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• Windows for IoT, continued

  - by Valter Minute

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products.   *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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• jqGrid - dynamically load different drop down values for different rows depending on another column value

  - by Renso

  Goal: As we all know the jqGrid examples in the demo and the Wiki always refer to static values for drop down boxes. This of course is a personal preference but in dynamic design these values should be populated from the database/xml file, etc, ideally JSON formatted. Can you do this in jqGrid, yes, but with some custom coding which we will briefly show below (refer to some of my other blog entries for a more detailed discussion on this topic). What you CANNOT do in jqGrid, referrign here up and to version 3.8.x, is to load different drop down values for different rows in the jqGrid. Well, not without some trickery, which is what this discussion is about. Issue: Of course the issue is that jqGrid has been designed for high performance and thus I have no issue with them loading a  reference to a single drop down values list for every column. This way if you have 500 rows or one, each row only refers to a single list for that particuolar column. Nice! SO how easy would it be to simply traverse the grid once loaded on gridComplete or loadComplete and simply load the select tag's options from scratch, via ajax, from memory variable, hard coded etc? Impossible! Since their is no embedded SELECT tag within each cell containing the drop down values (remeber it only has a reference to that list in memory), all you will see when you inspect the cell prior to clicking on it, or even before and on beforeEditCell, is an empty <TD></TD>. When trying to load that list via a click event on that cell will temporarily load the list but jqGrid's last internal callback event will remove it and replace it with the old one, and you are back to square one. Solution: Yes, after spending a few hours on this found a solution to the problem that does not require any updates to jqGrid source code, thank GOD! Before we get into the coding details, the solution here can of course be customized to suite your specific needs, this one loads the entire drop down list that would be needed across all rows once into global variable. I then parse this object that contains all the properties I need to filter the rows depending on which ones I want the user to see based off of another cell value in that row. This only happens when clicking the cell, so no performance penalty. You may of course to load it via ajax when the user clicks the cell, but I found it more effecient to load the entire list as part of jqGrid's normal editoptions: { multiple: false, value: listingStatus } colModel options which again keeps only a reference to the sinlge list, no duplciation. Lets get into the meat and potatoes of it.         var acctId = $('#Id').val();         var data = $.ajax({ url: $('#ajaxGetAllMaterialsTrackingLookupDataUrl').val(), data: { accountId: acctId }, dataType: 'json', async: false, success: function(data, result) { if (!result) alert('Failure to retrieve the Alert related lookup data.'); } }).responseText;         var lookupData = eval('(' + data + ')');         var listingCategory = lookupData.ListingCategory;         var listingStatus = lookupData.ListingStatus;         var catList = '{';         $(lookupData.ListingCategory).each(function() {             catList += this.Id + ':"' + this.Name + '",';         });         catList += '}';         var lastsel;         var ignoreAlert = true;         $(item)         .jqGrid({             url: listURL,             postData: '',             datatype: "local",             colNames: ['Id', 'Name', 'Commission<br />Rep', 'Business<br />Group', 'Order<br />Date', 'Edit', 'TBD', 'Month', 'Year', 'Week', 'Product', 'Product<br />Type', 'Online/<br />Magazine', 'Materials', 'Special<br />Placement', 'Logo', 'Image', 'Text', 'Contact<br />Info', 'Everthing<br />In', 'Category', 'Status'],             colModel: [                 { name: 'Id', index: 'Id', hidden: true, hidedlg: true },                 { name: 'AccountName', index: 'AccountName', align: "left", resizable: true, search: true, width: 100 },                 { name: 'OnlineName', index: 'OnlineName', align: 'left', sortable: false, width: 80 },                 { name: 'ListingCategoryName', index: 'ListingCategoryName', width: 85, editable: true, hidden: false, edittype: "select", editoptions: { multiple: false, value: eval('(' + catList + ')') }, editrules: { required: false }, formatoptions: { disabled: false} }             ],             jsonReader: {                 root: "List",                 page: "CurrentPage",                 total: "TotalPages",                 records: "TotalRecords",                 userdata: "Errors",                 repeatitems: false,                 id: "0"             },             rowNum: $rows,             rowList: [10, 20, 50, 200, 500, 1000, 2000],             imgpath: jQueryImageRoot,             pager: $(item + 'Pager'),             shrinkToFit: true,             width: 1455,             recordtext: 'Traffic lines',             sortname: 'OrderDate',             viewrecords: true,             sortorder: "asc",             altRows: true,             cellEdit: true,             cellsubmit: "remote",             cellurl: editURL + '?rows=' + $rows + '&page=1',             loadComplete: function() {               },             gridComplete: function() {             },             loadError: function(xhr, st, err) {             },             afterEditCell: function(rowid, cellname, value, iRow, iCol) {                 var select = $(item).find('td.edit-cell select');                 $(item).find('td.edit-cell select option').each(function() {                     var option = $(this);                     var optionId = $(this).val();                     $(lookupData.ListingCategory).each(function() {                         if (this.Id == optionId) {                                                       if (this.OnlineName != $(item).getCell(rowid, 'OnlineName')) {                                 option.remove();                                 return false;                             }                         }                     });                 });             },             search: true,             searchdata: {},             caption: "List of all Traffic lines",             editurl: editURL + '?rows=' + $rows + '&page=1',             hiddengrid: hideGrid   Here is the JSON data returned via the ajax call during the jqGrid function call above (NOTE it must be { async: false}: {"ListingCategory":[{"Id":29,"Name":"Document Imaging & Management","OnlineName":"RF Globalnet"} ,{"Id":1,"Name":"Ancillary Department Hardware","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":2,"Name":"Asset Tracking","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":3,"Name":"Asset Tracking","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":4,"Name":"Asset Tracking","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":5,"Name":"Document Imaging & Management","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":6,"Name":"Document Imaging & Management","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":7,"Name":"EMR/EHR Software","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"}]} I only need the Id and Name for the drop down list, but the third column in the JSON object is important, it is the only that I match up with the OnlineName in the jqGrid column, and then in the loop during afterEditCell simply remove the ones I don't want the user to see. That's it!

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• UppercuT v1.0 and 1.1&ndash;Linux (Mono), Multi-targeting, SemVer, Nitriq and Obfuscation, oh my!

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch for running builds with UC on Linux. We also released v1.1 very recently (December). UppercuT v1 Builds On Linux Perhaps the most significant changes to UC going v1 is that it now supports builds on Linux using Mono! This is thanks mostly to Svein Ackenhausen for the patches and working with me on getting it all working while not breaking the windows builds!  This means you can use mono on Windows or Linux. Notice the shell files to execute with Linux that come as part of UC now. Multi-Targeting Perhaps one of the hardest things to do that requires an automated build is multi-targeting. At v1 this is early, and possibly prone to some issues, but available.  We believe in making everything stupid simple, so it’s as simple as adding a comma to the microsoft.framework property. i.e. “net-3.5, net-4.0” to suddenly produce both framework builds. When you build, this is what you get (if you meet each framework’s requirements): At this time you have to let UC override the build location (as it does by default) or this will not work.  Semantic Versioning By now many of you have been using UppercuT for awhile and have watched how we have done versioning. Many of you who use git already know we put the revision hash in the informational/product version as the last octet. At v1, UppercuT has adopted the semantic versioning scheme. What does that mean? This is a short read, but a good one: http://SemVer.org SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is really using versioning what it was meant for. You have three octets. Major.Minor.Patch as in 1.1.0.  UC will use three different versioning concepts, one for the assembly version, one for the file version, and one for the product version. All versions - The first three octects of the version are owned by SemVer. Major.Minor.Patch i.e.: 1.1.0 Assembly Version - The assembly version would much closer follow SemVer. Last digit is always 0. Major.Minor.Patch.0 i.e: 1.1.0.0 File Version - The file version occupies the build number as the last digit. Major.Minor.Patch.Build i.e.: 1.1.0.2650 Product/Informational Version - The last octect of your product/informational version is the source control revision/hash. Major.Minor.Patch.RevisionOrHash i.e. (TFS/SVN): 1.1.0.235 i.e. (Git/HG): 1.1.0.a45ace4346adef0 SemVer is not on by default, the passive versioning scheme is still in effect. Notice that version.use_semanticversioning has been added to the UppercuT.config file (and version.patch in support of the third octet): Gems Support Gems support was added at v1. This will probably be deprecated as some point once there is an announced sunset for Nu v1. Application gems may keep it around since there is no alternative for that yet though (CoApp would be a possible replacement). Nitriq Support Nitriq is a code analysis tool like NDepend. It’s built by Mr. Jon von Gillern. It uses LINQ query language, so you can use a familiar idiom when analyzing your code base. It’s a pretty awesome tool that has a free version for those looking to do code analysis! To use Nitriq with UC, you are going to need the console edition.  To take advantage of Nitriq, you just need to update the location of Nitriq in the config: Then add the nitriq project files at the root of your source. Please refer to the Nitriq documentation on how these are created. UppercuT v1.1 Obfuscation One thing I started looking into was an easy way to obfuscate my code. I came across EazFuscator, which is both free and awesome. Plus the GUI for it is super simple to use. How do you make obfuscation even easier? Make it a convention and a configurable property in the UC config file! And the code gets obfuscated! Closing Definitely get out and look at the new release. It contains lots of chocolaty (sp?) goodness. And remember, the upgrade path is almost as simple as drag and drop!

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• Myths about Coding Craftsmanship part 2

  - by tom

  Myth 3: The source of all bad code is inept developers and stupid people When you review code is this what you assume?  Shame on you.  You are probably making assumptions in your code if you are assuming so much already.  Bad code can be the result of any number of causes including but not limited to using dated techniques (like boxing when generics are available), not following standards (“look how he does the spacing between arguments!” or “did he really just name that variable ‘bln_Hello_Cats’?”), being redundant, using properties, methods, or objects in a novel way (like switching on button.Text between “Hello World” and “Hello World “ //clever use of space character… sigh), not following the SOLID principals, hacking around assumptions made in earlier iterations / hacking in features that should be worked into the overall design.  The first two issues, while annoying are pretty easy to spot and can be fixed so easily.  If your coding team is made up of experienced professionals who are passionate about staying current then these shouldn’t be happening.  If you work with a variety of skills, backgrounds, and experience then there will be some of this stuff going on.  If you have an opportunity to mentor such a developer who is receptive to constructive criticism don’t be a jerk; help them and the codebase will improve.  A little patience can improve the codebase, your work environment, and even your perspective. The novelty and redundancy I have encountered has often been the use of creativity when language knowledge was perceived as unavailable or too time consuming.  When developers learn on the job you get a lot of this.  Rather than going to MSDN developers will use what they know.  Depending on the constraints of their assignment hacking together what they know may seem quite practical.  This was not stupid though I often wonder how much time is actually “saved” by hacking.  These issues are often harder to untangle if we ever do.  They can also grow out of control as we write hack after hack to make it work and get back to some development that is satisfying. Hacking upon an existing hack is what I call “feeding the monster”.  Code monsters are anti-patterns and hacks gone wild.  The reason code monsters continue to get bigger is that they keep growing in scope, touching more and more of the application.  This is not the result of dumb developers. It is probably the result of avoiding design, not taking the time to understand the problems or anticipate or communicate the vision of the product.  If our developers don’t understand the purpose of a feature or product how do we expect potential customers to do so? Forethought and organization are often what is missing from bad code.  Developers who do not use the SOLID principals should be encouraged to learn these principals and be given guidance on how to apply them.  The time “saved” by giving hackers room to hack will be made up for and then some. Not as technical debt but as shoddy work that if not replaced will be struggled with again and again.  Bad code is not the result of dumb developers (usually) it is the result of trying to do too much without the proper resources and neglecting the right thing that needs doing with the first thoughtless thing that comes into our heads. Object oriented code is all about relationships between objects.  Coders who believe their coworkers are all fools tend to write objects that are difficult to work with, not eager to explain themselves, and perform erratically and irrationally.  If you constantly find you are surrounded by idiots you may want to ask yourself if you are being unreasonable, if you are being closed minded, of if you have chosen the right profession.  Opening your mind up to the idea that you probably work with rational, well-intentioned people will probably make you a better coder and it might even make you less grumpy.  If you are surrounded by jerks who do not engage in the exchange of ideas who do not care about their customers or the durability of the code you are building together then I suggest you find a new place to work.  Myth 4: Customers don’t care about “beautiful” code Craftsmanship is customer focused because it means that the job was done right, the product will withstand the abuse, modifications, and scrutiny of our customers.  Users can appreciate a predictable timeline for a release, a product delivered on time and on budget, a feature set that does not interfere with the task(s) it is supporting, quick turnarounds on exception messages, self healing issues, and less issues.  These are all hindered by skimping on craftsmanship.  When we write data access and when we write reusable code.   What do you think?  Does bad code come primarily from low IQ individuals?  Do customers care about beautiful code?

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• Remote Workers...We're Not That Bad!

  - by user12601034

  I work from home a lot – my team is located in different cities and countries, my manager is in a different city, and most of our work is done via conference calls, email and collaboration through Oracle Social Network. We’ve figured out how to be effective and involve team members, regardless of where we are all located. When I mention that I work from home, a lot of my friends will laugh, roll their eyes or use their fingers to make quotation marks around “work from home.” Their belief is that I’m sitting at home, eating bon-bons and watching television. The attempts at humor only multiply when they know that my husband also mostly works from home. So, it was with great joy that I read the Lifehacker article Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged. I’m not going to re-write the article for you, but four highlights from the article include: Proximity breeds complacency –because communicating with employees sitting next to you is so easy, you may not do it well. Absence makes people try harder to connect – because you have to make an effort to connect to your team, you tend to pay better attention when you do connect Leaders of virtual team make better use of tools – when working remotely, you will use technology (many different forms of it) to connect with your team. This daily use of the tools makes you more proficient with those tools Leaders of far-flung teams maximize the time spent together – getting together takes effort, time and money, so leaders tend to filter out distractions when teams do get together. These points made me happy because I’ve seen the same things play out in my team located around the world. And I’m not saying that a virtual team is more effective than a co-located team – but my virtual team doesn’t have the option of filing into a conference room for a face-to-face meeting whenever we want. Instead, we have to figure out how to work effectively without meeting face-to-face. Am I more engaged as a remote worker? I’d like to think that I am. I’ve been on calls with colleagues at 3am – this would never happen if my only option was to be in the office. I can leave my “office” to pick up my kids from school…and I’m willingly back online after kids are in bed to finish up anything I need to. Oracle Social Network lets me use my iPad to engage with my teammates when I’m waiting at music lessons, the doctor’s office or any place else with a network connection. I feel like I’m more connected with my team, and I feel like I’m more connected with my family life. So yes, I am a remote worker, and I am engaged. If you lead a virtual team, I challenge you to increase the ways that you communicate to effectively engage your team. If you are on a virtual team, I challenge you to think about how you might interact with team members to keep both them and yourself engaged in your work. And if you have some great ideas on how to make virtual teams (and workers) effective and engaged, please share those ideas in the comments! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get a bon-bon...   :) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Relative cam movement and momentum on arbitrary surface

  - by user29244

  I have been working on a game for quite long, think sonic classic physics in 3D or tony hawk psx, with unity3D. However I'm stuck at the most fundamental aspect of movement. The requirement is that I need to move the character in mario 64 fashion (or sonic adventure) aka relative cam input: the camera's forward direction always point input forward the screen, left or right input point toward left or right of the screen. when input are resting, the camera direction is independent from the character direction and the camera can orbit the character when input are pressed the character rotate itself until his direction align with the direction the input is pointing at. It's super easy to do as long your movement are parallel to the global horizontal (or any world axis). However when you try to do this on arbitrary surface (think moving along complex curved surface) with the character sticking to the surface normal (basically moving on wall and ceiling freely), it seems harder. What I want is to achieve the same finesse of movement than in mario but on arbitrary angled surfaces. There is more problem (jumping and transitioning back to the real world alignment and then back on a surface while keeping momentum) but so far I didn't even take off the basics. So far I have accomplish moving along the curved surface and the relative cam input, but for some reason direction fail all the time (point number 3, the character align slowly to the input direction). Do you have an idea how to achieve that? Here is the code and some demo so far: The demo: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/flash%20build/litesonicengine/LiteSonicEngine5.html Camera code: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class CameraDrive : MonoBehaviour { public GameObject targetObject; public Transform camPivot, camTarget, camRoot, relcamdirDebug; float rot = 0; //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void Start() { this.transform.position = targetObject.transform.position; this.transform.rotation = targetObject.transform.rotation; } void FixedUpdate() { //the pivot system camRoot.position = targetObject.transform.position; //input on pivot orientation rot = 0; float mouse_x = Input.GetAxisRaw( "camera_analog_X" ); // rot = rot + ( 0.1f * Time.deltaTime * mouse_x ); // wrapAngle( rot ); // //when the target object rotate, it rotate too, this should not happen UpdateOrientation(this.transform.forward,targetObject.transform.up); camRoot.transform.RotateAround(camRoot.transform.up,rot); //debug the relcam dir RelativeCamDirection() ; //this camera this.transform.position = camPivot.position; //set the camera to the pivot this.transform.LookAt( camTarget.position ); // } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- public float wrapAngle ( float Degree ) { while (Degree < 0.0f) { Degree = Degree + 360.0f; } while (Degree >= 360.0f) { Degree = Degree - 360.0f; } return Degree; } private void UpdateOrientation( Vector3 forward_vector, Vector3 ground_normal ) { Vector3 projected_forward_to_normal_surface = forward_vector - ( Vector3.Dot( forward_vector, ground_normal ) ) * ground_normal; camRoot.transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation( projected_forward_to_normal_surface, ground_normal ); } float GetOffsetAngle( float targetAngle, float DestAngle ) { return ((targetAngle - DestAngle + 180)% 360) - 180; } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void OnDrawGizmos() { Gizmos.DrawCube( camPivot.transform.position, new Vector3(1,1,1) ); Gizmos.DrawCube( camTarget.transform.position, new Vector3(1,5,1) ); Gizmos.DrawCube( camRoot.transform.position, new Vector3(1,1,1) ); } void OnGUI() { GUI.Label(new Rect(0,80,1000,20*10), "targetObject.transform.up : " + targetObject.transform.up.ToString()); GUI.Label(new Rect(0,100,1000,20*10), "target euler : " + targetObject.transform.eulerAngles.y.ToString()); GUI.Label(new Rect(0,100,1000,20*10), "rot : " + rot.ToString()); } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void RelativeCamDirection() { float input_vertical_movement = Input.GetAxisRaw( "Vertical" ), input_horizontal_movement = Input.GetAxisRaw( "Horizontal" ); Vector3 relative_forward = Vector3.forward, relative_right = Vector3.right, relative_direction = ( relative_forward * input_vertical_movement ) + ( relative_right * input_horizontal_movement ) ; MovementController MC = targetObject.GetComponent<MovementController>(); MC.motion = relative_direction.normalized * MC.acceleration * Time.fixedDeltaTime; MC.motion = this.transform.TransformDirection( MC.motion ); //MC.transform.Rotate(Vector3.up, input_horizontal_movement * 10f * Time.fixedDeltaTime); } } Mouvement code: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class MovementController : MonoBehaviour { public float deadZoneValue = 0.1f, angle, acceleration = 50.0f; public Vector3 motion ; //-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void OnGUI() { GUILayout.Label( "transform.rotation : " + transform.rotation ); GUILayout.Label( "transform.position : " + transform.position ); GUILayout.Label( "angle : " + angle ); } void FixedUpdate () { Ray ground_check_ray = new Ray( gameObject.transform.position, -gameObject.transform.up ); RaycastHit raycast_result; Rigidbody rigid_body = gameObject.rigidbody; if ( Physics.Raycast( ground_check_ray, out raycast_result ) ) { Vector3 next_position; //UpdateOrientation( gameObject.transform.forward, raycast_result.normal ); UpdateOrientation( gameObject.transform.forward, raycast_result.normal ); next_position = GetNextPosition( raycast_result.point ); rigid_body.MovePosition( next_position ); } } //-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- private void UpdateOrientation( Vector3 forward_vector, Vector3 ground_normal ) { Vector3 projected_forward_to_normal_surface = forward_vector - ( Vector3.Dot( forward_vector, ground_normal ) ) * ground_normal; transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation( projected_forward_to_normal_surface, ground_normal ); } private Vector3 GetNextPosition( Vector3 current_ground_position ) { Vector3 next_position; // //-------------------------------------------------------------------- // angle = 0; // Vector3 dir = this.transform.InverseTransformDirection(motion); // angle = Vector3.Angle(Vector3.forward, dir);// * 1f * Time.fixedDeltaTime; // // if(angle > 0) this.transform.Rotate(0,angle,0); // //-------------------------------------------------------------------- next_position = current_ground_position + gameObject.transform.up * 0.5f + motion ; return next_position; } } Some observation: I have the correct input, I have the correct translation in the camera direction ... but whenever I attempt to slowly lerp the direction of the character in direction of the input, all I get is wild spin! Sad Also discovered that strafing to the right (immediately at the beginning without moving forward) has major singularity trapping on the equator!! I'm totally lost and crush (I have already done a much more featured version which fail at the same aspect)

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• Easiest, most fun way to program 2D games? Flash? XNA? Some other engine?

  - by Maxi

  Hi, this is a post detailing my search for the most enjoyable way for a hobbyist game programmer to sweeten his free time with making a game. My requirements: I looked at Flash first, I made a couple of small games but I'm doubtful of the performance. I would like to make a fairly large strategy game, with several hundred units fighting simultaneously, explosions and animations included. Also zoomable maps. I saw that Adobe has a new 3D API for Flash, but I don't know if that improves 2D performance aswell, I couldn't find anything related to that question on their MAX10 sessions. Would you say that Flash is a good technology for making large 2D games easily? I really like Actionscript, and I love how easy everything is in Flash. There are several engines available which make it even easier. I just do this for fun, and it would be even better if there were proper animation/particle editors available and if the engine I were to use, would be available for multiple platforms. (so more people can play my game once finished). I'd like to have it available on many mobile platforms aswell. (because I love touch input for some reason) I do know the XNA framework pretty well, but there are no good engines available for it, and it will only run on Windows, which is a huge turn off. Even bigger is, that you need to install the XNA redistributable each time you want to give the game to someone. If I use XNA, I would have to make all the tools myself, and I'd probably have to make them with WPF. (I'd love to make tools with Adobe AIR, but unfortunately the API's for image manipulation etc. are far worse in Flash, than they are in XNA/WPF.) Now, I'm aware that I could make my own engine that supports each of those platforms, but quite frankly, that would be too much work plowing through APIs. After all, I want to make a game, not an engine. So the question becomes: Is there maybe a cross platform (free or free to develop?) engine available that I could use for 2D development? I prefer: C#, Actionscript. I don't mind using c++ if the toolset is above average, but I highly doubt that there is something out there like that. Please prove me wrong :) So summary: I'd like to use Flash, but I don't know if it scales well enough. I'm not a scripter, I want some real APIs that I can work with inside a proper IDE. Just for information, I looked at several alternatives, I'm actually looking for a long time already. You'd help me a lot to make a decision finally. Feature-wise the Flatredball engine would be ideal. But I tried their tools, and quite frankly, they are horrible. Absolutely unusable, I'd need to make my own for sure. I didn't look at their API, but if their tools are so bad, I'm not inclined to look further. Unity3D. This one is quite nice, but I really don't need 3D, and it is quite ...a lot of work to learn. I also don't like that it is so expensive to use for different platforms and that I can only code for it through scripting. You have to buy each platform separately. The editor usability is average, the product overall is good enough for most purposes, but learning it myself would be overkill. Shiva 3D. It looks good enough, but again: I don't really need 3D. The editor usability is a little worse than Unity3D in my opinion and it wasn't clear to me how to start programming. I think it requires C++ for coding, so that's a negative too. I want to have fun, and c# is fun ;) SDL. Quite frankly, I'd still need to port to all those different SDL implementations. And I don't like OpenGL style programming, it's just plain ugly. And it needs c++, I know that there might be some wrappers available, but I don't like to use wrappers, because... Irrlicht. A lot of features, but support seems to be low and it is aimed at enthusiasts. C# bindings get dropped repeatedly. I'm not an engine enthusiast, I just want to make a game. I don't see this happening with Irrlicht. Ogre3D. Way too much work, it's just a graphics engine. Also no multiple platform support and c++. Torque2D. Costs something to use, and I didn't hear a lot of good things about support and documentation. Also costs extra for each platform.

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• On Reflector Pricing

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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• MERGE gives better OUTPUT options

  - by Rob Farley

  MERGE is very cool. There are a ton of useful things about it – mostly around the fact that you can implement a ton of change against a table all at once. This is great for data warehousing, handling changes made to relational databases by applications, all kinds of things. One of the more subtle things about MERGE is the power of the OUTPUT clause. Useful for logging.   If you’re not familiar with the OUTPUT clause, you really should be – it basically makes your DML (INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/MERGE) statement return data back to you. This is a great way of returning identity values from INSERT commands (so much better than SCOPE_IDENTITY() or the older (and worse) @@IDENTITY, because you can get lots of rows back). You can even use it to grab default values that are set using non-deterministic functions like NEWID() – things you couldn’t normally get back without running another query (or with a trigger, I guess, but that’s not pretty). That inserted table I referenced – that’s part of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that goes on with all DML changes. When you insert data, this internal table called inserted gets populated with rows, and then used to inflict the appropriate inserts on the various structures that store data (HoBTs – the Heaps or B-Trees used to store data as tables and indexes). When deleting, the deleted table gets populated. Updates get a matching row in both tables (although this doesn’t mean that an update is a delete followed by an inserted, it’s just the way it’s handled with these tables). These tables can be referenced by the OUTPUT clause, which can show you the before and after for any DML statement. Useful stuff. MERGE is slightly different though. With MERGE, you get a mix of entries. Your MERGE statement might be doing some INSERTs, some UPDATEs and some DELETEs. One of the most common examples of MERGE is to perform an UPSERT command, where data is updated if it already exists, or inserted if it’s new. And in a single operation too. Here, you can see the usefulness of the deleted and inserted tables, which clearly reflect the type of operation (but then again, MERGE lets you use an extra column called $action to show this). (Don’t worry about the fact that I turned on IDENTITY_INSERT, that’s just so that I could insert the values) One of the things I love about MERGE is that it feels almost cursor-like – the UPDATE bit feels like “WHERE CURRENT OF …”, and the INSERT bit feels like a single-row insert. And it is – but into the inserted and deleted tables. The operations to maintain the HoBTs are still done using the whole set of changes, which is very cool. And $action – very convenient. But as cool as $action is, that’s not the point of my post. If it were, I hope you’d all be disappointed, as you can’t really go near the MERGE statement without learning about it. The subtle thing that I love about MERGE with OUTPUT is that you can hook into more than just inserted and deleted. Did you notice in my earlier query that my source table had a ‘src’ field, that wasn’t used in the insert? Normally, this would be somewhat pointless to include in my source query. But with MERGE, I can put that in the OUTPUT clause. This is useful stuff, particularly when you’re needing to audit the changes. Suppose your query involved consolidating data from a number of sources, but you didn’t need to insert that into the actual table, just into a table for audit. This is now very doable, either using the INTO clause of OUTPUT, or surrounding the whole MERGE statement in brackets (parentheses if you’re American) and using a regular INSERT statement. This is also doable if you’re using MERGE to just do INSERTs. In case you hadn’t realised, you can use MERGE in place of an INSERT statement. It’s just like the UPSERT-style statement we’ve just seen, except that we want nothing to match. That’s easy to do, we just use ON 1=2. This is obviously more convoluted than a straight INSERT. And it’s slightly more effort for the database engine too. But, if you want the extra audit capabilities, the ability to hook into the other source columns is definitely useful. Oh, and before people ask if you can also hook into the target table’s columns... Yes, of course. That’s what deleted and inserted give you.

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• Code refactoring with Visual Studio 2010 Part-4

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I have been writing few post with code refactoring features in Visual Studio 2010. This post also will be part of series and this post will be last of the series. In this post I am going explain two features 1) Encapsulate Field and 2) Extract Interface. Let’s explore both features in details. Encapsulate Field: This is a nice code refactoring feature provides by Visual Studio 2010. With help of this feature we can create properties from the existing private field of the class. Let’s take a simple example of Customer Class. In that I there are two private field called firstName and lastName. Below is the code for the class. public class Customer { private string firstName; private string lastName; public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } Now lets encapsulate first field firstName with Encapsulate feature. So first select that field and goto refactor menu in Visual Studio 2010 and click on Encapsulate Field. Once you click that a dialog box will appear like following. Now once you click OK a preview dialog box will open as we have selected preview reference changes. I think its a good options to check that option to preview code that is being changed by IDE itself. Dialog will look like following. Once you click apply it create a new property called FirstName. Same way I have done for the lastName and now my customer class code look like following. public class Customer { private string firstName; public string FirstName { get { return firstName; } set { firstName = value; } } private string lastName; public string LastName { get { return lastName; } set { lastName = value; } } public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } So you can see that its very easy to create properties with existing fields and you don’t have to change anything there in code it will change all the stuff itself. Extract Interface: When you are writing software prototype and You don’t know the future implementation of that then its a good practice to use interface there. I am going to explain here that How we can extract interface from the existing code without writing a single line of code with the help of code refactoring feature of Visual Studio 2010. For that I have create a Simple Repository class called CustomerRepository with three methods like following. public class CustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } In above class there are three method Add,Update and Delete where we are going to implement some code for each one. Now I want to create a interface which I can use for my other entities in project. So let’s create a interface from the above class with the help of Visual Studio 2010. So first select class and goto refactor menu and click Extract Interface. It will open up dialog box like following. Here I have selected all the method for interface and Once I click OK then it will create a new file called ICustomerRespository where it has created a interface. Just like following. Here is a code for that interface. using System; namespace CodeRefractoring { interface ICustomerRespository { void Add(); void Delete(); void Update(); } } Now let's see the code for the our class. It will also changed like following to implement the interface. public class CustomerRespository : ICustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } Isn't that great we have created a interface and implemented it without writing a single line of code. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more.. Till that Happy Programming.

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• Subterranean IL: The ThreadLocal type

  - by Simon Cooper

  I came across ThreadLocal<T> while I was researching ConcurrentBag. To look at it, it doesn't really make much sense. What's all those extra Cn classes doing in there? Why is there a GenericHolder<T,U,V,W> class? What's going on? However, digging deeper, it's a rather ingenious solution to a tricky problem. Thread statics Declaring that a variable is thread static, that is, values assigned and read from the field is specific to the thread doing the reading, is quite easy in .NET: [ThreadStatic] private static string s_ThreadStaticField; ThreadStaticAttribute is not a pseudo-custom attribute; it is compiled as a normal attribute, but the CLR has in-built magic, activated by that attribute, to redirect accesses to the field based on the executing thread's identity. TheadStaticAttribute provides a simple solution when you want to use a single field as thread-static. What if you want to create an arbitary number of thread static variables at runtime? Thread-static fields can only be declared, and are fixed, at compile time. Prior to .NET 4, you only had one solution - thread local data slots. This is a lesser-known function of Thread that has existed since .NET 1.1: LocalDataStoreSlot threadSlot = Thread.AllocateNamedDataSlot("slot1"); string value = "foo"; Thread.SetData(threadSlot, value); string gettedValue = (string)Thread.GetData(threadSlot); Each instance of LocalStoreDataSlot mediates access to a single slot, and each slot acts like a separate thread-static field. As you can see, using thread data slots is quite cumbersome. You need to keep track of LocalDataStoreSlot objects, it's not obvious how instances of LocalDataStoreSlot correspond to individual thread-static variables, and it's not type safe. It's also relatively slow and complicated; the internal implementation consists of a whole series of classes hanging off a single thread-static field in Thread itself, using various arrays, lists, and locks for synchronization. ThreadLocal<T> is far simpler and easier to use. ThreadLocal ThreadLocal provides an abstraction around thread-static fields that allows it to be used just like any other class; it can be used as a replacement for a thread-static field, it can be used in a List<ThreadLocal<T>>, you can create as many as you need at runtime. So what does it do? It can't just have an instance-specific thread-static field, because thread-static fields have to be declared as static, and so shared between all instances of the declaring type. There's something else going on here. The values stored in instances of ThreadLocal<T> are stored in instantiations of the GenericHolder<T,U,V,W> class, which contains a single ThreadStatic field (s_value) to store the actual value. This class is then instantiated with various combinations of the Cn types for generic arguments. In .NET, each separate instantiation of a generic type has its own static state. For example, GenericHolder<int,C0,C1,C2> has a completely separate s_value field to GenericHolder<int,C1,C14,C1>. This feature is (ab)used by ThreadLocal to emulate instance thread-static fields. Every time an instance of ThreadLocal is constructed, it is assigned a unique number from the static s_currentTypeId field using Interlocked.Increment, in the FindNextTypeIndex method. The hexadecimal representation of that number then defines the specific Cn types that instantiates the GenericHolder class. That instantiation is therefore 'owned' by that instance of ThreadLocal. This gives each instance of ThreadLocal its own ThreadStatic field through a specific unique instantiation of the GenericHolder class. Although GenericHolder has four type variables, the first one is always instantiated to the type stored in the ThreadLocal<T>. This gives three free type variables, each of which can be instantiated to one of 16 types (C0 to C15). This puts an upper limit of 4096 (163) on the number of ThreadLocal<T> instances that can be created for each value of T. That is, there can be a maximum of 4096 instances of ThreadLocal<string>, and separately a maximum of 4096 instances of ThreadLocal<object>, etc. However, there is an upper limit of 16384 enforced on the total number of ThreadLocal instances in the AppDomain. This is to stop too much memory being used by thousands of instantiations of GenericHolder<T,U,V,W>, as once a type is loaded into an AppDomain it cannot be unloaded, and will continue to sit there taking up memory until the AppDomain is unloaded. The total number of ThreadLocal instances created is tracked by the ThreadLocalGlobalCounter class. So what happens when either limit is reached? Firstly, to try and stop this limit being reached, it recycles GenericHolder type indexes of ThreadLocal instances that get disposed using the s_availableIndices concurrent stack. This allows GenericHolder instantiations of disposed ThreadLocal instances to be re-used. But if there aren't any available instantiations, then ThreadLocal falls back on a standard thread local slot using TLSHolder. This makes it very important to dispose of your ThreadLocal instances if you'll be using lots of them, so the type instantiations can be recycled. The previous way of creating arbitary thread-static variables, thread data slots, was slow, clunky, and hard to use. In comparison, ThreadLocal can be used just like any other type, and each instance appears from the outside to be a non-static thread-static variable. It does this by using the CLR type system to assign each instance of ThreadLocal its own instantiated type containing a thread-static field, and so delegating a lot of the bookkeeping that thread data slots had to do to the CLR type system itself! That's a very clever use of the CLR type system.

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• JavaDay Taipei 2014 Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  JavaDay Taipei 2014 was held at the Taipei International Convention Center on August 1st. Organized by Oracle University, it is one of the largest Java developer events in Taiwan. This was another successful year for JavaDay Taipei with a fully sold out venue packed with youthful, energetic developers (this was my second time at the event and I have already been invited to speak again next year!). In addition to Oracle speakers like me, Steve Chin and Naveen Asrani, the event also featured a bevy of local speakers including Taipei Java community leaders. Topics included Java SE, Java EE, JavaFX, cloud and Big Data. It was my pleasure and privilege to present one of the opening keynotes for the event. I presented my session on Java EE titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". I covered the changes in Java EE 7 as well as what's coming in Java EE 8. I demoed the Cargo Tracker Java EE BluePrints. I also briefly talked about Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 8. The slides for the keynote are below (click here to download and view the actual PDF): It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file. In the afternoon I did my JavaScript + Java EE 7 talk titled "Using JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients with Java EE 7". This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The talk was completely packed. The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. I am delivering this material at JavaOne 2014 as a two-hour tutorial. This should give me a little more bandwidth to dig a little deeper, especially on the JavaScript end. I finished off Java Day Taipei with my talk titled "Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE" (this was the last session of the conference). The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here: Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE from Reza Rahman The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running. After the event the Oracle University folks hosted a reception in the evening which was very well attended by organizers, speakers and local Java community leaders. I am extremely saddened by the fact that this otherwise excellent trip was scarred by terrible tragedy. After the conference I joined a few folks for a hike on the Maokong Mountain on Saturday. The group included friends in the Taiwanese Java community including Ian and Robbie Cheng. Without warning, fatal tragedy struck on a remote part of the trail. Despite best efforts by us, the excellent Taiwanese Emergency Rescue Team and World class Taiwanese physicians we were unable to save our friend Robbie Cheng's life. Robbie was just thirty-four years old and is survived by his younger brother, mother and father. Being the father of a young child myself, I can only imagine the deep sorrow that this senseless loss unleashes. Robbie was a key member of the Taiwanese Java community and a Java Evangelist at Sun at one point. Ironically the only picture I was able to take of the trail was mere moments before tragedy. I thought I should place him in that picture in profoundly respectful memoriam: Perhaps there is some solace in the fact that there is something inherently honorable in living a bright life, dying young and meeting one's end on a beautiful remote mountain trail few venture to behold let alone attempt to ascend in a long and tired lifetime. Perhaps I'd even say it's a fate I would not entirely regret facing if it were my own. With that thought in mind it seems appropriate to me to quote some lyrics from the song "Runes to My Memory" by legendary Swedish heavy metal band Amon Amarth idealizing a fallen Viking warrior cut down in his prime: "Here I lie on wet sand I will not make it home I clench my sword in my hand Say farewell to those I love When I am dead Lay me in a mound Place my weapons by my side For the journey to Hall up high When I am dead Lay me in a mound Raise a stone for all to see Runes carved to my memory" I submit my deepest condolences to Robbie's family and hope my next trip to Taiwan ends in a less somber note.

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sherry LaMonica

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• Access Control Service v2: Registering Web Identities in your Applications [concepts]

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  ACS v2 support two fundamental types of client identities– I like to call them “enterprise identities” (WS-*) and “web identities” (Google, LiveID, OpenId in general…). I also see two different “mind sets” when it comes to application design using the above identity types: Enterprise identities – often the fact that a client can present a token from a trusted identity provider means he is a legitimate user of the application. Trust relationships and authorization details have been negotiated out of band (often on paper). Web identities – the fact that a user can authenticate with Google et al does not necessarily mean he is a legitimate (or registered) user of an application. Typically additional steps are necessary (like filling out a form, email confirmation etc). Sometimes also a mixture of both approaches exist, for the sake of this post, I will focus on the web identity case. I got a number of questions how to implement the web identity scenario and after some conversations it turns out it is the old authentication vs. authorization problem that gets in the way. Many people use the IsAuthenticated property on IIdentity to make security decisions in their applications (or deny user=”?” in ASP.NET terms). That’s a very natural thing to do, because authentication was done inside the application and we knew exactly when the IsAuthenticated condition is true. Been there, done that. Guilty ;) The fundamental difference between these “old style” apps and federation is, that authentication is not done by the application anymore. It is done by a third party service, and in the case of web identity providers, in services that are not under our control (nor do we have a formal business relationship with these providers). Now the issue is, when you switch to ACS, and someone with a Google account authenticates, indeed IsAuthenticated is true – because that’s what he is! This does not mean, that he is also authorized to use the application. It just proves he was able to authenticate with Google. Now this obviously leads to confusion. How can we solve that? Easy answer: We have to deal with authentication and authorization separately. Job done ;) For many application types I see this general approach: Application uses ACS for authentication (maybe both enterprise and web identities, we focus on web identities but you could easily have a dual approach here) Application offers to authenticate (or sign in) via web identity accounts like LiveID, Google, Facebook etc. Application also maintains a database of its “own” users. Typically you want to store additional information about the user In such an application type it is important to have a unique identifier for your users (think the primary key of your user database). What would that be? Most web identity provider (and all the standard ACS v2 supported ones) emit a NameIdentifier claim. This is a stable ID for the client (scoped to the relying party – more on that later). Furthermore ACS emits a claims identifying the identity provider (like the original issuer concept in WIF). When you combine these two values together, you can be sure to have a unique identifier for the user, e.g.: Facebook-134952459903700\799880347 You can now check on incoming calls, if the user is already registered and if yes, swap the ACS claims with claims coming from your user database. One claims would maybe be a role like “Registered User” which can then be easily used to do authorization checks in the application. The WIF claims authentication manager is a perfect place to do the claims transformation. If the user is not registered, show a register form. Maybe you can use some claims from the identity provider to pre-fill form fields. (see here where I show how to use the Facebook API to fetch additional user properties). After successful registration (which may include other mechanisms like a confirmation email), flip the bit in your database to make the web identity a registered user. This is all very theoretical. In the next post I will show some code and provide a download link for the complete sample. More on NameIdentifier Identity providers “guarantee” that the name identifier for a given user in your application will always be the same. But different applications (in the case of ACS – different ACS namespaces) will see different name identifiers. This is by design to protect the privacy of users because identical name identifiers could be used to create “profiles” of some sort for that user. In technical terms they create the name identifier approximately like this: name identifier = Hash((Provider Internal User ID) + (Relying Party Address)) Why is this important to know? Well – when you change the name of your ACS namespace, the name identifiers will change as well and you will will lose your “connection” to your existing users. Oh an btw – never use any other claims (like email address or name) to form a unique ID – these can often be changed by users.

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; YourKit Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  The YourKit (v7.0.5) profiler is interesting in terms of price (79€ single place license, 409€ + 1 year support and upgrades) and feature set. You do get a performance and memory profiler in one package for which you normally need also to pay extra from the other vendors. As an interesting side note the profiler UI is written in Java because they do also sell Java profilers with the same feature set. To get all methods of a VS startup you need first to configure it to include System* in the profiled methods and you need to configure * to measure wall clock time. By default it does record only CPU times which allows you to optimize CPU hungry operations. But you will never see a Thread.Sleep(10000) in the profiler blocking the UI in this mode. It can profile as all others processes started from within the profiler but it can also profile the next or all started processes. As usual it can profile in sampling and tracing mode. But since it is a memory profiler as well it does by default also record all object allocations > 1MB. With allocation recording enabled VS2012 did crash but without allocation recording there were no problems. The CPU tab contains the time line of the application and when you click in the graph you the call stacks of all threads at this time. This is really a nice feature. When you select a time region you the CPU Usage estimation for this time window. I have seen many applications consuming 100% CPU only because they did create garbage like crazy. For this is the Garbage Collection tab interesting in conjunction with a time range. This view is like the CPU table only that the CPU graph (green) is missing. All relevant information except for GCs/s is already visible in the CPU tab. Very handy to pinpoint excessive GC or CPU bound issues. The Threads tab does show the thread names and their lifetime. This is useful to see thread interactions or which thread is hottest in terms of CPU consumption. On the CPU tab the call tree does exist in a merged and thread specific view. When you click on a method you get below a list of all called methods. There you can sort for methods with a high own time which are worth optimizing. In the Method List you can select which scope you want to see. Back Traces are the methods which did call you. Callees ist the list of methods called directly or indirectly by your method as a flat list. This is not a call stack but still very useful to see which methods were slow so you can see the “root” cause quite quickly without the need to click trough long call stacks. The last view Merged Calles is a call stacked view of the previous view. This does help a lot to understand did call each method at run time. You would get the same view with a debugger for one call invocation but here you get the full statistics (invocation count) as well. Since YourKit is also a memory profiler you can directly see which objects you have on your managed heap and which objects do hold most of your precious memory. You can in in the Object Explorer view also examine the contents of your objects (strings or whatsoever) to get a better understanding which objects where potentially allocating this stuff.   YourKit is a very easy to use combined memory and performance profiler in one product. The unbeatable single license price makes it very attractive to straightly buy it. Although it is a Java UI it is very responsive and the memory consumption is considerably lower compared to dotTrace and ANTS profiler. What I do really like is to start the YourKit ui and then start the processes I want to profile as usual. There is no need to alter your own application code to be able to inject a profiler into your new started processes. For performance and memory profiling you can simply select the process you want to investigate from the list of started processes. That's the way I like to use profilers. Just get out of the way and let the application run without any special preparations.   Next: Telerik JustTrace

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• Alternative way of developing for ASP.NET to WebForms - Any problems with this?

  - by John

  So I have been developing in ASP.NET WebForms for some time now but often get annoyed with all the overhead (like ViewState and all the JavaScript it generates), and the way WebForms takes over a lot of the HTML generation. Sometimes I just want full control over the markup and produce efficient HTML of my own so I have been experimenting with what I like to call HtmlForms. Essentially this is using ASP.NET WebForms but without the form runat="server" tag. Without this tag, ASP.NET does not seem to add anything to the page at all. From some basic tests it seems that it runs well and you still have the ability to use code-behind pages, and many ASP.NET controls such as repeaters. Of course without the form runat="server" many controls won't work. A post at Enterprise Software Development lists the controls that do require the tag. From that list you will see that all of the form elements like TextBoxes, DropDownLists, RadioButtons, etc cannot be used. Instead you use normal HTML form controls. But how do you access these HTML controls from the code behind? Retrieving values on post back is easy, you just use Request.QueryString or Request.Form. But passing data to the control could be a little messy. Do you use a ASP.NET Literal control in the value field or do you use <%= value % in the markup page? I found it best to add runat="server" to my HTML controls and then you can access the control in your code-behind like this: ((HtmlInputText)txtName).Value = "blah"; Here's a example that shows what you can do with a textbox and drop down list: Default.aspx <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="NoForm.Default" %> <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="NoForm.Default" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title></title> </head> <body> <form action="" method="post"> <label for="txtName">Name:</label> <input id="txtName" name="txtName" runat="server" /><br /> <label for="ddlState">State:</label> <select id="ddlState" name="ddlState" runat="server"> <option value=""></option> </select><br /> <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> </form> </body> </html> Default.aspx.cs using System; using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; namespace NoForm { public partial class Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { //Default values string name = string.Empty; string state = string.Empty; if (Request.RequestType == "POST") { //If form submitted (post back) name = Request.Form["txtName"]; state = Request.Form["ddlState"]; //Server side form validation would go here //and actions to process form and redirect } ((HtmlInputText)txtName).Value = name; ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("ACT")); ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("NSW")); ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("NT")); ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("QLD")); ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("SA")); ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("TAS")); ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("VIC")); ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.Add(new ListItem("WA")); if (((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Items.FindByValue(state) != null) ((HtmlSelect)ddlState).Value = state; } } } As you can see, you have similar functionality to ASP.NET server controls but more control over the final markup, and less overhead like ViewState and all the JavaScript ASP.NET adds. Interestingly you can also use HttpPostedFile to handle file uploads using your own input type="file" control (and necessary form enctype="multipart/form-data"). So my question is can you see any problems with this method, and any thoughts on it's usefulness? I have further details and tests on my blog.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast

  - by Jeff

  (Repost from my personal blog.) This is another post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch soon. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love" If anything generally good for the craft has come out of the rise of ASP.NET MVC, it's that people are more likely to use dependency injection, and loosely couple the pieces parts of their applications. A lot of the emphasis on coding this way has been to facilitate unit testing, and that's awesome. Unit testing makes me feel a lot less like a hack, and a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Dependency injection is pretty straight forward. It says, "Given an instance of this class, I need instances of other classes, defined not by their concrete implementations, but their interfaces." Probably the first place a developer exercises this in when having a class talk to some kind of data repository. For a very simple example, pretend the FooService has to get some Foo. It looks like this: public class FooService {    public FooService(IFooRepository fooRepo)    {       _fooRepo = fooRepo;    }    private readonly IFooRepository _fooRepo;    public Foo GetMeFoo()    {       return _fooRepo.FooFromDatabase();    } } When we need the FooService, we ask the dependency container to get it for us. It says, "You'll need an IFooRepository in that, so let me see what that's mapped to, and put it in there for you." Why is this good for you? It's good because your FooService doesn't know or care about how you get some foo. You can stub out what the methods and properties on a fake IFooRepository might return, and test just the FooService. I don't want to get too far into unit testing, but it's the most commonly cited reason to use DI containers in MVC. What I wanted to mention is how there's another benefit in a project like mine, where I have to glue together a bunch of stuff. For example, when I have someone sign up for a new account on CoasterBuzz, I'm actually using POP Forums' new account mailer, which composes a bunch of text that includes a link to verify your account. The thing is, I want to use custom text and some other logic that's specific to CoasterBuzz. To accomplish this, I make a new class that inherits from the forum's NewAccountMailer, and override some stuff. Easy enough. Then I use Ninject, the DI container I'm using, to unbind the forum's implementation, and substitute my own. Ninject uses something called a NinjectModule to bind interfaces to concrete implementations. The forum has its own module, and then the CoasterBuzz module is loaded second. The CB module has two lines of code to swap out the mailer implementation: Unbind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>(); Bind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>().To<CbNewAccountMailer>(); Piece of cake! Now, when code asks the DI container for an INewAccountMailer, it gets my custom implementation instead. This is a lot easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. I could do some copy-paste, but then I'm not using well-tested code from the forum. I could write stuff from scratch, but then I'm throwing away a bunch of logic I've already written (in this case, stuff around e-mail, e-mail settings, mail delivery failures). There are other places where the DI container comes in handy. For example, CoasterBuzz does a number of custom things with user profiles, and special content for paid members. It uses the forum as the core piece to managing users, so I can ask the container to get me instances of classes that do user lookups, for example, and have zero care about how the forum handles database calls, configuration, etc. What a great world to live in, compared to ten years ago. Sure, the primary interest in DI is around the "separation of concerns" and facilitating unit testing, but as your library grows and you use more open source, it starts to be the glue that pulls everything together.

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• BYOD-The Tablet Difference

  - by Samantha.Y. Ma

  By Allison Kutz, Lindsay Richardson, and Jennifer Rossbach, Sales Consultants Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Less than three years ago, Apple introduced a new concept to the world: The Tablet. It’s hard to believe that in only 32 months, the iPad induced an entire new way to do business. Because of their mobility and ease-of-use, tablets have grown in popularity to keep up with the increasing “on the go” lifestyle, and their popularity isn’t expected to decrease any time soon. In fact, global tablet sales are expected to increase drastically within the next five years, from 56 million tablets to 375 million by 2016. Tablets have been utilized for every function imaginable in today’s world. With over 730,000 active applications available for the iPad, these tablets are educational devices, portable book collections, gateways into social media, entertainment for children when Mom and Dad need a minute on their own, and so much more. It’s no wonder that 74% of those who own a tablet use it daily, 60% use it several times a day, and an average of 13.9 hours per week are spent tapping away. Tablets have become a critical part of a user’s personal life; but why stop there? Businesses today are taking major strides in implementing these devices, with the hopes of benefiting from efficiency and productivity gains. Limo and taxi drivers use tablets as payment devices instead of traditional cash transactions. Retail outlets use tablets to find the exact merchandise customers are looking for. Professors use tablets to teach their classes, and business professionals demonstrate solutions and review reports from tablets. Since an overwhelming majority of tablet users have started to use their personal iPads, PlayBooks, Galaxys, etc. in the workforce, organizations have had to make a change. In many cases, companies are willing to make that change. In fact, 79% of companies are making new investments in mobility this year. Gartner reported that 90% of organizations are expected to support corporate applications on personal devices by 2014. It’s not just companies that are changing. Business professionals have become accustomed to tablets making their personal lives easier, and want that same effect in the workplace. Professionals no longer want to waste time manually entering data in their computer, or worse yet in a notebook, especially when the data has to be later transcribed to an online system. The response: the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon. According to Gartner, BOYD is “an alternative strategy allowing employees, business partners and other users to utilize a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data.” Employees whose companies embrace this trend are more efficient because they get to use devices they are already accustomed to. Tablets change the game when it comes to how sales professionals perform their jobs. Sales reps can easily store and access customer information and analytics using tablet applications, such as Oracle Fusion Tap. This method is much more enticing for sales reps than spending time logging interactions on their (what seem to be outdated) computers. Forrester & IDC reported that on average sales reps spend 65% of their time on activities other than selling, so having a tablet application to use on the go is extremely powerful. In February, Information Week released a list of “9 Powerful Business Uses for Tablet Computers,” ranging from “enhancing the customer experience” to “improving data accuracy” to “eco-friendly motivations”. Tablets compliment the lifestyle of professionals who strive to be effective and efficient, both in the office and on the road. Three Things Businesses Need to do to Embrace BYOD Make customer-facing websites tablet-friendly for consistent user experiences Develop tablet applications to continue to enhance the customer experience Embrace and use the technology that comes with tablets Almost 55 million people in the U.S. own tablets because they are convenient, easy, and powerful. These are qualities that companies strive to achieve with any piece of technology. The inherent power of the devices coupled with the growing number of business applications ensures that tablets will transform the way that companies and employees perform.

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• What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

  - by Jacek Ziabicki

  Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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• Application Composer Series: Where and When to use Groovy

  - by Richard Bingham

  This brief post is really intended as more of a reference than an article. The table below highlights two things, firstly where you can add you own custom logic via groovy code (end column), and secondly (middle column) when you might use each particular feature. Obviously this applies only where Application Composer exists, namely Fusion CRM and Oracle Sales Cloud, and is based on current (release 8) functionality. Feature Most Common Use Case Groovy Field Triggers React to run-time data changes. Only fired when the field is changed and upon submit. Y Object Triggers To extend the standard processing logic for an object, based on record creation, updates and deletes. There is a split between these firing events, with some related to UI/ADF actions and others originating in the database. UI Trigger Points: After Create - fires when a new object record is created. Commonly used to set default values for fields. Before Modify - Fires when the end-user tries to modify a field value. Could be used for generic warnings or extra security logic. Before Invalidate - Fires on the parent object when one of its child object records is created, updated, or deleted. For building in relationship logic. Before Remove - Fires when an attempt is made to delete an object record. Can be used to create conditions that prevent deletes. Database Trigger Points: Before Insert in Database - Fires before a new object is inserted into the database. Can be used to ensure a dependent record exists or check for duplicates. After Insert in Database - Fires after a new object is inserted into the database. Could be used to create a complementary record. Before Update in Database -Fires before an existing object is modified in the database. Could be used to check dependent record values. After Update in Database - Fires after an existing object is modified in the database. Could be used to update a complementary record. Before Delete in Database - Fires before an existing object is deleted from the database. Could be used to check dependent record values. After Delete in Database - Fires after an existing object is deleted from the database. Could be used to remove dependent records. After Commit in Database - Fires after the change pending for the current object (insert, update, delete) is made permanent in the current transaction. Could be used when committed data that has passed all validation is required. After Changes Posted to Database - Fires after all changes have been posted to the database, but before they are permanently committed. Could be used to make additional changes that will be saved as part of the current transaction. Y Field Validation Displays a user entered error message based groovy logic validating the field value. The message is shown only when the validation logic returns false, and the logic is triggered only when tabbing out of the field on the user interface. Y Object Validation Commonly used where validation is needed across multiple related fields on the object. Triggered on the submit UI action. Y Object Workflows All Object Workflows are fired upon either record creation or update, along with the option of adding a custom groovy firing condition. Y Field Updates - change another field when a specified one changes. Intended as an easy way to set different run-time values (e.g. pick values for LOV's) plus the value field permits groovy logic entry. Y E-Mail Notification - sends an email notification to specified users/roles. Templates support using run-time value tokens and rich text. N Task Creation - for adding standard tasks for use in the worklist functionality. N Outbound Message - will create and send an XML payload of the related object SDO to a specified endpoint. N Business Process Flow - intended for approval using the seeded process, however can also trigger custom BPMN flows. N Global Functions Utility functions that can be called from any groovy code in Application Composer (across applications). Y Object Functions Utility functions that are local to the parent object. Usually triggered from within 'Buttons and Actions' definitions in Application Composer, although can be called from other code for that object (e.g. from a trigger). Y Add Custom Fields When adding custom fields there are a few places you can include groovy logic. Y Default Value - to add logic within setting the default value when new records are entered. Y Conditionally Updateable - to add logic to set the field to read-only or not. Y Conditionally Required - to add logic to set the field to required or not. Y Formula Field - Used to provide a new aggregate field that is entirely based on groovy logic and other field values. Y Simplified UI Layouts - Advanced Expressions Used for creating dynamic layouts for simplified UI pages where fields and regions show/hide based on run-time context values and logic. Also includes support for the depends-on feature as a trigger. Y Related References This Blog: Application Composer Series Extending Sales Guide: Using Groovy Scripts Groovy Scripting Reference Guide

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• Speakers, Please Check Your Time

  - by AjarnMark

  Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a 10 minute speech. He replied "Two weeks". He was then asked how long it would take for a 1 hour speech. "One week", he replied. 2 hour speech? "I'm ready right now," he replied.  Whether that is a true story or an urban legend, I don’t really know, but either way, it is a poignant reminder for all speakers, and particularly apropos this week leading up to the PASS Community Summit. (Cross-posted to the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog #PASSProfDev.) What’s the point of that story?  Simply this…if you have plenty of time to do your presentation, you don’t need to prepare much because it is easy to throw in more and more material to stretch out to your allotted time.  But if you are on a tight time constraint, then it will take significant preparation to distill your talk down to only the essential points. I have attended seven of the last eight North American Summit events, and every one of them has been fantastic.  The speakers are great, the material is timely and relevant, and the networking opportunities are awesome.  And every year, there is one little thing that just bugs me…speakers going over their allotted time.  Why does it bother me so?  Well, if you look at a typical schedule for a Summit, you’ll see that there are six or more sessions going on at the same time, and only 15 minutes to move from one to another.  If you’re trying to maximize your training dollar by attending something during every session time slot, and you don’t want to be the last guy trying to squeeze into the middle of the row, then those 15 minutes can be critical.  All the more so if you need to stop and use the bathroom or if you have to hike to the opposite end of the convention center.  It is really a bad position to find yourself having to choose between learning the last key points of Speaker A who is going over time, and getting over to Speaker B on time so you don’t miss her key opening remarks. And frankly, I think it is just rude.  Yes, the speakers are the function, after all they are bringing the content that the rest of us are paying to learn.  But it is also an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at a conference like this, and no one speaker is so important that the conference would be a disaster without him.  Speakers know when they submit their abstract, long before the conference, how much time they will have.  It has been the same pattern at the Summit for at least the last eight years.  Program Sessions are 75 minutes long.  Some speakers who have a good track record, and meet other qualifying criteria, are extended an invitation to present a Spotlight Session which is 90 minutes (a 20% increase).  So there really is no excuse.  It’s not like you were promised a 2-hour segment and then discovered when you got here that it was only 75 minutes.  In fact, it’s not like PASS advertised 90-minute sessions for everyone and then a select few were cut back to only 75.  As a speaker, you know well before you get here which type of session you are doing and how long it is, so as a professional, you should plan accordingly. Now you might think that this only happens to rookies, but I’ll tell you that some of the worst offenders are big-name veterans who draw huge attendance numbers for their sessions.  Some attendees blow this off as, “Hey, it’s so-and-so, and I’d stay here for hours and listen to him/her talk.”  To which I would reply, “Then they should have submitted for a pre- or post-conference day-long seminar instead, but don’t try to squeeze your day-long talk into a 90-minute session.”  Now I don’t really believe that these speakers are being malicious or just selfishly trying to extend their time in the spotlight.  I think that most of them are merely being undisciplined and did not trim their presentation sufficiently, or allowed themselves to get off-track (often in a generous attempt to help someone in the audience with a question or problem that really should have been noted for further discussion after the session). So here is my recommendation…my plea, even.  TRIM THE FAT!  Now.  Before it’s too late.  Before you even get on the airplane, take a long, hard look at your presentation and eliminate some of the points that you originally thought you had to make, but in reality are not truly crucial to your main topic.  Delete a few slides.  Test your demos and have them already scripted rather than typing them during your talk.  It is better to cut out too much and end up with plenty of time at the end for Questions & Answers.  And you can always keep some notes on the stuff that you cut out so that you could fill it back in at the end as bonus material if you really do end up with a whole bunch of time on your hands.  But I don’t think you will.  And if you do, that will look even better to the audience as it will look like you’re giving them something extra that not every audience gets.  And they will thank you for that.

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• 4 Ways Your Brand Can Jump From the Edge of Space

  - by Mike Stiles

  Can your brand’s social media content captivate the world and make it hold its collective breath? Can you put something on the screen that’s so compelling that your audience can’t look away? Will they want to make sure their friends see it so they can talk about it? If not, you’re probably not with Red Bull. I was impressed with Red Bull’s approach to social content even before Felix Baumgartner’s stunning skydive from the edge of space. And then they did this. According to Visible Measures, videos of the jump scored 50 million views in 4 days. 1,700 clips were generated from both official and organic sources. The live stream was the most watched YouTube Stream of all time (8 million concurrent viewers). The 2nd most watched live stream was…Felix’ first attempt Oct. 9. Are you ready to compete with that? I ask that question because some brands are still out there tying themselves up in knots about whether or not they should tweet. The public’s time and attention are scarce commodities, commodities they value greatly. The competition amongst brands for that time and attention is intense and going up like Felix’s capsule. If you still view your press releases as “content,” you won’t even be counted as being among the competition. Here are 5 lessons learned from Red Bull’s big leap: 1. They have a total understanding of their target market and audience. Not only do they have an understanding of it, they do something about it. They act on it. They fill the majority of their thoughts with what the audience wants. They hunger for wild applause from that audience. They want to do things that embrace the audience’s lifestyle and immerse in it so the target will identify the brand as “one of them.” Takeaway: BE your target market. 2. They deliver content that strikes the audience right where they emotionally live. If you want your content to have impact, you have to make your audience’s heart race, or make them tear up, or make them laugh. Label them “data points” all you want, but humans are emotional creatures. No message connects that’s not carried in on an emotion. Takeaway: You’re on the inside. If your content doesn’t make you say “wow,” it’s unlikely it will register with fans. 3. They put aside old school marketing and don’t let their content be degraded into a commercial. Their execs seem to understand the value in keeping a lid on the hard sell. So many brands just can’t bring themselves to disconnect advertising and social content. The result is, otherwise decent content gets contaminated with a desperation the viewer can smell a mile away. Think the Baumgartner skydive didn’t do Red Bull any good since he wasn’t drinking one on the way down while singing a jingle? Analysis company Taykey discovered that at the peak of the skydive buzz, about 1% of all online conversation was about the jump. Mentions of Red Bull constituted 1/3 of 1% of all Internet activity. Views of other Red Bull videos also shot up. Takeaway: Chill out with the ads. Your brand will get full credit for entertaining/informing fans in a relevant way, provided you do it. 4. They don’t hesitate to ask, “What can we do next”? Most corporate cultures are a virtual training facility for “we can’t do that.” Few are encouraged to innovate or think big, if think at all. Thinking big involves faith, and work. It means freedom and letting employees run a little wild with their ideas. There will always be the opportunity to let fear of everything that moves creep in and kill grand visions dead in their tracks. Experimenting must be allowed. Failure must be allowed. Red Bull didn’t think big. They thought mega. They tried to outdo themselves. Felix could have gone ahead and jumped halfway up, thinking, “This is still relatively high up. Good enough.” But that wouldn’t have left us breathless. Takeaway: Go for it. Jump. In putting up social properties and gathering fans of your brand, you’ve basically invited people to a party. A good host doesn’t just set out warm beer and stale chips because that’s inexpensive and easy. Be on the lookout for ways to make your guests walk away saying, “That was epic.”

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• Separating text strings into a table of individual words in SQL via XML.

  - by Phil Factor

  p.MsoNormal {margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; } Nearly nine years ago, Mike Rorke of the SQL Server 2005 XML team blogged ‘Querying Over Constructed XML Using Sub-queries’. I remember reading it at the time without being able to think of a use for what he was demonstrating. Just a few weeks ago, whilst preparing my article on searching strings, I got out my trusty function for splitting strings into words and something reminded me of the old blog. I’d been trying to think of a way of using XML to split strings reliably into words. The routine I devised turned out to be slightly slower than the iterative word chop I’ve always used in the past, so I didn’t publish it. It was then I suddenly remembered the old routine. Here is my version of it. I’ve unwrapped it from its obvious home in a function or procedure just so it is easy to appreciate. What it does is to chop a text string into individual words using XQuery and the good old nodes() method. I’ve benchmarked it and it is quicker than any of the SQL ways of doing it that I know about. Obviously, you can’t use the trick I described here to do it, because it is awkward to use REPLACE() on 1…n characters of whitespace. I’ll carry on using my iterative function since it is able to tell me the location of each word as a character-offset from the start, and also because this method leaves punctuation in (removing it takes time!). However, I can see other uses for this in passing lists as input or output parameters, or as return values.   if exists (Select * from sys.xml_schema_collections where name like 'WordList')   drop XML SCHEMA COLLECTION WordList go create xml schema collection WordList as ' <xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xs:element name="words">        <xs:simpleType>               <xs:list itemType="xs:string" />        </xs:simpleType> </xs:element> </xs:schema>'   go   DECLARE @string VARCHAR(MAX) –we'll get some sample data from the great Ogden Nash Select @String='This is a song to celebrate banks, Because they are full of money and you go into them and all you hear is clinks and clanks, Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills, Which is the rustling of the thousand dollar bills. Most bankers dwell in marble halls, Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals, And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it, Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don''t need it. I know you, you cautious conservative banks! If people are worried about their rent it is your duty to deny them the loan of one nickel, yes, even one copper engraving of the martyred son of the late Nancy Hanks; Yes, if they request fifty dollars to pay for a baby you must look at them like Tarzan looking at an uppity ape in the jungle, And tell them what do they think a bank is, anyhow, they had better go get the money from their wife''s aunt or ungle. But suppose people come in and they have a million and they want another million to pile on top of it, Why, you brim with the milk of human kindness and you urge them to accept every drop of it, And you lend them the million so then they have two million and this gives them the idea that they would be better off with four, So they already have two million as security so you have no hesitation in lending them two more, And all the vice-presidents nod their heads in rhythm, And the only question asked is do the borrowers want the money sent or do they want to take it withm. Because I think they deserve our appreciation and thanks, the jackasses who go around saying that health and happi- ness are everything and money isn''t essential, Because as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant money to maintain their health and happiness they starve to death so they can''t go around any more sneering at good old money, which is nothing short of providential. '   –we now turn it into XML declare @xml_data xml(WordList)  set @xml_data='<words>'+ replace(@string,'&', '&amp;')+'</words>'    select T.ref.value('.', 'nvarchar(100)')  from (Select @xml_data.query('                      for $i in data(/words) return                      element li { $i }               '))  A(list) cross apply A.List.nodes('/li') T(ref)     …which gives (truncated, of course)…

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• WMemoryProfiler is Released

  - by Alois Kraus

  What is it? WMemoryProfiler is a managed profiling Api to aid integration testing. This free library can get managed heap statistics and memory usage for your own process (remember testing) and other processes as well. The best thing is that it does work from .NET 2.0 up to .NET 4.5 in x86 and x64. To make it more interesting it can attach to any running .NET process. The reason why I do mention this is that commercial profilers do support this functionality only for their professional editions. An normally only since .NET 4.0 since the profiling API only since then does support attaching to a running process. This thing does differ in many aspects from “normal” profilers because while profiling yourself you can get all objects from all managed heaps back as an object array. If you ever wanted to change the state of an object which does only exist a method local in another thread you can get your hands on it now … Enough theory. Show me some code /// <summary> /// Show feature to not only get statisics out of a process but also the newly allocated /// instances since the last call to MarkCurrentObjects. /// GetNewObjects does return the newly allocated objects as object array /// </summary> static void InstanceTracking() { using (var dumper = new MemoryDumper()) // if you have problems use to see the debugger windows true,true)) { dumper.MarkCurrentObjects(); Allocate(); ILookup<Type, object> newObjects = dumper.GetNewObjects() .ToLookup( x => x.GetType() ); Console.WriteLine("New Strings:"); foreach (var newStr in newObjects[typeof(string)] ) { Console.WriteLine("Str: {0}", newStr); } } } … New Strings: Str: qqd Str: String data: Str: String data: 0 Str: String data: 1 … This is really hot stuff. Not only you can get heap statistics but you can directly examine the new objects and make queries upon them. When I do find more time I can reconstruct the object root graph from it from my own process. It this cool or what? You can also peek into the Finalization Queue to check if you did accidentally forget to dispose a whole bunch of objects … /// <summary> /// .NET 4.0 or above only. Get all finalizable objects which are ready for finalization and have no other object roots anymore. /// </summary> static void NotYetFinalizedObjects() { using (var dumper = new MemoryDumper()) { object[] finalizable = dumper.GetObjectsReadyForFinalization(); Console.WriteLine("Currently {0} objects of types {1} are ready for finalization. Consider disposing them before.", finalizable.Length, String.Join(",", finalizable.ToLookup( x=> x.GetType() ) .Select( x=> x.Key.Name)) ); } } How does it work? The W of WMemoryProfiler is a good hint. It does employ Windbg and SOS dll to do the heavy lifting and concentrates on an easy to use Api which does hide completely Windbg. If you do not want to see Windbg you will never see it. In my experience the most complex thing is actually to download Windbg from the Windows 8 Stanalone SDK. This is described in the Readme and the exception you are greeted with if it is missing in much greater detail. So I will not go into this here.   What Next? Depending on the feedback I do get I can imagine some features which might be useful as well Calculate first order GC Roots from the actual object graph Identify global statics in Types in object graph Support read out of finalization queue of .NET 2.0 as well. Support Memory Dump analysis (again a feature only supported by commercial profilers in their professional editions if it is supported at all) Deserialize objects from a memory dump into a live process back (this would need some more investigation but it is doable) The last item needs some explanation. Why on earth would you want to do that? The basic idea is to store in your live process some logging/tracing data which can become quite big but since it is never written to it is very fast to generate. When your process crashes with a memory dump you could transfer this data structure back into a live viewer which can then nicely display your program state at the point it did crash. This is an advanced trouble shooting technique I have not seen anywhere yet but it could be quite useful. You can have here a look at the current feature list of WMemoryProfiler with some examples.   How To Get Started? First I would download the released source package (it is tiny). And compile the complete project. Then you can compile the Example project (it has this name) and uncomment in the main method the scenario you want to check out. If you are greeted with an exception it is time to install the Windows 8 Standalone SDK which is described in great detail in the exception text. Thats it for the first round. I have seen something more limited in the Java world some years ago (now I cannot find the link anymore) but anyway. Now we have something much better.

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