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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 30, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 30, 2012Popular ReleasesOMS.Ice - T4 Text Template Generator: OMS.Ice - T4 Text Template Generator v1.4.0.14110: Issue 601 - Template file name cannot contain characters that are not allowed in C#/VB identifiers Issue 625 - Last line will be ignored by the parser Issue 626 - Usage of environment variables and macrosSilverlight Toolkit: Silverlight 5 Toolkit Source - May 2012: Source code for December 2011 Silverlight 5 Toolkit release.totalem: version 2012.05.30.1: Beta version added function for mass renaming files and foldersAudio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch and Shift 4.4.0: Tracklist added on main window Improved performances with tracklist Some other fixesJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 6: New feature - Added IgnoreDataMemberAttribute support New feature - Added GetResolvedPropertyName to DefaultContractResolver New feature - Added CheckAdditionalContent to JsonSerializer Change - Metro build now always uses late bound reflection Change - JsonTextReader no longer returns no content after consecutive underlying content read failures Fix - Fixed bad JSON in an array with error handling creating an infinite loop Fix - Fixed deserializing objects with a non-default cons...DBScripterCmd - A command line tool to script database objects to seperate files: DBScripterCmd Source v1.0.2.zip: Add support for SQL Server 2005Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v12.1: Version History Changed in v12.1: Fixed crash when unable to start asynchronous analysis Fixed upgrade from v11 Changed in v12: background document analysis new options dialog with Quick Set selections for behavior new "glow" style for guides new menu icon in VS 11 preview control now uses editor theming highlighting can be customised on each line fixed issues with collapsed code blocks improved behaviour around left-aligned pragma/preprocessor commands (C#/C++) new setting...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.00: Major Highlights Fixed issue in the Site Settings when single quotes were being treated as escape characters Fixed issue loading the Mobile Premium Data after upgrading from CE to PE Fixed errors logged when updating folder provider settings Fixed the order of the mobile device capabilities in the Site Redirection Management UI The User Profile page was completely rebuilt. We needed User Profiles to have multiple child pages. This would allow for the most flexibility by still f...StarTrinity Face Recognition Library: Version 1.2: Much better accuracy????: ????2.0.1: 1、?????。WiX Toolset: WiX v3.6 RC: WiX v3.6 RC (3.6.2928.0) provides feature complete Burn with VS11 support. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/5/28/WiX-v3.6-Release-Candidate-availableJavascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.7: SetParameter() reverts to its old behaviour of allowing JavaScript code to add new properties to wrapped C# objects. The behavior added briefly in 0.6 (throws an exception) can be had via the new SetParameterOptions.RejectUnknownProperties. TerminateExecution now uses its isolate to terminate the correct context automatically. Added support for converting all C# integral types, decimal and enums to JavaScript numbers. (Previously only the common types were handled properly.) Bug fixe...callisto: callisto 2.0.29: Added DNS functionality to scripting. See documentation section for details of how to incorporate this into your scripts.Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (May 2012): Fixes: unserialize() of negative float numbers fix pcre possesive quantifiers and character class containing ()[] array deserilization when the array contains a reference to ISerializable parsing lambda function fix round() reimplemented as it is in PHP to avoid .NET rounding errors filesize bypass for FileInfo.Length bug in Mono New features: Time zones reimplemented, uses Windows/Linux databaseSharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.1): New fetures:Admin enable / disable match Hide/Show Euro 2012 SharePoint lists (3 lists) Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint Euro 2012 Predictor has been developed as a SharePoint Sandbox solution to support SharePoint Online (Office 365) Download the solution havivi.euro2012.wsp from the download page: Downloads Upload this solution to your Site Collection via the solutions area. Click on Activate to make the web parts in the solution available for use in the Site C...????SDK for .Net 4.0+(OAuth2.0+??V2?API): ??V2?SDK???: ????SDK for .Net 4.X???????PHP?SDK???OAuth??API???Client???。 ??????API?? ???????OAuth2.0???? ???：????????，DEMO??AppKey????????????????，?????AppKey，????AppKey???????????，?????“????>????>????>??????”.Net Code Samples: Code Samples: Code samples (SLNs).LINQ_Koans: LinqKoans v.02: Cleaned up a bitCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Application: FluentScript Version: 0.9.8 Build: 0.9.8.4 Changeset: 75050 ( CommonLibrary.NET ) Release date: May 24, 2012 Binaries: CommonLibrary.dll Namespace: ComLib.Lang Project site: http://fluentscript.codeplex.com...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.0 RC1 Refresh 2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript developers to query and update data from different sources like webSQL, indexedDB, OData, Facebook or YQL. See it in action in this 6 minutes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlJHgj1y0CU RC1 R2 Release highlights Knockout.js integrationUsing the Knockout.js module, your UI can be automatically refreshed when the data model changes, so you can develop the front-end of your data manager app even faster. Querying 1:N relations in W...New Projects5Widgets: 5Widgets is a framework for building HTML5 canvas interfaces. Written in JavaScript, 5Widgets consists of a library of widgets and a controller that implements the MVC pattern. Though the HTML5 standard is gaining popularity, there is no framework like this at the moment. Yet, as a professional developer, I know many, including myself, would really find such a library useful. I have uploaded my initial code, which can definitely be improved since I have not had the time to work on it fu...Azure Trace Listener: Simple Trace Listener outputting trace data directly to Windows Azure Queue or Table Storage. Unlike the Windows Azure Diagnostics Listener (WAD), logging happens immediately and does not rely on (scheduled or manually triggered) Log Transfer mechanism. A simple Reader application shows how to read trace entries and can be used as is or as base for more advanced scenarios.CodeSample2012: Code Sample is a windows tool for saving pieces of codeEncryption: The goal of the Encryption project is to provide solid, high quality functionality that aims at taking the complexity out of using the System.Security.Cryptography namespace. The first pass of this library provides a very strong password encryption system. It uses variable length random salt bytes with secure SHA512 cryptographic hashing functions to allow you to provide a high level of security to the users. Entity Framework Code-First Automatic Database Migration: The Entity Framework Code-First Automatic Database Migration tool was designed to help developers easily update their database schema while preserving their data when they change their POCO objects. This is not meant to take the place of Code-First Migrations. This project is simply designed to ease the development burden of database changes. It grew out of the desire to not have to delete, recreated, and seed the database every time I made an object model change. Function Point Plugin: Function Point Tracability Mapper VSIX for Visual Studio 2010/TFS 2010+FunkOS: dcpu16 operating systemGit for WebMatrix: This is a WebMatrix Extension that allows users to access Git Source Control functions.Groupon Houses: the groupon site for housesLiquifier - Complete serialisation/deserialisation for complex object graphs: Liquifier is a serialisation/deserialisation library for preserving object graphs with references intact. Liquifier uses attributes and interfaces to allow the user to control how a type is serialised - the aim is to free the user from having to write code to serialise and deserialise objects, especially large or complex graphs in which this is a significant undertaking.MTACompCommEx032012: lak lak lakMVC Essentials: MVC Essentials is aimed to have all my learning in the projects that I have worked.MyWireProject: This project manages wireless networks.Peulot Heshbon - Hebrew: This program is for teaching young students math, until 6th grade. The program gives questions for the user. The user needs to answer the question. After 10 questions the user gets his mark. The marks are saved and can be viewed from every run. PlusOne: A .NET Extension and Utility Library: PlusOne is a library of extension and utility methods for C#.Project Support: This project is a simple project management solution. This will allow you to manage your clients, track bug reports, request additional features to projects that you are currently working on and much more. A client will be allowed to have multiple users, so that you can track who has made reports etc and provide them feedback. The solution is set-up so that if you require you can modify the styling to fit your companies needs with ease, you can even have multiple styles that can be set ...SharePoint 2010 Slide Menu Control: Navigation control for building SharePoint slide menuSIGO: 1 person following this project (follow) Projeto SiGO O Projeto SiGO (Sistema de Gerenciamento Odontologico) tem um Escorpo Complexo com varios programas e rotinas, compondo o modulo de SAC e CRM, Finanças, Estoque e outro itens. Coordenador Heitor F Neto : O Projeto SiGo desenvolvido aqui no CodePlex e open source, sera apenas um Prototipo, assim que desenvolmemos os modulos basicos iremos migrar para um servidor Pago e com segurança dos Codigo Fonte e Banco de Dados. Pessoa...STEM123: Windows Phone 7 application to help people find and create STEM Topic details.TIL: Text Injection and Templating Library: An advanced alternative to string.Format() that encapsulates templates in objects, uses named tokens, and lets you define extra serializing/processing steps before injecting input into the template (think, join an array, serialize an object, etc).UAH Exchange: Ukrainian hrivna currency exchangeuberBook: uberBook ist eine Kontakt-Verwaltung für´s Tray. Das Programm syncronisiert sämtliche Kontakte mit dem Internet und sucht automatisch nach Social-Network Profilen Ihrer KontakteWPF Animated GIF: A simple library to display animated GIF images in WPF, usable in XAML or in code.

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• Why Are Minimized Programs Often Slow to Open Again?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  It seems particularly counterintuitive: you minimize an application because you plan on returning to it later and wish to skip shutting the application down and restarting it later, but sometimes maximizing it takes even longer than launching it fresh. What gives? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Bart wants to know why he’s not saving any time with application minimization: I’m working in Photoshop CS6 and multiple browsers a lot. I’m not using them all at once, so sometimes some applications are minimized to taskbar for hours or days. The problem is, when I try to maximize them from the taskbar – it sometimes takes longer than starting them! Especially Photoshop feels really weird for many seconds after finally showing up, it’s slow, unresponsive and even sometimes totally freezes for minute or two. It’s not a hardware problem as it’s been like that since always on all on my PCs. Would I also notice it after upgrading my HDD to SDD and adding RAM (my main PC holds 4 GB currently)? Could guys with powerful pcs / macs tell me – does it also happen to you? I guess OSes somehow “focus” on active software and move all the resources away from the ones that run, but are not used. Is it possible to somehow set RAM / CPU / HDD priorities or something, for let’s say, Photoshop, so it won’t slow down after long period of inactivity? So what is the deal? Why does he find himself waiting to maximize a minimized app? The Answer SuperUser contributor Allquixotic explains why: Summary The immediate problem is that the programs that you have minimized are being paged out to the “page file” on your hard disk. This symptom can be improved by installing a Solid State Disk (SSD), adding more RAM to your system, reducing the number of programs you have open, or upgrading to a newer system architecture (for instance, Ivy Bridge or Haswell). Out of these options, adding more RAM is generally the most effective solution. Explanation The default behavior of Windows is to give active applications priority over inactive applications for having a spot in RAM. When there’s significant memory pressure (meaning the system doesn’t have a lot of free RAM if it were to let every program have all the RAM it wants), it starts putting minimized programs into the page file, which means it writes out their contents from RAM to disk, and then makes that area of RAM free. That free RAM helps programs you’re actively using — say, your web browser — run faster, because if they need to claim a new segment of RAM (like when you open a new tab), they can do so. This “free” RAM is also used as page cache, which means that when active programs attempt to read data on your hard disk, that data might be cached in RAM, which prevents your hard disk from being accessed to get that data. By using the majority of your RAM for page cache, and swapping out unused programs to disk, Windows is trying to improve responsiveness of the program(s) you are actively using, by making RAM available to them, and caching the files they access in RAM instead of the hard disk. The downside of this behavior is that minimized programs can take a while to have their contents copied from the page file, on disk, back into RAM. The time increases the larger the program’s footprint in memory. This is why you experience that delay when maximizing Photoshop. RAM is many times faster than a hard disk (depending on the specific hardware, it can be up to several orders of magnitude). An SSD is considerably faster than a hard disk, but it is still slower than RAM by orders of magnitude. Having your page file on an SSD will help, but it will also wear out the SSD more quickly than usual if your page file is heavily utilized due to RAM pressure. Remedies Here is an explanation of the available remedies, and their general effectiveness: Installing more RAM: This is the recommended path. If your system does not support more RAM than you already have installed, you will need to upgrade more of your system: possibly your motherboard, CPU, chassis, power supply, etc. depending on how old it is. If it’s a laptop, chances are you’ll have to buy an entire new laptop that supports more installed RAM. When you install more RAM, you reduce memory pressure, which reduces use of the page file, which is a good thing all around. You also make available more RAM for page cache, which will make all programs that access the hard disk run faster. As of Q4 2013, my personal recommendation is that you have at least 8 GB of RAM for a desktop or laptop whose purpose is anything more complex than web browsing and email. That means photo editing, video editing/viewing, playing computer games, audio editing or recording, programming / development, etc. all should have at least 8 GB of RAM, if not more. Run fewer programs at a time: This will only work if the programs you are running do not use a lot of memory on their own. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Suite products such as Photoshop CS6 are known for using an enormous amount of memory. This also limits your multitasking ability. It’s a temporary, free remedy, but it can be an inconvenience to close down your web browser or Word every time you start Photoshop, for instance. This also wouldn’t stop Photoshop from being swapped when minimizing it, so it really isn’t a very effective solution. It only helps in some specific situations. Install an SSD: If your page file is on an SSD, the SSD’s improved speed compared to a hard disk will result in generally improved performance when the page file has to be read from or written to. Be aware that SSDs are not designed to withstand a very frequent and constant random stream of writes; they can only be written over a limited number of times before they start to break down. Heavy use of a page file is not a particularly good workload for an SSD. You should install an SSD in combination with a large amount of RAM if you want maximum performance while preserving the longevity of the SSD. Use a newer system architecture: Depending on the age of your system, you may be using an out of date system architecture. The “system architecture” is generally defined as the “generation” (think generations like children, parents, grandparents, etc.) of the motherboard and CPU. Newer generations generally support faster I/O (input/output), better memory bandwidth, lower latency, and less contention over shared resources, instead providing dedicated links between components. For example, starting with the “Nehalem” generation (around 2009), the Front-Side Bus (FSB) was eliminated, which removed a common bottleneck, because almost all system components had to share the same FSB for transmitting data. This was replaced with a “point to point” architecture, meaning that each component gets its own dedicated “lane” to the CPU, which continues to be improved every few years with new generations. You will generally see a more significant improvement in overall system performance depending on the “gap” between your computer’s architecture and the latest one available. For example, a Pentium 4 architecture from 2004 is going to see a much more significant improvement upgrading to “Haswell” (the latest as of Q4 2013) than a “Sandy Bridge” architecture from ~2010. Links Related questions: How to reduce disk thrashing (paging)? Windows Swap (Page File): Enable or Disable? Also, just in case you’re considering it, you really shouldn’t disable the page file, as this will only make matters worse; see here. And, in case you needed extra convincing to leave the Windows Page File alone, see here and here. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 26, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 26, 2011Popular ReleasesDirectQ: Release 1.8.7 Beta 2: Beta 2 release to fix some early reported problems with the original 1.8.7 Beta.Chiave File Encryption: Chiave 0.9.2: Release Notes Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.1 to 0.9.2: ==================== Added: > Now it displays number of files added in the wizard to the Window Title bar. > Added support to Windows XP. > Minor UI tweaks. I...Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide: Drop 1 - Claims Identity Guide V2: Highlights of drop #1 This is the first drop of the new "Claims Identity Guide" edition. In this release you will find: All previous samples updated and enhanced. All code upgraded to .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Extensive cleanup. Refactored Simulated Issuers: each solution now gets its own issuers. This results in much cleaner and simpler to understand code. Added Single Sign Out support. Added first sample using ACS ("ACS as a Federation Provider"). This sample extends the ori...HFR7 - Forum Hardware.fr pour Windows Phone 7: HFR7 - v1.1.1: NOUVELLES FONCTIONS : - Aucune. AMÉLIORATIONS : - La page "Catégories" est désormais intégrée au pivot "Bienvenue". - Apparition de boutons de changement de page en bas du sujet en consultation. - Les en-têtes sur les sujets sont désormais de la même couleur que la couleur d'accentuation de votre téléphone. BUGFIXES : - Les catégories s'affichent correctement. - Cliquer sur le bouton "drapeau" alors qu'on est dans la liste des topics d'une page n'amenait pas directement au dernier post non ...Simple Notify: Simple Notify Beta 2011-02-25: Feature: host the service with a single click in console Feature: host the service as a windows service Feature: notification cient application Feature: push client application Feature: push notifications from your powershell script Feature: C# wrapper libraries for your applicationsMono.Addins: Mono.Addins 0.6: The 0.6 release of Mono.Addins includes many improvements, bug fixes and new features: Add-in engine Add-in name and description can now be localized. There are new custom attributes for defining them, and can also be specified as xml elements in an add-in manifest instead of attributes. Support for custom add-in properties. It is now possible to specify arbitrary properties in add-ins, which can be queried at install time (using the Mono.Addins.Setup API) or at run-time. Custom extensio...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 3 - 25 Feb 2011: IntroductionWelcome to the third community drop of Project Silk. For this drop we are requesting feedback on overall application architecture, code review of the JavaScript Conductor and Widgets, and general direction of the application. Project Silk provides guidance and sample implementations that describe and illustrate recommended practices for building modern web applications using technologies such as HTML5, jQuery, CSS3 and Internet Explorer 9. This guidance is intended for experien...PhoneyTools: Initial Release (0.1): This is the 0.1 version for preview of the features.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.5: Now supports new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format, thanks to updated mcmap. Disabled biomes, until Minecraft Biome Extractor supports new format.Smartkernel: Smartkernel: ????，??????Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.2: New control, Toast Prompt! Removed progress bar since Silverlight Toolkit Feb 2010 has it.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.7: Service release fixing 31 issues. A full changelog will be available with the final stable release of 4.7 Important when upgradingUpgrade as if it was a patch release (update /bin, /umbraco and /umbraco_client). For general upgrade information follow the guide found at http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/install-and-setup/upgrading-an-umbraco-installation 4.7 requires the .NET 4.0 framework Web.Config changes Update the web web.config to include the 4 changes found in (they're clearly marked in...HubbleDotNet - Open source full-text search engine: V1.1.0.0: Add Sqlite3 DBAdapter Add App Report when Query Cache is Collecting. Improve the performance of index through Synchronize. Add top 0 feature so that we can only get count of the result. Improve the score calculating algorithm of match. Let the score of the record that match all items large then others. Add MySql DBAdapter Improve performance for multi-fields sort . Using hash table to access the Payload data. The version before used bin search. Using heap sort instead of qui...Silverlight????[???]: silverlight????[???]2.0: ???????，?????，????????silverlight??????。DBSourceTools: DBSourceTools_1.3.0.0: Release 1.3.0.0 Changed editors from FireEdit to ICSharpCode.TextEditor. Complete re-vamp of Intellisense ( further testing needed). Hightlight Field and Table Names in sql scripts. Added field dropdown on all tables and views in DBExplorer. Added data option for viewing data in Tables. Fixed comment / uncomment bug as reported by tareq. Included Synonyms in scripting engine ( nickt_ch ).IronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 1: We are pleased to announce the first Release Candidate for IronPython 2.7. This release contains over two dozen bugs fixed in preparation for 2.7 Final. See the release notes for 60193 for details and what has already been fixed in the earlier 2.7 prereleases. - IronPython TeamCaliburn Micro: A Micro-Framework for WPF, Silverlight and WP7: Caliburn.Micro 1.0 RC: This is the official Release Candicate for Caliburn.Micro 1.0. The download contains the binaries, samples and VS templates. VS Templates The templates included are designed for situations where the Caliburn.Micro source needs to be embedded within a single project solution. This was targeted at government and other organizations that expressed specific requirements around using an open source project like this. NuGet This release does not have a corresponding NuGet package. The NuGet pack...Caliburn: A Client Framework for WPF and Silverlight: Caliburn 2.0 RC: This is the official Release Candidate for Caliburn 2.0. It contains all binaries, samples and generated code docs.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.20 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer: WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer v1.0 Beta: Current release features:WPF desktop explorer client Visual Studio integrated tool window explorer client (Visual Studio 2010 Professional and above) Supported operations: Refresh (isolated storage information), Add Folder, Add Existing Item, Download File, Delete Folder, Delete File Explorer supports operations running on multiple remote applications at the same time Explorer detects application disconnect (1-2 second delay) Explorer confirms operation completed status Explorer d...New Projectsconvert digit to word upto thousand: convert digit to word upto thousandCustom XSLT with recursive loop in Biztalk 2009: Custom XSLT with recursive loop in Biztalk 2009ECO contrib: ECO ist a excellent framework for domain driven design developed by CapableObjects AB. Share your additional features in this contrib project.euler21: euler 21euler22: euler 22 problemflowless: Some workflow thingHFR7 - Forum Hardware.fr pour Windows Phone 7: HFR7 vous permet de surfer sur le forum de Hardware.fr via votre Windows Phone. Il est développé sous Silverlight (C#/XAML).ISP.NET: ISP.NET is a code level verification tool for MPI programs. It includes a Visual Studio 2010 extension that allows for push button verification of user programs that are written in C, C++ and C#. ISP checks for deadlocks, assertion violations, and other MPI program issues. IVY Frameworks: Ivy Frameworks is an architectural framework to create multi-tire application in a consistent way. We are creating specific application blocks. When completed it will help to create a software development pattern, to mass produce .Net applications in a software factory model. Jobeet: Just another Symfony Tutorial I'm following.Lurity: Project Codename "Lurity".Metro Toolkit: Metro ToolkitMySchoolManager: MySchoolManager es un programa de fines didácticos, de código fuente abierto y documentado en español, que simula un sistema de administración del personal de una escuela. NewRapp: Project at KTH in course DD2388NHibernateCMS: NHibernateCMSParametero - Yet Another Console Arguments Parsing Library: Parametero - Yet Another Console Arguments Parsing LibraryRasifiel's test: Test projectSilverlight Gantt Chart: Don't waste time creating your own Gantt Chart. We've already done it!SKWebSite: This is my first ASP.NET MVC3 projectTechChat: TechChat is a ASP.net AJAX based stylish chat room. It demonstrates the use of database and use of AJAX. It is developed in VB.netUDK Development Kit Addons: UDK Development Kit Addons makes it easier for UDK users to develop and debug UDK scripts. It's developed in C# with using Visual Studio Shell.UltraLight.mvvm Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework: A lightweight (< 300 lines, < 25KB) framework for developing MVVM Silverlight applications with support for tombstoning on the Windows Phone 7.Website Panel: Website PanelxMS (eXtensible Management System): The xMS is a simple console that can be extended using plugins. Those plugins can be written by developers using a simple interface. It's a good starting for who want to develop a plugin based application.Xna Midi Project: A project that will allow midi functionality using only the compact framework for windows and Xbox solutions.

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• Why unhandled exceptions are useful

  - by Simon Cooper

  It’s the bane of most programmers’ lives – an unhandled exception causes your application or webapp to crash, an ugly dialog gets displayed to the user, and they come complaining to you. Then, somehow, you need to figure out what went wrong. Hopefully, you’ve got a log file, or some other way of reporting unhandled exceptions (obligatory employer plug: SmartAssembly reports an application’s unhandled exceptions straight to you, along with the entire state of the stack and variables at that point). If not, you have to try and replicate it yourself, or do some psychic debugging to try and figure out what’s wrong. However, it’s good that the program crashed. Or, more precisely, it is correct behaviour. An unhandled exception in your application means that, somewhere in your code, there is an assumption that you made that is actually invalid. Coding assumptions Let me explain a bit more. Every method, every line of code you write, depends on implicit assumptions that you have made. Take this following simple method, that copies a collection to an array and includes an item if it isn’t in the collection already, using a supplied IEqualityComparer: public static T[] ToArrayWithItem( ICollection<T> coll, T obj, IEqualityComparer<T> comparer) { // check if the object is in collection already // using the supplied comparer foreach (var item in coll) { if (comparer.Equals(item, obj)) { // it's in the collection already // simply copy the collection to an array // and return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); return array; } } // not in the collection // copy coll to an array, and add obj to it // then return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count+1]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); array[array.Length-1] = obj; return array; } What’s all the assumptions made by this fairly simple bit of code? coll is never null comparer is never null coll.CopyTo(array, 0) will copy all the items in the collection into the array, in the order defined for the collection, starting at the first item in the array. The enumerator for coll returns all the items in the collection, in the order defined for the collection comparer.Equals returns true if the items are equal (for whatever definition of ‘equal’ the comparer uses), false otherwise comparer.Equals, coll.CopyTo, and the coll enumerator will never throw an exception or hang for any possible input and any possible values of T coll will have less than 4 billion items in it (this is a built-in limit of the CLR) array won’t be more than 2GB, both on 32 and 64-bit systems, for any possible values of T (again, a limit of the CLR) There are no threads that will modify coll while this method is running and, more esoterically: The C# compiler will compile this code to IL according to the C# specification The CLR and JIT compiler will produce machine code to execute the IL on the user’s computer The computer will execute the machine code correctly That’s a lot of assumptions. Now, it could be that all these assumptions are valid for the situations this method is called. But if this does crash out with an exception, or crash later on, then that shows one of the assumptions has been invalidated somehow. An unhandled exception shows that your code is running in a situation which you did not anticipate, and there is something about how your code runs that you do not understand. Debugging the problem is the process of learning more about the new situation and how your code interacts with it. When you understand the problem, the solution is (usually) obvious. The solution may be a one-line fix, the rewrite of a method or class, or a large-scale refactoring of the codebase, but whatever it is, the fix for the crash will incorporate the new information you’ve gained about your own code, along with the modified assumptions. When code is running with an assumption or invariant it depended on broken, then the result is ‘undefined behaviour’. Anything can happen, up to and including formatting the entire disk or making the user’s computer sentient and start doing a good impression of Skynet. You might think that those can’t happen, but at Halting problem levels of generality, as soon as an assumption the code depended on is broken, the program can do anything. That is why it’s important to fail-fast and stop the program as soon as an invariant is broken, to minimise the damage that is done. What does this mean in practice? To start with, document and check your assumptions. As with most things, there is a level of judgement required. How you check and document your assumptions depends on how the code is used (that’s some more assumptions you’ve made), how likely it is a method will be passed invalid arguments or called in an invalid state, how likely it is the assumptions will be broken, how expensive it is to check the assumptions, and how bad things are likely to get if the assumptions are broken. Now, some assumptions you can assume unless proven otherwise. You can safely assume the C# compiler, CLR, and computer all run the method correctly, unless you have evidence of a compiler, CLR or processor bug. You can also assume that interface implementations work the way you expect them to; implementing an interface is more than simply declaring methods with certain signatures in your type. The behaviour of those methods, and how they work, is part of the interface contract as well. For example, for members of a public API, it is very important to document your assumptions and check your state before running the bulk of the method, throwing ArgumentException, ArgumentNullException, InvalidOperationException, or another exception type as appropriate if the input or state is wrong. For internal and private methods, it is less important. If a private method expects collection items in a certain order, then you don’t necessarily need to explicitly check it in code, but you can add comments or documentation specifying what state you expect the collection to be in at a certain point. That way, anyone debugging your code can immediately see what’s wrong if this does ever become an issue. You can also use DEBUG preprocessor blocks and Debug.Assert to document and check your assumptions without incurring a performance hit in release builds. On my coding soapbox… A few pet peeves of mine around assumptions. Firstly, catch-all try blocks: try { ... } catch { } A catch-all hides exceptions generated by broken assumptions, and lets the program carry on in an unknown state. Later, an exception is likely to be generated due to further broken assumptions due to the unknown state, causing difficulties when debugging as the catch-all has hidden the original problem. It’s much better to let the program crash straight away, so you know where the problem is. You should only use a catch-all if you are sure that any exception generated in the try block is safe to ignore. That’s a pretty big ask! Secondly, using as when you should be casting. Doing this: (obj as IFoo).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = obj as IFoo; ... foo.Method(); when you should be doing this: ((IFoo)obj).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = (IFoo)obj; ... foo.Method(); There’s an assumption here that obj will always implement IFoo. If it doesn’t, then by using as instead of a cast you’ve turned an obvious InvalidCastException at the point of the cast that will probably tell you what type obj actually is, into a non-obvious NullReferenceException at some later point that gives you no information at all. If you believe obj is always an IFoo, then say so in code! Let it fail-fast if not, then it’s far easier to figure out what’s wrong. Thirdly, document your assumptions. If an algorithm depends on a non-trivial relationship between several objects or variables, then say so. A single-line comment will do. Don’t leave it up to whoever’s debugging your code after you to figure it out. Conclusion It’s better to crash out and fail-fast when an assumption is broken. If it doesn’t, then there’s likely to be further crashes along the way that hide the original problem. Or, even worse, your program will be running in an undefined state, where anything can happen. Unhandled exceptions aren’t good per-se, but they give you some very useful information about your code that you didn’t know before. And that can only be a good thing.

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• ASMLib

  - by wcoekaer

  Oracle ASMlib on Linux has been a topic of discussion a number of times since it was released way back when in 2004. There is a lot of confusion around it and certainly a lot of misinformation out there for no good reason. Let me try to give a bit of history around Oracle ASMLib. Oracle ASMLib was introduced at the time Oracle released Oracle Database 10g R1. 10gR1 introduced a very cool important new features called Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management). A very simplistic description would be that this is a very sophisticated volume manager for Oracle data. Give your devices directly to the ASM instance and we manage the storage for you, clustered, highly available, redundant, performance, etc, etc... We recommend using Oracle ASM for all database deployments, single instance or clustered (RAC). The ASM instance manages the storage and every Oracle server process opens and operates on the storage devices like it would open and operate on regular datafiles or raw devices. So by default since 10gR1 up to today, we do not interact differently with ASM managed block devices than we did before with a datafile being mapped to a raw device. All of this is without ASMLib, so ignore that one for now. Standard Oracle on any platform that we support (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, ...) does it the exact same way. You start an ASM instance, it handles storage management, all the database instances use and open that storage and read/write from/to it. There are no extra pieces of software needed, including on Linux. ASM is fully functional and selfcontained without any other components. In order for the admin to provide a raw device to ASM or to the database, it has to have persistent device naming. If you booted up a server where a raw disk was named /dev/sdf and you give it to ASM (or even just creating a tablespace without asm on that device with datafile '/dev/sdf') and next time you boot up and that device is now /dev/sdg, you end up with an error. Just like you can't just change datafile names, you can't change device filenames without telling the database, or ASM. persistent device naming on Linux, especially back in those days ways to say it bluntly, a nightmare. In fact there were a number of issues (dating back to 2004) : Linux async IO wasn't pretty persistent device naming including permissions (had to be owned by oracle and the dba group) was very, very difficult to manage system resource usage in terms of open file descriptors So given the above, we tried to find a way to make this easier on the admins, in many ways, similar to why we started working on OCFS a few years earlier - how can we make life easier for the admins on Linux. A feature of Oracle ASM is the ability for third parties to write an extension using what's called ASMLib. It is possible for any third party OS or storage vendor to write a library using a specific Oracle defined interface that gets used by the ASM instance and by the database instance when available. This interface offered 2 components : Define an IO interface - allow any IO to the devices to go through ASMLib Define device discovery - implement an external way of discovering, labeling devices to provide to ASM and the Oracle database instance This is similar to a library that a number of companies have implemented over many years called libODM (Oracle Disk Manager). ODM was specified many years before we introduced ASM and allowed third party vendors to implement their own IO routines so that the database would use this library if installed and make use of the library open/read/write/close,.. routines instead of the standard OS interfaces. PolyServe back in the day used this to optimize their storage solution, Veritas used (and I believe still uses) this for their filesystem. It basically allowed, in particular, filesystem vendors to write libraries that could optimize access to their storage or filesystem.. so ASMLib was not something new, it was basically based on the same model. You have libodm for just database access, you have libasm for asm/database access. Since this library interface existed, we decided to do a reference implementation on Linux. We wrote an ASMLib for Linux that could be used on any Linux platform and other vendors could see how this worked and potentially implement their own solution. As I mentioned earlier, ASMLib and ODMLib are libraries for third party extensions. ASMLib for Linux, since it was a reference implementation implemented both interfaces, the storage discovery part and the IO part. There are 2 components : Oracle ASMLib - the userspace library with config tools (a shared object and some scripts) oracleasm.ko - a kernel module that implements the asm device for /dev/oracleasm/* The userspace library is a binary-only module since it links with and contains Oracle header files but is generic, we only have one asm library for the various Linux platforms. This library is opened by Oracle ASM and by Oracle database processes and this library interacts with the OS through the asm device (/dev/asm). It can install on Oracle Linux, on SuSE SLES, on Red Hat RHEL,.. The library itself doesn't actually care much about the OS version, the kernel module and device cares. The support tools are simple scripts that allow the admin to label devices and scan for disks and devices. This way you can say create an ASM disk label foo on, currently /dev/sdf... So if /dev/sdf disappears and next time is /dev/sdg, we just scan for the label foo and we discover it as /dev/sdg and life goes on without any worry. Also, when the database needs access to the device, we don't have to worry about file permissions or anything it will be taken care of. So it's a convenience thing. The kernel module oracleasm.ko is a Linux kernel module/device driver. It implements a device /dev/oracleasm/* and any and all IO goes through ASMLib - /dev/oracleasm. This kernel module is obviously a very specific Oracle related device driver but it was released under the GPL v2 so anyone could easily build it for their Linux distribution kernels. Advantages for using ASMLib : A good async IO interface for the database, the entire IO interface is based on an optimal ASYNC model for performance A single file descriptor per Oracle process, not one per device or datafile per process reducing # of open filehandles overhead Device scanning and labeling built-in so you do not have to worry about messing with udev or devlabel, permissions or the likes which can be very complex and error prone. Just like with OCFS and OCFS2, each kernel version (major or minor) has to get a new version of the device drivers. We started out building the oracleasm kernel module rpms for many distributions, SLES (in fact in the early days still even for this thing called United Linux) and RHEL. The driver didn't make sense to get pushed into upstream Linux because it's unique and specific to the Oracle database. As it takes a huge effort in terms of build infrastructure and QA and release management to build kernel modules for every architecture, every linux distribution and every major and minor version we worked with the vendors to get them to add this tiny kernel module to their infrastructure. (60k source code file). The folks at SuSE understood this was good for them and their customers and us and added it to SLES. So every build coming from SuSE for SLES contains the oracleasm.ko module. We weren't as successful with other vendors so for quite some time we continued to build it for RHEL and of course as we introduced Oracle Linux end of 2006 also for Oracle Linux. With Oracle Linux it became easy for us because we just added the code to our build system and as we churned out Oracle Linux kernels whether it was for a public release or for customers that needed a one off fix where they also used asmlib, we didn't have to do any extra work it was just all nicely integrated. With the introduction of Oracle Linux's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and our interest in being able to exploit ASMLib more, we started working on a very exciting project called Data Integrity. Oracle (Martin Petersen in particular) worked for many years with the T10 standards committee and storage vendors and implemented Linux kernel support for DIF/DIX, data protection in the Linux kernel, note to those that wonder, yes it's all in mainline Linux and under the GPL. This basically gave us all the features in the Linux kernel to checksum a data block, send it to the storage adapter, which can then validate that block and checksum in firmware before it sends it over the wire to the storage array, which can then do another checksum and to the actual DISK which does a final validation before writing the block to the physical media. So what was missing was the ability for a userspace application (read: Oracle RDBMS) to write a block which then has a checksum and validation all the way down to the disk. application to disk. Because we have ASMLib we had an entry into the Linux kernel and Martin added support in ASMLib (kernel driver + userspace) for this functionality. Now, this is all based on relatively current Linux kernels, the oracleasm kernel module depends on the main kernel to have support for it so we can make use of it. Thanks to UEK and us having the ability to ship a more modern, current version of the Linux kernel we were able to introduce this feature into ASMLib for Linux from Oracle. This combined with the fact that we build the asm kernel module when we build every single UEK kernel allowed us to continue improving ASMLib and provide it to our customers. So today, we (Oracle) provide Oracle ASMLib for Oracle Linux and in particular on the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. We did the build/testing/delivery of ASMLib for RHEL until RHEL5 but since RHEL6 decided that it was too much effort for us to also maintain all the build and test environments for RHEL and we did not have the ability to use the latest kernel features to introduce the Data Integrity features and we didn't want to end up with multiple versions of asmlib as maintained by us. SuSE SLES still builds and comes with the oracleasm module and they do all the work and RHAT it certainly welcome to do the same. They don't have to rebuild the userspace library, it's really about the kernel module. And finally to re-iterate a few important things : Oracle ASM does not in any way require ASMLib to function completely. ASMlib is a small set of extensions, in particular to make device management easier but there are no extra features exposed through Oracle ASM with ASMLib enabled or disabled. Often customers confuse ASMLib with ASM. again, ASM exists on every Oracle supported OS and on every supported Linux OS, SLES, RHEL, OL withoutASMLib Oracle ASMLib userspace is available for OTN and the kernel module is shipped along with OL/UEK for every build and by SuSE for SLES for every of their builds ASMLib kernel module was built by us for RHEL4 and RHEL5 but we do not build it for RHEL6, nor for the OL6 RHCK kernel. Only for UEK ASMLib for Linux is/was a reference implementation for any third party vendor to be able to offer, if they want to, their own version for their own OS or storage ASMLib as provided by Oracle for Linux continues to be enhanced and evolve and for the kernel module we use UEK as the base OS kernel hope this helps.

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• Working with Timelines with LINQ to Twitter

  - by Joe Mayo

  When first working with the Twitter API, I thought that using SinceID would be an effective way to page through timelines. In practice it doesn’t work well for various reasons. To explain why, Twitter published an excellent document that is a must-read for anyone working with timelines: Twitter Documentation: Working with Timelines This post shows how to implement the recommended strategies in that document by using LINQ to Twitter. You should read the document in it’s entirety before moving on because my explanation will start at the bottom and work back up to the top in relation to the Twitter document. What follows is an explanation of SinceID, MaxID, and how they come together to help you efficiently work with Twitter timelines. The Role of SinceID Specifying SinceID says to Twitter, “Don’t return tweets earlier than this”. What you want to do is store this value after every timeline query set so that it can be reused on the next set of queries.  The next section will explain what I mean by query set, but a quick explanation is that it’s a loop that gets all new tweets. The SinceID is a backstop to avoid retrieving tweets that you already have. Here’s some initialization code that includes a variable named sinceID that will be used to populate the SinceID property in subsequent queries: // last tweet processed on previous query set ulong sinceID = 210024053698867204; ulong maxID; const int Count = 10; var statusList = new List<status>(); Here, I’ve hard-coded the sinceID variable, but this is where you would initialize sinceID from whatever storage you choose (i.e. a database). The first time you ever run this code, you won’t have a value from a previous query set. Initially setting it to 0 might sound like a good idea, but what if you’re querying a timeline with lots of tweets? Because of the number of tweets and rate limits, your query set might take a very long time to run. A caveat might be that Twitter won’t return an entire timeline back to Tweet #0, but rather only go back a certain period of time, the limits of which are documented for individual Twitter timeline API resources. So, to initialize SinceID at too low of a number can result in a lot of initial tweets, yet there is a limit to how far you can go back. What you’re trying to accomplish in your application should guide you in how to initially set SinceID. I have more to say about SinceID later in this post. The other variables initialized above include the declaration for MaxID, Count, and statusList. The statusList variable is a holder for all the timeline tweets collected during this query set. You can set Count to any value you want as the largest number of tweets to retrieve, as defined by individual Twitter timeline API resources. To effectively page results, you’ll use the maxID variable to set the MaxID property in queries, which I’ll discuss next. Initializing MaxID On your first query of a query set, MaxID will be whatever the most recent tweet is that you get back. Further, you don’t know what MaxID is until after the initial query. The technique used in this post is to do an initial query and then use the results to figure out what the next MaxID will be.  Here’s the code for the initial query: var userStatusResponse = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.User && tweet.ScreenName == "JoeMayo" && tweet.SinceID == sinceID && tweet.Count == Count select tweet) .ToList(); statusList.AddRange(userStatusResponse); // first tweet processed on current query maxID = userStatusResponse.Min( status => ulong.Parse(status.StatusID)) - 1; The query above sets both SinceID and Count properties. As explained earlier, Count is the largest number of tweets to return, but the number can be less. A couple reasons why the number of tweets that are returned could be less than Count include the fact that the user, specified by ScreenName, might not have tweeted Count times yet or might not have tweeted at least Count times within the maximum number of tweets that can be returned by the Twitter timeline API resource. Another reason could be because there aren’t Count tweets between now and the tweet ID specified by sinceID. Setting SinceID constrains the results to only those tweets that occurred after the specified Tweet ID, assigned via the sinceID variable in the query above. The statusList is an accumulator of all tweets receive during this query set. To simplify the code, I left out some logic to check whether there were no tweets returned. If  the query above doesn’t return any tweets, you’ll receive an exception when trying to perform operations on an empty list. Yeah, I cheated again. Besides querying initial tweets, what’s important about this code is the final line that sets maxID. It retrieves the lowest numbered status ID in the results. Since the lowest numbered status ID is for a tweet we already have, the code decrements the result by one to keep from asking for that tweet again. Remember, SinceID is not inclusive, but MaxID is. The maxID variable is now set to the highest possible tweet ID that can be returned in the next query. The next section explains how to use MaxID to help get the remaining tweets in the query set. Retrieving Remaining Tweets Earlier in this post, I defined a term that I called a query set. Essentially, this is a group of requests to Twitter that you perform to get all new tweets. A single query might not be enough to get all new tweets, so you’ll have to start at the top of the list that Twitter returns and keep making requests until you have all new tweets. The previous section showed the first query of the query set. The code below is a loop that completes the query set: do { // now add sinceID and maxID userStatusResponse = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.User && tweet.ScreenName == "JoeMayo" && tweet.Count == Count && tweet.SinceID == sinceID && tweet.MaxID == maxID select tweet) .ToList(); if (userStatusResponse.Count > 0) { // first tweet processed on current query maxID = userStatusResponse.Min( status => ulong.Parse(status.StatusID)) - 1; statusList.AddRange(userStatusResponse); } } while (userStatusResponse.Count != 0 && statusList.Count < 30); Here we have another query, but this time it includes the MaxID property. The SinceID property prevents reading tweets that we’ve already read and Count specifies the largest number of tweets to return. Earlier, I mentioned how it was important to check how many tweets were returned because failing to do so will result in an exception when subsequent code runs on an empty list. The code above protects against this problem by only working with the results if Twitter actually returns tweets. Reasons why there wouldn’t be results include: if the first query got all the new tweets there wouldn’t be more to get and there might not have been any new tweets between the SinceID and MaxID settings of the most recent query. The code for loading the returned tweets into statusList and getting the maxID are the same as previously explained. The important point here is that MaxID is being reset, not SinceID. As explained in the Twitter documentation, paging occurs from the newest tweets to oldest, so setting MaxID lets us move from the most recent tweets down to the oldest as specified by SinceID. The two loop conditions cause the loop to continue as long as tweets are being read or a max number of tweets have been read.  Logically, you want to stop reading when you’ve read all the tweets and that’s indicated by the fact that the most recent query did not return results. I put the check to stop after 30 tweets are reached to keep the demo from running too long – in the console the response scrolls past available buffer and I wanted you to be able to see the complete output. Yet, there’s another point to be made about constraining the number of items you return at one time. The Twitter API has rate limits and making too many queries per minute will result in an error from twitter that LINQ to Twitter raises as an exception. To use the API properly, you’ll have to ensure you don’t exceed this threshold. Looking at the statusList.Count as done above is rather primitive, but you can implement your own logic to properly manage your rate limit. Yeah, I cheated again. Summary Now you know how to use LINQ to Twitter to work with Twitter timelines. After reading this post, you have a better idea of the role of SinceID - the oldest tweet already received. You also know that MaxID is the largest tweet ID to retrieve in a query. Together, these settings allow you to page through results via one or more queries. You also understand what factors affect the number of tweets returned and considerations for potential error handling logic. The full example of the code for this post is included in the downloadable source code for LINQ to Twitter.   @JoeMayo

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• Particle and Physics problem.

  - by Quincy

  This was originally a forum post so I hope you guys don't mind it being 2 questions in one. I am making a game and I got some basic physics implemented. I have 2 problems, 1 with particles being drawn in the wrong place and one with going through walls while jumping in corners. Skip over to about 15 sec video showing the 2 problems : http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tm9nfWsWfiM So the problem with the particles seems to be coming from the removal, as soon as I remove that piece of code it instantly works, but there shouldn't be a problem since they shouldn't even draw when their energy gets to 0 (and then they get removed) So my first question is, how are these particles getting warped all over the screen ? Relevant code : Particle class : class Particle { //Physics public Vector2 position = new Vector2(0,0); public float direction = 180; public float speed = 100; public float energy = 1; protected float startEnergy = 1; //Visual public Sprite sprite; public float rotation = 0; public float scale = 1; public byte alpha = 255; public BlendMode blendMode { get { return sprite.BlendMode; } set { sprite.BlendMode = value; } } public Particle() { } public virtual void Think(float frameTime) { if (energy - frameTime < 0) energy = 0; else energy -= frameTime; position += new Vector2((float)Math.Cos(MathHelper.DegToRad(direction)), (float)Math.Sin(MathHelper.DegToRad(direction))) * speed * frameTime; alpha = (byte)(255 * energy / startEnergy); sprite.Rotation = rotation; sprite.Position = position; sprite.Color = new Color(sprite.Color.R, sprite.Color.G, sprite.Color.B, alpha); } public virtual void Draw(float frameTime) { if (energy > 0) { World.camera.DrawSprite(sprite); } } // Basic particle implementation class BasicSprite : Particle { public BasicSprite(Sprite _sprite) { sprite = _sprite; } } Emitter : class Emitter { protected static Random rand = new Random(); protected List<Particle> particles = new List<Particle>(); public BaseEntity target = null; public Vector2 position = new Vector2(0, 0); public bool Active = true; public float timeAlive = 0; public int particleCount = 0; public int ParticlesPerSeccond { get { return (int)(1 / particleSpawnTime); } set { particleSpawnTime = 1 / (float)value; } } public float dieTime = float.MaxValue; float particleSpawnTime = 0.05f; float spawnTime = 0; public Emitter() { } public virtual void Think(float frametime) { spawnTime += frametime; if (dieTime != float.MaxValue) { timeAlive += frametime; if (timeAlive >= dieTime) Active = false; } if (Active) { if (target != null) position = target.Position; while (spawnTime > particleSpawnTime) { spawnTime -= particleSpawnTime; AddParticle(); particleCount++; } } for (int i = 0; i < particles.Count; i++) { particles[i].Think(frametime); if (particles[i].energy <= 0) { particles.Remove(particles[i]); // As soon as this is removed, it works particleCount--; } } } public virtual void AddParticle() { } public virtual void Draw(float frametime) { foreach (Particle particle in particles) { particle.Draw(frametime); } } } class BloodEmitter : Emitter { Image image; public BloodEmitter() { image = new Image(@"Content/Particles/TinyCircle.png"); image.CreateMaskFromColor(new Color(255, 0, 255, 255)); this.dieTime = 0.5f; this.ParticlesPerSeccond = 100; } public override void AddParticle() { Sprite sprite = new Sprite(image); sprite.Color = new Color((byte)(rand.NextDouble() * 255), (byte)(rand.NextDouble() * 255), (byte)(rand.NextDouble() * 255)); BasicSprite particle = new BasicSprite(sprite); particle.direction = (float)rand.NextDouble() * 360; particle.position = position; particle.blendMode = BlendMode.Alpha; particles.Add(particle); } } The seccond problem is the physics problem, for some reason I can get through the right bottom corner while jumping. I think this is coming from me switching animations but I thought I made it compensate for that. Relevant code : PhysicsEntity : class PhysicsEntity : BaseEntity { // Horizontal movement constants protected const float maxHorizontalSpeed = 1000; protected const float horizontalAcceleration = 15; protected const float horizontalDragAir = 0.95f; protected const float horizontalDragGround = 0.95f; // Vertical movement constants protected const float maxVerticalSpeed = 1000; protected const float verticalAcceleration = 20; // Everything needed for movement and correct animations protected float movement = 0; protected bool onGround = false; protected Vector2 Velocity = new Vector2(0, 0); protected float maxSpeed = 0; float lastThink = 0; float thinkTime = 1f/60f; public PhysicsEntity(Vector2 position, Sprite sprite) : base(position, sprite) { } public override void Draw(float frameTime) { base.Draw(frameTime); } public override void Think(float frameTime) { CalculateMovement(frameTime); base.Think(frameTime); } protected void CalculateMovement(float frameTime) { lastThink += frameTime; while (lastThink > thinkTime) { onGround = false; Velocity.X = MathHelper.Clamp(Velocity.X + horizontalAcceleration * movement, -maxHorizontalSpeed, maxHorizontalSpeed); if (onGround) Velocity.X *= horizontalDragGround; else Velocity.X *= horizontalDragAir; if (maxSpeed < Velocity.X) maxSpeed = Velocity.X; Velocity.Y = MathHelper.Clamp(Velocity.Y + verticalAcceleration, -maxVerticalSpeed, maxVerticalSpeed); lastThink -= thinkTime; DoCollisions(thinkTime); DoAnimations(thinkTime); } } public virtual void DoAnimations(float frameTime) { } public void DoCollisions(float frameTime) { Position.Y += Velocity.Y * frameTime; Vector2 tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.Y += collisionDepth.Y; if (collisionDepth.Y < 0) onGround = true; Velocity.Y = 0; } Position.X += Velocity.X * frameTime; tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.X += collisionDepth.X; Velocity.X = 0; } } public void DoCollisions(Vector2 difference) { CollisionRectangle.Y = Position.Y - difference.Y; CollisionRectangle.Height += difference.Y; Vector2 tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.Y += collisionDepth.Y; if (collisionDepth.Y < 0) onGround = true; Velocity.Y = 0; } CollisionRectangle.X = Position.X - difference.X; CollisionRectangle.Width += difference.X; tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.X += collisionDepth.X; Velocity.X = 0; } } Vector2 GetTileCollision() { int topLeftTileX = (int)(CollisionRectangle.TopLeft.X / World.tileEngine.TileWidth); int topLeftTileY = (int)(CollisionRectangle.TopLeft.Y / World.tileEngine.TileHeight); int BottomRightTileX = (int)(CollisionRectangle.DownRight.X / World.tileEngine.TileWidth); int BottomRightTileY = (int)(CollisionRectangle.DownRight.Y / World.tileEngine.TileHeight); if (CollisionRectangle.DownRight.Y % World.tileEngine.TileHeight == 0) // If your exactly against the tile don't count that as being inside the tile BottomRightTileY -= 1; if (CollisionRectangle.DownRight.X % World.tileEngine.TileWidth == 0) // If your exactly against the tile don't count that as being inside the tile BottomRightTileX -= 1; for (int i = topLeftTileX; i <= BottomRightTileX; i++) { for (int j = topLeftTileY; j <= BottomRightTileY; j++) { if (World.tileEngine.TileIsSolid(i, j)) { return new Vector2(i, j); } } } return new Vector2(-1, -1); } } Player : enum State { Standing, Running, Jumping, Falling, Sliding, WallSlide } class Player : PhysicsEntity { private State state { get { return currentState; } set { if (currentState != value) { currentState = value; animationChanged = true; } } } private State currentState = State.Standing; private BasicEmitter basicEmitter = new BasicEmitter(); public bool flipped; public bool animationChanged = false; protected const float jumpPower = 600; AnimationManager animationManager; Rectangle DrawRectangle; public override Rectangle CollisionRectangle { get { return new Rectangle( Position.X - DrawRectangle.Width / 2f, Position.Y - DrawRectangle.Height / 2f, DrawRectangle.Width, DrawRectangle.Height ); } } public Player(Vector2 position, Sprite sprite) : base(position, sprite) { // Only posted the relevant bit DrawRectangle = animationManager.currentAnimation.drawingRectangle; } public override void Draw(float frameTime) { World.camera.DrawSprite( Sprite, Position + new Vector2(DrawRectangle.X, DrawRectangle.Y), animationManager.currentAnimation.drawingRectangle ); } public override void Think(float frameTime) { //I only posted the relevant stuff if (animationChanged) { // if the animation has changed make sure we compensate for the change in with and height animationChanged = false; DoCollisions(animationManager.getSizeDifference()); } DoCustomMovement(); base.Think(frameTime); if (!onGround && Velocity.Y > 0) { state = State.Falling; } } void DoCustomMovement() { if (onGround) { if (World.renderWindow.Input.IsKeyDown(KeyCode.W)) { Velocity.Y = -jumpPower; state = State.Jumping; } } } public override void DoAnimations(float frameTime) { string stateName = Enum.GetName(typeof(State), state); if (!animationManager.currentAnimationIs(stateName)) { animationManager.PlayAnimation(stateName); } animationManager.Think(frameTime); DrawRectangle = animationManager.currentAnimation.drawingRectangle; Sprite.Center = new Vector2( DrawRectangle.X + DrawRectangle.Width / 2, DrawRectangle.Y + DrawRectangle.Height / 2 ); Sprite.FlipX(flipped); } So why am I warping through walls ? I have given this some thought but I just can't seem to find out why this is happening. Full source if needed : source : http://www.mediafire.com/?rc7ddo09gnr68zd (download link)

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• Toon shader with Texture. Can this be optimized?

  - by Alex

  I am quite new to OpenGL, I have managed after long trial and error to integrate Nehe's Cel-Shading rendering with my Model loaders, and have them drawn using the Toon shade and outline AND their original texture at the same time. The result is actually a very nice Cel Shading effect of the model texture, but it is havling the speed of the program, it's quite very slow even with just 3 models on screen... Since the result was kind of hacked together, I am thinking that maybe I am performing some extra steps or extra rendering tasks that maybe are not needed, and are slowing down the game? Something unnecessary that maybe you guys could spot? Both MD2 and 3DS loader have an InitToon() function called upon creation to load the shader initToon(){ int i; // Looping Variable ( NEW ) char Line[255]; // Storage For 255 Characters ( NEW ) float shaderData[32][3]; // Storate For The 96 Shader Values ( NEW ) FILE *In = fopen ("Shader.txt", "r"); // Open The Shader File ( NEW ) if (In) // Check To See If The File Opened ( NEW ) { for (i = 0; i < 32; i++) // Loop Though The 32 Greyscale Values ( NEW ) { if (feof (In)) // Check For The End Of The File ( NEW ) break; fgets (Line, 255, In); // Get The Current Line ( NEW ) shaderData[i][0] = shaderData[i][1] = shaderData[i][2] = float(atof (Line)); // Copy Over The Value ( NEW ) } fclose (In); // Close The File ( NEW ) } else return false; // It Went Horribly Horribly Wrong ( NEW ) glGenTextures (1, &shaderTexture[0]); // Get A Free Texture ID ( NEW ) glBindTexture (GL_TEXTURE_1D, shaderTexture[0]); // Bind This Texture. From Now On It Will Be 1D ( NEW ) // For Crying Out Loud Don't Let OpenGL Use Bi/Trilinear Filtering! ( NEW ) glTexParameteri (GL_TEXTURE_1D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri (GL_TEXTURE_1D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexImage1D (GL_TEXTURE_1D, 0, GL_RGB, 32, 0, GL_RGB , GL_FLOAT, shaderData); // Upload ( NEW ) } This is the drawing for the animated MD2 model: void MD2Model::drawToon() { float outlineWidth = 3.0f; // Width Of The Lines ( NEW ) float outlineColor[3] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f }; // Color Of The Lines ( NEW ) // ORIGINAL PART OF THE FUNCTION //Figure out the two frames between which we are interpolating int frameIndex1 = (int)(time * (endFrame - startFrame + 1)) + startFrame; if (frameIndex1 > endFrame) { frameIndex1 = startFrame; } int frameIndex2; if (frameIndex1 < endFrame) { frameIndex2 = frameIndex1 + 1; } else { frameIndex2 = startFrame; } MD2Frame* frame1 = frames + frameIndex1; MD2Frame* frame2 = frames + frameIndex2; //Figure out the fraction that we are between the two frames float frac = (time - (float)(frameIndex1 - startFrame) / (float)(endFrame - startFrame + 1)) * (endFrame - startFrame + 1); // I ADDED THESE FROM NEHE'S TUTORIAL FOR FIRST PASS (TOON SHADE) glHint (GL_LINE_SMOOTH_HINT, GL_NICEST); // Use The Good Calculations ( NEW ) glEnable (GL_LINE_SMOOTH); // Cel-Shading Code // glEnable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Enable 1D Texturing ( NEW ) glBindTexture (GL_TEXTURE_1D, shaderTexture[0]); // Bind Our Texture ( NEW ) glColor3f (1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Set The Color Of The Model ( NEW ) // ORIGINAL DRAWING CODE //Draw the model as an interpolation between the two frames glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); for(int i = 0; i < numTriangles; i++) { MD2Triangle* triangle = triangles + i; for(int j = 0; j < 3; j++) { MD2Vertex* v1 = frame1->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; MD2Vertex* v2 = frame2->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; Vec3f pos = v1->pos * (1 - frac) + v2->pos * frac; Vec3f normal = v1->normal * (1 - frac) + v2->normal * frac; if (normal[0] == 0 && normal[1] == 0 && normal[2] == 0) { normal = Vec3f(0, 0, 1); } glNormal3f(normal[0], normal[1], normal[2]); MD2TexCoord* texCoord = texCoords + triangle->texCoords[j]; glTexCoord2f(texCoord->texCoordX, texCoord->texCoordY); glVertex3f(pos[0], pos[1], pos[2]); } } glEnd(); // ADDED THESE FROM NEHE'S FOR SECOND PASS (OUTLINE) glDisable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Disable 1D Textures ( NEW ) glEnable (GL_BLEND); // Enable Blending ( NEW ) glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA,GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); // Set The Blend Mode ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_LINE); // Draw Backfacing Polygons As Wireframes ( NEW ) glLineWidth (outlineWidth); // Set The Line Width ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_FRONT); // Don't Draw Any Front-Facing Polygons ( NEW ) glDepthFunc (GL_LEQUAL); // Change The Depth Mode ( NEW ) glColor3fv (&outlineColor[0]); // Set The Outline Color ( NEW ) // HERE I AM PARSING THE VERTICES AGAIN (NOT IN THE ORIGINAL FUNCTION) FOR THE OUTLINE AS PER NEHE'S TUT glBegin (GL_TRIANGLES); // Tell OpenGL What We Want To Draw for(int i = 0; i < numTriangles; i++) { MD2Triangle* triangle = triangles + i; for(int j = 0; j < 3; j++) { MD2Vertex* v1 = frame1->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; MD2Vertex* v2 = frame2->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; Vec3f pos = v1->pos * (1 - frac) + v2->pos * frac; Vec3f normal = v1->normal * (1 - frac) + v2->normal * frac; if (normal[0] == 0 && normal[1] == 0 && normal[2] == 0) { normal = Vec3f(0, 0, 1); } glNormal3f(normal[0], normal[1], normal[2]); MD2TexCoord* texCoord = texCoords + triangle->texCoords[j]; glTexCoord2f(texCoord->texCoordX, texCoord->texCoordY); glVertex3f(pos[0], pos[1], pos[2]); } } glEnd (); // Tell OpenGL We've Finished glDepthFunc (GL_LESS); // Reset The Depth-Testing Mode ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_BACK); // Reset The Face To Be Culled ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_FILL); // Reset Back-Facing Polygon Drawing Mode ( NEW ) glDisable (GL_BLEND); } Whereas this is the drawToon function in the 3DS loader void Model_3DS::drawToon() { float outlineWidth = 3.0f; // Width Of The Lines ( NEW ) float outlineColor[3] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f }; // Color Of The Lines ( NEW ) //ORIGINAL CODE if (visible) { glPushMatrix(); // Move the model glTranslatef(pos.x, pos.y, pos.z); // Rotate the model glRotatef(rot.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(rot.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(rot.z, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glScalef(scale, scale, scale); // Loop through the objects for (int i = 0; i < numObjects; i++) { // Enable texture coordiantes, normals, and vertices arrays if (Objects[i].textured) glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); if (lit) glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); // Point them to the objects arrays if (Objects[i].textured) glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, Objects[i].TexCoords); if (lit) glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, Objects[i].Normals); glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, Objects[i].Vertexes); // Loop through the faces as sorted by material and draw them for (int j = 0; j < Objects[i].numMatFaces; j ++) { // Use the material's texture Materials[Objects[i].MatFaces[j].MatIndex].tex.Use(); // AFTER THE TEXTURE IS APPLIED I INSERT THE TOON FUNCTIONS HERE (FIRST PASS) glHint (GL_LINE_SMOOTH_HINT, GL_NICEST); // Use The Good Calculations ( NEW ) glEnable (GL_LINE_SMOOTH); // Cel-Shading Code // glEnable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Enable 1D Texturing ( NEW ) glBindTexture (GL_TEXTURE_1D, shaderTexture[0]); // Bind Our Texture ( NEW ) glColor3f (1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Set The Color Of The Model ( NEW ) glPushMatrix(); // Move the model glTranslatef(Objects[i].pos.x, Objects[i].pos.y, Objects[i].pos.z); // Rotate the model glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.z, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Draw the faces using an index to the vertex array glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].numSubFaces, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].subFaces); glPopMatrix(); } glDisable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Disable 1D Textures ( NEW ) // THIS IS AN ADDED SECOND PASS AT THE VERTICES FOR THE OUTLINE glEnable (GL_BLEND); // Enable Blending ( NEW ) glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA,GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); // Set The Blend Mode ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_LINE); // Draw Backfacing Polygons As Wireframes ( NEW ) glLineWidth (outlineWidth); // Set The Line Width ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_FRONT); // Don't Draw Any Front-Facing Polygons ( NEW ) glDepthFunc (GL_LEQUAL); // Change The Depth Mode ( NEW ) glColor3fv (&outlineColor[0]); // Set The Outline Color ( NEW ) for (int j = 0; j < Objects[i].numMatFaces; j ++) { glPushMatrix(); // Move the model glTranslatef(Objects[i].pos.x, Objects[i].pos.y, Objects[i].pos.z); // Rotate the model glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.z, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Draw the faces using an index to the vertex array glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].numSubFaces, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].subFaces); glPopMatrix(); } glDepthFunc (GL_LESS); // Reset The Depth-Testing Mode ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_BACK); // Reset The Face To Be Culled ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_FILL); // Reset Back-Facing Polygon Drawing Mode ( NEW ) glDisable (GL_BLEND); glPopMatrix(); } Finally this is the tex.Use() function that loads a BMP texture and somehow gets blended perfectly with the Toon shading void GLTexture::Use() { glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); // Enable texture mapping glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // Bind the texture as the current one }

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• Contract Work - Lessons Learned

  - by samerpaul

  I thought I would write a post of a different nature today, but still relevant to the tech world. I do a lot of contract jobs myself and really enjoy it. It's nice to keep jumping from project to project, and not having to go to an office or keep regular hours, etc. I really enjoy it. I have learned a lot in the past few years of doing it (both from experience and from help given to me from others, and the internet) so I thought I'd share some of that knowledge/experience today.So here's my own personal "lesson's learned" that hopefully will help you if you find yourself doing contract work:Should I take the job?Ok, so this is the first step. Assuming you were given sufficient information about what they want, then you should really think about what you're capable of doing and whether or not you should take this job. Personally, my rule is, if I know it's possible, I'll say yes, even if I don't yet know how to do it. That's because the internet is such a great help, it would be rare to run into an issue that you can't figure out with some help. So if your clients are asking for something that you don't yet know how to program, but you know you can do it on the platform then go for it. How else are you going to learn?Use this rule with some limitation, however. If you're really lacking the expertise or foundation in something, then unless you have tons of time to complete the project, then I wouldn't say yes. For example, I haven't personally done any 3d/openGL programming yet so I wouldn't say yes to a project that extensively uses it. OK, so I want the job, but how much do I charge?This part can be tricky. There is no set formula really, but I have some tips for pricing that will hopefully give you a better idea on how to confidently ask your price and have them accept. Here are some personal guidelinesHow much time do you have to complete the project? If it's shorter than average, then charge more. You can even make a subtle note about this (or not so subtle if they still don't get it.) If it seems too short of a time (i.e. near impossible to complete), be sure to say that. It looks bad to promise a time that you can't keep--and it makes it less likely for them to return to you for work.Your Hourly rate: How long have you been working in that language? Do you have existing projects to back you up? Or previous contacts that can vouch for your work? Are there very few people with your particular skill set? All of these things will lend themselves to setting an hourly rate. I'd also try out a quick google search of what your line of work is, to see what the industry standard is at that point in time.I wouldn't price too low, because you want to make your time worth it. You also want them to feel like they're paying for quality work (assuming you can deliver it :) ). Finally, think about your client. If it's a small business, then don't price it too high if you want the job. If it's an enterprise (like a Fortune company), then don't be afraid to price higher. They have the budget for it.Fixed price: If they want a fixed price project, then you need to think about how many hours it will take you to complete it and multiply it by the hourly rate you set for yourself. Then, honestly, I would add 10-20% on top of that. Why? Because nothing ever works exactly how you want it to. There are lots of times that something "trivial" is way harder than it should be, or something that "should work" doesn't for hours and it eats away at your hourly rate. I can't count the number of times I encountered a logical bug that took away an entire's day work because debuggers don't help in those cases. By adding that padding in, it's still OK to have those days where you don't get as much done as you want. And another useful tip: Depending on your client, and the scope, you most likely want to set that you both sign off on a specification sheet before doing any work, and that any changes will result in a re-evaulation of the price. This is to help protect you from being handed a huge new addition to the project half-way in, without any extra payment.Scope of project: Finally, is it a huge project? Is it really small/fast? This affects how much your client will be willing to pay. If it sounds big, they will be willing to pay more for it. If it seems really small, then you won't be able to get away with a large asking price (as easily).Ok, I priced it, now what?So now that you have the price, you want to make sure it feels justified to your client. I never set a price before I can really think about everything. For example, if you're still in your introduction phase, and they want a price, don't give one! Just comment that you will send them a proposal sheet with all the features outlined, and a price for everything. You don't want to shout out a low number and then deliver something that is way higher. You also don't want to shock them with a big number before they feel like they are getting a great product.Make up a proposal document in a word editor. Personally, I leave the price till the very end. Why? Because by the time they reach the end, you've already discussed all the great features you plan to implement, and how it's the best product they'll ever use, etc etc...so your price comes off as a steal! If you hit them up front with a price, they will read through the document with a negative bias. Think about those commercials on TV. They always go on about their product, then at the end, ask "What would you pay for something like this? $100? $50? How about $20!!". This is not by accident.Scenario: I finished the job way earlier than expectedYou have two options then. You can either polish the hell out of the application, and even throw in a few bonus features (assuming they are in-line with the customer's needs) or you can sit and wait on it until you near your deadline. Why don't you want to turn it in too early? Because you should treat that extra time as a surplus. If you said it is going to take you 3 weeks, and it took you only 1, you have a surplus of 2 weeks. I personally don't want to let them know that I can do a 3 week project in 1 week. Why not? Because that may not always be the case! I may later have a 3 week project that takes all 3 weeks, but if I set a precedent of delivering super early, then the pressure is on for that longer project. It also makes it harder to quote longer times if you keep delivering too early.Feel free to deliver early, but again, don't do it too early. They may also wonder why they paid you for 3 weeks of work if you're done in 1. They may further wonder if the product sucks, or what is wrong with it, if it's done so early, etc.I would just polish the application. Everyone loves polish in their applications. The smallest details are what make an application go from "functional" to "fantastic". And since you are still delivering on time, then they are still going to be very happy with you.Scenario: It's taking way too long to finish this, and the deadline is nearing/here!So this is not a fun scenario to be in, but it'll happen. Sometimes the scope of the project gets out of hand. The best policy here is OPENNESS/HONESTY. Tell them that the project is taking longer than expected, and give a reasonable time for when you think you'll have it done. I typically explain it in a way that makes it sound like it isn't something that I did wrong, but it's just something about the nature of the project. This really goes for any scenario, to be honest. Just continue to stay open and communicative about your progress. This doesn't mean that you should email them every five minutes (unless they want you to), but it does mean that maybe every few days or once a week, give them an update on where you're at, and what's next. They'll be happy to know they are paying for progress, and it'll make it easier to ask for an extension when something goes wrong, because they know that you've been working on it all along.Final tips and thoughts:In general, contract work is really fun and rewarding. It's nice to learn new things all the time, as mandated by the project ,and to challenge yourself to do things you may not have done before. The key is to build a great relationship with your clients for future work, and for recommendations. I am always very honest with them and I never promise something I can't deliver. Again, under promise, over deliver!I hope this has proved helpful!Cheers,samerpaul

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• Passing Strings by Ref

  - by SGWellens

  Humbled yet again…DOH! No matter how much experience you acquire, no matter how smart you may be, no matter how hard you study, it is impossible to keep fully up to date on all the nuances of the technology we are exposed to. There will always be gaps in our knowledge: Little 'dead zones' of uncertainty. For me, this time, it was about passing string parameters to functions. I thought I knew this stuff cold. First, a little review... Value Types and Ref Integers and structs are value types (as opposed to reference types). When declared locally, their memory storage is on the stack; not on the heap. When passed to a function, the function gets a copy of the data and works on the copy. If a function needs to change a value type, you need to use the ref keyword.  Here's an example:     // ---- declaration -----------------     public struct MyStruct    {        public string StrTag;    }     // ---- functions -----------------------     void SetMyStruct(MyStruct myStruct)     // pass by value    {        myStruct.StrTag = "BBB";    }     void SetMyStruct(ref MyStruct myStruct)  // pass by ref    {        myStruct.StrTag = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage -----------------------     protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyStruct Data;        Data.StrTag = "AAA";         SetMyStruct(Data);        // Data.StrTag is still "AAA"         SetMyStruct(ref Data);        // Data.StrTag is now "CCC"    } No surprises here. All value types like ints, floats, datetimes, enums, structs, etc. work the same way. And now on to... Class Types and Ref     // ---- Declaration -----------------------------     public class MyClass    {        public string StrTag;    }     // ---- Functions ----------------------------     void SetMyClass(MyClass myClass)  // pass by 'value'    {        myClass.StrTag = "BBB";    }     void SetMyClass(ref MyClass myClass)   // pass by ref    {        myClass.StrTag = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage ---------------------------------------     protected void Button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyClass Data = new MyClass();        Data.StrTag = "AAA";         SetMyClass(Data);          // Data.StrTag is now "BBB"         SetMyClass(ref Data);        // Data.StrTag is now "CCC"    }  No surprises here either. Since Classes are reference types, you do not need the ref keyword to modify an object. What may seem a little strange is that with or without the ref keyword, the results are the same: The compiler knows what to do. So, why would you need to use the ref keyword when passing an object to a function? Because then you can change the reference itself…ie you can make it refer to a completely different object. Inside the function you can do: myClass = new MyClass() and the old object will be garbage collected and the new object will be returned to the caller. That ends the review. Now let's look at passing strings as parameters. The String Type and Ref Strings are reference types. So when you pass a String to a function, you do not need the ref keyword to change the string. Right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. When I saw this, I was so surprised that I fell out of my chair. Getting up, I bumped my head on my desk (which really hurt). My bumping the desk caused a large speaker to fall off of a bookshelf and land squarely on my big toe. I was screaming in pain and hopping on one foot when I lost my balance and fell. I struck my head on the side of the desk (once again) and knocked myself out cold. When I woke up, I was in the hospital where due to a database error (thanks Oracle) the doctors had put casts on both my hands. I'm typing this ever so slowly with just my ton..tong ..tongu…tongue. But I digress. Okay, the only true part of that story is that I was a bit surprised. Here is what happens passing a String to a function.     // ---- Functions ----------------------------     void SetMyString(String myString)   // pass by 'value'    {        myString = "BBB";    }     void SetMyString(ref String myString)  // pass by ref    {        myString = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage ---------------------------------     protected void Button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        String MyString = "AAA";         SetMyString(MyString);        // MyString is still "AAA"  What!!!!         SetMyString(ref MyString);        // MyString is now "CCC"    } What the heck. We should not have to use the ref keyword when passing a String because Strings are reference types. Why didn't the string change? What is going on?   I spent hours unssuccessfully researching this anomaly until finally, I had a Eureka moment: This code: String MyString = "AAA"; Is semantically equivalent to this code (note this code doesn't actually compile): String MyString = new String(); MyString = "AAA"; Key Point: In the function, the copy of the reference is pointed to a new object and THAT object is modified. The original reference and what it points to is unchanged. You can simulate this behavior by modifying the class example code to look like this:      void SetMyClass(MyClass myClass)  // call by 'value'    {        //myClass.StrTag = "BBB";        myClass = new MyClass();        myClass.StrTag = "BBB";    } Now when you call the SetMyClass function without using ref, the parameter is unchanged...just like the string example.  I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, July 31, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, July 31, 2014Popular ReleasesDbEntry.Net (Leafing Framework): DbEntry.Net 4.2: DbEntry.Net is a lightweight Object Relational Mapping (ORM) database access compnent for .Net 4.0+. It has clearly and easily programing interface for ORM and sql directly, and supoorted Access, Sql Server, MySql, SQLite, Firebird, PostgreSQL and Oracle. It also provide a Ruby On Rails style MVC framework. Asp.Net DataSource and a simple IoC. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Setup.zip include the setup package. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Src.zip include source files and unit tests. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Samples.zip ...Recaptcha for .NET: Recaptcha for .NET v1.5: What's NewMinor bug fixes Support for legacy .NET framework 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC 4. Support for .NET Framework 4.5.1.Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1: Welcome to Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1 This is the first release of the latest Azure Storage Explorer, code-named Phoenix. What's New?Here are some important things to know about version 6: Open Source Now being run as a full open source project. Full source code on CodePlex. Collaboration encouraged! Updated Code Base Brand-new code base (WPF/C#/.NET 4.5) Visual Studio 2013 solution (previously VS2010) Uses the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for asynchronous background operat...Wsus Package Publisher: release v1.3.1407.29: Updated WPP to recognize the very latest console version. Some files was missing into the latest release of WPP which lead to crash when trying to make a custom update. Add a workaround to avoid clipboard modification when double-clicking on a label when creating a custom update. Add the ability to publish detectoids. (This feature is still in a BETA phase. Packages relying on these detectoids to determine which computers need to be updated, may apply to all computers).VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.32: changes NEW: Added Support for 'ImgMega.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgCandy.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgPit.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Img.yt' links FIXED: 'Radikal.ru' links FIXED: 'ImageTeam.org' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.com' links FIXED: 'Img.yt' linksDynamics AX Development tools: Version 1.0.0: Alpha release of the package. I am just combining greate community tools into a package. I have not go through testing every function of the tools. However, feel free to point out if you found any bugs!Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with Todo List WebApplication: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with simple Todo List WebApplication, Overview TodoList is a simple web application to create, store and modify Todo tasks to be maintained by the users, which comprises of following fields to the user (Task Name, Task Description, Severity, Target Date, Task Status). TodoList web application is created using MVC - 4 architecture, code-first Entity Framework (ORM) and Jqgrid for displaying the data.Waterfox: Waterfox 31.0 Portable: New features in Waterfox 31.0: Added support for Unicode 7.0 Experimental support for WebCL New features in Firefox 31.0:New Add the search field to the new tab page Support of Prefer:Safe http header for parental control mozilla::pkix as default certificate verifier Block malware from downloaded files Block malware from downloaded files audio/video .ogg and .pdf files handled by Firefox if no application specified Changed Removal of the CAPS infrastructure for specifying site-sp...SuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6.3: The changes below are included in this release: fixed an exception when collect a server's status but it has been stopped fixed a bug that can cause an exception in case of sending data when the connection dropped already fixed the log4net missing issue for a QuickStart project fixed a warning in a QuickStart projectYnote Classic: Ynote Classic 2.8.5 Beta: Several Changes - Multiple Carets and Multiple Selections - Improved Startup Time - Improved Syntax Highlighting - Search Improvements - Shell Command - Improved StabilityHead First C#: The Quest: The Quest: Stable release of "The Quest" game ( Lab 2 from Head First C#, 3rd edition)TCP/IP Adapter BizTalk 2013: TCPIP Adapter for BizTalk 2013 - Version 1.0: Version 1.0 This is an updated version of the BizTalk 2010 TCP/IP adapter. References have been updated and a new setup (ISLE) has been used. Follow the installation instructions below to install the adapter. Still want to automate step 4, but haven't got to it yet. Installation instructions Make sure to close the BizTalk Administration Console. Just to make sure everything gets refreshed after installation. Download and install the setup. The setup makes sure the adapter will be regis...gicon: gicon HTTP service v1.0.0: core: 1.0.0.26592 service: 1.0.0.27190 Github: http://rynnwang.github.io/gicon/ Github.io: http://rynnwang.github.io/gicon/ Codeplex: http://gicon.codeplex.com .NET required: 2.0 or above. Installation notes: 1. You need to run intallutil command to install ifunction.GuidIconHttpService.exe file as Windows Service 2. You need to update ifunction.GuidIconHttpService.exe.config file in the folder to set correct HTTP URI prefixes. In release zip by default, it is set as http://localhost:20000...TEBookConverter: 1.2: Fixed: Could not start convertion in some cases Fixed: Progress show during convertion was truncated Fixed: Stopping convertion didn't reset program titlenewmail_OutlookCOM: newmail_OutlookCOM: First Stable ReleaseSharePoint - Data View Web Part Documenter: Data View Web Part Documenter 1.0: .NET Framework 4 Client Profile required for this to run on your PC. Please see the documentation for running the tool.LOL zmena skinu klienta: LOL jednoduchý menic skinu klienta: Jednoduchý prográmek, který ušetrí cas pri zmene klienta. Nemusí se proklikáva18541855 adresáru :)SSRS Plus+: Latest - SSRS Plus Application and Source Code: This release contains the Beta version with significant changes in comparison to the old release which I am keeping for legacy reasons. At some point a changeover will be made once it has been confirmed that my branch is stable and Mr Bagwan is in agreement also.CS-Script Source: Release v3.8.4: CSScript.Evaluator is migrated to Mono v3.3.0 Added aggregating //css_ignore_ns from the imported scripts cs-script.7z - CS-Script Suite (binaries, documentation, samples) cs-script.ExtensionPack.7z - CS-Script Extension Pack (additional binaries and samples) cs-scriptDocs.7z - CS-Script DocumentationDotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.7: DotSpatial.Full - includes all DotSpatial libraries, extensions and DemoMap application DotSpatial.Core - includes only DotSpatial core libraries Entire list of changes see in the issue tracker. Main changes: Improved common stability, optimized memory and speed when loading and rendering shapefiles, fixed some memory leaks in rasters and shape layers. Simplified plugin infrastructure. Now there are predefined implementations for all required components (IStatusControl, IDockManager, IHead...New ProjectsBrilliantORM: ????ORM??，??SQL?????????。???????????。Crafter: ?????? ??? ????Dotnetnuke xblog // Blog, Article, Events, Documents: xBlog is a blog program based on DNN, it has powerful functions and unique design style. In addition to article management function which common blog module hasIn Plain Sight: Embedding plain text into an image so one can hide the text "In Plain Sight". A cursory view into the world of Steganography.JS Koans Visual Studio Friendly Version: A Version of JS koans loaded into Visual StudioMy Troop First: just adding to the siteOFX Parser: Biblioteca desenvolvida em C# que traduz arquivos OFX e gera a instância de uma classe que representa o arquivo. Um exemplo de uso está disponível, assim como aOrchard Custom Code module: This module adds a very simple tool to add custom code in front-end pages head and foot.SPB Export to KeePass Import Conversion: A simple script to convert the .xml-file by konste's "SPB Wallet Export" (https://spbwalletexport.codeplex.com/) into an import format accepted by KeePass 2The unTroublemaker: The unTroublemaker is a troubleshooter program that helps your project quickly find and fix missing dependency issues using simple XML-based specifications.

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• Reading OpenDocument spreadsheets using C#

  - by DigiMortal

  Excel with its file formats is not the only spreadsheet application that is widely used. There are also users on Linux and Macs and often they are using OpenOffice and other open-source office packages that use ODF instead of OpenXML. In this post I will show you how to read Open Document spreadsheet in C#. Importer as example My previous post about importers showed you how to build flexible importers support to your web application. This post introduces you practical example of one of my importers. Of course, sensitive code is omitted. We start with ODS importer class and we add new methods as we go. public class OdsImporter : ImporterBase {     public OdsImporter()     {     }       public override string[] SupportedFileExtensions     {         get { return new[] { "ods" }; }     }       public override ImportResult Import(Stream fileStream, long companyId, short year)     {         string contentXml = GetContentXml(fileStream);           var result = new ImportResult();         var doc = XDocument.Parse(contentXml);           var rows = doc.Descendants("{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}table-row").Skip(1);           foreach (var row in rows)         {             ImportRow(row, companyId, year, result);         }           return result;     } } The class given here just extends base class for importers (previous post uses interface but as I already told there you move to abstract base class when writing code for real projects). Import method reads data from *.ods file, parses it (it is XML), finds all data rows and imports data. As you may see then first row is skipped. This is because the first row on my sheet is always headers row. Reading ODS file Our import method starts with getting XML from *.ods file. ODS files like OpenXml files are zipped containers that contain different files. We need content.xml as all data is kept there. To get the contents of file we use SharpZipLib library to read uploaded file as *.zip file. private static string GetContentXml(Stream fileStream) {     var contentXml = "";       using (var zipInputStream = new ZipInputStream(fileStream))     {         ZipEntry contentEntry = null;         while ((contentEntry = zipInputStream.GetNextEntry()) != null)         {             if (!contentEntry.IsFile)                 continue;             if (contentEntry.Name.ToLower() == "content.xml")                 break;         }           if (contentEntry.Name.ToLower() != "content.xml")         {             throw new Exception("Cannot find content.xml");         }           var bytesResult = new byte[] { };         var bytes = new byte[2000];         var i = 0;           while ((i = zipInputStream.Read(bytes, 0, bytes.Length)) != 0)         {             var arrayLength = bytesResult.Length;             Array.Resize<byte>(ref bytesResult, arrayLength + i);             Array.Copy(bytes, 0, bytesResult, arrayLength, i);         }         contentXml = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytesResult);     }     return contentXml; } If here is content.xml file then we stop browsing the file. We read this file to memory and return it as UTF-8 format string. Importing rows Our last task is to import rows. We use special method for this as we have to handle some tricks here. To keep files smaller the cell count on row is not always the same. If we have more than one empty cell one after another then ODS keeps only one cell for sequential empty cells. This cell has attribute called number-columns-repeated and it’s value is set to the number of sequential empty cells. This is why we use two indexers for cells collection. private void ImportRow(XElement row, ImportResult result) {     var cells = (from c in row.Descendants()                 where c.Name == "{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}table-cell"                 select c).ToList();       var dto = new DataDto();       var count = cells.Count;     var j = -1;       for (var i = 0; i < count; i++)     {         j++;         var cell = cells[i];         var attr = cell.Attribute("{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}number-columns-repeated");         if (attr != null)         {             var numToSkip = 0;             if (int.TryParse(attr.Value, out numToSkip))             {                 j += numToSkip - 1;             }         }           if (i > 30) break;         if (j == 0)         {             dto.SomeProperty = cells[i].Value;         }         if (j == 1)         {             dto.SomeOtherProperty = cells[i].Value;         }         // some more data reading     }       // save data } You can define your own class for import results and add there all problems found during data import. Your application gets the results and shows them to user. Conclusion Reading ODS files may seem to complex task but actually it is very easy if we need only data from those documents. We can use some zip-library to get the content file and then parse it to XML. It is not hard to go through the XML but there are some optimization tricks we have to know. The code here is safe to use in web applications as it is not using any API-s that may have special needs to server and infrastructure.

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• Farseer tutorial for the absolute beginners

  - by Bil Simser

  This post is inspired (and somewhat a direct copy) of a couple of posts Emanuele Feronato wrote back in 2009 about Box2D (his tutorial was ActionScript 3 based for Box2D, this is C# XNA for the Farseer Physics Engine). Here’s what we’re building: What is Farseer The Farseer Physics Engine is a collision detection system with realistic physics responses to help you easily create simple hobby games or complex simulation systems. Farseer was built as a .NET version of Box2D (based on the Box2D.XNA port of Box2D). While the constructs and syntax has changed over the years, the principles remain the same. This tutorial will walk you through exactly what Emanuele create for Flash but we’ll be doing it using C#, XNA and the Windows Phone platform. The first step is to download the library from its home on CodePlex. If you have NuGet installed, you can install the library itself using the NuGet package that but we’ll also be using some code from the Samples source that can only be obtained by downloading the library. Once you download and unpacked the zip file into a folder and open the solution, this is what you will get: The Samples XNA WP7 project (and content) have all the demos for Farseer. There’s a wealth of info here and great examples to look at to learn. The Farseer Physics XNA WP7 project contains the core libraries that do all the work. DebugView XNA contains an XNA-ready class to let you view debug data and information in the game draw loop (which you can copy into your project or build the source and reference the assembly). The downloaded version has to be compiled as it’s only available in source format so you can do that now if you want (open the solution file and rebuild everything). If you’re using the NuGet package you can just install that. We only need the core library and we’ll be copying in some code from the samples later. Your first Farseer experiment Start Visual Studio and create a new project using the Windows Phone template can call it whatever you want. It’s time to edit Game1.cs 1 public class Game1 : Game 2 { 3 private readonly GraphicsDeviceManager _graphics; 4 private DebugViewXNA _debugView; 5 private Body _floor; 6 private SpriteBatch _spriteBatch; 7 private float _timer; 8 private World _world; 9 10 public Game1() 11 { 12 _graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this) 13 { 14 PreferredBackBufferHeight = 800, 15 PreferredBackBufferWidth = 480, 16 IsFullScreen = true 17 }; 18 19 Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; 20 21 // Frame rate is 30 fps by default for Windows Phone. 22 TargetElapsedTime = TimeSpan.FromTicks(333333); 23 24 // Extend battery life under lock. 25 InactiveSleepTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1); 26 } 27 28 protected override void LoadContent() 29 { 30 // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. 31 _spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(_graphics.GraphicsDevice); 32 33 // Load our font (DebugViewXNA needs it for the DebugPanel) 34 Content.Load<SpriteFont>("font"); 35 36 // Create our World with a gravity of 10 vertical units 37 if (_world == null) 38 { 39 _world = new World(Vector2.UnitY*10); 40 } 41 else 42 { 43 _world.Clear(); 44 } 45 46 if (_debugView == null) 47 { 48 _debugView = new DebugViewXNA(_world); 49 50 // default is shape, controller, joints 51 // we just want shapes to display 52 _debugView.RemoveFlags(DebugViewFlags.Controllers); 53 _debugView.RemoveFlags(DebugViewFlags.Joint); 54 55 _debugView.LoadContent(GraphicsDevice, Content); 56 } 57 58 // Create and position our floor 59 _floor = BodyFactory.CreateRectangle( 60 _world, 61 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(480), 62 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(50), 63 10f); 64 _floor.Position = ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(240, 775); 65 _floor.IsStatic = true; 66 _floor.Restitution = 0.2f; 67 _floor.Friction = 0.2f; 68 } 69 70 protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) 71 { 72 // Allows the game to exit 73 if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) 74 Exit(); 75 76 // Create a random box every second 77 _timer += (float) gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; 78 if (_timer >= 1.0f) 79 { 80 // Reset our timer 81 _timer = 0f; 82 83 // Determine a random size for each box 84 var random = new Random(); 85 var width = random.Next(20, 100); 86 var height = random.Next(20, 100); 87 88 // Create it and store the size in the user data 89 var box = BodyFactory.CreateRectangle( 90 _world, 91 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(width), 92 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(height), 93 10f, 94 new Point(width, height)); 95 96 box.BodyType = BodyType.Dynamic; 97 box.Restitution = 0.2f; 98 box.Friction = 0.2f; 99 100 // Randomly pick a location along the top to drop it from 101 box.Position = ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(random.Next(50, 400), 0); 102 } 103 104 // Advance all the elements in the world 105 _world.Step(Math.Min((float) gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds*0.001f, (1f/30f))); 106 107 // Clean up any boxes that have fallen offscreen 108 foreach (var box in from box in _world.BodyList 109 let pos = ConvertUnits.ToDisplayUnits(box.Position) 110 where pos.Y > _graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height 111 select box) 112 { 113 _world.RemoveBody(box); 114 } 115 116 base.Update(gameTime); 117 } 118 119 protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) 120 { 121 GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.FromNonPremultiplied(51, 51, 51, 255)); 122 123 _spriteBatch.Begin(); 124 125 var projection = Matrix.CreateOrthographicOffCenter( 126 0f, 127 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(_graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width), 128 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(_graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height), 0f, 0f, 129 1f); 130 _debugView.RenderDebugData(ref projection); 131 132 _spriteBatch.End(); 133 134 base.Draw(gameTime); 135 } 136 } 137 Lines 4: Declare the debug view we’ll use for rendering (more on that later). Lines 8: Declare _world variable of type class World. World is the main object to interact with the Farseer engine. It stores all the joints and bodies, and is responsible for stepping through the simulation. Lines 12-17: Create the graphics device we’ll be rendering on. This is an XNA component and we’re just setting it to be the same size as the phone and toggling it to be full screen (no system tray). Lines 34: We create a SpriteFont here by adding it to the project. It’s called “font” because that’s what the DebugView uses but you can name it whatever you want (and if you’re not using DebugView for your production app you might have several fonts). Lines 37-44: We create the physics environment that Farseer uses to contain all the objects by specifying it here. We’re using Vector2.UnitY*10 to represent the gravity to be used in the environment. In other words, 10 units going in a downward motion. Lines 46-56: We create the DebugViewXNA here. This is copied from the […] from the code you downloaded and provides the ability to render all entities onto the screen. In a production release you’ll be doing the rendering yourself of each object but we cheat a bit for the demo and let the DebugView do it for us. The other thing it can provide is to render out a panel of debugging information while the simulation is going on. This is useful in tracking down objects, figuring out how something works, or just keeping track of what’s in the engine. Lines 49-67: Here we create a rigid body (Farseer only supports rigid bodies) to represent the floor that we’ll drop objects onto. We create it by using one of the Farseer factories and specifying the width and height. The ConvertUnits class is copied from the samples code as-is and lets us toggle between display units (pixels) and simulation units (usually metres). We’re creating a floor that’s 480 pixels wide and 50 pixels high (converting them to SimUnits for the engine to understand). We also position it near the bottom of the screen. Values are in metres and when specifying values they refer to the centre of the body object. Lines 77-78: The game Update method fires 30 times a second, too fast to be creating objects this quickly. So we use a variable to track the elapsed seconds since the last update, accumulate that value, then create a new box to drop when 1 second has passed. Lines 89-94: We create a box the same way we created our floor (coming up with a random width and height for the box). Lines 96-101: We set the box to be Dynamic (rather than Static like the floor object) and position it somewhere along the top of the screen. And now you created the world. Gravity does the rest and the boxes fall to the ground. Here’s the result: Farseer Physics Engine Demo using XNA Lines 105: We must update the world at every frame. We do this with the Step method which takes in the time interval. [more] Lines 108-114: Body objects are added to the world but never automatically removed (because Farseer doesn’t know about the display world, it has no idea if an item is on the screen or not). Here we just loop through all the entities and anything that’s dropped off the screen (below the bottom) gets removed from the World. This keeps our entity count down (the simulation never has more than 30 or 40 objects in the world no matter how long you run it for). Too many entities and the app will grind to a halt. Lines 125-130: Farseer knows nothing about the UI so that’s entirely up to you as to how to draw things. Farseer is just tracking the objects and moving them around using the physics engine and it’s rules. You’ll still use XNA to draw items (using the SpriteBatch.Draw method) so you can load up your usual textures and draw items and pirates and dancing zombies all over the screen. Instead in this demo we’re going to cheat a little. In the sample code for Farseer you can download there’s a project called DebugView XNA. This project contains the DebugViewXNA class which just handles iterating through all the bodies in the world and drawing the shapes. So we call the RenderDebugData method here of that class to draw everything correctly. In the case of this demo, we just want to draw Shapes so take a look at the source code for the DebugViewXNA class as to how it extracts all the vertices for the shapes created (in this case simple boxes) and draws them. You’ll learn a *lot* about how Farseer works just by looking at this class. That’s it, that’s all. Simple huh? Hope you enjoy the code and library. Physics is hard and requires some math skills to really grok. The Farseer Physics Engine makes it pretty easy to get up and running and start building games. In future posts we’ll get more in-depth with things you can do with the engine so this is just the beginning. Enjoy!

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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• How to make a player stay within bounds of world with 2D Camera

  - by Craig

  Im creating a simple top down survival game. At the moment, i have the sprite which is a ship and moves by rotating left or right then going forward in that direction. I have implemented a 2D camera, its always centered on the player. However, when i move towards the bounds of the world that the sprite is in it just keeps on going :( How to i sort it that it stops at the edge of the world and cant go beyond it? Cheers :) Below is the main game class using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; namespace GamesCoursework_1 { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; // player variables Texture2D Ship; Vector2 Ship_Position; float Ship_Rotation = 0.0f; Vector2 Ship_Origin; Vector2 Ship_Velocity; const float tangentialVelocity = 4f; float friction = 0.05f; static Point CameraViewport = new Point(800, 800); Camera2d cam = new Camera2d((int)CameraViewport.X, (int)CameraViewport.Y); //Size of world static Point worldSize = new Point(1600, 1600); // Screen variables static Point worldCenter = new Point(worldSize.X / 2, worldSize.Y / 2); Rectangle playerBounds = new Rectangle(CameraViewport.X / 2, CameraViewport.Y / 2, worldSize.X - CameraViewport.X, worldSize.Y - CameraViewport.Y); Rectangle worldBounds = new Rectangle(0, 0, worldSize.X, worldSize.Y); Texture2D background; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = CameraViewport.X; graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = CameraViewport.Y; Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); // TODO: use this.Content to load your game content here Ship = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Ship"); Ship_Origin.X = Ship.Width / 2; Ship_Origin.Y = Ship.Height / 2; background = Content.Load<Texture2D>("aus"); Ship_Position = new Vector2(worldCenter.X, worldCenter.Y); cam.Pos = Ship_Position; cam.Zoom = 1f; } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // TODO: Add your update logic here Ship_Position = Ship_Velocity + Ship_Position; keyPressed(); base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); // TODO: Add your drawing code here spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, BlendState.AlphaBlend, null, null, null,null, cam.get_transformation(GraphicsDevice)); spriteBatch.Draw(background, Vector2.Zero, Color.White); spriteBatch.Draw(Ship, Ship_Position, Ship.Bounds, Color.White, Ship_Rotation, Ship_Origin, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0f); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } private void Ship_Move(Vector2 move) { Ship_Position += move; } private void keyPressed() { KeyboardState keyState; // Move right keyState = Keyboard.GetState(); if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)) { Ship_Rotation = Ship_Rotation + 0.1f; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) { Ship_Rotation = Ship_Rotation - 0.1f; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) { Ship_Velocity.X = (float)Math.Cos(Ship_Rotation) * tangentialVelocity; Ship_Velocity.Y = (float)Math.Sin(Ship_Rotation) * tangentialVelocity; if ((int)Ship_Position.Y < playerBounds.Bottom && (int)Ship_Position.Y > playerBounds.Top) cam._pos.Y = Ship_Position.Y; if ((int)Ship_Position.X > playerBounds.Left && (int)Ship_Position.X < playerBounds.Right) cam._pos.X = Ship_Position.X; //tried world bounds here if (!worldBounds.Contains(new Point((int)Ship_Position.X, (int)Ship_Position.Y))) Ship_Position -= new Vector2(0.0f, -tangentialVelocity * 2); if (!worldBounds.Contains(new Point((int)Ship_Position.X, (int)Ship_Position.Y))) Ship_Position -= new Vector2(0.0f, 2 * tangentialVelocity); } else if(Ship_Velocity != Vector2.Zero) { float i = Ship_Velocity.X; float j = Ship_Velocity.Y; Ship_Velocity.X = i -= friction * i; Ship_Velocity.Y = j -= friction * j; if ((int)Ship_Position.Y < playerBounds.Bottom && (int)Ship_Position.Y > playerBounds.Top) cam._pos.Y = Ship_Position.Y; if ((int)Ship_Position.X > playerBounds.Left && (int)Ship_Position.X < playerBounds.Right) cam._pos.X = Ship_Position.X; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Q)) { if (cam.Zoom < 2f) cam.Zoom += 0.05f; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.A)) { if (cam.Zoom > 0.3f) cam.Zoom -= 0.05f; } } } } my 2d camera class using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace GamesCoursework_1 { public class Camera2d { protected float _zoom; // Camera Zoom public Matrix _transform; // Matrix Transform public Vector2 _pos; // Camera Position protected float _rotation; // Camera Rotation public int _viewportWidth, _viewportHeight; // viewport size public Camera2d(int ViewportWidth, int ViewportHeight) { _zoom = 1.0f; _rotation = 0.0f; _pos = Vector2.Zero; _viewportWidth = ViewportWidth; _viewportHeight = ViewportHeight; } // Sets and gets zoom public float Zoom { get { return _zoom; } set { _zoom = value; if (_zoom < 0.1f) _zoom = 0.1f; } // Negative zoom will flip image } public float Rotation { get { return _rotation; } set { _rotation = value; } } // Auxiliary function to move the camera public void Move(Vector2 amount) { _pos += amount; } // Get set position public Vector2 Pos { get { return _pos; } set { _pos = value; } } public Matrix get_transformation(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { _transform = // Thanks to o KB o for this solution Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(-_pos.X, -_pos.Y, 0)) * Matrix.CreateRotationZ(Rotation) * Matrix.CreateScale(new Vector3(Zoom, Zoom, 1)) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(_viewportWidth * 0.5f, _viewportHeight * 0.5f, 0)); return _transform; } } }

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• How to Implement Project Type "Copy", "Move", "Rename", and "Delete"

  - by Geertjan

  You've followed the NetBeans Project Type Tutorial and now you'd like to let the user copy, move, rename, and delete the projects conforming to your project type. When they right-click a project, they should see the relevant menu items and those menu items should provide dialogs for user interaction, followed by event handling code to deal with the current operation. Right now, at the end of the tutorial, the "Copy" and "Delete" menu items are present but disabled, while the "Move" and "Rename" menu items are absent: The NetBeans Project API provides a built-in mechanism out of the box that you can leverage for project-level "Copy", "Move", "Rename", and "Delete" actions. All the functionality is there for you to use, while all that you need to do is a bit of enablement and configuration, which is described below. To get started, read the following from the NetBeans Project API: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-projectapi/org/netbeans/spi/project/ActionProvider.html http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-projectapi/org/netbeans/spi/project/CopyOperationImplementation.html http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-projectapi/org/netbeans/spi/project/MoveOrRenameOperationImplementation.html http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-projectapi/org/netbeans/spi/project/DeleteOperationImplementation.html Now, let's do some work. For each of the menu items we're interested in, we need to do the following: Provide enablement and invocation handling in an ActionProvider implementation. Provide appropriate OperationImplementation classes. Add the new classes to the Project Lookup. Make the Actions visible on the Project Node. Run the application and verify the Actions work as you'd like. Here we go: Create an ActionProvider. Here you specify the Actions that should be supported, the conditions under which they should be enabled, and what should happen when they're invoked, using lots of default code that lets you reuse the functionality provided by the NetBeans Project API: class CustomerActionProvider implements ActionProvider { @Override public String[] getSupportedActions() { return new String[]{ ActionProvider.COMMAND_RENAME, ActionProvider.COMMAND_MOVE, ActionProvider.COMMAND_COPY, ActionProvider.COMMAND_DELETE }; } @Override public void invokeAction(String string, Lookup lkp) throws IllegalArgumentException { if (string.equalsIgnoreCase(ActionProvider.COMMAND_RENAME)) { DefaultProjectOperations.performDefaultRenameOperation( CustomerProject.this, ""); } if (string.equalsIgnoreCase(ActionProvider.COMMAND_MOVE)) { DefaultProjectOperations.performDefaultMoveOperation( CustomerProject.this); } if (string.equalsIgnoreCase(ActionProvider.COMMAND_COPY)) { DefaultProjectOperations.performDefaultCopyOperation( CustomerProject.this); } if (string.equalsIgnoreCase(ActionProvider.COMMAND_DELETE)) { DefaultProjectOperations.performDefaultDeleteOperation( CustomerProject.this); } } @Override public boolean isActionEnabled(String command, Lookup lookup) throws IllegalArgumentException { if ((command.equals(ActionProvider.COMMAND_RENAME))) { return true; } else if ((command.equals(ActionProvider.COMMAND_MOVE))) { return true; } else if ((command.equals(ActionProvider.COMMAND_COPY))) { return true; } else if ((command.equals(ActionProvider.COMMAND_DELETE))) { return true; } return false; } } Importantly, to round off this step, add "new CustomerActionProvider()" to the "getLookup" method of the project. If you were to run the application right now, all the Actions we're interested in would be enabled (if they are visible, as described in step 4 below) but when you invoke any of them you'd get an error message because each of the DefaultProjectOperations above looks in the Lookup of the Project for the presence of an implementation of a class for handling the operation. That's what we're going to do in the next step. Provide Implementations of Project Operations. For each of our operations, the NetBeans Project API lets you implement classes to handle the operation. The dialogs for interacting with the project are provided by the NetBeans project system, but what happens with the folders and files during the operation can be influenced via the operations. Below are the simplest possible implementations, i.e., here we assume we want nothing special to happen. Each of the below needs to be in the Lookup of the Project in order for the operation invocation to succeed. private final class CustomerProjectMoveOrRenameOperation implements MoveOrRenameOperationImplementation { @Override public List<FileObject> getMetadataFiles() { return new ArrayList<FileObject>(); } @Override public List<FileObject> getDataFiles() { return new ArrayList<FileObject>(); } @Override public void notifyRenaming() throws IOException { } @Override public void notifyRenamed(String nueName) throws IOException { } @Override public void notifyMoving() throws IOException { } @Override public void notifyMoved(Project original, File originalPath, String nueName) throws IOException { } } private final class CustomerProjectCopyOperation implements CopyOperationImplementation { @Override public List<FileObject> getMetadataFiles() { return new ArrayList<FileObject>(); } @Override public List<FileObject> getDataFiles() { return new ArrayList<FileObject>(); } @Override public void notifyCopying() throws IOException { } @Override public void notifyCopied(Project prjct, File file, String string) throws IOException { } } private final class CustomerProjectDeleteOperation implements DeleteOperationImplementation { @Override public List<FileObject> getMetadataFiles() { return new ArrayList<FileObject>(); } @Override public List<FileObject> getDataFiles() { return new ArrayList<FileObject>(); } @Override public void notifyDeleting() throws IOException { } @Override public void notifyDeleted() throws IOException { } } Also make sure to put the above methods into the Project Lookup. Check the Lookup of the Project. The "getLookup()" method of the project should now include the classes you created above, as shown in bold below: @Override public Lookup getLookup() { if (lkp == null) { lkp = Lookups.fixed(new Object[]{ this, new Info(), new CustomerProjectLogicalView(this), new CustomerCustomizerProvider(this), new CustomerActionProvider(), new CustomerProjectMoveOrRenameOperation(), new CustomerProjectCopyOperation(), new CustomerProjectDeleteOperation(), new ReportsSubprojectProvider(this), }); } return lkp; } Make Actions Visible on the Project Node. The NetBeans Project API gives you a number of CommonProjectActions, including for the actions we're dealing with. Make sure the items in bold below are in the "getActions" method of the project node: @Override public Action[] getActions(boolean arg0) { return new Action[]{ CommonProjectActions.newFileAction(), CommonProjectActions.copyProjectAction(), CommonProjectActions.moveProjectAction(), CommonProjectActions.renameProjectAction(), CommonProjectActions.deleteProjectAction(), CommonProjectActions.customizeProjectAction(), CommonProjectActions.closeProjectAction() }; } Run the Application. When you run the application, you should see this: Let's now try out the various actions: Copy. When you invoke the Copy action, you'll see the dialog below. Provide a new project name and location and then the copy action is performed when the Copy button is clicked below: The message you see above, in red, might not be relevant to your project type. When you right-click the application and choose Branding, you can find the string in the Resource Bundles tab, as shown below: However, note that the message will be shown in red, no matter what the text is, hence you can really only put something like a warning message there. If you have no text at all, it will also look odd.If the project has subprojects, the copy operation will not automatically copy the subprojects. Take a look here and here for similar more complex scenarios. Move. When you invoke the Move action, the dialog below is shown: Rename. The Rename Project dialog below is shown when you invoke the Rename action: I tried it and both the display name and the folder on disk are changed. Delete. When you invoke the Delete action, you'll see this dialog: The checkbox is not checkable, in the default scenario, and when the dialog above is confirmed, the project is simply closed, i.e., the node hierarchy is removed from the application. However, if you truly want to let the user delete the project on disk, pass the Project to the DeleteOperationImplementation and then add the children of the Project you want to delete to the getDataFiles method: private final class CustomerProjectDeleteOperation implements DeleteOperationImplementation { private final CustomerProject project; private CustomerProjectDeleteOperation(CustomerProject project) { this.project = project; } @Override public List<FileObject> getDataFiles() { List<FileObject> files = new ArrayList<FileObject>(); FileObject[] projectChildren = project.getProjectDirectory().getChildren(); for (FileObject fileObject : projectChildren) { addFile(project.getProjectDirectory(), fileObject.getNameExt(), files); } return files; } private void addFile(FileObject projectDirectory, String fileName, List<FileObject> result) { FileObject file = projectDirectory.getFileObject(fileName); if (file != null) { result.add(file); } } @Override public List<FileObject> getMetadataFiles() { return new ArrayList<FileObject>(); } @Override public void notifyDeleting() throws IOException { } @Override public void notifyDeleted() throws IOException { } } Now the user will be able to check the checkbox, causing the method above to be called in the DeleteOperationImplementation: Hope this answers some questions or at least gets the discussion started. Before asking questions about this topic, please take the steps above and only then attempt to apply them to your own scenario. Useful implementations to look at: http://kickjava.com/src/org/netbeans/modules/j2ee/clientproject/AppClientProjectOperations.java.htm https://kenai.com/projects/nbandroid/sources/mercurial/content/project/src/org/netbeans/modules/android/project/AndroidProjectOperations.java

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 11, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 11, 2013Popular ReleasesULS Log Viewer Feature: ULS Log Viewer Feature: What's getting installed? - The solution include Custom Action (New action in Site Menu). Features: - Only Site Administrators can see Custom Action in site menu. - Multi-Language SUPPORT! (English, Hebrew). - Works against Secure Store Service to use administrator rights for getting access to ULS Logs Path on farm servers (Use the guide for creating new SSA). - Load only the last log file from ULS log path. - Gets automatically the ULS log path from Central Administration. - Choose from whi...Lib.Web.Mvc & Yet another developer blog: Lib.Web.Mvc 6.3.3: Lib.Web.Mvc is a library which contains some helper classes for ASP.NET MVC such as strongly typed jqGrid helper, XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionResult, FileResult with range request support, custom attributes and more. Release contains: Lib.Web.Mvc.dll with xml documentation file Standalone documentation in chm file and change log Library source code Sample application for strongly typed jqGrid helper is available here. Sample application for XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionRe...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.501: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.5. Breaking changes: - Refactored MagickImageStatistics to prepare for upcoming changes in ImageMagick 7. - Renamed MagickImage.SetOption to SetDefine.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.587b: Fixed* TV - Locked shows display correctly after refresh * TV - missing episodes display in correct colour for missed or to be aired * TV - Rescrape of Multi-episodes working. * TV - Cache fix where was writing episodes multiple times * TV - Fixed Cache writing missing episodes when Display missing eps was disabled. Revision HistoryGenerate report of user mailbox size for Exchange 2010: Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Generate-report-of-user-e4e9afcaCheck SQL Server a specified database index fragmentation percentage (SQL): Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Check-SQL-Server-a-a5758043Save attachments from multiple selected items in Outlook (VBA): Script Download: Script Download: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Save-attachments-from-5b6bf54bRemove Windows Store apps in Windows 8: Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Remove-Windows-Store-Apps-a00ef4a4PCSX-Reloaded: 1.9.94: General changes:Support for compressed audio in cue files. ECM support. OS X changes:32-bit support has been dropped Partial French and Hungarian translationsDynamics AX 2012 R2 Kitting: AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of Kitting: Here is the AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of kitting. Released both as a XPO and a model.VidCoder: 1.5.12 Beta: Added an option to preserve Created and Last Modified times when converting files. In Options -> Advanced. Added an option to mark an automatically selected subtitle track as "Default". Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5878. Fixed auto passthrough not applying just after switching to it. Fixed bug where preset/profile/tune could disappear when reverting a preset.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.9.25): XrmToolbox improvement Correct changing connection from the status dropdown Tools improvement Updated tool Audit Center (v1.2013.9.10) -> Publish entities Iconator (v1.2013.9.27) -> Optimized asynchronous loading of images and entities MetadataDocumentGenerator (v1.2013.11.6) -> Correct system entities reading with incorrect attribute type Script Manager (v1.2013.9.27) -> Retrieve only custom events SiteMapEditor (v1.2013.11.7) -> Reset of CRM 2013 SiteMap ViewLayoutReplicator (v1.201...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: SQL Server 2014 CTP2 In-Memory OLTP Sample, based: This sample showcases the new In-Memory OLTP feature, which is part of SQL Server 2014 CTP2. It shows the new memory-optimized tables and natively-compiled stored procedures, and can be used to show the performance benefit of in-memory OLTP. Installation instructions for the sample are included in the file ‘awinmemsample.doc’, which is part of the download. You can ask a question about this sample at the SQL Server Samples Forum Composite C1 CMS - Open Source on .NET: Composite C1 4.1: Composite C1 4.1 (4.1.5058.34326) Write a review for this release - help us improve, recommend us. Getting started If you are new to Composite C1 and want to install it: http://docs.composite.net/Getting-started What's new in Composite C1 4.1 The following are highlights of major changes since Composite C1 4.0: General user features: Drag-and-drop images and files like PDF and Word directly from own your desktop and folders into page content Allow you to install Composite Form Builder ...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.9.0: Implemented Recent Scripts list Added checking for plugin updates from AboutBox Multiple formatting improvements/fixes Implemented selection of the CLR version when preparing distribution package Added project panel button for showing plugin shortcuts list Added 'What's New?' panel Fixed auto-formatting scrolling artifact Implemented navigation to "logical" file (vs. auto-generated) file from output panel To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.Resources Editor: Resources Editor: Stable releaseWPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.10 binaries: Now row summaries are updated whenever autofilter value sis modified.Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.9.1): This new version includes: - Include me option is back - Fixed the login bug reported latelyVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0c: Changes between 1.0b and 1.0c (11 November 2013) : Set correctly the minimum required version in volumes header (this value must always follow the program version after any major changes). This also solves also the hidden volume issueCaptcha MVC: Captcha MVC 2.5: v 2.5: Added support for MVC 5. The DefaultCaptchaManager is no longer throws an error if the captcha values was entered incorrectly. Minor changes. v 2.4.1: Fixed issues with deleting incorrect values of the captcha token in the SessionStorageProvider. This could lead to a situation when the captcha was not working with the SessionStorageProvider. Minor changes. v 2.4: Changed the IIntelligencePolicy interface, added ICaptchaManager as parameter for all methods. Improved font size ...New ProjectsASP.NET Web API: ASP.NET Web API is a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices. ASP.NET WebDungeonPaper: DungeonPaper will be a platform for RPG players to utilize computers to replace traditional pen and paper in their campaigns.EMS: demoEvent Dispatcher: Event Dispatcher is a powershell module for centralized logging. Supports filtering events, and outputs to flat files or the Windows event log.Koopakiller.Numerics: A growing Math-Library for .NET, provided as a portable class library.NetroTrix: NetroTrix is a LAN Messenger Project.....Sharp Explorer: Sort of an alpha Play with C# to make a treeView Windows explorer. Currently multi-threaded dbl click to explore, r-click to preview some text files.TI Sensor Tag Library: A library to access the Texas Instruments Sensor Tag in Windows Store apps with Bluetooth GATT. Written in C#.ULS Log Viewer Feature: "ULS Log Viewer Feature" used by SharePoint Administrators, Developers and SharePoint Site Managers for get easily the real error behind the Correlation ID.Visual Studio Code Line Counter: VS Code Line Counter parses a Visual Studio solution file (.sln), reads each included project, and counts the number of lines in each included file.Vulcanus: TODOWax - The WiX Setup Project Editor: An interactive editor for WiX setup projects.

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• HTML Tidy in NetBeans IDE

  - by Geertjan

  First step in integrating HTML Tidy (via its JTidy implementation) into NetBeans IDE: The reason why I started doing this is because I want to integrate this into the pluggable analyzer functionality of NetBeans IDE that I recently blogged about, i.e., where the FindBugs functionality is found. So a logical first step is to get it working in an Action class, after which I can port it into the analyzer infrastructure: import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.PrintWriter; import java.io.StringWriter; import org.openide.awt.ActionID; import org.openide.awt.ActionReference; import org.openide.awt.ActionReferences; import org.openide.awt.ActionRegistration; import org.openide.cookies.EditorCookie; import org.openide.cookies.LineCookie; import org.openide.loaders.DataObject; import org.openide.text.Line; import org.openide.text.Line.ShowOpenType; import org.openide.util.Exceptions; import org.openide.util.NbBundle.Messages; import org.openide.windows.IOProvider; import org.openide.windows.InputOutput; import org.openide.windows.OutputEvent; import org.openide.windows.OutputListener; import org.openide.windows.OutputWriter; import org.w3c.tidy.Tidy; @ActionID(     category = "Tools", id = "org.jtidy.TidyAction") @ActionRegistration(     displayName = "#CTL_TidyAction") @ActionReferences({     @ActionReference(path = "Loaders/text/html/Actions", position = 150),     @ActionReference(path = "Editors/text/html/Popup", position = 750) }) @Messages("CTL_TidyAction=Run HTML Tidy") public final class TidyAction implements ActionListener {     private final DataObject context;     private final OutputWriter writer;     private EditorCookie ec = null;     public TidyAction(DataObject context) {         this.context = context;         ec = context.getLookup().lookup(org.openide.cookies.EditorCookie.class);         InputOutput io = IOProvider.getDefault().getIO("HTML Tidy", false);         io.select();         writer = io.getOut();     }     @Override     public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ev) {         Tidy tidy = new Tidy();         try {             writer.reset();             StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();             PrintWriter errorWriter = new PrintWriter(stringWriter);             tidy.setErrout(errorWriter);             tidy.parse(context.getPrimaryFile().getInputStream(), System.out);             String[] split = stringWriter.toString().split("\n");             for (final String string : split) {                 final int end = string.indexOf(" c");                 if (string.startsWith("line")) {                     writer.println(string, new OutputListener() {                         @Override                         public void outputLineAction(OutputEvent oe) {                             LineCookie lc = context.getLookup().lookup(LineCookie.class);                             int lineNumber = Integer.parseInt(string.substring(0, end).replace("line ", ""));                             Line line = lc.getLineSet().getOriginal(lineNumber - 1);                             line.show(ShowOpenType.OPEN, Line.ShowVisibilityType.FOCUS);                         }                         @Override                         public void outputLineSelected(OutputEvent oe) {}                         @Override                         public void outputLineCleared(OutputEvent oe) {}                     });                 }             }         } catch (IOException ex) {             Exceptions.printStackTrace(ex);         }     } } The string parsing above is ugly but gets the job done for now. A problem integrating this into the pluggable analyzer functionality is the limitation of its scope. The analyzer lets you select one or more projects, or individual files, but not a folder. So it doesn't work on folders in the Favorites window, for example, which is where I'd like to apply HTML Tidy, across multiple folders via the analyzer functionality. That's a bit of a bummer that I'm hoping to get around somehow.

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part III)

  The last post ended with us just getting started on stumbling into text template file customization, a task that required a Visual Studio extension (Tangible T4 Editor) to even have a chance at completing.  Despite the benefits of the Tangible T4 Editor, I still had a hard time putting together a solid text template that would be easy to explain.  This is mostly due to the way the files allow you to mix code (encapsulated in <# #>) with straight-up text to generate.  It is effective to be sure, but not very readable.  Nevertheless, I will try and explain what was accomplished in my custom tt file, though the details of which are not really the point of this article (my way of saying dont criticize my crappy code, and certainly dont use it in any somewhat real application.  You may become dumber just by looking at this code.  You have been warned really the footnote I should put at the end of all of my blog posts). To begin with, there were two basic requirements that I needed the code generator to satisfy:  Reading one to many entity framework files, and using the entities that were found to write one to many class files.  Thankfully, using the Entity Object Generator as a starting point gave us an example on how to do exactly that by using the MetadataLoader and EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager you include references to these items and use them like so: // Instantiate an entity framework file reader and file writer MetadataLoader loader = new MetadataLoader(this); EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager fileManager = EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager.Create(this); // Load the entity model metadata workspace MetadataWorkspace metadataWorkspace = null; bool allMetadataLoaded =loader.TryLoadAllMetadata("MFL.tt", out metadataWorkspace); EdmItemCollection ItemCollection = (EdmItemCollection)metadataWorkspace.GetItemCollection(DataSpace.CSpace); // Create an IO class to contain the 'get' methods for all entities in the model fileManager.StartNewFile("MFL.IO.gen.cs"); Next, we want to be able to loop through all of the entities found in the model, and then each property for each entity so we can generate classes and methods for each.  The code for that is blissfully simple: // Iterate through each entity in the model foreach (EntityType entity in ItemCollection.GetItems<EntityType>().OrderBy(e => e.Name)) {     // Iterate through each primitive property of the entity     foreach (EdmProperty edmProperty in entity.Properties.Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType is PrimitiveType && p.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create properties     }     // Iterate through each relationship of the entity     foreach (NavigationProperty navProperty in entity.NavigationProperties.Where(np => np.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create associations     } } There really isnt anything more advanced than that going on in the text template the only thing I had to blunder through was realizing that if you want the generator to interpret a line of code (such as our iterations above), you need to enclose the code in <# and #> while if you want the generator to interpret the VALUE of code, such as putting the entity name into the class name, you need to enclose the code in <#= and #> like so: public partial class <#=entity.Name#> To make a long story short, I did a lot of repetition of the above to come up with a text template that generates a class for each entity based on its properties, and a set of IO methods for each entity based on its relationships.  The two work together to provide lazy-loading for hierarchical data (such getting Team.Players) so it should be pretty intuitive to use on a front-end.  This text template is available here you can tweak the inputFiles array to load one or many different edmx models and generate the basic xml IO and class files, though it will probably only work correctly in the simplest of cases, like our MFL model described in the previous post.  Additionally, there is no validation, logging or error handling which is something I want to handle later by stumbling through the enterprise library 5.0. The code that gets generated isnt anything special, though using the LINQ to XML feature was something very new and exciting for me I had only worked with XML in the past using the DOM or XML Reader objects along with XPath, and the LINQ to XML model is just so much more elegant and supposedly efficient (something to test later).  For example, the following code was generated to create a Player object for each Player node in the XML:         return from element in GetXmlData(_PlayerDataFile).Descendants("Player")             select new Player             {                 Id = int.Parse(element.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,ParentName = element.Parent.Name.LocalName                 ,ParentId = long.Parse(element.Parent.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,Name = element.Attribute("Name").Value                 ,PositionId = int.Parse(element.Attribute("PositionId").Value)             }; It is all done in one line of code, no looping needed.  Even though GetXmlData loads the entire xml file just like the old XML DOM approach would have, it is supposed to be much less resource intensive.  I will definitely put that to the test after we develop a user interface for getting at this data.  Speaking of the data where IS the data?  Weve put together a pretty model and a bunch of code around it, but we dont have any data to speak of.  We can certainly drop to our favorite XML editor and crank out some data, but if it doesnt totally match our model, it will not load correctly.  To help with this, Ive built in a method to generate xml at any given layer in the hierarchy.  So for us to get the closest possible thing to real data, wed need to invoke MFL.IO.GenerateTeamXML and save the results to file.  Doing so should get us something that looks like this: <Team Id="0" Name="0">   <Player Id="0" Name="0" PositionId="0">     <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="0" RushYards="0" Year="0" />   </Player> </Team> Sadly, it is missing the Positions node (havent thought of a way to generate lookup xml yet) and the data itself isnt quite realistic (well, as realistic as MFL data can be anyway).  Lets manually remedy that for now to give us a decent starter set of data.  Note that this is TWO xml files Lookups.xml and Teams.xml: <Lookups Id=0>   <Position Id="0" Name="Quarterback"/>   <Position Id="1" Name="Runningback"/> </Lookups> <Teams Id=0>   <Team Id="0" Name="Chicago">     <Player Id="0" Name="QB Bears" PositionId="0">       <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="4000" RushYards="120" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="1" PassYards="4200" RushYards="180" Year="2009" />     </Player>     <Player Id="1" Name="RB Bears" PositionId="1">       <Statistic Id="2" PassYards="0" RushYards="800" Year="2007" />       <Statistic Id="3" PassYards="0" RushYards="1200" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="4" PassYards="3" RushYards="1450" Year="2009" />     </Player>   </Team> </Teams> Ok, so we have some data, we have a way to read/write that data and we have a friendly way of representing that data.  Now, what remains is the part that I have been looking forward to the most: present the data to the user and give them the ability to add/update/delete, and doing so in a way that is very intuitive (easy) from a development standpoint.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part III)

  The last post ended with us just getting started on stumbling into text template file customization, a task that required a Visual Studio extension (Tangible T4 Editor) to even have a chance at completing.  Despite the benefits of the Tangible T4 Editor, I still had a hard time putting together a solid text template that would be easy to explain.  This is mostly due to the way the files allow you to mix code (encapsulated in <# #>) with straight-up text to generate.  It is effective to be sure, but not very readable.  Nevertheless, I will try and explain what was accomplished in my custom tt file, though the details of which are not really the point of this article (my way of saying dont criticize my crappy code, and certainly dont use it in any somewhat real application.  You may become dumber just by looking at this code.  You have been warned really the footnote I should put at the end of all of my blog posts). To begin with, there were two basic requirements that I needed the code generator to satisfy:  Reading one to many entity framework files, and using the entities that were found to write one to many class files.  Thankfully, using the Entity Object Generator as a starting point gave us an example on how to do exactly that by using the MetadataLoader and EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager you include references to these items and use them like so: // Instantiate an entity framework file reader and file writer MetadataLoader loader = new MetadataLoader(this); EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager fileManager = EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager.Create(this); // Load the entity model metadata workspace MetadataWorkspace metadataWorkspace = null; bool allMetadataLoaded =loader.TryLoadAllMetadata("MFL.tt", out metadataWorkspace); EdmItemCollection ItemCollection = (EdmItemCollection)metadataWorkspace.GetItemCollection(DataSpace.CSpace); // Create an IO class to contain the 'get' methods for all entities in the model fileManager.StartNewFile("MFL.IO.gen.cs"); Next, we want to be able to loop through all of the entities found in the model, and then each property for each entity so we can generate classes and methods for each.  The code for that is blissfully simple: // Iterate through each entity in the model foreach (EntityType entity in ItemCollection.GetItems<EntityType>().OrderBy(e => e.Name)) {     // Iterate through each primitive property of the entity     foreach (EdmProperty edmProperty in entity.Properties.Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType is PrimitiveType && p.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create properties     }     // Iterate through each relationship of the entity     foreach (NavigationProperty navProperty in entity.NavigationProperties.Where(np => np.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create associations     } } There really isnt anything more advanced than that going on in the text template the only thing I had to blunder through was realizing that if you want the generator to interpret a line of code (such as our iterations above), you need to enclose the code in <# and #> while if you want the generator to interpret the VALUE of code, such as putting the entity name into the class name, you need to enclose the code in <#= and #> like so: public partial class <#=entity.Name#> To make a long story short, I did a lot of repetition of the above to come up with a text template that generates a class for each entity based on its properties, and a set of IO methods for each entity based on its relationships.  The two work together to provide lazy-loading for hierarchical data (such getting Team.Players) so it should be pretty intuitive to use on a front-end.  This text template is available here you can tweak the inputFiles array to load one or many different edmx models and generate the basic xml IO and class files, though it will probably only work correctly in the simplest of cases, like our MFL model described in the previous post.  Additionally, there is no validation, logging or error handling which is something I want to handle later by stumbling through the enterprise library 5.0. The code that gets generated isnt anything special, though using the LINQ to XML feature was something very new and exciting for me I had only worked with XML in the past using the DOM or XML Reader objects along with XPath, and the LINQ to XML model is just so much more elegant and supposedly efficient (something to test later).  For example, the following code was generated to create a Player object for each Player node in the XML:         return from element in GetXmlData(_PlayerDataFile).Descendants("Player")             select new Player             {                 Id = int.Parse(element.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,ParentName = element.Parent.Name.LocalName                 ,ParentId = long.Parse(element.Parent.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,Name = element.Attribute("Name").Value                 ,PositionId = int.Parse(element.Attribute("PositionId").Value)             }; It is all done in one line of code, no looping needed.  Even though GetXmlData loads the entire xml file just like the old XML DOM approach would have, it is supposed to be much less resource intensive.  I will definitely put that to the test after we develop a user interface for getting at this data.  Speaking of the data where IS the data?  Weve put together a pretty model and a bunch of code around it, but we dont have any data to speak of.  We can certainly drop to our favorite XML editor and crank out some data, but if it doesnt totally match our model, it will not load correctly.  To help with this, Ive built in a method to generate xml at any given layer in the hierarchy.  So for us to get the closest possible thing to real data, wed need to invoke MFL.IO.GenerateTeamXML and save the results to file.  Doing so should get us something that looks like this: <Team Id="0" Name="0">   <Player Id="0" Name="0" PositionId="0">     <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="0" RushYards="0" Year="0" />   </Player> </Team> Sadly, it is missing the Positions node (havent thought of a way to generate lookup xml yet) and the data itself isnt quite realistic (well, as realistic as MFL data can be anyway).  Lets manually remedy that for now to give us a decent starter set of data.  Note that this is TWO xml files Lookups.xml and Teams.xml: <Lookups Id=0>   <Position Id="0" Name="Quarterback"/>   <Position Id="1" Name="Runningback"/> </Lookups> <Teams Id=0>   <Team Id="0" Name="Chicago">     <Player Id="0" Name="QB Bears" PositionId="0">       <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="4000" RushYards="120" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="1" PassYards="4200" RushYards="180" Year="2009" />     </Player>     <Player Id="1" Name="RB Bears" PositionId="1">       <Statistic Id="2" PassYards="0" RushYards="800" Year="2007" />       <Statistic Id="3" PassYards="0" RushYards="1200" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="4" PassYards="3" RushYards="1450" Year="2009" />     </Player>   </Team> </Teams> Ok, so we have some data, we have a way to read/write that data and we have a friendly way of representing that data.  Now, what remains is the part that I have been looking forward to the most: present the data to the user and give them the ability to add/update/delete, and doing so in a way that is very intuitive (easy) from a development standpoint.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• VBA WinHTTPRequest and submitting forms

  - by Hazerider

  Hi. I spent all day yesterday trying to figure out how to submit a form using WinHTTPRequest. I can do it pretty easily with an InternetExplorer object, but the problem is that I need to save a PDF file that gets returned, and I am not sure how to do this with the IE object. Here is the relevant HTML code snippet: <div class="loginHome-left"> <fieldset> <h3>Log in Using</h3> <form> <label for="standardLogin" accesskey="s"> <input name="useLogin" id="standardLogin" value="standard" type="radio" checked="true">Standard Login</label> &nbsp; <label for="rsaSecurID" accesskey="r"> <input name="useLogin" value="rsaSecur" type="radio" id="rsaSecurID" onclick="redirectLogin('ct_logon_securid');return false;">RSA SecurID</label> &nbsp; <label for="employeeNTXP" accesskey="e"> <input name="useLogin" id="employeeNTXP" value="employee" type="radio" onclick="redirectLogin('ct_logon_external_nt');return false; "> Employee Windows Login<br></label> </form> <br> <div class="error">Error: ...</div><br> <form onSubmit="if(validate(this)) {formSubmit();} return false;" name="passwdForm" method="post" action="/UAB/ct_logon"> <input value="custom" name="pageId" type="hidden"> <input value="custom" name="auth_mode" type="hidden"> <input value="/UAB/ct_logon" name="ct_orig_uri" type="hidden"> <INPUT VALUE="" NAME="orig_url" TYPE="hidden"> <input value="" name="lpSp" type="hidden"> <label for="user"> <strong>Username</strong> </label> <input autocomplete="off" name="user" type="text" value="" class="txtFld" onkeypress="return handleEnter(this, event);"> <br> <label for="EnterPassword"> <strong>Password</strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;(<a tabindex="-1" href="/UAB/BCResetWithSecrets">Forgot Your Password?</a>) </label> <input autocomplete="off" name="password" type="password" class="txtFld" onkeypress="return handleEnter(this, event);"> <INPUT id="rememberLogin" name="lpCookie" type="checkbox"> <label for="rememberLogin">Remember My Login Information</label><br> </form> <div class="right"> <br> <input type="image" src="/BC_S/images/bclogin/btn_login.gif" name="" value="Submit" onClick="if(validate(document.forms['passwdForm'])){formSubmit();}return false;"> </div> <div class="clearfix"></div> </fieldset> </div> In order to log in through InternetExplorer, I do the following: Sub TestLogin() Dim ie As InternetExplorer, doc As HTMLDocument, form As HTMLFormElement, inp As Variant Set ie = New InternetExplorer ie.Visible = True ie.navigate "https://URL of the login page" Do Until ie.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE Loop Set doc = ie.document For Each form In doc.forms If InStr(form.innerText, "Password") <> 0 Then form.elements("user").Value = "my_name" form.elements("password").Value = "my_password" Exit For Else End If Next 'This is the unnamed input with an image that is used to submit the form' doc.all(78).Click ie.navigate "https://url of the PDF" Do Until ie.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE Loop Dim filename As String, filenum As Integer filename = "somefile.pdf" filenum = FreeFile Open filename For Binary Access Write As #filenum Write #filenum, doc.DocumentElement.innerText Close #filenum ie.Quit Debug.Print Set ie = Nothing End Sub What I really would like to do is something along the lines of the following: Sub TestLogin3() Dim whr As New WinHttpRequest, postData As String whr.Open "POST", "https://live.barcap.com/UAB/ct_logon", False whr.setRequestHeader "User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)" whr.setRequestHeader "Connection", "Keep-Alive" whr.Send whr.WaitForResponse postData = "user=paschom1&password=change01" 'Or the following?' postData = "user=paschom1&password=change01&orig_url=&pageId=custom&auth_mode=custom&ct_orig_uri=/BC/dispatcher&lpSp=&lpCookie=off" whr.Send postData whr.WaitForResponse Debug.Print whr.responseText End Sub It just refuses to work though. Not sure if I need to use more setRequestHeader with Content-Form or something similar, and if I do, not sure what exactly I am supposed to pass it. If anyone has any advice regarding this, it would be hugely appreciated. I could probably use a perl module to do it, but I would rather keep it all in VBA if possible. Thanks, Marc.

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• java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Method must not be null

  - by abc

  Nested in org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer#0': Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Method must not be null:java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Method must not be null i am getting this deployment error while deploying my application. java -version java version "1.6.0_20" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02) Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode) while the same build gets deployed successfully in the same server jetty 6.1.3 with following conf. java version "1.6.0_17" spring version used is 2.5.6.SEC01 how to overcome, googling didnt work? 2010-05-13 15:53:20.903::WARN: Failed startup of context org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext@9ad840{/caw,jar:file:/home/jigar/jetty-6.1.3/webapps/caw.war!/} org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer#0': Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Method must not be null at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:480) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory$1.run(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:409) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:380) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory$1.getObject(AbstractBeanFactory.java:264) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.getSingleton(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:222) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.doGetBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:261) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:185) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:164) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.invokeBeanFactoryPostProcessors(AbstractApplicationContext.java:515) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:362) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.createWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:255) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:199) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:45) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.startContext(ContextHandler.java:530) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.Context.startContext(Context.java:135) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.startContext(WebAppContext.java:1218) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.doStart(ContextHandler.java:500) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.doStart(WebAppContext.java:448) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerCollection.doStart(HandlerCollection.java:147) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandlerCollection.doStart(ContextHandlerCollection.java:161) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerCollection.doStart(HandlerCollection.java:147) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.doStart(HandlerWrapper.java:117) at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.doStart(Server.java:210) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.xml.XmlConfiguration.main(XmlConfiguration.java:929) 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.mortbay.start.Main.invokeMain(Main.java:183) at org.mortbay.start.Main.start(Main.java:497) at org.mortbay.start.Main.main(Main.java:115) Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Method must not be null at org.springframework.util.Assert.notNull(Assert.java:112) at org.springframework.core.BridgeMethodResolver.findBridgedMethod(BridgeMethodResolver.java:63) at org.springframework.beans.GenericTypeAwarePropertyDescriptor.<init>(GenericTypeAwarePropertyDescriptor.java:58) at org.springframework.beans.CachedIntrospectionResults.<init>(CachedIntrospectionResults.java:250) at org.springframework.beans.CachedIntrospectionResults.forClass(CachedIntrospectionResults.java:144) at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.getCachedIntrospectionResults(BeanWrapperImpl.java:252) at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.getPropertyDescriptorInternal(BeanWrapperImpl.java:282) at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.isWritableProperty(BeanWrapperImpl.java:333) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.applyPropertyValues(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1247) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.populateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1010) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:472) ... 35 more 2010-05-13 15:53:20.906::WARN: Nested in org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer#0': Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Method must not be null: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Method must not be null at org.springframework.util.Assert.notNull(Assert.java:112) at org.springframework.core.BridgeMethodResolver.findBridgedMethod(BridgeMethodResolver.java:63) at org.springframework.beans.GenericTypeAwarePropertyDescriptor.<init>(GenericTypeAwarePropertyDescriptor.java:58) at org.springframework.beans.CachedIntrospectionResults.<init>(CachedIntrospectionResults.java:250) at org.springframework.beans.CachedIntrospectionResults.forClass(CachedIntrospectionResults.java:144) at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.getCachedIntrospectionResults(BeanWrapperImpl.java:252) at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.getPropertyDescriptorInternal(BeanWrapperImpl.java:282) at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.isWritableProperty(BeanWrapperImpl.java:333) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.applyPropertyValues(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1247) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.populateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1010) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:472) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory$1.run(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:409) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:380) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory$1.getObject(AbstractBeanFactory.java:264) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.getSingleton(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:222) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.doGetBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:261) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:185) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:164) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.invokeBeanFactoryPostProcessors(AbstractApplicationContext.java:515) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:362) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.createWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:255) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:199) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:45) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.startContext(ContextHandler.java:530) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.Context.startContext(Context.java:135) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.startContext(WebAppContext.java:1218) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.doStart(ContextHandler.java:500) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.doStart(WebAppContext.java:448) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerCollection.doStart(HandlerCollection.java:147) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandlerCollection.doStart(ContextHandlerCollection.java:161) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerCollection.doStart(HandlerCollection.java:147) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.doStart(HandlerWrapper.java:117) at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.doStart(Server.java:210) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.xml.XmlConfiguration.main(XmlConfiguration.java:929) 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.mortbay.start.Main.invokeMain(Main.java:183) at org.mortbay.start.Main.start(Main.java:497) at org.mortbay.start.Main.main(Main.java:115) 2010-05-13 15:53:20.964::INFO: Started SelectChannelConnector @ 0.0.0.0:8090

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• How to reduce iOS AVPlayer start delay

  - by Bernt Habermeier

  Note, for the below question: All assets are local on the device -- no network streaming is taking place. The videos contain audio tracks. I'm working on an iOS application that requires playing video files with minimum delay to start the video clip in question. Unfortunately we do not know what specific video clip is next until we actually need to start it up. Specifically: When one video clip is playing, we will know what the next set of (roughly) 10 video clips are, but we don't know which one exactly, until it comes time to 'immediately' play the next clip. What I've done to look at actual start delays is to call addBoundaryTimeObserverForTimes on the video player, with a time period of one millisecond to see when the video actually started to play, and I take the difference of that time stamp with the first place in the code that indicates which asset to start playing. From what I've seen thus-far, I have found that using the combination of AVAsset loading, and then creating an AVPlayerItem from that once it's ready, and then waiting for AVPlayerStatusReadyToPlay before I call play, tends to take between 1 and 3 seconds to start the clip. I've since switched to what I think is roughly equivalent: calling [AVPlayerItem playerItemWithURL:] and waiting for AVPlayerItemStatusReadyToPlay to play. Roughly same performance. One thing I'm observing is that the first AVPlayer item load is slower than the rest. Seems one idea is to pre-flight the AVPlayer with a short / empty asset before trying to play the first video might be of good general practice. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/900461/slow-start-for-avaudioplayer-the-first-time-a-sound-is-played] I'd love to get the video start times down as much as possible, and have some ideas of things to experiment with, but would like some guidance from anyone that might be able to help. Update: idea 7, below, as-implemented yields switching times of around 500 ms. This is an improvement, but it it'd be nice to get this even faster. Idea 1: Use N AVPlayers (won't work) Using ~ 10 AVPPlayer objects and start-and-pause all ~ 10 clips, and once we know which one we really need, switch to, and un-pause the correct AVPlayer, and start all over again for the next cycle. I don't think this works, because I've read there is roughly a limit of 4 active AVPlayer's in iOS. There was someone asking about this on StackOverflow here, and found out about the 4 AVPlayer limit: fast-switching-between-videos-using-avfoundation Idea 2: Use AVQueuePlayer (won't work) I don't believe that shoving 10 AVPlayerItems into an AVQueuePlayer would pre-load them all for seamless start. AVQueuePlayer is a queue, and I think it really only makes the next video in the queue ready for immediate playback. I don't know which one out of ~10 videos we do want to play back, until it's time to start that one. ios-avplayer-video-preloading Idea 3: Load, Play, and retain AVPlayerItems in background (not 100% sure yet -- but not looking good) I'm looking at if there is any benefit to load and play the first second of each video clip in the background (suppress video and audio output), and keep a reference to each AVPlayerItem, and when we know which item needs to be played for real, swap that one in, and swap the background AVPlayer with the active one. Rinse and Repeat. The theory would be that recently played AVPlayer/AVPlayerItem's may still hold some prepared resources which would make subsequent playback faster. So far, I have not seen benefits from this, but I might not have the AVPlayerLayer setup correctly for the background. I doubt this will really improve things from what I've seen. Idea 4: Use a different file format -- maybe one that is faster to load? I'm currently using .m4v's (video-MPEG4) H.264 format. I have not played around with other formats, but it may well be that some formats are faster to decode / get ready than others. Possible still using video-MPEG4 but with a different codec, or maybe quicktime? Maybe a lossless video format where decoding / setup is faster? Idea 5: Combination of lossless video format + AVQueuePlayer If there is a video format that is fast to load, but maybe where the file size is insane, one idea might be to pre-prepare the first 10 seconds of each video clip with a version that is boated but faster to load, but back that up with an asset that is encoded in H.264. Use an AVQueuePlayer, and add the first 10 seconds in the uncompressed file format, and follow that up with one that is in H.264 which gets up to 10 seconds of prepare/preload time. So I'd get 'the best' of both worlds: fast start times, but also benefits from a more compact format. Idea 6: Use a non-standard AVPlayer / write my own / use someone else's Given my needs, maybe I can't use AVPlayer, but have to resort to AVAssetReader, and decode the first few seconds (possibly write raw file to disk), and when it comes to playback, make use of the raw format to play it back fast. Seems like a huge project to me, and if I go about it in a naive way, it's unclear / unlikely to even work better. Each decoded and uncompressed video frame is 2.25 MB. Naively speaking -- if we go with ~ 30 fps for the video, I'd end up with ~60 MB/s read-from-disk requirement, which is probably impossible / pushing it. Obviously we'd have to do some level of image compression (perhaps native openGL/es compression formats via PVRTC)... but that's kind crazy. Maybe there is a library out there that I can use? Idea 7: Combine everything into a single movie asset, and seekToTime One idea that might be easier than some of the above, is to combine everything into a single movie, and use seekToTime. The thing is that we'd be jumping all around the place. Essentially random access into the movie. I think this may actually work out okay: avplayer-movie-playing-lag-in-ios5 Which approach do you think would be best? So far, I've not made that much progress in terms of reducing the lag.

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• Help with Design for Vacation Tracking System (C#/.NET/Access/WebServices/SOA/Excel) [closed]

  - by Aaronaught

  I have been tasked with developing a system for tracking our company's paid time-off (vacation, sick days, etc.) At the moment we are using an Excel spreadsheet on a shared network drive, and it works pretty well, but we are concerned that we won't be able to "trust" employees forever and sometimes we run into locking issues when two people try to open the spreadsheet at once. So we are trying to build something a little more robust. I would like some input on this design in terms of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, etc. It's a pretty simple workflow we need to represent right now: I started with a basic MS Access schema like this: Employees (EmpID int, EmpName varchar(50), AllowedDays int) Vacations (VacationID int, EmpID int, BeginDate datetime, EndDate datetime) But we don't want to spend a lot of time building a schema and database like this and have to change it later, so I think I am going to go with something that will be easier to expand through configuration. Right now the vacation table has this schema: Vacations (VacationID int, PropName varchar(50), PropValue varchar(50)) And the table will be populated with data like this: VacationID | PropName | PropValue -----------+--------------+------------------ 1 | EmpID | 4 1 | EmpName | James Jones 1 | Reason | Vacation 1 | BeginDate | 2/24/2010 1 | EndDate | 2/30/2010 1 | Destination | Spectate Swamp 2 | ... | ... I think this is a pretty good, extensible design, we can easily add new properties to the vacation like the destination or maybe approval status, etc. I wasn't too sure how to go about managing the database of valid properties, I thought of putting them in a separate PropNames table but it gets complicated to manage all the different data types and people say that you shouldn't put CLR type names into a SQL database, so I decided to use XML instead, here is the schema: <VacationProperties> <PropertyNames>EmpID,EmpName,Reason,BeginDate,EndDate,Destination</PropertyNames> <PropertyTypes>System.Int32,System.String,System.String,System.DateTime,System.DateTime,System.String</PropertyTypes> <PropertiesRequired>true,true,false,true,true,false</PropertiesRequired> </VacationProperties> I might need more fields than that, I'm not completely sure. I'm parsing the XML like this (would like some feedback on the parsing code): string xml = File.ReadAllText("properties.xml"); Match m = Regex.Match(xml, "<(PropertyNames)>(.*?)</PropertyNames>"; string[] pn = m.Value.Split(','); // do the same for PropertyTypes, PropertiesRequired Then I use the following code to persist configuration changes to the database: string sql = "DROP TABLE VacationProperties"; sql = sql + " CREATE TABLE VacationProperties "; sql = sql + "(PropertyName varchar(100), PropertyType varchar(100) "; sql = sql + "IsRequired varchar(100))"; for (int i = 0; i < pn.Length; i++) { sql = sql + " INSERT VacationProperties VALUES (" + pn[i] + "," + pt[i] + "," + pv[i] + ")"; } // GlobalConnection is a singleton new SqlCommand(sql, GlobalConnection.Instance).ExecuteReader(); So far so good, but after a few days of this I then realized that a lot of this was just a more specific kind of a generic workflow which could be further abstracted, and instead of writing all of this boilerplate plumbing code I could just come up with a workflow and plug it into a workflow engine like Windows Workflow Foundation and have the users configure it: In order to support routing these configurations throw the workflow system, it seemed natural to implement generic XML Web Services for this instead of just using an XML file as above. I've used this code to implement the Web Services: public class VacationConfigurationService : WebService { [WebMethod] public void UpdateConfiguration(string xml) { // Above code goes here } } Which was pretty easy, although I'm still working on a way to validate that XML against some kind of schema as there's no error-checking yet. I also created a few different services for other operations like VacationSubmissionService, VacationReportService, VacationDataService, VacationAuthenticationService, etc. The whole Service Oriented Architecture looks like this: And because the workflow itself might change, I have been working on a way to integrate the WF workflow system with MS Visio, which everybody at the office already knows how to use so they could make changes pretty easily. We have a diagram that looks like the following (it's kind of hard to read but the main items are Activities, Authenticators, Validators, Transformers, Processors, and Data Connections, they're all analogous to the services in the SOA diagram above). The requirements for this system are: (Note - I don't control these, they were given to me by management) Main workflow must interface with Excel spreadsheet, probably through VBA macros (to ease the transition to the new system) Alerts should integrate with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMS (text messages). We also want to interface it with the company Voice Mail system but that is not a "hard" requirement. Performance requirements: Must handle 250,000 Transactions Per Second Should be able to handle up to 20,000 employees (right now we have 3) 99.99% uptime ("four nines") expected Must be secure against outside hacking, but users cannot be required to enter a username/password. Platforms: Must support Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, DOS 2.0, VAX, IRIX, PDP-11, Apple IIc. Time to complete: 6 to 8 weeks. My questions are: Is this a good design for the system so far? Am I using all of the recommended best practices for these technologies? How do I integrate the Visio diagram above with the Windows Workflow Foundation to call the ConfigurationService and persist workflow changes? Am I missing any important components? Will this be extensible enough to support any scenario via end-user configuration? Will the system scale to the above performance requirements? Will we need any expensive hardware to run it? Are there any "gotchas" I should know about with respect to cross-platform compatibility? For example would it be difficult to convert this to an iPhone app? How long would you expect this to take? (We've dedicated 1 week for testing so I'm thinking maybe 5 weeks?) Many thanks for your advices, Aaron

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• Java: immutability, overuse of stack -- better data structure?

  - by HH

  I overused hashSets but it was slow, then changed to Stacks, speed boost-up. Poly's reply uses Collections.emptyList() as immutable list, cutting out excess null-checkers. No Collections.emptyStack(). Combining the words stack and immutability, from the last experiences, gets "immutable stack" (probably not related to functional prog). Java Api 5 for list interface shows that Stack is an implementing class for list and arraylist, here. The java.coccurrent pkg does not have any immutable Stack data structure. The first hinted of misusing stack. The lack of immutabily in the last and poly's book recommendation leads way to list. Something very primitive, fast, no extra layers, with methods like emptyThing(). Overuse of stack and where I use it DataFile.java: public Stack<DataFile> files; FileObject.java: public Stack<String> printViews = new Stack<String>(); FileObject.java:// private static Stack<Object> getFormat(File f){return (new Format(f)).getFormat();} Format.java: private Stack<Object> getLine(File[] fs,String s){return wF;} Format.java: private Stack<Object> getFormat(){return format;} Positions.java: public static Stack<Integer[]> getPrintPoss(String s,File f,Integer maxViewPerF) Positions.java: Stack<File> possPrint = new Stack<File>(); Positions.java: Stack<Integer> positions=new Stack<Integer>(); Record.java: private String getFormatLine(Stack<Object> st) Record.java: Stack<String> lines=new Stack<String>(); SearchToUser.java: public static final Stack<File> allFiles = findf.getFs(); SearchToUser.java: public static final Stack<File> allDirs = findf.getDs(); SearchToUser.java: private Stack<Integer[]> positionsPrint=new Stack<Integer[]>(); SearchToUser.java: public Stack<String> getSearchResults(String s, Integer countPerFile, Integer resCount) SearchToUser.java: Stack<File> filesToS=Fs2Word.getFs2W(s,50); SearchToUser.java: Stack<String> rs=new Stack<String>(); View.java: public Stack<Integer[]> poss = new Stack<Integer[4]>(); View.java: public static Stack<String> getPrintViewsFileWise(String s,Object[] df,Integer maxViewsPerF) View.java: Stack<String> substrings = new Stack<String>(); View.java: private Stack<String> printViews=new Stack<String>(); View.java: MatchView(Stack<Integer> pss,File f,Integer maxViews) View.java: Stack<String> formatFile; View.java: private Stack<Search> files; View.java: private Stack<File> matchingFiles; View.java: private Stack<String> matchViews; View.java: private Stack<String> searchMatches; View.java: private Stack<String> getSearchResults(Integer numbResults) Easier with List: AllDirs and AllFs, now looping with push, but list has more pow. methods such as addAll [OLD] From Stack to some immutable data structure How to get immutable Stack data structure? Can I box it with list? Should I switch my current implementatios from stacks to Lists to get immutable? Which immutable data structure is Very fast with about similar exec time as Stack? No immutability to Stack with Final import java.io.*; import java.util.*; public class TestStack{ public static void main(String[] args) { final Stack<Integer> test = new Stack<Integer>(); Stack<Integer> test2 = new Stack<Integer>(); test.push(37707); test2.push(80437707); //WHY is there not an error to remove an elment // from FINAL stack? System.out.println(test.pop()); System.out.println(test2.pop()); } }

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