(); userHome.persist(user); } @Test public void testDoSomething() { ... } } Leading to this exception: org.hibernate.HibernateException: No Hibernate Session bound to thread, and configuration does not allow creation of non-transactional one here at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.SpringSessionContext.currentSession(SpringSessionContext.java:63) at org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryImpl.getCurrentSession(SessionFactoryImpl.java:687) at de.diandan.asynch.modell.GenericHome.getSession(GenericHome.java:40) at de.diandan.asynch.modell.GenericHome.persist(GenericHome.java:53) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.springframework.aop.support.AopUtils.invokeJoinpointUsingReflection(AopUtils.java:318) at org.springframework.aop.framework.JdkDynamicAopProxy.invoke(JdkDynamicAopProxy.java:196) at $Proxy28.persist(Unknown Source) at de.diandan.asynch.service.ReceiptServiceTest.init(ReceiptServiceTest.java:63) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.junit.runners.model.FrameworkMethod$1.runReflectiveCall(FrameworkMethod.java:44) at org.junit.internal.runners.model.ReflectiveCallable.run(ReflectiveCallable.java:15) at org.junit.runners.model.FrameworkMethod.invokeExplosively(FrameworkMethod.java:41) at org.junit.internal.runners.statements.RunBefores.evaluate(RunBefores.java:27) at org.springframework.test.context.junit4.statements.RunBeforeTestMethodCallbacks.evaluate(RunBeforeTestMethodCallbacks.java:74) at org.springframework.test.context.junit4.statements.RunAfterTestMethodCallbacks.evaluate(RunAfterTestMethodCallbacks.java:83) at org.springframework.test.context.junit4.statements.SpringRepeat.evaluate(SpringRepeat.java:72) at org.springframework.test.context.junit4.SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.java:231) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:50) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$3.run(ParentRunner.java:193) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$1.schedule(ParentRunner.java:52) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.runChildren(ParentRunner.java:191) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.access$000(ParentRunner.java:42) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$2.evaluate(ParentRunner.java:184) at org.springframework.test.context.junit4.statements.RunBeforeTestClassCallbacks.evaluate(RunBeforeTestClassCallbacks.java:61) at org.springframework.test.context.junit4.statements.RunAfterTestClassCallbacks.evaluate(RunAfterTestClassCallbacks.java:71) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.run(ParentRunner.java:236) at org.springframework.test.context.junit4.SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.run(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.java:174) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestReference.run(JUnit4TestReference.java:49) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.TestExecution.run(TestExecution.java:38) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:467) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:683) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.run(RemoteTestRunner.java:390) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.main(RemoteTestRunner.java:197) I dont know whats the right way to get the transaction around setup database. What I tried: @Before @Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED) public void setup() { setup database } - Spring seems not to start transaction in @Before-annotated methods. Beyond that, thats not what I really want, cause there are a lot merhods in my testclass which needs a slightly differnt setup, so I need several of that init-methods. @Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED) public void setup() { setup database } public void doTest { init(); service.doStuff() // doStuff is annotated @Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED) } -- init seems not to get started in transaction What I dont want to do: public void doTest { // doing my own transaction-handling setup database // doing my own transaction-handling service.doStuff() // doStuff is annotated @Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED) } -- start mixing springs transaction-handling and my own seems to get pain in the ass. @Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED) public void doTest { setup database service.doStuff() } -- I want to test as real as possible situation, so my service should start with a clean session and no transaction opened So whats the right way to setup database for my testcase?

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• Problem with SIngleton Class

  - by zp26

  Hi, I have a prblem with my code. I have a viewController and a singleton class. When i call the method readXml and run a for my program update the UITextView. When i call the clearTextView method the program exit with EXC_BAD_ACCESS. The prblem it's the name of the variable position. This is invalid but i don't change anything between the two methods. You have an idea? My code: #import "PositionIdentifierViewController.h" #import "WriterXML.h" #import "ParserXML.h" #define timeToScan 0.1 @implementation PositionIdentifierViewController @synthesize accelerometer; @synthesize actualPosition; @synthesize actualX; @synthesize actualY; @synthesize actualZ; -(void)updateTextView:(NSString*)nomePosizione { NSString *string = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",nomePosizione]; textEvent.text = [textEvent.text stringByAppendingString:@"\n"]; textEvent.text = [textEvent.text stringByAppendingString:string]; } -(IBAction)clearTextEvent{ textEvent.text = @""; //with this for my program exit for(int i=0; i<[[sharedController arrayPosition]count]; i++){ NSLog(@"sononelfor"); Position *tempPosition = [[Position alloc]init]; tempPosition = [[sharedController arrayPosition]objectAtIndex:i]; [self updateTextView:(NSString*)[tempPosition name]]; } } -(void)readXml{ if([sharedController readXml]){ UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"Caricamento Posizioni" message:@"Caricamento effettuato con successo" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@"Cancel" otherButtonTitles:nil]; [alert show]; [alert release]; NSString *string = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [[sharedController arrayPosition]count]]; [self updateTextView:(NSString*)string]; //with only this the program is ok for(int i=0; i<[[sharedController arrayPosition]count]; i++){ NSLog(@"sononelfor"); Position *tempPosition = [[Position alloc]init]; tempPosition = [[sharedController arrayPosition]objectAtIndex:i]; [self updateTextView:(NSString*)[tempPosition name]]; } } else{ UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"Caricamento Posizioni" message:@"Caricamento non riuscito" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@"Cancel" otherButtonTitles:nil]; [alert show]; [alert release]; } } // Implement viewDidLoad to do additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib. - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; sharedController = [SingletonController sharedSingletonController]; actualPosition = [[Position alloc]init]; self.accelerometer = [UIAccelerometer sharedAccelerometer]; self.accelerometer.updateInterval = timeToScan; self.accelerometer.delegate = self; actualX=0; actualY=0; actualZ=0; [self readXml]; } - (void)dealloc { [super dealloc]; [actualPosition dealloc]; [super dealloc]; } @end #import "SingletonController.h" #import "Position.h" #import "WriterXML.h" #import "ParserXML.h" #define standardSensibility 2 #define timeToScan .1 @implementation SingletonController @synthesize arrayPosition; @synthesize arrayMovement; @synthesize actualPosition; @synthesize actualMove; @synthesize stopThread; +(SingletonController*)sharedSingletonController{ static SingletonController *sharedSingletonController; @synchronized(self) { if(!sharedSingletonController){ sharedSingletonController = [[SingletonController alloc]init]; } } return sharedSingletonController; } -(BOOL)readXml{ ParserXML *newParser = [[ParserXML alloc]init]; if([newParser startParsing:(NSString*)@"filePosizioni.xml"]){ [arrayPosition addObjectsFromArray:[newParser arrayPosition]]; return TRUE; } else return FALSE; } -(id)init{ self = [super init]; if (self != nil) { arrayPosition = [[NSMutableArray alloc]init]; arrayMovement = [[NSMutableArray alloc]init]; actualPosition = [[Position alloc]init]; actualMove = [[Movement alloc]init]; stopThread = FALSE; } return self; } -(void) dealloc { [super dealloc]; } @end

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• Why does one of two identical Javascripts work in Firefox?

  - by Gigpacknaxe

  Hi, I have two image swap functions and one works in Firefox and the other does not. The swap functions are identical and both work fine in IE. Firefox does not even recognize the images as hyperlinks. I am very confused and I hope some one can shed some light on this for me. Thank you very much in advance for any and all help. FYI: the working script swaps by onClick via DIV elements and the non-working script swaps onMouseOver/Out via "a" elements. Remember both of these work just fine in IE. Joshua Working Javascript in FF: <script type="text/javascript"> var aryImages = new Array(); aryImages[1] = "/tires/images/mich_prim_mxv4_profile.jpg"; aryImages[2] = "/tires/images/mich_prim_mxv4_tread.jpg"; aryImages[3] = "/tires/images/mich_prim_mxv4_side.jpg"; for (i=0; i < aryImages.length; i++) { var preload = new Image(); preload.src = aryImages[i]; } function swap(imgIndex, imgTarget) { document[imgTarget].src = aryImages[imgIndex]; } <div id="image-container"> <div style="text-align: right">Click small images below to view larger.</div> <div class="thumb-box" onclick="swap(1, 'imgColor')"><img src="/tires/images/thumbs/mich_prim_mxv4_profile_thumb.jpg" width="75" height="75" /></div> <div class="thumb-box" onclick="swap(2, 'imgColor')"><img src="/tires/images/thumbs/mich_prim_mxv4_tread_thumb.jpg" width="75" height="75" /></div> <div class="thumb-box" onclick="swap(3, 'imgColor')"><img src="/tires/images/thumbs/mich_prim_mxv4_side_thumb.jpg" width="75" height="75" /></div> <div><img alt="" name="imgColor" src="/tires/images/mich_prim_mxv4_profile.jpg" /></div> <div><a href="mich-prim-102-large.php"><img src="/tires/images/super_view.jpg" border="0" /></a></div> Not Working in FF: <script type="text/javascript"> var aryImages = new Array(); aryImages[1] = "/images/home-on.jpg"; aryImages[2] = "/images/home-off.jpg"; aryImages[3] = "/images/services-on.jpg"; aryImages[4] = "/images/services-off.jpg"; aryImages[5] = "/images/contact_us-on.jpg"; aryImages[6] = "/images/contact_us-off.jpg"; aryImages[7] = "/images/about_us-on.jpg"; aryImages[8] = "/images/about_us-off.jpg"; aryImages[9] = "/images/career-on.jpg"; aryImages[10] = "/images/career-off.jpg"; for (i=0; i < aryImages.length; i++) { var preload = new Image(); preload.src = aryImages[i]; } function swap(imgIndex, imgTarget) { document[imgTarget].src = aryImages[imgIndex]; } <td> <a href="home.php" onMouseOver="swap(1, 'home')" onMouseOut="swap(2, 'home')"><img name="home" src="/images/home-off.jpg" alt="Home Button" border="0px" /></a> </td>

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• What language/framework (technology) to use for website (flash games portal)

  - by cripox

  Hello, I know there are a lot of similar questions on the net, but because I am a newbie in web development I didn't find the solution for my specific problem. I am planing on creating a flash games portal from scratch. It is a big chance that there will be big traffic from the beginning (millions of pageviews). I want to reduce the server costs as much as possible but in the same time to not be tide to an expensive contract as there is a chance that the project will not be as successfully as I want and in that case the money would be very little. The question is : what technology to use? I don't know any web dev technology yet so it doesn't matter what I will learn. My web dev experience is a little php 8 years ago, and from then I programmed in C++ / Java- game and mobile development. I like Java and C syntax and language very much and I tend to dislike dynamic typing or non robust scripting (like php)- but I can get along if these are the best choices. The candidates are now: - Grails (my best for now) Ruby on Rails Cake PHP Other technologies (Google App Engine, Python/Django etc...) I was considering at first using pure C and compiling the web app in the server- just to squeeze more from the servers, but soon I understand that this is overkill. Next my eyes came on Ruby - as there is a lot of buzz for it's easiness of use. Next I discovered Grails and looked at Java because it is said that it is "faster". But I don't know what this "Faster" really means on my needs, so here comes the first question: 1) What will be my biggest consumption on the server, other than bandwidth, for a lot of flash content requests? Is it memory? I heard that Java needs a lot of memory, but is faster. Is it CPU? I am planning to take some daily VPS.NET nodes at first, to see if there is a demand, and if the "spike" is permanent to move to a dedicated server (serverloft.com has some good offers), else to remain with less nodes. I was also considering developing in Google App Engine- cheap or free hosting to use at first - so I can test my assumption- and also very easy to use (no need for sys administration) but the costs became high if used more ( 3 million games played / month .. x mb/ each). And the issue with Google is that it looks me in this technology. My other concern is scalability (not only for traffic/users, but as adding functionality) My plans are to release a functional site in just 4 weeks (just the basics frontend and some quick basic backend - so I can be able to modify some things and add games manually) - but then to raise it and add more things to it. I am planning to take a little different approach than other portals so I need to write it from scratch (a script will not do). 2) Will Grails take much more resources than RoR or Php server wise? I heard that making it on Java stack will be hardware expensive and is overkill if you don't make a bank application. My application will not be very complex (I hope and i will try to) but will have a lot of traffic. I also took in account using CDN for files, but the cheapest CDN found was 5c/GB (vps.net) and the cost per gb on serverloft (http://www.serverloft.com/dedizierte-server/server-details.php?products=4) is only 1.79 cents/GB and comes with the other resources either. I am new to this domain (web). I am learning the ropes and searching on the web for ~half of year but don't have any really practical experience, so I know that I must have some naive thinking and other issues that i don't know from now, so please give me any advice you want regarding anything, not just the specific questions asked. And thank you so much for such great community!

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• Testing for Adjacent Cells In a Multi-level Grid

  - by Steve

  I'm designing an algorithm to test whether cells on a grid are adjacent or not. The catch is that the cells are not on a flat grid. They are on a multi-level grid such as the one drawn below. Level 1 (Top Level) | - - - - - | | A | B | C | | - - - - - | | D | E | F | | - - - - - | | G | H | I | | - - - - - | Level 2 | -Block A- | -Block B- | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 3 | | - - - - - | - - - - - | | 4 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 6 | ... | - - - - - | - - - - - | | 7 | 8 | 9 | 7 | 8 | 9 | | - - - - - | - - - - - | | -Block D- | -Block E- | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 3 | | - - - - - | - - - - - | | 4 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 6 | ... | - - - - - | - - - - - | | 7 | 8 | 9 | 7 | 8 | 9 | | - - - - - | - - - - - | . . . . . . This diagram is simplified from my actual need but the concept is the same. There is a top level block with many cells within it (level 1). Each block is further subdivided into many more cells (level 2). Those cells are further subdivided into level 3, 4 and 5 for my project but let's just stick to two levels for this question. I'm receiving inputs for my function in the form of "A8, A9, B7, D3". That's a list of cell Ids where each cell Id has the format (level 1 id)(level 2 id). Let's start by comparing just 2 cells, A8 and A9. That's easy because they are in the same block. private static RelativePosition getRelativePositionInTheSameBlock(String v1, String v2) { RelativePosition relativePosition; if( v1-v2 == -1 ) { relativePosition = RelativePosition.LEFT_OF; } else if (v1-v2 == 1) { relativePosition = RelativePosition.RIGHT_OF; } else if (v1-v2 == -BLOCK_WIDTH) { relativePosition = RelativePosition.TOP_OF; } else if (v1-v2 == BLOCK_WIDTH) { relativePosition = RelativePosition.BOTTOM_OF; } else { relativePosition = RelativePosition.NOT_ADJACENT; } return relativePosition; } An A9 - B7 comparison could be done by checking if A is a multiple of BLOCK_WIDTH and whether B is (A-BLOCK_WIDTH+1). Either that or just check naively if the A/B pair is 3-1, 6-4 or 9-7 for better readability. For B7 - D3, they are not adjacent but D3 is adjacent to A9 so I can do a similar adjacency test as above. So getting away from the little details and focusing on the big picture. Is this really the best way to do it? Keeping in mind the following points: I actually have 5 levels not 2, so I could potentially get a list like "A8A1A, A8A1B, B1A2A, B1A2B". Adding a new cell to compare still requires me to compare all the other cells before it (seems like the best I could do for this step is O(n)) The cells aren't all 3x3 blocks, they're just that way for my example. They could be MxN blocks with different M and N for different levels. In my current implementation above, I have separate functions to check adjacency if the cells are in the same blocks, if they are in separate horizontally adjacent blocks or if they are in separate vertically adjacent blocks. That means I have to know the position of the two blocks at the current level before I call one of those functions for the layer below. Judging by the complexity of having to deal with mulitple functions for different edge cases at different levels and having 5 levels of nested if statements. I'm wondering if another design is more suitable. Perhaps a more recursive solution, use of other data structures, or perhaps map the entire multi-level grid to a single-level grid (my quick calculations gives me about 700,000+ atomic cell ids). Even if I go that route, mapping from multi-level to single level is a non-trivial task in itself.

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• (This is for a project, so yes it is homework) How would I finish this java code?

  - by user2924318

  The task is to create arrays using user input (which I was able to do), then for the second part, use a separate method to sort the array in ascending order then output it. I have gotten it to do everything I need except I don't know how I would get it to sort. The directions say to use a while loop from 0 to the length to find the minimum value then swap that with the 1st, but I don't know how to do this. This is what I have so far: public static void main(String[] args) { Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in); int storage = getNumDigits(in); if(storage == 0){ System.out.print("No digits to store? OK, goodbye!"); System.exit(0); } int []a = new int [storage]; a = getDigits(a, in); displayDigits(a); selectionSort(a); } private static int getNumDigits(Scanner inScanner) { System.out.print("Please enter the number of digits to be stored: "); int stored = inScanner.nextInt(); while(stored < 0){ System.out.println("ERROR! You must enter a non-negative number of digits!"); System.out.println(); System.out.print("Please enter the number of digits to be stored: "); stored = inScanner.nextInt(); } return stored; } private static int[] getDigits(int[] digits, Scanner inScanner) { int length = digits.length; int count = 0; int toBeStored = 0; while(count < length){ System.out.print("Enter integer " +count +": "); toBeStored = inScanner.nextInt(); digits[count] = toBeStored; count++; } return digits; } private static void displayDigits(int[] digits) { int len = digits.length; System.out.println(); System.out.println("Array before sorting:"); System.out.println("Number of digits in array: " +len); System.out.print("Digits in array: "); for(int cnt = 0; cnt < len-1; cnt++){ System.out.print(digits[cnt] + ", "); } System.out.println(digits[len-1]); } private static void selectionSort(int[] digits) { int l = digits.length; System.out.println(); System.out.println("Array after sorting:"); System.out.println("Number of digits in array: " +l); System.out.print("Digits in array: "); int index = 0; int value = digits[0]; int indVal = digits[index]; while(index < l){ indVal = digits[index]; if(indVal <= value){ indVal = value; digits[index] = value; index++; } else if(value < indVal){ index++; } System.out.print(value); //This is where I don't know what to do. } }

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• Ajax Control Toolkit July 2011 Release and the New HTML Editor Extender

  - by Stephen Walther

  I’m happy to announce the July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which includes important bug fixes and a completely new HTML Editor Extender control. You can download the July 2011 Release by visiting the Ajax Control Toolkit CodePlex site at: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Using the New HTML Editor Extender Control You can use the new HTML Editor Extender to extend any standard ASP.NET TextBox control so that it supports rich formatting such as bold, italics, bulleted lists, numbered lists, typefaces and different foreground and background colors. The following code illustrates how you can extend a standard ASP.NET TextBox control with the HtmlEditorExtender: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Simple.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.Simple" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Simple</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager runat="Server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="60" Rows="8" runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> This page has the following three controls: ToolkitScriptManager – The ToolkitScriptManager renders all of the scripts required by the Ajax Control Toolkit. TextBox – The TextBox control is a standard ASP.NET TextBox which is set to display multiple lines (a TextArea instead of an Input element). HtmlEditorExtender – The HtmlEditorExtender is set to extend the TextBox control. You can use the standard TextBox Text property to read the rich text entered into the TextBox control on the server. Lightweight and HTML5 The HTML Editor Extender works on all modern browsers including the most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox (Firefox 5), Google Chrome (Chrome 12), and Apple Safari (Safari 5). Furthermore, the HTML Editor Extender is compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and newer. The HTML Editor Extender is very lightweight. It takes advantage of the HTML5 ContentEditable attribute so it does not require an iframe or complex browser workarounds. If you select View Source in your browser while using the HTML Editor Extender, we hope that you will be pleasantly surprised by how little markup and script is generated by the HTML Editor Extender. Customizable Toolbar Buttons Depending on the web application that you are building, you will want to display different toolbar buttons with the HTML Editor Extender. One of the design goals of the HTML Editor Extender was to make it very easy for you to customize the toolbar buttons. Imagine, for example, that you want to use the HTML Editor Extender when accepting comments on blog posts. In that case, you might want to restrict the type of formatting that a user can display. You might want to enable a user to format text as bold or italic but you do not want the user to make any other formatting changes. The following page illustrates how you can customize the HTML Editor Extender toolbar: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="CustomToolbar.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.CustomToolbar" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html> <head runat="server"> <title>Custom Toolbar</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager Runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="50" Rows="10" Text="Hello <b>world!</b>" Runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server"> <Toolbar> <asp:Bold /> <asp:Italic /> </Toolbar> </asp:HtmlEditorExtender> </form> </body> </html> Notice that the HTML Editor Extender in the page above has a Toolbar subtag. You can list the toolbar buttons which you want to appear within the subtag. In the case above, only Bold and Italic buttons are displayed. Here is a complete list of the Toolbar buttons currently supported by the HTML Editor Extender: Undo Redo Bold Italic Underline StrikeThrough Subscript Superscript JustifyLeft JustifyCenter JustifyRight JustifyFull InsertOrderedList InsertUnorderedList CreateLink UnLink RemoveFormat SelectAll UnSelect Delete Cut Copy Paste BackgroundColorSelector ForeColorSelector FontNameSelector FontSizeSelector Indent Outdent InsertHorizontalRule HorizontalSeparator Of course the HTML Editor Extender was designed to be extensible. You can create your own buttons and add them to the control. Compatible with the AntiXSS Library When using the HTML Editor Extender on a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the HTML Editor Extender with the AntiXSS Library. If you allow users to submit arbitrary HTML, and you don’t take any action to strip out malicious markup, then you are opening your website to Cross-Site Scripting Attacks (XSS attacks). The HTML Editor Extender uses the Provider Model to support different Sanitizer Providers. The July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit ships with a single Sanitizer Provider which uses the AntiXSS library (see http://AntiXss.CodePlex.com ). A Sanitizer Provider is responsible for sanitizing HTML markup by removing any malicious elements, attributes, and attribute values. For example, the AntiXss Sanitizer Provider will take the following block of HTML: <b><a href=""javascript:doEvil()"">Visit Grandma</a></b> <script>doEvil()</script> And return the following sanitized block of HTML: <b><a href="">Visit Grandma</a></b> Notice that the JavaScript href and <SCRIPT> tag are both stripped out. Be aware that there are a depressingly large number of ways to sneak evil markup into your HTML. You definitely want a Sanitizer as a safety net. Before you can use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider, you must add three assemblies to your web application: AntiXSSLibrary.dll, HtmlSanitizationLibrary.dll, and SanitizerProviders.dll. All three assemblies are included with the CodePlex download of the Ajax Control Toolkit in the SanitizerProviders folder. Here’s how you modify your web.config file to use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider: <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="system.web"> <section name="sanitizer" requirePermission="false" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.ProviderSanitizerSection, AjaxControlToolkit"/> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <system.web> <compilation targetFramework="4.0" debug="true"/> <sanitizer defaultProvider="AntiXssSanitizerProvider"> <providers> <add name="AntiXssSanitizerProvider" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.AntiXssSanitizerProvider"></add> </providers> </sanitizer> </system.web> </configuration> You can detect whether the HTML Editor Extender is using the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider by checking the HtmlEditorExtender SanitizerProvider property like this: if (MyHtmlEditorExtender.SanitizerProvider == null) { throw new Exception("Please enable the AntiXss Sanitizer!"); } When the SanitizerProvider property has the value null, you know that a Sanitizer Provider has not been configured in the web.config file. Because the AntiXSS library requires Full Trust, you cannot use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider with most shared website hosting providers. Because most shared hosting providers only support Medium Trust and not Full Trust, we do not recommend using the HTML Editor Extender with a public website hosted with a shared hosting provider. Why a New HTML Editor Control? The Ajax Control Toolkit now includes two HTML Editor controls. Why did we introduce a new HTML Editor control when there was already an existing HTML Editor? We think you will like the new HTML Editor much more than the previous one. We had several goals with the new HTML Editor Extender: Lightweight – We wanted to leverage HTML5 to create a lightweight HTML Editor. The new HTML Editor generates much less markup and script than the previous HTML Editor. Secure – We wanted to make it easy to integrate the AntiXSS library with the HTML Editor. If you are creating a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the AntiXSS Provider. Customizable – We wanted to make it easy for users to customize the toolbar buttons displayed by the HTML Editor. Compatibility – We wanted to ensure that the HTML Editor will work with the latest versions of the most popular browsers (including Internet Explorer 6 and higher). The old HTML Editor control is still included in the Ajax Control Toolkit and continues to live in the AjaxControlToolkit.HTMLEditor namespace. We have not modified the control and you can continue to use the control in the same way as you have used it in the past. However, we hope that you will consider migrating to the new HTML Editor Extender for the reasons listed above. Summary We’ve introduced a new Ajax Control Toolkit control with this release. I want to thank the developers and testers on the Superexpert team for the huge amount of work which they put into this control. It was a non-trivial task to build an entirely new control which has the complexity of the HTML Editor in less than 6 weeks. Please let us know what you think! We want to hear your feedback. If you discover issues with the new HTML Editor Extender control, or you have questions about the control, or you have ideas for how it can be improved, then please post them to this blog. Tomorrow starts a new sprint

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• NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC

  - by shiju

   In this post, I will give an introduction to how to work on NoSQL and document database with MongoDB , NoRM and ASP.Net MVC 2. NoSQL and Document Database The NoSQL movement is getting big attention in this year and people are widely talking about document databases and NoSQL along with web application scalability. According to Wikipedia, "NoSQL is a movement promoting a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases. These data stores may not require fixed table schemas, usually avoid join operations and typically scale horizontally. Academics and papers typically refer to these databases as structured storage". Document databases are schema free so that you can focus on the problem domain and don't have to worry about updating the schema when your domain is evolving. This enables truly a domain driven development. One key pain point of relational database is the synchronization of database schema with your domain entities when your domain is evolving.There are lots of NoSQL implementations are available and both CouchDB and MongoDB got my attention. While evaluating both CouchDB and MongoDB, I found that CouchDB can’t perform dynamic queries and later I picked MongoDB over CouchDB. There are many .Net drivers available for MongoDB document database. MongoDB MongoDB is an open source, scalable, high-performance, schema-free, document-oriented database written in the C++ programming language. It has been developed since October 2007 by 10gen. MongoDB stores your data as binary JSON (BSON) format . MongoDB has been getting a lot of attention and you can see the some of the list of production deployments from here - http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments NoRM – C# driver for MongoDB NoRM is a C# driver for MongoDB with LINQ support. NoRM project is available on Github at http://github.com/atheken/NoRM. Demo with ASP.NET MVC I will show a simple demo with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC. To work with MongoDB and  NoRM, do the following steps Download the MongoDB databse For Windows 32 bit, download from http://downloads.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-win32-i386-1.4.1.zip  and for Windows 64 bit, download  from http://downloads.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-win32-x86_64-1.4.1.zip . The zip contains the mongod.exe for run the server and mongo.exe for the client Download the NorM driver for MongoDB at http://github.com/atheken/NoRM Create a directory call C:\data\db. This is the default location of MongoDB database. You can override the behavior. Run C:\Mongo\bin\mongod.exe. This will start the MongoDb server Now I am going to demonstrate how to program with MongoDb and NoRM in an ASP.NET MVC application.Let’s write a domain class public class Category {            [MongoIdentifier]public ObjectId Id { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")][StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]public string Name { get; set;}public string Description { get; set; }}  ObjectId is a NoRM type that represents a MongoDB ObjectId. NoRM will automatically update the Id becasue it is decorated by the MongoIdentifier attribute. The next step is to create a mongosession class. This will do the all interactions to the MongoDB. internal class MongoSession<TEntity> : IDisposable{    private readonly MongoQueryProvider provider;     public MongoSession()    {        this.provider = new MongoQueryProvider("Expense");    }     public IQueryable<TEntity> Queryable    {        get { return new MongoQuery<TEntity>(this.provider); }    }     public MongoQueryProvider Provider    {        get { return this.provider; }    }     public void Add<T>(T item) where T : class, new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Insert(item);    }     public void Dispose()    {        this.provider.Server.Dispose();     }    public void Delete<T>(T item) where T : class, new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Delete(item);    }     public void Drop<T>()    {        this.provider.DB.DropCollection(typeof(T).Name);    }     public void Save<T>(T item) where T : class,new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Save(item);                }  }    The MongoSession constrcutor will create an instance of MongoQueryProvider that supports the LINQ expression and also create a database with name "Expense". If database is exists, it will use existing database, otherwise it will create a new databse with name  "Expense". The Save method can be used for both Insert and Update operations. If the object is new one, it will create a new record and otherwise it will update the document with given ObjectId.  Let’s create ASP.NET MVC controller actions for CRUD operations for the domain class Category public class CategoryController : Controller{ //Index - Get the category listpublic ActionResult Index(){    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var categories = session.Queryable.AsEnumerable<Category>();        return View(categories);    }} //edit a single category[HttpGet]public ActionResult Edit(ObjectId id) {     using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var category = session.Queryable              .Where(c => c.Id == id)              .FirstOrDefault();         return View("Save",category);    } }// GET: /Category/Create[HttpGet]public ActionResult Create(){    var category = new Category();    return View("Save", category);}//insert or update a category[HttpPost]public ActionResult Save(Category category){    if (!ModelState.IsValid)    {        return View("Save", category);    }    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        session.Save(category);        return RedirectToAction("Index");    } }//Delete category[HttpPost]public ActionResult Delete(ObjectId Id){    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var category = session.Queryable              .Where(c => c.Id == Id)              .FirstOrDefault();        session.Delete(category);        var categories = session.Queryable.AsEnumerable<Category>();        return PartialView("CategoryList", categories);    } }        }  You can easily work on MongoDB with NoRM and can use with ASP.NET MVC applications. I have created a repository on CodePlex at http://mongomvc.codeplex.com and you can download the source code of the ASP.NET MVC application from here

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• Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

  - by Rick Strahl

  ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. .blackborder td { border-bottom: solid 1px silver; border-left: solid 1px silver; } Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in  a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or  you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted  it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject port Uri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString(); What else? I took a look through the old post’s comments and addressed as many of the questions and comments that came up in there. With a few small and silly exceptions this update post handles most of these. But I’m sure there are a more things that go in here. What else would be useful to put onto this post so it serves as a nice all in one place to go for path references? If you think of something leave a comment and I’ll try to update the post with it in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Installing SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7

  - by smisner

  Many people like me want (or need) to do their business intelligence development work on a laptop. As someone who frequently speaks at various events or teaches classes on all subjects related to the Microsoft business intelligence stack, I need a way to run multiple server products on my laptop with reasonable performance. Once upon a time, that requirement meant only that I had to load the current version of SQL Server and the client tools of choice. In today's post, I'll review my latest experience with trying to make the newly released Microsoft BI products work with a Windows 7 operating system.The entrance of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 into the BI stack complicated matters and I started using Virtual Server to establish a "suitable" environment. As part of the team that delivered a lot of education as part of the Yukon pre-launch activities (that would be SQL Server 2005 for the uninitiated), I was working with four - yes, four - virtual servers. That was a pretty brutal workload for a 2GB laptop, which worked if I was very, very careful. It could also be a finicky and unreliable configuration as I learned to my dismay at one TechEd session several years ago when I had to reboot a very carefully cached set of servers just minutes before my session started. Although it worked, it came back to life very, very slowly much to the displeasure of the audience. They couldn't possibly have been less pleased than me.At that moment, I resolved to get the beefiest environment I could afford and consolidate to a single virtual server. Enter the 4GB 64-bit laptop to preserve my sanity and my livelihood. Likewise, for SQL Server 2008, I managed to keep everything within a single virtual server and I could function reasonably well with this approach.Now we have SQL Server 2008 R2 plus Office SharePoint Server 2010. That means a 64-bit operating system. Period. That means no more Virtual Server. That means I must use Hyper-V or another alternative. I've heard alternatives exist, but my few dabbles in this area did not yield positive results. It might have been just me having issues rather than any failure of those technologies to adequately support the requirements.My first run at working with the new BI stack configuration was to set up a 64-bit 4GB laptop with a dual-boot to run Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. However, I was generally not happy with running Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop. For one, I couldn't put it into sleep mode, which is helpful if I want to prepare for a presentation beforehand and then walk to the podium without the need to hold my laptop in its open state along the way (my strategy at the TechEd session long, long ago). Secondly, it was finicky with projectors. I had issues from time to time and while I always eventually got it to work, I didn't appreciate those nerve-wracking moments wondering whether this would be the time that it wouldn't work.Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was possible to load SharePoint 2010 in a Windows 7 which piqued my interest. I had just acquired a new laptop running Windows 7 64-bit, and thought surely running the BI stack natively on my laptop must be better than running Hyper-V. (I have not tried booting to Hyper-V VHD yet, but that's on my list of things to try so the jury of one is still out on this approach.) Recently, I had to build up a server with the RTM versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Sharepoint Server 2010 and decided to follow suit on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop. The process is slightly different, but I'm happy to report that it IS possible, although I had some fits and starts along the way.DISCLAIMER: These products are NOT intended to be run in production mode on the Windows 7 operating system. The configuration described in this post is strictly for development or learning purposes and not supported by Microsoft. If you have trouble, you will NOT get help from them. I might be able to help, but I provide no guarantees of my ability or availablity to help. I won't provide the step-by-step instructions in this post as there are other resources that provide these details, but I will provide an overview of my approach, point you to the relevant resources, describe some of the problems I encountered, and explain how I addressed those problems to achieve my desired goal.Because my goal was not simply to set up SharePoint Server 2010 on my laptop, but specifically PowerPivot for SharePoint, I started out by referring to the installation instructions at the PowerPiovt-Info site, but mainly to confirm that I was performing steps in the proper sequence. I didn't perform the steps in Part 1 because those steps are applicable only to a server operating system which I am not running on my laptop. Then, the instructions in Part 2, won't work exactly as written for the same reason. Instead, I followed the instructions on MSDN, Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. In general, I found the following differences in installation steps from the steps at PowerPivot-Info:You must copy the SharePoint installation media to the local drive so that you can edit the config.xml to allow installation on a Windows client.You also have to manually install the prerequisites. The instructions provides links to each item that you must manually install and provides a command-line instruction to execute which enables required Windows features.I will digress for a moment to save you some grief in the sequence of steps to perform. I discovered later that a missing step in the MSDN instructions is to install the November CTP Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. When I went to test my SharePoint site (I believe I tested after I had a successful PowerPivot installation), I ran into the following error: Could not load file or assembly 'RSSharePointSoapProxy, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. I was rather surprised that Reporting Services was required. Then I found an article by Alan le Marquand, Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010,that instructed readers to install the November add-in. My first reaction was, "Really?!?" But I confirmed it in another TechNet article on hardware and software requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. It doesn't refer explicitly to the November CTP but following the link took me there. (Interestingly, I retested today and there's no longer any reference to the November CTP. Here's the link to download the latest and greatest Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies 2010.) You don't need to download the add-in anymore if you're doing a regular server-based installation of SharePoint because it installs as part of the prerequisites automatically.When it was time to start the installation of SharePoint, I deviated from the MSDN instructions and from the PowerPivot-Info instructions:On the Choose the installation you want page of the installation wizard, I chose Server Farm.On the Server Type page, I chose Complete.At the end of the installation, I did not run the configuration wizard.Returning to the PowerPivot-Info instructions, I tried to follow the instructions in Part 3 which describe installing SQL Server 2008 R2 with the PowerPivot option. These instructions tell you to choose the New Server option on the Setup Role page where you add PowerPivot for SharePoint. However, I ran into problems with this approach and got installation errors at the end.It wasn't until much later as I was investigating an error that I encountered Dave Wickert's post that installing PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7 is unsupported. Uh oh. But he did want to hear about it if anyone succeeded, so I decided to take the plunge. Perseverance paid off, and I can happily inform Dave that it does work so far. I haven't tested absolutely everything with PowerPivot for SharePoint but have successfully deployed a workbook and viewed the PowerPivot Management Dashboard. I have not yet tested the data refresh feature, but I have installed. Continue reading to see how I accomplished my objective.I unintalled SQL Server 2008 R2 and started again. I had different problems which I don't recollect now. However, I uninstalled again and approached installation from a different angle and my next attempt succeeded. The downside of this approach is that you must do all of the things yourself that are done automatically when you install PowerPivot as a new server. Here are the steps that I followed:Install SQL Server 2008 R2 to get a database engine instance installed.Run the SharePoint configuration wizard to set up the SharePoint databases.In Central Administration, create a Web application using classic mode authentication as per a TechNet article on PowerPivot Authentication and Authorization.Then I followed the steps I found at How to: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint on an Existing SharePoint Server. Especially important to note - you must launch setup by using Run as administrator. I did not have to manually deploy the PowerPivot solution as the instructions specify, but it's good to know about this step because it tells you where to look in Central Administration to confirm a successful deployment.I did spot some incorrect steps in the instructions (at the time of this writing) in How To: Configure Stored Credentials for PowerPivot Data Refresh. Specifically, in the section entitled Step 1: Create a target application and set the credentials, both steps 10 and 12 are incorrect. They tell you to provide an actual Windows user name and password on the page where you are simply defining the prompts for your application in the Secure Store Service. To add the Windows user name and password that you want to associate with the application - after you have successfully created the target application - you select the target application and then click Set credentials in the ribbon.Lastly, I followed the instructions at How to: Install Office Data Connectivity Components on a PowerPivot server. However, I have yet to test this in my current environment.I did have several stops and starts throughout this process and edited those out to spare you from reading non-essential information. I believe the explanation I have provided here accurately reflect the steps I followed to produce a working configuration. If you follow these steps and get a different result, please let me know so that together we can work through the issue and correct these instructions. I'm sure there are many other folks in the Microsoft BI community that will appreciate the ability to set up the BI stack in a Windows 7 environment for development or learning purposes. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• jQuery Templates and Data Linking (and Microsoft contributing to jQuery)

  - by ScottGu

  The jQuery library has a passionate community of developers, and it is now the most widely used JavaScript library on the web today. Two years ago I announced that Microsoft would begin offering product support for jQuery, and that we’d be including it in new versions of Visual Studio going forward. By default, when you create new ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects with VS 2010 you’ll find jQuery automatically added to your project. A few weeks ago during my second keynote at the MIX 2010 conference I announced that Microsoft would also begin contributing to the jQuery project.  During the talk, John Resig -- the creator of the jQuery library and leader of the jQuery developer team – talked a little about our participation and discussed an early prototype of a new client templating API for jQuery. In this blog post, I’m going to talk a little about how my team is starting to contribute to the jQuery project, and discuss some of the specific features that we are working on such as client-side templating and data linking (data-binding). Contributing to jQuery jQuery has a fantastic developer community, and a very open way to propose suggestions and make contributions.  Microsoft is following the same process to contribute to jQuery as any other member of the community. As an example, when working with the jQuery community to improve support for templating to jQuery my team followed the following steps: We created a proposal for templating and posted the proposal to the jQuery developer forum (http://forum.jquery.com/topic/jquery-templates-proposal and http://forum.jquery.com/topic/templating-syntax ). After receiving feedback on the forums, the jQuery team created a prototype for templating and posted the prototype at the Github code repository (http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl ). We iterated on the prototype, creating a new fork on Github of the templating prototype, to suggest design improvements. Several other members of the community also provided design feedback by forking the templating code. There has been an amazing amount of participation by the jQuery community in response to the original templating proposal (over 100 posts in the jQuery forum), and the design of the templating proposal has evolved significantly based on community feedback. The jQuery team is the ultimate determiner on what happens with the templating proposal – they might include it in jQuery core, or make it an official plugin, or reject it entirely.  My team is excited to be able to participate in the open source process, and make suggestions and contributions the same way as any other member of the community. jQuery Template Support Client-side templates enable jQuery developers to easily generate and render HTML UI on the client.  Templates support a simple syntax that enables either developers or designers to declaratively specify the HTML they want to generate.  Developers can then programmatically invoke the templates on the client, and pass JavaScript objects to them to make the content rendered completely data driven.  These JavaScript objects can optionally be based on data retrieved from a server. Because the jQuery templating proposal is still evolving in response to community feedback, the final version might look very different than the version below. This blog post gives you a sense of how you can try out and use templating as it exists today (you can download the prototype by the jQuery core team at http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl or the latest submission from my team at http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl).  jQuery Client Templates You create client-side jQuery templates by embedding content within a <script type="text/html"> tag.  For example, the HTML below contains a <div> template container, as well as a client-side jQuery “contactTemplate” template (within the <script type="text/html"> element) that can be used to dynamically display a list of contacts: The {{= name }} and {{= phone }} expressions are used within the contact template above to display the names and phone numbers of “contact” objects passed to the template. We can use the template to display either an array of JavaScript objects or a single object. The JavaScript code below demonstrates how you can render a JavaScript array of “contact” object using the above template. The render() method renders the data into a string and appends the string to the “contactContainer” DIV element: When the page is loaded, the list of contacts is rendered by the template.  All of this template rendering is happening on the client-side within the browser:   Templating Commands and Conditional Display Logic The current templating proposal supports a small set of template commands - including if, else, and each statements. The number of template commands was deliberately kept small to encourage people to place more complicated logic outside of their templates. Even this small set of template commands is very useful though. Imagine, for example, that each contact can have zero or more phone numbers. The contacts could be represented by the JavaScript array below: The template below demonstrates how you can use the if and each template commands to conditionally display and loop the phone numbers for each contact: If a contact has one or more phone numbers then each of the phone numbers is displayed by iterating through the phone numbers with the each template command: The jQuery team designed the template commands so that they are extensible. If you have a need for a new template command then you can easily add new template commands to the default set of commands. Support for Client Data-Linking The ASP.NET team recently submitted another proposal and prototype to the jQuery forums (http://forum.jquery.com/topic/proposal-for-adding-data-linking-to-jquery). This proposal describes a new feature named data linking. Data Linking enables you to link a property of one object to a property of another object - so that when one property changes the other property changes.  Data linking enables you to easily keep your UI and data objects synchronized within a page. If you are familiar with the concept of data-binding then you will be familiar with data linking (in the proposal, we call the feature data linking because jQuery already includes a bind() method that has nothing to do with data-binding). Imagine, for example, that you have a page with the following HTML <input> elements: The following JavaScript code links the two INPUT elements above to the properties of a JavaScript “contact” object that has a “name” and “phone” property: When you execute this code, the value of the first INPUT element (#name) is set to the value of the contact name property, and the value of the second INPUT element (#phone) is set to the value of the contact phone property. The properties of the contact object and the properties of the INPUT elements are also linked – so that changes to one are also reflected in the other. Because the contact object is linked to the INPUT element, when you request the page, the values of the contact properties are displayed: More interesting, the values of the linked INPUT elements will change automatically whenever you update the properties of the contact object they are linked to. For example, we could programmatically modify the properties of the “contact” object using the jQuery attr() method like below: Because our two INPUT elements are linked to the “contact” object, the INPUT element values will be updated automatically (without us having to write any code to modify the UI elements): Note that we updated the contact object above using the jQuery attr() method. In order for data linking to work, you must use jQuery methods to modify the property values. Two Way Linking The linkBoth() method enables two-way data linking. The contact object and INPUT elements are linked in both directions. When you modify the value of the INPUT element, the contact object is also updated automatically. For example, the following code adds a client-side JavaScript click handler to an HTML button element. When you click the button, the property values of the contact object are displayed using an alert() dialog: The following demonstrates what happens when you change the value of the Name INPUT element and click the Save button. Notice that the name property of the “contact” object that the INPUT element was linked to was updated automatically: The above example is obviously trivially simple.  Instead of displaying the new values of the contact object with a JavaScript alert, you can imagine instead calling a web-service to save the object to a database. The benefit of data linking is that it enables you to focus on your data and frees you from the mechanics of keeping your UI and data in sync. Converters The current data linking proposal also supports a feature called converters. A converter enables you to easily convert the value of a property during data linking. For example, imagine that you want to represent phone numbers in a standard way with the “contact” object phone property. In particular, you don’t want to include special characters such as ()- in the phone number - instead you only want digits and nothing else. In that case, you can wire-up a converter to convert the value of an INPUT element into this format using the code below: Notice above how a converter function is being passed to the linkFrom() method used to link the phone property of the “contact” object with the value of the phone INPUT element. This convertor function strips any non-numeric characters from the INPUT element before updating the phone property.  Now, if you enter the phone number (206) 555-9999 into the phone input field then the value 2065559999 is assigned to the phone property of the contact object: You can also use a converter in the opposite direction also. For example, you can apply a standard phone format string when displaying a phone number from a phone property. Combining Templating and Data Linking Our goal in submitting these two proposals for templating and data linking is to make it easier to work with data when building websites and applications with jQuery. Templating makes it easier to display a list of database records retrieved from a database through an Ajax call. Data linking makes it easier to keep the data and user interface in sync for update scenarios. Currently, we are working on an extension of the data linking proposal to support declarative data linking. We want to make it easy to take advantage of data linking when using a template to display data. For example, imagine that you are using the following template to display an array of product objects: Notice the {{link name}} and {{link price}} expressions. These expressions enable declarative data linking between the SPAN elements and properties of the product objects. The current jQuery templating prototype supports extending its syntax with custom template commands. In this case, we are extending the default templating syntax with a custom template command named “link”. The benefit of using data linking with the above template is that the SPAN elements will be automatically updated whenever the underlying “product” data is updated.  Declarative data linking also makes it easier to create edit and insert forms. For example, you could create a form for editing a product by using declarative data linking like this: Whenever you change the value of the INPUT elements in a template that uses declarative data linking, the underlying JavaScript data object is automatically updated. Instead of needing to write code to scrape the HTML form to get updated values, you can instead work with the underlying data directly – making your client-side code much cleaner and simpler. Downloading Working Code Examples of the Above Scenarios You can download this .zip file to get with working code examples of the above scenarios.  The .zip file includes 4 static HTML page: Listing1_Templating.htm – Illustrates basic templating. Listing2_TemplatingConditionals.htm – Illustrates templating with the use of the if and each template commands. Listing3_DataLinking.htm – Illustrates data linking. Listing4_Converters.htm – Illustrates using a converter with data linking. You can un-zip the file to the file-system and then run each page to see the concepts in action. Summary We are excited to be able to begin participating within the open-source jQuery project.  We’ve received lots of encouraging feedback in response to our first two proposals, and we will continue to actively contribute going forward.  These features will hopefully make it easier for all developers (including ASP.NET developers) to build great Ajax applications. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

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• Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup.  Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the ability to easily generate clean, CSS-friendly output and markup.  Some of the specific complaints with previous ASP.NET releases include: Auto-generated ID attributes within HTML make it hard to write JavaScript and style with CSS Use of tables instead of semantic markup for certain controls (in particular the asp:menu control) make styling ugly Some controls render inline style properties even if no style property on the control has been set ViewState can often be bigger than ideal ASP.NET 4 provides better support for building standards-compliant pages out of the box.  The built-in <asp:> server controls with ASP.NET 4 now generate cleaner markup and support CSS styling – and help address all of the above issues.  Markup Compatibility When Upgrading Existing ASP.NET Web Forms Applications A common question people often ask when hearing about the cleaner markup coming with ASP.NET 4 is “Great - but what about my existing applications?  Will these changes/improvements break things when I upgrade?” To help ensure that we don’t break assumptions around markup and styling with existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications, we’ve enabled a configuration flag – controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion – within web.config that let’s you decide if you want to use the new cleaner markup approach that is the default with new ASP.NET 4 applications, or for compatibility reasons render the same markup that previous versions of ASP.NET used:   When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “3.5” your application and server controls will by default render output using the same markup generation used with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “4.0” your application and server controls will strictly adhere to the XHTML 1.1 specification, have cleaner client IDs, render with semantic correctness in mind, and have extraneous inline styles removed. This flag defaults to 4.0 for all new ASP.NET Web Forms applications built using ASP.NET 4. Any previous application that is upgraded using VS 2010 will have the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag automatically set to 3.5 by the upgrade wizard to ensure backwards compatibility.  You can then optionally change it (either at the application level, or scope it within the web.config file to be on a per page or directory level) if you move your pages to use CSS and take advantage of the new markup rendering. Today’s Cleaner Markup Topic: Client IDs The ability to have clean, predictable, ID attributes on rendered HTML elements is something developers have long asked for with Web Forms (ID values like “ctl00_ContentPlaceholder1_ListView1_ctrl0_Label1” are not very popular).  Having control over the ID values rendered helps make it much easier to write client-side JavaScript against the output, makes it easier to style elements using CSS, and on large pages can help reduce the overall size of the markup generated. New ClientIDMode Property on Controls ASP.NET 4 supports a new ClientIDMode property on the Control base class.  The ClientIDMode property indicates how controls should generate client ID values when they render.  The ClientIDMode property supports four possible values: AutoID—Renders the output as in .NET 3.5 (auto-generated IDs which will still render prefixes like ctrl00 for compatibility) Predictable (Default)— Trims any “ctl00” ID string and if a list/container control concatenates child ids (example: id=”ParentControl_ChildControl”) Static—Hands over full ID naming control to the developer – whatever they set as the ID of the control is what is rendered (example: id=”JustMyId”) Inherit—Tells the control to defer to the naming behavior mode of the parent container control The ClientIDMode property can be set directly on individual controls (or within container controls – in which case the controls within them will by default inherit the setting): Or it can be specified at a page or usercontrol level (using the <%@ Page %> or <%@ Control %> directives) – in which case controls within the pages/usercontrols inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): Or it can be set within the web.config file of an application – in which case pages within the application inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): This gives you the flexibility to customize/override the naming behavior however you want. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Non-List Controls Let’s take a look at how we can use the new ClientIDMode property to control the rendering of “ID” elements within a page.  To help illustrate this we can create a simple page called “SingleControlExample.aspx” that is based on a master-page called “Site.Master”, and which has a single <asp:label> control with an ID of “Message” that is contained with an <asp:content> container control called “MainContent”: Within our code-behind we’ll then add some simple code like below to dynamically populate the Label’s Text property at runtime:   If we were running this application using ASP.NET 3.5 (or had our ASP.NET 4 application configured to run using 3.5 rendering or ClientIDMode=AutoID), then the generated markup sent down to the client would look like below: This ID is unique (which is good) – but rather ugly because of the “ct100” prefix (which is bad). Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Predictable” With ASP.NET 4, server controls by default now render their ID’s using ClientIDMode=”Predictable”.  This helps ensure that ID values are still unique and don’t conflict on a page, but at the same time it makes the IDs less verbose and more predictable.  This means that the generated markup of our <asp:label> control above will by default now look like below with ASP.NET 4: Notice that the “ct100” prefix is gone. Because the “Message” control is embedded within a “MainContent” container control, by default it’s ID will be prefixed “MainContent_Message” to avoid potential collisions with other controls elsewhere within the page. Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Static” Sometimes you don’t want your ID values to be nested hierarchically, though, and instead just want the ID rendered to be whatever value you set it as.  To enable this you can now use ClientIDMode=static, in which case the ID rendered will be exactly the same as what you set it on the server-side on your control.  This will cause the below markup to be rendered with ASP.NET 4: This option now gives you the ability to completely control the client ID values sent down by controls. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Data-Bound List Controls Data-bound list/grid controls have historically been the hardest to use/style when it comes to working with Web Form’s automatically generated IDs.  Let’s now take a look at a scenario where we’ll customize the ID’s rendered using a ListView control with ASP.NET 4. The code snippet below is an example of a ListView control that displays the contents of a data-bound collection — in this case, airports: We can then write code like below within our code-behind to dynamically databind a list of airports to the ListView above: At runtime this will then by default generate a <ul> list of airports like below.  Note that because the <ul> and <li> elements in the ListView’s template are not server controls, no IDs are rendered in our markup: Adding Client ID’s to Each Row Item Now, let’s say that we wanted to add client-ID’s to the output so that we can programmatically access each <li> via JavaScript.  We want these ID’s to be unique, predictable, and identifiable. A first approach would be to mark each <li> element within the template as being a server control (by giving it a runat=server attribute) and by giving each one an id of “airport”: By default ASP.NET 4 will now render clean IDs like below (no ctl001-like ids are rendered):   Using the ClientIDRowSuffix Property Our template above now generates unique ID’s for each <li> element – but if we are going to access them programmatically on the client using JavaScript we might want to instead have the ID’s contain the airport code within them to make them easier to reference.  The good news is that we can easily do this by taking advantage of the new ClientIDRowSuffix property on databound controls in ASP.NET 4 to better control the ID’s of our individual row elements. To do this, we’ll set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to “Code” on our ListView control.  This tells the ListView to use the databound “Code” property from our Airport class when generating the ID: And now instead of having row suffixes like “1”, “2”, and “3”, we’ll instead have the Airport.Code value embedded within the IDs (e.g: _CLE, _CAK, _PDX, etc): You can use this ClientIDRowSuffix approach with other databound controls like the GridView as well. It is useful anytime you want to program row elements on the client – and use clean/identified IDs to easily reference them from JavaScript code. Summary ASP.NET 4 enables you to generate much cleaner HTML markup from server controls and from within your Web Forms applications.  In today’s post I covered how you can now easily control the client ID values that are rendered by server controls.  In upcoming posts I’ll cover some of the other markup improvements that are also coming with the ASP.NET 4 release. Hope this helps, Scott

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 15, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 15, 2010New ProjectsAT Accounts: AT Accounts helps developers to intergrate accounting functionality in their applications. It has both the WPF userinterface and SilverlightChild page list(for dnn4/5): A free module which can display sub pages list for a selected tab. It is template based and support options like Recursive/Child tab prefix/link...dashCommerce: dashCommerce is the leading ASP.NET e-commerce platform.Fire Utilities: My Development Utiltites and base classes: New Zealand Bank Account ValidatorFlyCatch (Bugtracking System): A simple webbased Bugtracking System.fracback: Fractal feedback concepts, based on video feedbackftc3650: code for ftc 3650Google AJAX Search Services for jQuery: This plug-in encapsulates part of the Google AJAX Search API to streamline the process of Google Search integration.Little Black Book DB: This is the Database for the following Projects: SQL Azure PHP Connection SQL Azure Ruby Connection SQL Azure Python Connection SQL Azure .NE...MediaCommMVC: MediaCommMVC is a community platform focusing on photos, videos and discussions. It's based on ASP.NET MVC and uses (fluent) nhibernate, jquery an...Miracle OS: The Miracle OS is an OS from Fox. We work on it, but it isn't ready. Do you want help us? Please send a mail to victor@fox.fi.stMultiwfn: (1)Plotting various graph(filled color/contour/relief map...) (2)Generate Cube file (3)Manipulate & analyze wavefunction Supportting lots of proper...MySpace DataRelay: Data Relay is the foundation of MySpace's middle tier. At its heart, it is a messaging system for relaying information both between clients and ser...NinjaCMS: Ninja CMS is an asp.net based content management system which provides a designer friendly, developer friendly interface to work with. It's flexibl...open gaze and mouse analyzer: Ogama allows recording and analyzing eye- and mouse-tracking data from slideshow eyetracking experiments in parallel. It´s developed in C#.NET and ...Özkasoft.Net | E-Commerce: Özkasoft's E-Commerce ProjectProfiCV: Profi CVpyTarget: Implement a powerful iscsi target in python, and easily use under most popular systems. It also includes the following features: multi-target, mult...SharePoint Platform Extensions: SharePoint Platform Extensions by Espora. Sorting Algorithm Visualization: Sorting Algorithm Visualization Displays Bead Sort, Binary Tree Sort, Bubble Sort, Bucket Sort, Cocktail Sort, Counting Sort, Gnome Sort, In Place ...Specify: A framework for creating executable specifications in .NET. Spell Corrector: A spell corrector that uses Bayes algorithm and BK (Burkhard-Keller) tree.SQL Azure Ruby Connection: This is a demo to show how to connect to SQL Azure with Ruby on Rails.uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage is an Active Directory Self-Service Portal as well as Help Desk web application designed for use on intranet systems. It allows users to u...Winforms Rounded Group Box Control: Rounded Group Box - A Grouping control with Rounded Corners, Gradients, and Drop ShadowWizard Engine: Host application agnostic wizard engine platform, that allows you to fluently define complex conditional flows and provides means for execution of ...WS-Transfer based File Upload: WS-Transer based upload of large files in multiple partsXAMLStylePad: XAMLStylePad - is a simple in use styles and templates XAML-editor. It designed for comfortable coding in XAML with real-time preview result on aut...Your Twitt Engine: Ovo je aplikacija za sve ljude koji su na svom radnom mjestu pod prismotrom poslodavca ili sefa, koji kontroliraju njihov monitor. Tako uz ovu apl...New ReleasesAmiBroker Plug-ins with C#. A non official AmiBroker Plug-in SDK: AniBroker Plug-in SDK v0.0.5: Removed dependency on .NET 4.0, now it works fine with .NET 2.0BeerMath.net: 0.1: Version 0.1Initial set of calculations supported: IBUs Color ABV/ABWChild page list(for dnn4/5): Child Page List 2.6: Source code is also include in module package.dashCommerce: dashCommerce Releases: You can download both Source and WebReady packages at http://www.dashcommerce.org. If you wish to submit patches, then use the Source Code tab her...ExcelDna: ExcelDna Version 0.23: ExcelDna Version 0.23 2010/03/14 - Packing and other features This release adds a number of features to ExcelDna: Add ExplicitExports attribute to ...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.7.1: Version 1.0.7.0 Update Census form to show family totals Fix England and Wales Lost Cousins reports to be England OR Wales Problems with Gedcom in...Foursquare BlogEngine Widget: foursquare widget for BlogEngine.NET Version 0.2: To see the changes which have been made, visit http://philippkueng.ch/post/Foursquare-BlogEngineNET-Widget-Version-02.aspx For installation instruc...GLB Virtual Player Builder: 0.4.0 Official Archetypes Release: Updated for new archetypes. The builder still includes the old player formats, and you can still import your old players' builds. Please PM me an...Home Access Plus+: v3.1.4.0: Version 3.1.3.1 Release Change Log: Added Breadcrumbs to My Computer File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb ~/images/arro...Little Black Book DB: Little Black Book R1: This is the first release of the Little black book presentation I presented at Confoo. I decided to package the Database along with the Windows Az...mite.net - .NET API for mite: Version 1.2.1: Added Support for budget type Modified TimerMapper to return timers Fixed Encoding issue in xml conversionMultiwfn: multiwfn1.0: multiwfn1.0Multiwfn: multiwfn1.0_source: multiwfn1.0_sourceMultiwfn: multiwfn1.1: multiwfn1.1Multiwfn: multiwfn1.1_source: multiwfn1.1_sourceMultiwfn: multiwfn1.2: 1.2 2010-FEB-9 *加入了对10f型轨道的支持。 *新支持非限制性Post-HF波函数用以计算自旋密度。 *新增加直接读入高斯03/09的fch文件的支持，可以观看NBO轨道，详见readme实例4.10。 *绘制平面图时允许通过输入三个点坐标定义平面，允许自定义平面的原点与平移向...Multiwfn: multiwfn1.2_source: Include all the file that needed by compilation in CVF6.5PowerShell Community Extensions: 2.0 Beta 2: Release NotesThis is a pretty close to final release. We have eliminated all of the names that ran afound of the module loading mechanism which me...pyTarget: pyTarget.binary-for-windows-x86.rar: pyTarget.binary-for-windows-x86.rarpyTarget: pyTarget.src.tar.bz2: pyTarget.src.tar.bz2RedBulb for XNA Framework: RedBulbConsole (Console, Menu and TrackHUD Sample): http://bayimg.com/image/jalhmaacd.jpgScrum Sprint Monitor: 1.0.0.45262 (.NET 4.0 RC): Tested against TFS 2010 RC. For the .NET 3.5 SP1 platform, use the .NET 3.5 SP1 download. What is new in this release? Major performance increase ...sELedit: sELedit v1.1: Removed: Clone and Delete Button Added: Context Menu to Item List Added: Clone and Delete button to Context Menu Added: Export / Import Item ...Sorting Algorithm Visualization: Beta 1: Sorting Algorithm VisualizationSpecify: Version 1.0: Version 1.0Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.1: A basic version that supports basic functionality.Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.1 Source Code: Source code of version 0.1Spiral Architecture Driven Development (SADD): SADD v.0.9: Pre-final release with the NEW materials now all in English ! The Final release is coming soon. After guest column for SADD publication in MS Ar...Spiral Architecture Driven Development (SADD) for Russian: SADD v.0.9: Pre-final release with the NEW materials now all in English ! The Final release is coming soon. After guest column for SADD publication in MS Ar...SQL Azure Ruby Connection: Little Black Book Ruby R1: This is the Ruby Demo that I demostrated at Confoo. Special Thanks to Tony Thompson for putting this demo together. To check out Tony's Portfolio ...The Scrum Factory: The Scrum Factory Server - V1a: This is the newest version of the server. Some minor bugs from version v1 were fixed, and some slighted changed were made some database views.twNowplaying: twNowplaying 1.0.0.4: Please note that the user has to press the Twitter logo to log in the first time the application is started.uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage - v1.0 (.NET 4.0 RC): Initial Release of uManage. NOTE: Designed for ASP.NET and .NET 4.0 RC ONLY! This is the initial release of uManage and covers the first phase of ...Virtu: Virtu 0.8: Source Requirements.NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1 Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1, or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition with Service Pa...Visual Studio DSite: Speech Synthesizer (Text to Speech) in Visual C++: A very simple text to speech program written in visual c 2008.White Tiger: 0.0.4.0: *now you can disable the file security checks *winforms aplications created to manage tablesWinforms Rounded Group Box Control: Release 1.0: To use this control simply add the class to your project and compile it. It will then show up in the projects components section in the toolbox. ...WS-Transfer based File Upload: 0.5: Implements the binary file transfer mechanism onlyXsltDb - DotNetNuke XSLT module: 01.00.89: Super modules configuration names. 16767 - Fixed more bug fixes...Yakiimo3D: DirectX11 Rheinhard Tonemapping Source and Binary: DirectX11 Rheinhard tonemapping source and binary.Your Twitt Engine: test: Slobodno probajte sa vasim twitter korisničkim računomMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySharePoint Team-MailerjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightFarseer Physics EngineCalcium: A modular application toolset leveraging Prism

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• ASP.NET MVC Postbacks and HtmlHelper Controls ignoring Model Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  So here's a binding behavior in ASP.NET MVC that I didn't really get until today: HtmlHelpers controls (like .TextBoxFor() etc.) don't bind to model values on Postback, but rather get their value directly out of the POST buffer from ModelState. Effectively it looks like you can't change the display value of a control via model value updates on a Postback operation. To demonstrate here's an example. I have a small section in a document where I display an editable email address: This is what the form displays on a GET operation and as expected I get the email value displayed in both the textbox and plain value display below, which reflects the value in the mode. I added a plain text value to demonstrate the model value compared to what's rendered in the textbox. The relevant markup is the email address which needs to be manipulated via the model in the Controller code. Here's the Razor markup: <div class="fieldcontainer"> <label> Email: &nbsp; <small>(username and <a href="http://gravatar.com">Gravatar</a> image)</small> </label> <div> @Html.TextBoxFor( mod=> mod.User.Email, new {type="email",@class="inputfield"}) @Model.User.Email </div> </div>   So, I have this form and the user can change their email address. On postback the Post controller code then asks the business layer whether the change is allowed. If it's not I want to reset the email address back to the old value which exists in the database and was previously store. The obvious thing to do would be to modify the model. Here's the Controller logic block that deals with that:// did user change email? if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(oldEmail) && user.Email != oldEmail) { if (userBus.DoesEmailExist(user.Email)) { userBus.ValidationErrors.Add("New email address exists already. Please…"); user.Email = oldEmail; } else // allow email change but require verification by forcing a login user.IsVerified = false; }… model.user = user; return View(model); The logic is straight forward - if the new email address is not valid because it already exists I don't want to display the new email address the user entered, but rather the old one. To do this I change the value on the model which effectively does this:model.user.Email = oldEmail; return View(model); So when I press the Save button after entering in my new email address ([email protected]) here's what comes back in the rendered view: Notice that the textbox value and the raw displayed model value are different. The TextBox displays the POST value, the raw value displays the actual model value which are different. This means that MVC renders the textbox value from the POST data rather than from the view data when an Http POST is active. Now I don't know about you but this is not the behavior I expected - initially. This behavior effectively means that I cannot modify the contents of the textbox from the Controller code if using HtmlHelpers for binding. Updating the model for display purposes in a POST has in effect - no effect. (Apr. 25, 2012 - edited the post heavily based on comments and more experimentation) What should the behavior be? After getting quite a few comments on this post I quickly realized that the behavior I described above is actually the behavior you'd want in 99% of the binding scenarios. You do want to get the POST values back into your input controls at all times, so that the data displayed on a form for the user matches what they typed. So if an error occurs, the error doesn't mysteriously disappear getting replaced either with a default value or some value that you changed on the model on your own. Makes sense. Still it is a little non-obvious because the way you create the UI elements with MVC, it certainly looks like your are binding to the model value:@Html.TextBoxFor( mod=> mod.User.Email, new {type="email",@class="inputfield",required="required" }) and so unless one understands a little bit about how the model binder works this is easy to trip up. At least it was for me. Even though I'm telling the control which model value to bind to, that model value is only used initially on GET operations. After that ModelState/POST values provide the display value. Workarounds The default behavior should be fine for 99% of binding scenarios. But if you do need fix up values based on your model rather than the default POST values, there are a number of ways that you can work around this. Initially when I ran into this, I couldn't figure out how to set the value using code and so the simplest solution to me was simply to not use the MVC Html Helper for the specific control and explicitly bind the model via HTML markup and @Razor expression: <input type="text" name="User.Email" id="User_Email" value="@Model.User.Email" /> And this produces the right result. This is easy enough to create, but feels a little out of place when using the @Html helpers for everything else. As you can see by the difference in the name and id values, you also are forced to remember the naming conventions that MVC imposes in order for ModelBinding to work properly which is a pain to remember and set manually (name is the same as the property with . syntax, id replaces dots with underlines). Use the ModelState Some of my original confusion came because I didn't understand how the model binder works. The model binder basically maintains ModelState on a postback, which holds a value and binding errors for each of the Post back value submitted on the page that can be mapped to the model. In other words there's one ModelState entry for each bound property of the model. Each ModelState entry contains a value property that holds AttemptedValue and RawValue properties. The AttemptedValue is essentially the POST value retrieved from the form. The RawValue is the value that the model holds. When MVC binds controls like @Html.TextBoxFor() or @Html.TextBox(), it always binds values on a GET operation. On a POST operation however, it'll always used the AttemptedValue to display the control. MVC binds using the ModelState on a POST operation, not the model's value. So, if you want the behavior that I was expecting originally you can actually get it by clearing the ModelState in the controller code:ModelState.Clear(); This clears out all the captured ModelState values, and effectively binds to the model. Note this will produce very similar results - in fact if there are no binding errors you see exactly the same behavior as if binding from ModelState, because the model has been updated from the ModelState already and binding to the updated values most likely produces the same values you would get with POST back values. The big difference though is that any values that couldn't bind - like say putting a string into a numeric field - will now not display back the value the user typed, but the default field value or whatever you changed the model value to. This is the behavior I was actually expecting previously. But - clearing out all values might be a bit heavy handed. You might want to fix up one or two values in a model but rarely would you want the entire model to update from the model. So, you can also clear out individual values on an as needed basis:if (userBus.DoesEmailExist(user.Email)) { userBus.ValidationErrors.Add("New email address exists already. Please…"); user.Email = oldEmail; ModelState.Remove("User.Email"); } This allows you to remove a single value from the ModelState and effectively allows you to replace that value for display from the model. Why? While researching this I came across a post from Microsoft's Brad Wilson who describes the default binding behavior best in a forum post: The reason we use the posted value for editors rather than the model value is that the model may not be able to contain the value that the user typed. Imagine in your "int" editor the user had typed "dog". You want to display an error message which says "dog is not valid", and leave "dog" in the editor field. However, your model is an int: there's no way it can store "dog". So we keep the old value. If you don't want the old values in the editor, clear out the Model State. That's where the old value is stored and pulled from the HTML helpers. There you have it. It's not the most intuitive behavior, but in hindsight this behavior does make some sense even if at first glance it looks like you should be able to update values from the model. The solution of clearing ModelState works and is a reasonable one but you have to know about some of the innards of ModelState and how it actually works to figure that out.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Azure Grid Computing - Worker Roles as HPC Compute Nodes

  - by JoshReuben

  Overview ·        With HPC 2008 R2 SP1 You can add Azure worker roles as compute nodes in a local Windows HPC Server cluster. ·        The subscription for Windows Azure like any other Azure Service - charged for the time that the role instances are available, as well as for the compute and storage services that are used on the nodes. ·        Win-Win ? - Azure charges the computer hour cost (according to vm size) amortized over a month – so you save on purchasing compute node hardware. Microsoft wins because you need to purchase HPC to have a local head node for managing this compute cluster grid distributed in the cloud. ·        Blob storage is used to hold input & output files of each job. I can see how Parametric Sweep HPC jobs can be supported (where the same job is run multiple times on each node against different input units), but not MPI.NET (where different HPC Job instances function as coordinated agents and conduct master-slave inter-process communication), unless Azure is somehow tunneling MPI communication through inter-WorkerRole Azure Queues. ·        this is not the end of the story for Azure Grid Computing. If MS requires you to purchase a local HPC license (and administrate it), what's to stop a 3rd party from doing this and encapsulating exposing HPC WCF Broker Service to you for managing compute nodes? If MS doesn’t  provide head node as a service, someone else will! Process ·        requires creation of a worker node template that specifies a connection to an existing subscription for Windows Azure + an availability policy for the worker nodes. ·        After worker nodes are added to the cluster, you can start them, which provisions the Windows Azure role instances, and then bring them online to run HPC cluster jobs. ·        A Windows Azure worker role instance runs a HPC compatible Azure guest operating system which runs on the VMs that host your service. The guest operating system is updated monthly. You can choose to upgrade the guest OS for your service automatically each time an update is released - All role instances defined by your service will run on the guest operating system version that you specify. see Windows Azure Guest OS Releases and SDK Compatibility Matrix (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=190549). ·        use the hpcpack command to upload file packages and install files to run on the worker nodes. see hpcpack (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=205514). Requirements ·        assuming you have an azure subscription account and the HPC head node installed and configured. ·        Install HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP 1 -  see Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Release Notes (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=202812). ·        Configure the head node to connect to the Internet - connectivity is provided by the connection of the head node to the enterprise network. You may need to configure a proxy client on the head node. Any cluster network topology (1-5) is supported). ·        Configure the firewall - allow outbound TCP traffic on the following ports: 80,       443, 5901, 5902, 7998, 7999 ·        Note: HPC Server  uses Admin Mode (Elevated Privileges) in Windows Azure to give the service administrator of the subscription the necessary privileges to initialize HPC cluster services on the worker nodes. ·        Obtain a Windows Azure subscription certificate - the Windows Azure subscription must be configured with a public subscription (API) certificate -a valid X.509 certificate with a key size of at least 2048 bits. Generate a self-sign certificate & upload a .cer file to the Windows Azure Portal Account page > Manage my API Certificates link. see Using the Windows Azure Service Management API (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=205526). ·        import the certificate with an associated private key on the HPC cluster head node - into the trusted root store of the local computer account. Obtain Windows Azure Connection Information for HPC Server ·        required for each worker node template ·        copy from azure portal - Get from: navigation pane > Hosted Services > Storage Accounts & CDN ·        Subscription ID - a 32-char hex string in the form xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx. In Properties pane. ·        Subscription certificate thumbprint - a 40-char hex string (you need to remove spaces). In Management Certificates > Properties pane. ·        Service name - the value of <ServiceName> configured in the public URL of the service (http://<ServiceName>.cloudapp.net). In Hosted Services > Properties pane. ·        Blob Storage account name - the value of <StorageAccountName> configured in the public URL of the account (http://<StorageAccountName>.blob.core.windows.net). In Storage Accounts > Properties pane. Import the Azure Subscription Certificate on the HPC Head Node ·        enable the services for Windows HPC Server  to authenticate properly with the Windows Azure subscription. ·        use the Certificates MMC snap-in to import the certificate to the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store of the local computer account. The certificate must be in PFX format (.pfx or .p12 file) with a private key that is protected by a password. ·        see Certificates (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=163918). ·        To open the certificates snapin: Run > mmc. File > Add/Remove Snap-in > certificates > Computer account > Local Computer ·        To import the certificate via wizard - Certificates > Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates > All Tasks > Import ·        After the certificate is imported, it appears in the details pane in the Certificates snap-in. You can open the certificate to check its status. Configure a Proxy Client on the HPC Head Node ·        the following Windows HPC Server services must be able to communicate over the Internet (through the firewall) with the services for Windows Azure: HPCManagement, HPCScheduler, HPCBrokerWorker. ·        Create a Windows Azure Worker Node Template ·        Edit HPC node templates in HPC Node Template Editor. ·        Specify: 1) Windows Azure subscription connection info (unique service name) for adding a set of worker nodes to the cluster + 2)worker node availability policy – rules for deploying / removing worker role instances in Windows Azure o   HPC Cluster Manager > Configuration > Navigation Pane > Node Templates > Actions pane > New à Create Node Template Wizard or Edit à Node Template Editor o   Choose Node Template Type page - Windows Azure worker node template o   Specify Template Name page – template name & description o   Provide Connection Information page – Azure Subscription ID (text) & Subscription certificate (browse) o   Provide Service Information page - Azure service name + blob storage account name (optionally click Retrieve Connection Information to get list of available from azure – possible LRT). o   Configure Azure Availability Policy page - how Windows Azure worker nodes start / stop (online / offline the worker role instance -  add / remove) – manual / automatic o   for automatic - In the Configure Windows Azure Worker Availability Policy dialog -select days and hours for worker nodes to start / stop. ·        To validate the Windows Azure connection information, on the template's Connection Information tab > Validate connection information. ·        You can upload a file package to the storage account that is specified in the template - eg upload application or service files that will run on the worker nodes. see hpcpack (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=205514). Add Azure Worker Nodes to the HPC Cluster ·        Use the Add Node Wizard – specify: 1) the worker node template, 2) The number of worker nodes   (within the quota of role instances in the azure subscription), and 3)           The VM size of the worker nodes : ExtraSmall, Small, Medium, Large, or ExtraLarge.  ·        to add worker nodes of different sizes, must run the Add Node Wizard separately for each size. ·        All worker nodes that are added to the cluster by using a specific worker node template define a set of worker nodes that will be deployed and managed together in Windows Azure when you start the nodes. This includes worker nodes that you add later by using the worker node template and, if you choose, worker nodes of different sizes. You cannot start, stop, or delete individual worker nodes. ·        To add Windows Azure worker nodes o   In HPC Cluster Manager: Node Management > Actions pane > Add Node à Add Node Wizard o   Select Deployment Method page - Add Azure Worker nodes o   Specify New Nodes page - select a worker node template, specify the number and size of the worker nodes ·        After you add worker nodes to the cluster, they are in the Not-Deployed state, and they have a health state of Unapproved. Before you can use the worker nodes to run jobs, you must start them and then bring them online. ·        Worker nodes are numbered consecutively in a naming series that begins with the root name AzureCN – this is non-configurable. Deploying Windows Azure Worker Nodes ·        To deploy the role instances in Windows Azure - start the worker nodes added to the HPC cluster and bring the nodes online so that they are available to run cluster jobs. This can be configured in the HPC Azure Worker Node Template – Azure Availability Policy -  to be automatic or manual. ·        The Start, Stop, and Delete actions take place on the set of worker nodes that are configured by a specific worker node template. You cannot perform one of these actions on a single worker node in a set. You also cannot perform a single action on two sets of worker nodes (specified by two different worker node templates). ·        ·          Starting a set of worker nodes deploys a set of worker role instances in Windows Azure, which can take some time to complete, depending on the number of worker nodes and the performance of Windows Azure. ·        To start worker nodes manually and bring them online o   In HPC Node Management > Navigation Pane > Nodes > List / Heat Map view - select one or more worker nodes. o   Actions pane > Start – in the Start Azure Worker Nodes dialog, select a node template. o   the state of the worker nodes changes from Not Deployed to track the provisioning progress – worker node Details Pane > Provisioning Log tab. o   If there were errors during the provisioning of one or more worker nodes, the state of those nodes is set to Unknown and the node health is set to Unapproved. To determine the reason for the failure, review the provisioning logs for the nodes. o   After a worker node starts successfully, the node state changes to Offline. To bring the nodes online, select the nodes that are in the Offline state > Bring Online. ·        Troubleshooting o   check node template. o   use telnet to test connectivity: telnet <ServiceName>.cloudapp.net 7999 o   check node status - Deployment status information appears in the service account information in the Windows Azure Portal - HPC queries this -  see  node status information for any failed nodes in HPC Node Management. ·        When role instances are deployed, file packages that were previously uploaded to the storage account using the hpcpack command are automatically installed. You can also upload file packages to storage after the worker nodes are started, and then manually install them on the worker nodes. see hpcpack (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=205514). ·        to remove a set of role instances in Windows Azure - stop the nodes by using HPC Cluster Manager (apply the Stop action). This deletes the role instances from the service and changes the state of the worker nodes in the HPC cluster to Not Deployed. ·        Each time that you start a set of worker nodes, two proxy role instances (size Small) are configured in Windows Azure to facilitate communication between HPC Cluster Manager and the worker nodes. The proxy role instances are not listed in HPC Cluster Manager after the worker nodes are added. However, the instances appear in the Windows Azure Portal. The proxy role instances incur charges in Windows Azure along with the worker node instances, and they count toward the quota of role instances in the subscription.

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• Day 2 - Game Design Documentation

  - by dapostolov

  So yesterday I didn't cut any code for my game but I was able to do a tiny bit of research on the XNA Game Development Technology and the communities out there and do you know what? I feel I'm a bit closer to my goal. The bad news is today I didn't cut code either. However, not all is lost because I wanted to get my ideas on paper and today I just did that.  Today, I began to jot down notes about the game and how I felt the visual elements would interact with each other. Unlike my workplace, my personal level of documentation is nothing more than a task list or a mind map of my ideas; it helps me streamline my solutions quiet effectively and circumvent the long process of articulating each thought to the n-th degree. I truly dislike documentation (because I have an extremely hard time articulating my thought and solutions); however, because I tend to do a really good job with documentation I tend to get stuck writing the buggers. But as a generalist remark: 'No Developer likes documentation.' For now let's stick with my basic notes and call this post a living document. Here are my notes, fresh, from after watching the new first episode of Merlin second season! Actually, a quick recommendation to anyone who is reading this (if anyone is): I truly recommend you envelope yourself in the medium or task you're trying to tackle. Be one with moment and feel it! For instance: Are you writing a fantasy script / game? What would the music of the genre sound like? For me the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is frackin awesome. There are many other good CD's out there, which I listen to (some who even use medival instruments, but Conan I keep returning to. It's a creative trigger for me. Ask yourself what would the imagery look like? Time to surf google for artist renditions of fantasy! What would the game feel like? Start playing some of your favorite games that inspire you, be wary though, have some self control and don't let it absorb your time. Anyhow, onto the documentation... Screens, Scenes, and Sprites. Oh My! (groan...) The first thing that came to mind were the screens, I thought the following would suffice: Menu Screen Character Customisation Screen Loading Screen? Battle Ground The Menu Screen Ok. So, the thought here is when the game loads a huge title is displayed: Wizard Wars. The player is prompted with 3 menu items: 1 Player Game, 2 Player Game, and Exit. Since I'm targetting the PC platform, as a non-networked game to start, I picture myself running my mouse over each menu option and the visual element of the menu item changes, along with a sound to indicate that I am over a curent menu item. And as I move my mouse away, it changes back, and possibly an exit mouse sound. Maybe on the screen somewhere is a brazier alit with a magical tome open right beside it, OR, maybe the tome is the menu! I hear the menu music as mellow, not obtrusive or piercing. On a menu item select, a confirmation sound bellows to indicate the players selection. The Esc key will always return me to the previous screens or desktop. The menu screen must feel...dark, like a really important ritual is about to happen and thus the music should build up. 1 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) 2 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) Exit - > Back to Windows Notes: So the first thing I pick up here are a couple things: First and foremost, my artistic abilities suck crap, so I may have to hire an artist (now that i've said that, lets get techy) graphical objects will be positioned within a scene on each screen / window. Menu items will be represented grapically, possibly animated, and have sound / animation effects triggered by user input or a time line. I have an animated scene involving a brazier or fire on a stick IF I was to move this game to the xbox, I'd have to track which menu item is currently selected (unless I do a mouse pointer type thing.) WindowObject has a scene A Scene has many GameObjects GameObject has a position graphic or animation MenuObject is a GameObject which has a mouse in, mouse out, and click event which either does something graphically (animation), does something with sound, or moves to another screen.  Character Customisation Screen With either the 1 or 2 player option selected, both selections will come to this screen; a wizard requires a name, powers, and vestements of course! Player one will configure his character first and then player two. I considered a split screen for PC but to have two people fighting over a keyboard would probably suck. For XBox, a split screen could work; maybe when I get into the networking portion (phase 2 blog?) of this game I will remove the 2 player option for PC and provide only multiplayer and I will leave 2 player for xbox...hmm... Anyhow...I picture the creation process as follows: Name: (textbox / keyboard entry) - for xbox, this would have to be different. Robe Color: (color box, or something) Stats: Speed, Oomph, and Health. (as sliders) 1 as minimum and 10 as maximum. Ok, Back, and Cancel buttons / options. Each stat has a benefit which are listed below. The idea is the player decides if he wants his wizard to run fast, be a tank and ... hit with a purse.Regardless, the player will have a pool of 12 points to use. Ideally, A balanced wizard will have 5 in each attribute. Spells? The only spell of choice is a ball of fire which comes without question. The music and screen should still feel like a ritual. The Character Speed Basically, how fast your character moves and casts. Oomph (Best Monster Truck Voice): PURE POWAH!!! The damage output of your fireball. Health How much damage you can take. Notes: I realise the game dynamics may sound uninteresting at the moment; but I think after a couple releases, we could have some other grand ideas such as: saved profiles, gold to upgrade arsenal of spells, talents, etc...but for now...a vanilla fireball thrower mage will suffice for this experiment. OK. So... a MenuObject  may need to be loosely coupled to allow future items such as networking? may be a button? a CharacterObject has a name speed oomph health and a funky robe color. cap on the three stats (1-10) an arsenal of 1 spell (possibly could expand this) The Loading Screen As is. The Battleground Screen For now, I'm keeping the screen as max resolution for the PC. The screen isn't going to move or even be a split screen. I'm not aiming high here because I want to see what level of change is involved when new features / concepts are added to game content. I'm interested to find out if we could apply techniques such as MVC or MVVM to this type of development or is it too tightly coupled? This reminds me when when my best friend and I were brainstorming our game idea (this is going back a while...1994, 6?) and he cringed at the thought of bringing business technology into games, especially when I suggested a database to store character information and COM / DCOM as the medium, but it seems I wasn't far off (reflecting); just like his implementation of a xml "config file" for dynamic direct-x menus back before .net in 1999...anyhow...i digress... The Battle One screen, two characters lobing balls of fire at each other...It doesn't get better than that. Every so often a scroll appears...and the fireballs bounce off walls, or the wizard has rapid fire, or even scrolls of healing! The scroll options are endless. Two bars at the top, each the color of the wizard (with their name beside the bar) indicate how much health they have. Possibly the appearance of the scrolls means the battle is taking too long? I'm thinking 1 player controls: up, down, left, right and space to fire the button. Or even possibly, mouse click and shift - mouse button to fire a spell in the direction they are facing. Two player controls: a, s, d, f and space AND arrows (up, down, left, right) and Del key or Crtl. The game ends when a player has 0 health and a dialog box appears asking for a rematch / reconfigure / exit. Health goes down when a fireball (friendly or not), connects with a wizard. When a wizard connects with a scroll, a countdown clock / icon appears near the health bar and the wizard begins to glow. For the most part, a wizard can have only scroll 1 effect on him at a time. Notes: Ok, there's alot to cover here. a CharacterObject is a GameObject it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has sounds (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, whistling, other?) it has animations (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, idle, other?) it has a lifespan (determined by health) it is alive or dead it has a position a ScrollObject is a GameObject it carries a transferance of points "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it carries a transferance of "other" it is stationary it has a sound on impact it has a stationary animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by game) it is alive or dead it has a position a WallObject is a GameObject it has a sound on fireball impact? it is a still image / stationary it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it is dead it has a position A FireBall is a GameObject it carries a transferance of poinst "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has a sound it has a travel animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by caster) it is alive or dead it has a position As I look at this, I can see some common attributes in each object that I can carry up to the GameObject. I think I'm going to end the documentation here, it's taken me a bit of time to type this all out, tomorrow. I'll load up my IDE and my paint studio to get some good old fashioned cowboy hacking going!   D.

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