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  • Convert enumeration to string

    - by emptyheaded
    I am trying to build a function that converts an item from an enum to its corresponding string. The enums I use are fairly long, so I didn't want to use a switch-case. I found a method using boost::unordered_map very convenient, but I don't know how to make a default return (when there is no item matching the enum). const boost::unordered_map<enum_type, const std::string> enumToString = boost::assign::map_list_of (data_1, "data_1") (data_2, "data_2"); I tried to create an additional function: std::string convert(enum_type entry) { if (enumToString.find(entry)) // not sure what test to place here, return enumToString.at(entry); //because the find method returns an iter else return "invalid_value"; } I even tried something exceedingly wrong: std::string convert(enum_type entry) { try{ return enumToString.at(entry); } catch(...){ return "invalid_value"; } } Result: evil "Debug" runtime error. Can somebody give me a suggestion on how to either 1) find an easier method to convert enum to a string with the same name as the enum item 2) find a way to use already built boost methods to get a default value from a hash map (best option) 3) find what to place in the test to use a function that returns either the pair of the key-value, or a different string if the key is not found in the map. Thank you very much.

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  • Building a structure/object in a place other than the constructor

    - by Vishal Naidu
    I have different types of objects representing the same business entity. UIObject, PowershellObject, DevCodeModelObject, WMIObject all are different representation to the same entity. So say if the entity is Animal then I have AnimalUIObject, AnimalPSObject, AnimalModelObject, AnimalWMIObject, etc. Now the implementations of AnimalUIObject, AnimalPSObject, AnimalModelObject are all in separate assemblies. Now my scenario is I want to verify the contents of business entity Animal irrespective of the assembly it came from. So I created a GenericAnimal class to represent the Animal entity. Now in GenericAnimal I added the following constructors: GenericAnimal(AnimalUIObject) GenericAnimal(AnimalPSObject) GenericAnimal(AnimalModelObject) Basically I made GenericAnimal depend on all the underlying assemblies so that while verifying I deal with this abstraction. Now the other approach to do this is have GenericAnimal with an empty constructor an allow these underlying assemblies to have a Transform() method which would build the GenericAnimal. Both approaches have some pros and cons: The 1st approach: Pros: All construction logic is in one place in one class GenericAnimal Cons: GenericAnimal class must be touched every-time there is a new representation form. The 2nd approach: Pros: construction responsibility is delegated to the underlying assembly. Cons: As construction logic is spread accross assemblies, tomorrow if I need to add a property X in GenericAnimal then I have to touch all the assemblies to change the Transform method. Which approach looks better ? or Which would you consider a lesser evil ? Is there any alternative way better than the above two ?

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  • Why does local variable names take precedence over function names in JavaScripts?

    - by fredrik
    In JavaScript you can define function in a bunch of different ways: function BatmanController () { } var BatmanController = function () { } // If you want to be EVIL eval("function BatmanController () {}"); // If you are fancy (function () { function BatmanController () { } }()); By accident I ran across a unexpected behaviour today. When declaring a local variable (in the fancy way) with the same name as function the local variable takes presence inside the local scope. For example: (function () { "use strict"; function BatmanController () { } console.log(typeof BatmanController); // outputs "function" var RobinController = function () { } console.log(typeof RobinController); // outputs "function" var JokerController = 1; function JokerController () { } console.log(typeof JokerController); // outputs "number", Ehm what? }()); Anyone know why var JokerController isn't overwritten by function JokerController? I tested this in Chrome, Safari, Canary, Firefox. I would guess it's due to some "look ahead" JavaScript optimizing done in the V8 and JägerMonkey engines. But is there any technical explanation to explain this behaviour?

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  • Windows 7 laptop constantly dropping internet connection

    - by Corbin Holbert
    I have scoured the web for an answer and failed to find one. I am using a Toshiba Satellite laptop running Windows 7 64-Bit. I have the computer connected via Wifi. Now, I am no beginner with the Internet, or anything related to computers, as I have grown up teaching everyone around me how to use computers, and went to college for IT. Everything on my network works flawlessly at all times, except for this evil laptop. The worst part is that I fixed this once before a few years back and recently had to replace the hard drive and re-install the OS, but cannot for the life of me remember what I did to make this problem go away. I am in my browser, connected to the Internet. I click a link. Suddenly no internet access. All I do is click down on the WiFi connection in the task bar, disconnect and reconnect immediately. Internet is back the moment I hit "connect." I have read many people had the same issues as I am having, but they all had triggers or other network issues. I have no trigger (this happens literally five to six times per minute no matter what I am doing) and I have no problems with my router, modem, or any other devices or computers on said network. As I am a web designer, and like to test my work live at every turn- this is going to result in this laptop being in pieces if I can't get it fixed soon. If more info is needed, let me know and I will provide. Thanks for any help offered! EDIT: Network Card: Realtek RTL8188CE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC Network state reads as "No Internet Access" when the problem first occurs, then magically I have Internet access for about ten seconds once I disconnect and reconnect. I have turned off IPV6, I have turned off power saving options for the network adapter, no viruses. Any new ideas? Also, I had to disconnect and reconnect four times just to get to this edit screen- and will likely have to do the same just to post it- it's that bad.

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  • Radeon HD4850 serious issues when using DirectX 10

    - by ricsmania
    Hello, I have a problem with my video card. Whenever I run a DirectX 10 game, it works for a few seconds (10 or so) and then starts displaying nothing but big polygons. I have tested this with Crysis and Resident Evil 5, both have the same problems. The same games running under DirectX 9 work fine, except for some small black squares once in a while. I have the following specs: Asus P7P55D LE Intel Core i5 750 Sapphire Radeon HD4850 1GB 2x2GB Patriot Viper II Sector 5, DDR3 1600 MHz OCZ Stealth X Stream 500SXS 500W At first I thought it could be the video card overheating (it has stock cooling), but the game crashes even when it's running at 50 degrees C, and it's never been higher than 70. I also thought it could be the PSU, but as far as I know 500W is enough for this computer, especially because I haven't overclocked anything. My OS is Windows 7 X64 and I am using Catalyst 10.10, but I have also tried many older versions with no success. I don't think there is a problem with the card itself, or else it wouldn't run DirectX 9 games I believe. I have spent many hours searching for a solution but I couldn't, so any help is appreciated. Thank you. EDIT: I did some further investigation about the problem, and it seems taspeotis was right, it might be related to memory. I slightly underclocked the memory from 993 to 965 MHz and the problem went away completely. Both the black squares using DirectX 9 and the weird polygons using DirectX 10. I was using RE DirectX 10 Benchmark, as it consistently crashed around the same point, and now I can play the full benchmark with no artifacts at all. Unfortunately, the underclock has an obvious hit in performance. Although it's not critical, it's definitely noticeable. So, if the video memory test software showed no erros, but the card needs an underclock to work, what might be the problem? Temperature? Voltage? By the way, I couldn't find what the default voltage for this card is. And what is a good software to try and increase it? I tried Ati Tray Tools but it has a bug that increases the clock speed dramatically whenever I change something in the Overclock tab, so I'm afraid it might fry my card. Worst case scenario, if I don't find I solution I will try to slightly increase the GPU clock to compensate for the memory clock. Thank you again.

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  • PHP-FPM performing worse than mod_php

    - by lordstyx
    Recently the website I maintain has been growing a lot and I saw the point coming where I'd want to switch from apache to nginx, because I kept on reading that it performs way better. Now I've done the switch, and I have to say, nginx is keeping up just fine. However, php-fpm is forming a problem. Where the php pages used to take 0.1 second to generate with the same load they now take around 3 seconds! Furthermore the error.log from nginx is being spammed with errors like: upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while connecting to upstream, client: ... I also tried using unix sockets instead, but those would complain about the following: connect() to unix:/tmp/php5-fpm.sock failed (11: Resource temporarily unavailable) while connecting to upstream I've fiddled with settings here and there but nothing seems to work. Changing the amount of pm.max_children doesn't seem to help a lot either, but with it's current amount at 350 it seems to be the lesser of all evil. The server that's being used has 3 GB RAM (not all of it is free due to a MySQL server also running) along with 2 dual-core processors (4 cores in total). Am I doing something majorly wrong with the settings here, or is the server simply not capable enough? EDIT: Here is the nginx server block server { listen 80; listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; server_name localhost; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; deny all; } location = /50x.html { root /usr/share/nginx/www; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini try_files $uri = 404; # With php5-cgi alone: fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # With php5-fpm: #fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php5-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; } location ~ /\.ht { deny all; } } And the php-fpm pool: [www] user = www-data group = www-data listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 ;listen = /tmp/php5-fpm.sock listen.backlog = -1 pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 350 pm.start_servers = 200 pm.min_spare_servers = 10 pm.max_spare_servers = 350 pm.max_requests = 1536 rlimit_files = 65536 rlimit_core = unlimited chdir = /

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  • Google Rules for Retail

    - by David Dorf
    In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts.  These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future.  While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth.  So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success.  The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you.  Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers.  It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent.  Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other.  Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear.  Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day.  Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce.  The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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  • XNA Notes 009

    - by George Clingerman
    This past week the MVPs (myself included) were on Microsoft campus for the MVP summit. So I apologize in advance if you did something cool or heard of something cool happening with XNA and XBLIGs and it’s not in my notes. I did my best to stay on top of things, but honestly this community is fast and furious with what it’s doing and creating. I really can’t keep up and that’s fantastic! But here’s what I *did* notice while I was there on Microsoft Campus (and I did make sure to point out to the XNA team several of these very cool happenings while I had their ears). Time Critical XNA News: The XNA team wants you to know that Dream Build Play registration is now open! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/28/registration-now-open-for-dream-build-play-2011-challenge.aspx Join the XNA-UK create on March 24, 2011 at the Microsoft Tech Days Conference http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/27/join-the-xna-uk-crew-at-the-microsoft-tech-days-conference-on-24th-march-2011.aspx XNA Team: Shawn Hargreaves shares one of the coolest things that’s happened in the XNA community http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/03/02/xbox-indies-pivot-view.aspx Nick Gravelyn continues his unique marketing/work prioritization strategy as he tries to get to 5,000 Pixel Man users before he makes Pixel Man 2 (and he’s almost there!) http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: A lot of the XNA MVPs were at the Microsoft MVP Summit 2011. Due to NDAs, most things can’t be shared, but I’m sure if you’re curious you could ask them about the general vibe and feeling they got from the team and the future of XNA/XBLIG and more. Catalin Zima and team release the free WP7 game Chickens Can Dream http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/41174062923390976 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/chickens-can-dream-is-live/ Charles Humphrey (NemoKrad) posts his March talk source and PowerPoint http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/03/04/march-2011-talk-post-processing-framework.aspx XNA Developers: Michael B. McLaughlin posts about ANTS Memory Profile and creates a CheckMemoryAllocationGame sample (extremely useful if you’re looking to see how much memory some operation allocates!) http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/28/ants-memory-profiler-7.0-review.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/01/checkmemoryallocationgame-sample.aspx Andy Schatz (2009 IGF winner for Monaco) talking XNA at GDC 2011 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33313/GDC_2011_Andy_Schatz_Ill_Make_My_Last_Game_When_I_Die.php Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Clover: A Curious Tale by BinaryTweed is coming as a Deal of the Week during St. Patricks Day http://majornelson.com/archive/2011/03/03/comingsoontothexboxlivemarketplacemarchthird.aspx Ska Studios away at GDC but still very post happy as always http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/02/swamped-picture-pack/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/28/the-february-showcase/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/25/good-morning-gato-51-smelling-the-roses/ Just Press Start interviews Matthew Mikuszewski of Darkwind Media about Blocks Indie http://justpressstart.net/?p=516 Gamergeddon Xbox Indie Game Round Up - February 27th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/27/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-27th/ http://www.gamergeddon.com/category/xbox-360/indie-games/ GameMarx does a round up of all the Xbox Live Indie Game podcasts that are currently available http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/27/xbox-live-indie-game-podcasts.aspx GameMarx episode 11 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/26/ep-11-february-25-2011.aspx In perhaps what I feel is the most exciting news I’ve heard all week, Michael C. Neel (ViNull of GameMarx fame) re-launch XboxIndies.com! http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/03/01/the-relaunch-of-xboxindies-com.aspx http://xboxindies.com/ Armless Octopus shares a little of what they heard from Luke Schneider of Radiangames during his GDC 2011 talk http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/02/gdc-2011-luke-schneider-offers-insight-into-radiangames-success/ VVGindiecast Episode 1 with guests Derek Strickland(Mr_Deeke), Kris Steele(Kriswd40 from FunInfused Games) and Dave Voyles(From armlessoctopus.com) http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/25/vvgindiecast-xblig-podcast/ If you’re doing Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews get in touch with XboxIndies.com to get into their aggregated feed http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76931/467189.aspx#467189 B.U.T.T.O.N and Flotilla represented XNA very well at the Independent Games Festival (are there any more games entered that were created using XNA? Stand up and be heard!) http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2011.php?id=374 Armless Ocotopus interview at GDC 2011 with Soulcaster creator Ian Stocker http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/04/gdc-2011-interview-with-soulcaster-creator-ian-stocker/ MommysBestGames gets a nod in the DarkBasic newsletter where it features the Explosionade Editor (just do a search for Explosionade to get to the interesting bits!) http://www.thegamecreators.com/pages/newsletters/newsletter_issue_98.html You may be hearing the cries of FortressCraft (coming soon to XBLIG) being so wrong for stealing the idea from MineCraft. But did you know the the game MineCraft started from was an XNA game called Infiniminer? XNA is getting it’s fingers into EVERYTHING! http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Infiniminer XNA Development: TorqueX is NOT dead thanks to the tremendous efforts of the XNA Community working on the CEV (special thanks to @PinoEire for all his hard work on making that happen!) http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20878 http://torquecev.com/ Dave Henry has posted XNA 3.x adding platformer start kit to the network game state management on his new site http://twitter.com/#!/mort8088/status/43407715908853760 http://mort8088.com/2011/03/03/xna-3-x-adding-platformer-starter-kit-to-network-game-state-management/ Mark Bamford releases XNAViewer 4.0, great for running XNA games inside of a Windows Form (for building level editors, etc.) http://twitter.com/#!/xzodia04/status/43466830412660736 http://xnaviewer.codeplex.com/ Unit testing an XNA game with Resharper and NUnit http://smnbss.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/planetx-unit-testing-an-xna-game-with-resharper-and-nunit-wp7-xbox-xna/ XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures) http://ht.ly/1bxwUE Mike McLaughlin shares a link he stumbled across for those looking to understand vector and matrix math http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/42587074725036032 http://chortle.ccsu.edu/VectorLessons/vectorIndex.html DigitalRune Resources Pooling in XNA (Part 1) http://www.digitalrune.com/Support/Blog/tabid/719/EntryId/84/DigitalRune-Helper-Library-Resource-Pooling-in-XNA-Part-1.aspx JohnK “bobthecbuilder” released a new SunBurn Update that lowers the requirements for Windows Games http://twitter.com/#!/bobthecbuilder/status/43457306578522112 http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2011/03/03/sunburn-update-windows-redistributable.aspx Quick update on the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.4 development status http://indiefreaks.com/2011/03/04/quick-update-on-igf-v0-4-development/

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  • March 21st Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight

    - by ScottGu
    Here is the latest in my link-listing series. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET URL Routing in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that talks about the new URL routing features coming to Web Forms applications with ASP.NET 4.  Also check out my previous blog post on this topic. Control of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how it is now easy to control the client “id” value emitted by server controls with ASP.NET 4. Web Deployment Made Awesome: Very nice MIX10 talk by Scott Hanselman on the new web deployment features coming with VS 2010, MSDeploy, and .NET 4.  Makes deploying web applications much, much easier. ASP.NET 4’s Browser Capabilities Support: Nice blog post by Stephen Walther that talks about the new browser definition capabilities support coming with ASP.NET 4. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that demonstrates how to call and integrate Twitter from within your ASP.NET applications. Improving CSS with .LESS: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that describes how to optimize CSS using .LESS – a free, open source library. ASP.NET MVC Upgrading ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2: Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET team has a nice post that describes how to easily upgrade your ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2.  He has an automated tool that makes this easy. Note that automated MVC upgrade support is also built-into VS 2010.  Use the tool in this blog post for updating existing MVC projects using VS 2008. Advanced ASP.NET MVC 2: Nice video talk by Brad Wilson of the ASP.NET MVC team.  In it he describes some of the more advanced features in ASP.NET MVC 2 and how to maximize your productivity with them. Dynamic Select Lists with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery: Michael Ceranski has a nice blog post that describes how to dynamically populate dropdownlists on the client using AJAX. AJAX Microsoft AJAX Minifier: We recently shipped an updated minifier utility that allows you to shrink/minify both JavaScript and CSS files – which can improve the performance of your web applications.  You can run this either manually as a command-line tool or now automatically integrate it using a Visual Studio build task.  You can download it for free here. Visual Studio VS 2010 Tip: Quickly Closing Documents: Nice blog post that describes some techniques for optimizing how windows are closed with the new VS 2010 IDE. Collpase to Definitions with Outlining: Nice tip from Zain on how to collapse your code editor to outline mode using Ctrl + M, Ctrl + O.  Also check out his post on copy/paste with outlining here. $299 VS 2010 Upgrade Offer for VS 2005/2008 Standard Users: Soma blogs about a nice VS 2010 upgrade offer you can take advantage of if you have VS 2005 or VS 2008 Standard editions.  For $299 you can upgrade to VS 2010 Professional edition. Dependency Graphics: Jason Zander (who runs the VS team) has a nice blog post that covers the new dependency graph support within VS 2010.  This makes it easier to visualize the dependencies within your application.  Also check out this video here. Layer Validation: Jason Zander has a nice blog post that talks about the new layer validation features in VS 2010.  This enables you to enforce cleaner layering within your projects and solutions.  VS 2010 Profiler Blog: The VS 2010 Profiler Team has their own blog and on it you can find a bunch of nice posts from the last few months that talk about a lot of the new features coming with VS 2010’s Profiler support.  Some really nice features coming. Silverlight Silverlight 4 Training Course: Nice free set of training courses from Microsoft that can help bring you up to speed on all of the new Silverlight 4 features and how to build applications with them.  Updated and current with the recently released Silverlight 4 RC build and tools. Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development: Nice blog post by Tim Heuer that summarizes how to get started building Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight.  Also check out my blog post from last week on how to build a Windows Phone 7 Twitter application using Silverlight. A Guide to What Has Changed with the Silverlight 4 RC: Nice summary post by Tim Heuer that describes all of the things that have changed between the Silverlight 4 Beta and the Silverlight 4 RC. Path Based Layout - Part 1 and Part 2: Christian Schormann has a nice blog post about a really cool new feature in Expression Blend 4 and Silverlight 4 called Path Layout. Also check out Andy Beaulieu’s blog post on this. Hope this helps, Scott

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  • “Being Agile” Means No Documentation, Right?

    - by jesschadwick
    Ask most software professionals what Agile is and they’ll probably start talking about flexibility and delivering what the customer wants.  Some may even mention the word “iterations”.  But inevitably, they’ll say at some point that it means less or even no documentation.  After all, doesn’t creating, updating, and circulating painstakingly comprehensive documentation that everyone and their mother have officially signed off on go against the very core of Agile?  Of course it does!  But really, they’re missing the point! Read The Agile Manifesto. (No, seriously - read it now. It’s short. I’ll wait.)  It’s essentially a list of values.  More specifically, it’s a right-side/left-side weighted list of values:  “Value this over that”. Many people seem to get the impression that this is really a “good vs. bad” list and that those values on the right side are evil and should essentially be tossed on the floor.  This leads to the conclusion that in order to be Agile we must throw away our fancy expensive tools, document as little as possible, and scoff at the idea of a project plan.  This conclusion is quite convenient because it essentially means “less work, more productivity!” (particularly in regards to the documentation and project planning).  I couldn’t disagree with this conclusion more. My interpretation of the Manifesto targets “over” as the operative word.  It’s not just a list of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad.  It’s a list of priorities.  In other words, none of the concepts on the list should be removed from your development lifecycle – they are all important… just not equally important.  This is not a unique interpretation, in fact it says so right at the end of the manifesto! So, the next time your team sits down to tackle that big new project, don’t make the first order of business to outlaw all meetings, documentation, and project plans.  Instead, collaborate with both your team and the business members involved (you do have business members sitting in the room, directly involved in the project planning, right?) and determine the bare minimum that will allow all of you to work and communicate in the best way possible.  This often means that you can pick and choose which parts of the Agile methodologies and process work for your particular project and end up with an amalgamation of Waterfall, Agile, XP, SCRUM and whatever other methodologies the members of your team have been exposed to (my favorite is “SCRUMerfall”). The biggest implication of this is that there is no one way to implement Agile.  There is no checklist with which you can tick off boxes and confidently conclude that, “Yep, we’re Agile™!”  In fact, depending on your business and the members of your team, moving to Agile full-bore may actually be ill-advised.  Such a drastic change just ends up taking everyone out of their comfort zone which they inevitably fall back into by the end of the project.  This often results in frustration to the point that Agile is abandoned altogether because “we just need to ship something!”  Needless to say, this is far more devastating to a project. Instead, I offer this approach: keep it simple and take it slow.  If your business members or customers are only involved at the beginning phases and nowhere to be seen until the project is delivered, invite them to your daily meetings; encourage them to keep up to speed on what’s going on on a daily basis and provide feedback.  If your current process is heavy on the documentation, try to reduce it as opposed to eliminating it outright.  If you need a “TPS Change Request” signed in triplicate with a 5-day “cooling off period” before a change is implemented, try a simple bug tracking system!  Tighten the feedback loop! Finally, at the end of every “iteration” (whatever that means to you, as long as it’s relatively frequent), take as much time as you can spare (even if it’s an hour or so) and perform some kind of retrospective.  Learn from your mistakes.  Figure out what’s working for you and what’s not, then fix it.  Before you know it you’ve got a handful of iterations and/or projects under your belt and you sit down with your team to realize that, “Hey, this is working - we’re pretty Agile!”  After all, Agile is a Zen journey.  It’s a destination that you aim for, not force, and even if you never reach true “enlightenment” that doesn’t mean your team can’t be exponentially better off from merely taking the journey.

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  • How To Replace Notepad in Windows 7

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    It used to be that Notepad was a necessary evil because it started up quickly and let us catch a quick glimpse of plain text files. Now, there are a bevy of capable Notepad replacements that are just as fast, but also have great feature sets. Before following the rest of this how-to, ensure that you’re logged into an account with Administrator access. Note: The following instructions involve modifying some Windows system folders. Don’t mess anything up while you’re in there! If you follow our instructions closely, you’ll be fine. Choose your replacement There are a ton of great Notepad replacements, including Notepad2, Metapad, and Notepad++. The best one for you will depend on what types of text files you open and what you do with them. We’re going to use Notepad++ in this how-to. The first step is to find the executable file that you’ll replace Notepad with. Usually this will be the only file with the .exe file extension in the folder where you installed your text editor. Copy the executable file to your desktop and try to open it, to make sure that it works when opened from a different folder. In the Notepad++ case, a special little .exe file is available for the explicit purpose of replacing Notepad.If we run it from the desktop, it opens up Notepad++ in all its glory. Back up Notepad You will probably never go back once you switch, but you never know. You can backup Notepad to a special location if you’d like, but we find it’s easiest to just keep a backed up copy of Notepad in the folders it was originally located. In Windows 7, Notepad resides in: C:\Windows C:\Windows\System32 C:\Windows\SysWOW64 in 64-bit versions only Navigate to each of those directories and copy Notepad. Paste it into the same folder. If prompted, choose to Copy, but keep both files. You can keep your backup as “notepad (2).exe”, but we prefer to rename it to “notepad.exe.bak”. Do this for all of the folders that have Notepad (2 total for 32-bit Windows 7, 3 total for 64-bit). Take control of Notepad and delete it Even if you’re on an administrator account, you can’t just delete Notepad – Microsoft has made some security gains in this respect. Fortunately for us, it’s still possible to take control of a file and delete it without resorting to nasty hacks like disabling UAC. Navigate to one of the directories that contain Notepad. Right-click on it and select Properties.   Switch to the Security tab, then click on the Advanced button. Note that the owner of the file is a user called “TrustedInstaller”. You can’t do much with files owned by TrustedInstaller, so let’s take control of it. Click the Edit… button. Select the desired owner (you could choose your own account, but we’re going to give any Administrator control) and click OK. You’ll get a message that you need to close and reopen the Properties windows to edit permissions. Before doing that, confirm that the owner has changed to what you selected. Click OK, then OK again to close the Properties window. Right-click on Notepad and click on Properties again. Switch to the Security tab. Click on Edit…. Select the appropriate group or user name in the list at the top, then add a checkmark in the checkbox beside Full control in the Allow column. Click OK, then Yes to the dialog box that pops up. Click OK again to close the Properties window. Now you can delete Notepad, by either selecting it and pressing Delete on the keyboard, or right-click on it and click Delete.   You’re now free from Notepad’s foul clutches! Repeat this procedure for the remaining folders (or folder, on 32-bit Windows 7). Drop in your replacement Copy your Notepad replacement’s executable, which should still be on your desktop. Browse to the two or three folders listed above and copy your .exe to those locations. If prompted for Administrator permission, click Continue. If your executable file was named something other than “notepad.exe”, rename it to “notepad.exe”. Don’t be alarmed if the thumbnail still shows the old Notepad icon. Double click on Notepad and your replacement should open. To make doubly sure that it works, press Win+R to bring up the Run dialog box and enter “notepad” into the text field. Press enter or click OK. Now you can allow Windows to open files with Notepad by default with little to no shame! All without restarting or having to disable UAC! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Search and Replace Specific Formatting (fonts, styles,etc) in Microsoft WordHow to Drag Files to the Taskbar to Open Them in Windows 7Customize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuKill Processes from the Windows Command LineChange Your Windows 7 Library Icons the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text Discovery Channel LIFE Theme (Win7) Increase the size of Taskbar Previews (Win 7) Scan your PC for nasties with Panda ActiveScan CleanMem – Memory Cleaner AceStock – The Personal Stock Monitor

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  • C# 4.0: Named And Optional Arguments

    - by Paulo Morgado
    As part of the co-evolution effort of C# and Visual Basic, C# 4.0 introduces Named and Optional Arguments. First of all, let’s clarify what are arguments and parameters: Method definition parameters are the input variables of the method. Method call arguments are the values provided to the method parameters. In fact, the C# Language Specification states the following on §7.5: The argument list (§7.5.1) of a function member invocation provides actual values or variable references for the parameters of the function member. Given the above definitions, we can state that: Parameters have always been named and still are. Parameters have never been optional and still aren’t. Named Arguments Until now, the way the C# compiler matched method call definition arguments with method parameters was by position. The first argument provides the value for the first parameter, the second argument provides the value for the second parameter, and so on and so on, regardless of the name of the parameters. If a parameter was missing a corresponding argument to provide its value, the compiler would emit a compilation error. For this call: Greeting("Mr.", "Morgado", 42); this method: public void Greeting(string title, string name, int age) will receive as parameters: title: “Mr.” name: “Morgado” age: 42 What this new feature allows is to use the names of the parameters to identify the corresponding arguments in the form: name:value Not all arguments in the argument list must be named. However, all named arguments must be at the end of the argument list. The matching between arguments (and the evaluation of its value) and parameters will be done first by name for the named arguments and than by position for the unnamed arguments. This means that, for this method definition: public static void Method(int first, int second, int third) this call declaration: int i = 0; Method(i, third: i++, second: ++i); will have this code generated by the compiler: int i = 0; int CS$0$0000 = i++; int CS$0$0001 = ++i; Method(i, CS$0$0001, CS$0$0000); which will give the method the following parameter values: first: 2 second: 2 third: 0 Notice the variable names. Although invalid being invalid C# identifiers, they are valid .NET identifiers and thus avoiding collision between user written and compiler generated code. Besides allowing to re-order of the argument list, this feature is very useful for auto-documenting the code, for example, when the argument list is very long or not clear, from the call site, what the arguments are. Optional Arguments Parameters can now have default values: public static void Method(int first, int second = 2, int third = 3) Parameters with default values must be the last in the parameter list and its value is used as the value of the parameter if the corresponding argument is missing from the method call declaration. For this call declaration: int i = 0; Method(i, third: ++i); will have this code generated by the compiler: int i = 0; int CS$0$0000 = ++i; Method(i, 2, CS$0$0000); which will give the method the following parameter values: first: 1 second: 2 third: 1 Because, when method parameters have default values, arguments can be omitted from the call declaration, this might seem like method overloading or a good replacement for it, but it isn’t. Although methods like this: public static StreamReader OpenTextFile( string path, Encoding encoding = null, bool detectEncoding = true, int bufferSize = 1024) allow to have its calls written like this: OpenTextFile("foo.txt", Encoding.UTF8); OpenTextFile("foo.txt", Encoding.UTF8, bufferSize: 4096); OpenTextFile( bufferSize: 4096, path: "foo.txt", detectEncoding: false); The complier handles default values like constant fields taking the value and useing it instead of a reference to the value. So, like with constant fields, methods with parameters with default values are exposed publicly (and remember that internal members might be publicly accessible – InternalsVisibleToAttribute). If such methods are publicly accessible and used by another assembly, those values will be hard coded in the calling code and, if the called assembly has its default values changed, they won’t be assumed by already compiled code. At the first glance, I though that using optional arguments for “bad” written code was great, but the ability to write code like that was just pure evil. But than I realized that, since I use private constant fields, it’s OK to use default parameter values on privately accessed methods.

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  • Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate stirs a movement

    - by Gopinath
    Bollywood actor Aamir Khan is known for his dedication and hard work in inspiring millions of viewers though movies by discussing social problems and motivating people to solve them. His movie Rang De Basanthi seeded Indian anti-corruption movement, Tare Zameen Par touched the problems faced by few challenged kids and the latest movie 3 idiots exposed how education institutions in India are producing lakhs of Donkeys out of colleges every year. He extended his dedication of serving the society to small screen with the launch of reality TV show Satyamev Jayate. Before you start misjudging it as one of those non sense drama / entertaining reality shows, let me tell you that it is not a typical music, games, fight or dance reality show. Satyamev Jayate is all about the real people of India, their problems and how to tackle them.  This is not just a reality show, its movement to educate people about the social evils. Its been many years since I spent couple of hours  in front of TV as most of the programs are too cynical or does not add much value.  In my childhood I use to anxiously wait for Mahabarath or He-Man TV shows to start but after a two decades I waited anxiously for the start of Satyamev Jayate. The wait was worth and the 1 hours 30 minutes spent watching it meaningful. When was the last time you were so satisfied after watching a TV show and inspired to do something? I don’t remember. Today, the show focused on female foeticide and its impact. It showed women who were tortured and forced to abort female foetuses. On the show few brave women shared their experiences of giving birth to girl babies and rough times they are going through with their in-laws & husbands. The show not only focused on the problem but also on the root cause of the evil,  inspiring people working to tackle it and what every individual can do his part to solve it.  The best part of the show is,  its not a blame game. When there is a problem most of the people quickly get into identifying who is wrong and start blaming them instead of solve the actual problem.  Aamir did not blame anyone for female foeticide – neither the government who don’t impose strict rules, nor the doctors who abort girl babies to make money or the mother-in-laws & husbands who torcher girl baby mothers are blamed. He careful highlighted the problem, showed horrifying statistics and their impact on the future society and few inspiring people working to tackle the problem.  He touched heart and stirred a movement against the issue. First time ever I voted for a reality show through SMS and it’s for Satyamev Jayate. I’m proud to do so. Here are the few reactions of popular people, activists & media about the program @aamir_khan absolutely the best program I have seen on TV in recent past. Thanku for converting an idiot box into an inspirationsl medium — Kiran Bedi (@thekiranbedi) May 6, 2012 Satyamev Jayate proves tht TV 2 can b a tool of social change. — Shekhar Kapur (@shekharkapur) May 6, 2012 i absolutely loved #satyamevjayate. at least aamir is doing what all of us only talk about. — Harsha Bhogle (@bhogleharsha) May 6, 2012 Now Television will no longer be called an idiot box,the VISION of Television broadens up with#SatyamevJayate !!! — Madhur Bhandarkar (@mbhandarkar268) May 6, 2012 The Sunday 11am slot seems to have come back with a bang… #SatyamevJayate — atul kasbekar (@atulkasbekar) May 6, 2012   I was spellbound, says Prasoon Joshi – It’s a unique show. I was completely bowled over by it. It’s a never-done before concept Aamir Khan strikes the right chord with Satyamev Jayate – The format is quite crisp. Talking about the emotional connect, there are moments when your eyes well up with tears, but the various segments ensure there’s more content than emotional drama ‘Satyamev Jayate’ gutsy, sensible show: Viewers – From filmmakers to clinical psychologists to professors – everyone has given the thumbs up to Aamir Khan’s television show ‘Satyamev Jayate’, saying it is a gutsy, hard-hitting and sensible programme that strikes an emotional chord with the audiences. Aamir Khan’s TV debut ‘Satyamev Jayate’ takes Twitter by storm – The roads of the capital sported a deserted look around 11 am on Sunday morning, as everyone was hooked on to their TV sets. Did you watch the program? What is your opinion? I’m waiting for next 11 AM of next Sunday. Are you?

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  • SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

    What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Independence Day for Software Components &ndash; Loosening Coupling by Reducing Connascence

    - by Brian Schroer
    Today is Independence Day in the USA, which got me thinking about loosely-coupled “independent” software components. I was reminded of a video I bookmarked quite a while ago of Jim Weirich’s “Grand Unified Theory of Software Design” talk at MountainWest RubyConf 2009. I finally watched that video this morning. I highly recommend it. In the video, Jim talks about software connascence. The dictionary definition of connascence (con-NAY-sense) is: 1. The common birth of two or more at the same time 2. That which is born or produced with another. 3. The act of growing together. The brief Wikipedia page about Connascent Software Components says that: Two software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system. Connascence is a way to characterize and reason about certain types of complexity in software systems. The term was introduced to the software world in Meilir Page-Jones’ 1996 book “What Every Programmer Should Know About Object-Oriented Design”. The middle third of that book is the author’s proposed graphical notation for describing OO designs. UML became the standard about a year later, so a revised version of the book was published in 1999 as “Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML”. Weirich says that the third part of the book, in which Page-Jones introduces the concept of connascence “is worth the price of the entire book”. (The price of the entire book, by the way, is not much – I just bought a used copy on Amazon for $1.36, so that was a pretty low-risk investment. I’m looking forward to getting the book and learning about connascence from the original source.) Meanwhile, here’s my summary of Weirich’s summary of Page-Jones writings about connascence: The stronger the form of connascence, the more difficult and costly it is to change the elements in the relationship. Some of the connascence types, ordered from weak to strong are: Connascence of Name Connascence of name is when multiple components must agree on the name of an entity. If you change the name of a method or property, then you need to change all references to that method or property. Duh. Connascence of name is unavoidable, assuming your objects are actually used. My main takeaway about connascence of name is that it emphasizes the importance of giving things good names so you don’t need to go changing them later. Connascence of Type Connascence of type is when multiple components must agree on the type of an entity. I assume this is more of a problem for languages without compilers (especially when used in apps without tests). I know it’s an issue with evil JavaScript type coercion. Connascence of Meaning Connascence of meaning is when multiple components must agree on the meaning of particular values, e.g that “1” means normal customer and “2” means preferred customer. The solution to this is to use constants or enums instead of “magic” strings or numbers, which reduces the coupling by changing the connascence form from “meaning” to “name”. Connascence of Position Connascence of positions is when multiple components must agree on the order of values. This refers to methods with multiple parameters, e.g.: eMailer.Send("[email protected]", "[email protected]", "Your order is complete", "Order completion notification"); The more parameters there are, the stronger the connascence of position is between the component and its callers. In the example above, it’s not immediately clear when reading the code which email addresses are sender and receiver, and which of the final two strings are subject vs. body. Connascence of position could be improved to connascence of type by replacing the parameter list with a struct or class. This “introduce parameter object” refactoring might be overkill for a method with 2 parameters, but would definitely be an improvement for a method with 10 parameters. This points out two “rules” of connascence:  The Rule of Degree: The acceptability of connascence is related to the degree of its occurrence. The Rule of Locality: Stronger forms of connascence are more acceptable if the elements involved are closely related. For example, positional arguments in private methods are less problematic than in public methods. Connascence of Algorithm Connascence of algorithm is when multiple components must agree on a particular algorithm. Be DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself. If you have “cloned” code in multiple locations, refactor it into a common function.   Those are the “static” forms of connascence. There are also “dynamic” forms, including… Connascence of Execution Connascence of execution is when the order of execution of multiple components is important. Consumers of your class shouldn’t have to know that they have to call an .Initialize method before it’s safe to call a .DoSomething method. Connascence of Timing Connascence of timing is when the timing of the execution of multiple components is important. I’ll have to read up on this one when I get the book, but assume it’s largely about threading. Connascence of Identity Connascence of identity is when multiple components must reference the entity. The example Weirich gives is when you have two instances of the “Bob” Employee class and you call the .RaiseSalary method on one and then the .Pay method on the other does the payment use the updated salary?   Again, this is my summary of a summary, so please be forgiving if I misunderstood anything. Once I get/read the book, I’ll make corrections if necessary and share any other useful information I might learn.   See Also: Gregory Brown: Ruby Best Practices Issue #24: Connascence as a Software Design Metric (That link is failing at the time I write this, so I had to go to the Google cache of the page.)

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  • SQL SERVER – Parsing SSIS Catalog Messages – Notes from the Field #030

    - by Pinal Dave
    [Note from Pinal]: This is a new episode of Notes from the Field series. SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) is one of the most key essential part of the entire Business Intelligence (BI) story. It is a platform for data integration and workflow applications. The tool may also be used to automate maintenance of SQL Server databases and updates to multidimensional cube data. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series I requested SSIS Expert Andy Leonard to discuss one of the most interesting concepts of SSIS Catalog Messages. There are plenty of interesting and useful information captured in the SSIS catalog and we will learn together how to explore the same. The SSIS Catalog captures a lot of cool information by default. Here’s a query I use to parse messages from the catalog.operation_messages table in the SSISDB database, where the logged messages are stored. This query is set up to parse a default message transmitted by the Lookup Transformation. It’s one of my favorite messages in the SSIS log because it gives me excellent information when I’m tuning SSIS data flows. The message reads similar to: Data Flow Task:Information: The Lookup processed 4485 rows in the cache. The processing time was 0.015 seconds. The cache used 1376895 bytes of memory. The query: USE SSISDB GO DECLARE @MessageSourceType INT = 60 DECLARE @StartOfIDString VARCHAR(100) = 'The Lookup processed ' DECLARE @ProcessingTimeString VARCHAR(100) = 'The processing time was ' DECLARE @CacheUsedString VARCHAR(100) = 'The cache used ' DECLARE @StartOfIDSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @StartOfIDString + '%' DECLARE @ProcessingTimeSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @ProcessingTimeString + '%' DECLARE @CacheUsedSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @CacheUsedString + '%' SELECT operation_id , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1))) AS LookupRowsCount , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1))) AS LookupProcessingTime , CASE WHEN (CONVERT(numeric(3,3),SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1))))) = 0 THEN 0 ELSE CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))) / CONVERT(numeric(3,3),SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)))) END AS LookupRowsPerSecond , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1))) AS LookupBytesUsed ,CASE WHEN (CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))))= 0 THEN 0 ELSE CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)))) / CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))) END AS LookupBytesPerRow FROM [catalog].[operation_messages] WHERE message_source_type = @MessageSourceType AND MESSAGE LIKE @StartOfIDSearchString GO Note that you have to set some parameter values: @MessageSourceType [int] – represents the message source type value from the following results: Value     Description 10           Entry APIs, such as T-SQL and CLR Stored procedures 20           External process used to run package (ISServerExec.exe) 30           Package-level objects 40           Control Flow tasks 50           Control Flow containers 60           Data Flow task 70           Custom execution message Note: Taken from Reza Rad’s (excellent!) helper.MessageSourceType table found here. @StartOfIDString [VarChar(100)] – use this to uniquely identify the message field value you wish to parse. In this case, the string ‘The Lookup processed ‘ identifies all the Lookup Transformation messages I desire to parse. @ProcessingTimeString [VarChar(100)] – this parameter is message-specific. I use this parameter to specifically search the message field value for the beginning of the Lookup Processing Time value. For this execution, I use the string ‘The processing time was ‘. @CacheUsedString [VarChar(100)] – this parameter is also message-specific. I use this parameter to specifically search the message field value for the beginning of the Lookup Cache  Used value. It returns the memory used, in bytes. For this execution, I use the string ‘The cache used ‘. The other parameters are built from variations of the parameters listed above. The query parses the values into text. The string values are converted to numeric values for ratio calculations; LookupRowsPerSecond and LookupBytesPerRow. Since ratios involve division, CASE statements check for denominators that equal 0. Here are the results in an SSMS grid: This is not the only way to retrieve this information. And much of the code lends itself to conversion to functions. If there is interest, I will share the functions in an upcoming post. If you want to get started with SSIS with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SSIS

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  • XNA Notes 002

    - by George Clingerman
    This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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  • Open World Day 3

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part IV My third day was exhibition day for me!  I took the opportunity to wander around the JavaOne and OpenWorld exhibitions to see what might be useful for me when selling WebLogic, Coherence & SOA Suite.  I found a number of interesting vendors and thought I would share what I found here.  These are not necessarily endorsements, but observations on companies that I thought had interesting looking products that fill a need I have seen at customers. Highly Available EBS Upgrades A few years ago I worked with a customer that was a port authority.  They wanted to tie E-Business Suite into their operations to provide faster processing of cargo and passengers.  However they only had a 2 hour downtime window to perform upgrades.  This was not a problem for core database and middleware technology, this could accommodate those upgrade timescales easily.  It was a problem for EBS however so I intrigued to find Rapid E-Suite Inc offering an 11i to 12i upgrade service that claims to require no outage.  This could be a real boon to EBS customers like my port friends that need to upgrade without disruption to their business. Mobile on WebLogic I have come across a number of customers who want a comprehensive mobile solution, connected and disconnected operation and so forth.  ADF only addresses part of these requirements currently so I was excited to discover mFrontiers Inc offering an apparently comprehensive solution that should integrate easily with Oracle SOA Suite to mobile enable a SOA infrastructure.  The ability to operate without a network is important for many applications, particularly in industries that require their engineers to enter buildings to perform maintenance or repairs, because network access is not always available – many of my colleagues don’t have mobile access from their homes because they live in the middle of nowhere – and disconnected support is crucial in these situations. Sharepoint Connector for WebCenter Content Obviously Sharepoint is an evil pernicious intrusion into a companies IT estate but it is widely deployed and many people like it but also would like to take advantage of Oracle products such as WebCenter Content.  So I was encouraged to see that Fishbowl Solutions have created a connector for Sharepoint that allows it to bring in content from WebCenter, it looks like a valuable way to maintain the Sharepoint interface end users are used to but extend the range of content by pulling stuff (technical term for content) from WebCenter.   Load Balancing The Enterprise Deployment Guides are Oracles bible on building highly available FMW environments, and each of them requires a front end load balancer.  I have been asked to help configure F5 Load Balancers on a number of occasions over my time at Oracle and each time I come back to it I find more useful features have been added to the BigIP line of load balancers that F5 sell, many of their documents are tailored to FMW.  I like F5, they provide (relatively) easy to use products that do what they say on the side of the box.  They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of their more expensive competitors but they do the job and do it well!  Besides which I like their logo! Other Stuff I saw lots of other interesting products and services, such as a lightweight monitoring tool for Coherence, Forms migration services, JCAPS migration services and lots of cool freebies to take home to the children! A Quiet Night Wednesday night was the partner appreciation event and I had decided to go back to the hotel and have an early night.  I decided to attend the last session of the day – a Maven/Hudson/WebLogic tutorial.  I got the wrong hotel for the session and snuck in 20 minutes late at the back and starting working on the hands on workshop.  One of my co-attendees raised his hand for help and as the presenter came over to help he suddenly stopped and yelled – “Is that Antony”!  It was my old friend Steve Button who used to be based in Redwood Shores but is now a WebLogic guru PM in Australia.  It was good to catch up with him.  As he yelled out a guy with really bad posture turned around to see who he was talking to, this turned out to be my friend Simon Haslan, Oracle ACE from the UK.  After the tutorial Simon and I retired to the coffee shop to catch up and share stories.  2 and half hours later we decided it was time to retire, so much for an early night but great to renew old friendships and find out what real customers are worrying about.

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  • The standards that fail us and the intellectual bubble

    - by Jeff
    There has been a great deal of noise in the techie community about standards, and a sudden and unexplainable hate for Flash. This noise isn't coming from consumers... the countless soccer moms, teens and your weird uncle Bob, it's coming from the people who build (or at least claim to build) the stuff those consumers consume. If you could survey the position of consumers on the topic, they'd likely tell you that they just want stuff on the Web to work.The noise goes something like this: Web standards are the correct and right thing to use across the Intertubes, and anything not a part of those standards (Flash) is bad. Furthermore, the more recent noise is centered around the idea that HTML 5, along with Javascript, is the right thing to use. The arguments against Flash are, well, the truth is I haven't seen a good argument. I see anecdotal nonsense about high CPU usage and things I'd never think to check when I'm watching Piano Cat on YouTube, but these aren't arguments to me. Sure, I've seen it crash a browser a few times, but it's totally rare.But let's go back to standards. Yes, standards have played an important role in establishing the ubiquity of the Web. The protocols themselves, TCP/IP and HTTP, have been critical. HTML, which has served us well for a very long time, established an incredible foundation. Javascript did an OK job, and thanks to clever programmers writing great frameworks like JQuery, is becoming more and more useful. CSS is awful (there, I said it, I feel SO much better), and I'll never understand why it's so disconnected and different from anything else. It doesn't help that it's so widely misinterpreted by different browsers. Still, there's no question that standards are a good thing, and they've been good for the Web, consumers and publishers alike.HTML 4 has been with us for more than a decade. In Web years, that might as well be 80. HTML 5, contrary to popular belief, is not a standard, and likely won't be for many years to come. In fact, the Web hasn't really evolved at all in terms of its standards. The tools that generate the standard markup and script have, but at the end of the day, we're still living with standards that are more than ten years old. The "official" standards process has failed us.The Web evolved anyway, and did not wait for standards bodies to decide what to do next. It evolved in part because Macromedia, then Adobe, kept evolving Flash. In the earlier days, it mostly just did obnoxious splash pages, but then it started doing animation, and then rich apps as they added form input. Eventually it found its killer app: video. Now more than 95% of browsers have Flash installed. Consumers are better for it.But I'll do it one better... I'll go out on a limb and say that Flash is a standard. If it's that pervasive, I don't care what you tell me, it's a standard. Just because a company owns it doesn't mean that it's evil or not a standard. And hey, it pains me to say that as a developer, because I think the dev tools are the suck (more on that in a minute). But again, consumers don't care. They don't even pay for Flash. The bottom line is that if I put something Flash based on the Internet, it's likely that my audience will see it.And what about the speed of standards owned by a company? Look no further than Silverlight. Silverlight 2 (which I consider the "real" start to the story) came out about a year and a half ago. Now version 4 is out, and it has come a very long way in its capabilities. If you believe Riastats.com, more than half of browsers have it now. It didn't have to wait for standards bodies and nerds drafting documents, it's out today. At this rate, Silverlight will be on version 6 or 7 by the time HTML 5 is a ratified standard.Back to the noise, one of the things that has continually disappointed me about this profession is the number of people who get stuck in an intellectual bubble, color it with dogmatic principles, and completely ignore the actual marketplace where this stuff all has to live. We aren't machines; Binary thinking that forces us to choose between "open standards" and "proprietary lock-in" (the most loaded b.s. FUD term evar) isn't smart at all. The truth is that the <object> tag has allowed us to build incredible stuff on top of the old standards, and consumers have benefitted greatly. Consumer desire, capitalism, and yes, standards ratified by nerds who think about this stuff for years have all played a role in the broad adoption of the Interwebs.We could all do without the noise. At the end of the day, I'm going to build stuff for the Web that's good for my users, and I'm not going to base my decisions on a techie bubble religion. Imagine what the brilliant minds behind the noise could do for the Web if they joined me in that pursuit.

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  • Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

    - by Brian Dirking
    We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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  • Fun With the Chrome JavaScript Console and the Pluralsight Website

    - by Steve Michelotti
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2013/07/24/fun-with-the-chrome-javascript-console-and-the-pluralsight-website.aspxI’m currently working on my third course for Pluralsight. Everyone already knows that Scott Allen is a “dominating force” for Pluralsight but I was curious how many courses other authors have published as well. The Pluralsight Authors page - http://pluralsight.com/training/Authors – shows all 146 authors and you can click on any author’s page to see how many (and which) courses they have authored. The problem is: I don’t want to have to click into 146 pages to get a count for each author. With this in mind, I figured I could write a little JavaScript using the Chrome JavaScript console to do some “detective work.” My first step was to figure out how the HTML was structured on this page so I could do some screen-scraping. Right-click the first author - “Inspect Element”. I can see there is a primary <div> with a class of “main” which contains all the authors. Each author is in an <h3> with an <a> tag containing their name and link to their page:     This web page already has jQuery loaded so I can use $ directly from the console. This allows me to just use jQuery to inspect items on the current page. Notice this is a multi-line command. In order to use multiple lines in the console you have to press SHIFT-ENTER to go to the next line:     Now I can see I’m extracting data just fine. At this point I want to follow each URL. Then I want to screen-scrape this next page to see how many courses each author has done. Let’s take a look at the author detail page:       I can see we have a table (with a css class of “course”) that contains rows for each course authored. This means I can get the number of courses pretty easily like this:     Now I can put this all together. Back on the authors page, I want to follow each URL, extract the returned HTML, and grab the count. In the code below, I simply use the jQuery $.get() method to get the author detail page and the “data” variable that is in the callback contains the HTML. A nice feature of jQuery is that I can simply put this HTML string inside of $() and I can use jQuery selectors directly on it in conjunction with the find() method:     Now I’m getting somewhere. I have every Pluralsight author and how many courses each one has authored. But that’s not quite what I’m after – what I want to see are the authors that have the MOST courses in the library. What I’d like to do is to put all of the data in an array and then sort that array descending by number of courses. I can add an item to the array after each author detail page is returned but the catch here is that I can’t perform the sort operation until ALL of the author detail pages have executed. The jQuery $.get() method is naturally an async method so I essentially have 146 async calls and I don’t want to perform my sort action until ALL have completed (side note: don’t run this script too many times or the Pluralsight servers might think your an evil hacker attempting a DoS attack and deny you). My C# brain wants to use a WaitHandle WaitAll() method here but this is JavaScript. I was able to do this by using the jQuery Deferred() object. I create a new deferred object for each request and push it onto a deferred array. After each request is complete, I signal completion by calling the resolve() method. Finally, I use a $.when.apply() method to execute my descending sort operation once all requests are complete. Here is my complete console command: 1: var authorList = [], 2: defList = []; 3: $(".main h3 a").each(function() { 4: var def = $.Deferred(); 5: defList.push(def); 6: var authorName = $(this).text(); 7: var authorUrl = $(this).attr('href'); 8: $.get(authorUrl, function(data) { 9: var courseCount = $(data).find("table.course tbody tr").length; 10: authorList.push({ name: authorName, numberOfCourses: courseCount }); 11: def.resolve(); 12: }); 13: }); 14: $.when.apply($, defList).then(function() { 15: console.log("*Everything* is complete"); 16: var sortedList = authorList.sort(function(obj1, obj2) { 17: return obj2.numberOfCourses - obj1.numberOfCourses; 18: }); 19: for (var i = 0; i < sortedList.length; i++) { 20: console.log(authorList[i]); 21: } 22: });   And here are the results:     WOW! John Sonmez has 44 courses!! And Matt Milner has 29! I guess Scott Allen isn’t the only “dominating force”. I would have assumed Scott Allen was #1 but he comes in as #3 in total course count (of course Scott has 11 courses in the Top 50, and 14 in the Top 100 which is incredible!). Given that I’m in the middle of producing only my third course, I better get to work!

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  • Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet

    - by Rick Strahl
    As a publisher of a Help Creation tool called Html Help Help Builder, I’ve seen a lot of problems with help files that won't properly display actual topic content and displays an error message for topics instead. Here’s the scenario: You go ahead and happily build your fancy, schmanzy Help File for your application and deploy it to your customer. Or alternately you've created a help file and you let your customers download them off the Internet directly or in a zip file. The customer downloads the file, opens the zip file and copies the help file contained in the zip file to disk. She then opens the help file and finds the following unfortunate result:     The help file  comes up with all topics in the tree on the left, but a Navigation to the WebPage was cancelled or Operation Aborted error in the Help Viewer's content window whenever you try to open a topic. The CHM file obviously opened since the topic list is there, but the Help Viewer refuses to display the content. Looks like a broken help file, right? But it's not - it's merely a Windows security 'feature' that tries to be overly helpful in protecting you. The reason this happens is because files downloaded off the Internet - including ZIP files and CHM files contained in those zip files - are marked as as coming from the Internet and so can potentially be malicious, so do not get browsing rights on the local machine – they can’t access local Web content, which is exactly what help topics are. If you look at the URL of a help topic you see something like this:   mk:@MSITStore:C:\wwapps\wwIPStuff\wwipstuff.chm::/indexpage.htm which points at a special Microsoft Url Moniker that in turn points the CHM file and a relative path within that HTML help file. Try pasting a URL like this into Internet Explorer and you'll see the help topic pop up in your browser (along with a warning most likely). Although the URL looks weird this still equates to a call to the local computer zone, the same as if you had navigated to a local file in IE which by default is not allowed.  Unfortunately, unlike Internet Explorer where you have the option of clicking a security toolbar, the CHM viewer simply refuses to load the page and you get an error page as shown above. How to Fix This - Unblock the Help File There's a workaround that lets you explicitly 'unblock' a CHM help file. To do this: Open Windows Explorer Find your CHM file Right click and select Properties Click the Unblock button on the General tab Here's what the dialog looks like:   Clicking the Unblock button basically, tells Windows that you approve this Help File and allows topics to be viewed.   Is this insecure? Not unless you're running a really old Version of Windows (XP pre-SP1). In recent versions of Windows Internet Explorer pops up various security dialogs or fires script errors when potentially malicious operations are accessed (like loading Active Controls), so it's relatively safe to run local content in the CHM viewer. Since most help files don't contain script or only load script that runs pure JavaScript access web resources this works fine without issues. How to avoid this Problem As an application developer there's a simple solution around this problem: Always install your Help Files with an Installer. The above security warning pop up because Windows can't validate the source of the CHM file. However, if the help file is installed as part of an installation the installation and all files associated with that installation including the help file are trusted. A fully installed Help File of an application works just fine because it is trusted by Windows. Summary It's annoying as all hell that this sort of obtrusive marking is necessary, but it's admittedly a necessary evil because of Microsoft's use of the insecure Internet Explorer engine that drives the CHM Html Engine's topic viewer. Because help files are viewing local content and script is allowed to execute in CHM files there's potential for malicious code hiding in CHM files and the above precautions are supposed to avoid any issues. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • SQLAuthority News – Great Time Spent at Great Indian Developers Summit 2014

    - by Pinal Dave
    The Great Indian Developer Conference (GIDS) is one of the most popular annual event held in Bangalore. This year GIDS is scheduled on April 22, 25. I will be presented total four sessions at this event and each session is very different from each other. Here are the details of four of my sessions, which I presented there. Pluralsight Shades This event was a great event and I had fantastic fun presenting a technology over here. I was indeed very excited that along with me, I had many of my friends presenting at the event as well. I want to thank all of you to attend my session and having standing room every single time. I have already sent resources in my newsletter. You can sign up for the newsletter over here. Indexing is an Art I was amazed with the crowd present in the sessions at GIDS. There was a great interest in the subject of SQL Server and Performance Tuning. Audience at GIDS I believe event like such provides a great platform to meet and share knowledge. Pinal at Pluralsight Booth Here are the abstract of the sessions which I had presented. They were recorded so at some point in time they will be available, but if you want the content of all the courses immediately, I suggest you check out my video courses on the same subject on Pluralsight. Indexes, the Unsung Hero Relevant Pluralsight Course Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Indexes are the most crucial objects of the database. They are the first stop for any DBA and Developer when it is about performance tuning. There is a good side as well evil side to indexes. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of indexes and the best practices associated with the same. We will cover various aspects of Indexing such as Duplicate Index, Redundant Index, Missing Index as well as best practices around Indexes. SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting: Ancient Problems and Modern Solutions Relevant Pluralsight Course Many believe Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting is an art which has been lost in time. However, truth is that art has evolved with time and there are more tools and techniques to overcome ancient troublesome scenarios. There are three major resources that when bottlenecked creates performance problems: CPU, IO, and Memory. In this session we will focus on High CPU scenarios detection and their resolutions. If time permits we will cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will have a clear idea as well as action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. We will discuss about performance tuning in this session with the help of Demos. Pinal Dave at GIDS MySQL Performance Tuning – Unexplored Territory Relevant Pluralsight Course Performance is one of the most essential aspects of any application. Everyone wants their server to perform optimally and at the best efficiency. However, not many people talk about MySQL and Performance Tuning as it is an extremely unexplored territory. In this session, we will talk about how we can tune MySQL Performance. We will also try and cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will not only have a clear idea, but also carry home action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. You will also witness some impressive performance tuning demos in this session. Hidden Secrets and Gems of SQL Server We Bet You Never Knew Relevant Pluralsight Course SQL Trio Session! It really amazes us every time when someone says SQL Server is an easy tool to handle and work with. Microsoft has done an amazing work in making working with complex relational database a breeze for developers and administrators alike. Though it looks like child’s play for some, the realities are far away from this notion. The basics and fundamentals though are simple and uniform across databases, the behavior and understanding the nuts and bolts of SQL Server is something we need to master over a period of time. With a collective experience of more than 30+ years amongst the speakers on databases, we will try to take a unique tour of various aspects of SQL Server and bring to you life lessons learnt from working with SQL Server. We will share some of the trade secrets of performance, configuration, new features, tuning, behaviors, T-SQL practices, common pitfalls, productivity tips on tools and more. This is a highly demo filled session for practical use if you are a SQL Server developer or an Administrator. The speakers will be able to stump you and give you answers on almost everything inside the Relational database called SQL Server. I personally attended the session of Vinod Kumar, Balmukund Lakhani, Abhishek Kumar and my favorite Govind Kanshi. Summary If you have missed this event here are two action items 1) Sign up for Resource Newsletter 2) Watch my video courses on Pluralsight Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL Tagged: GIDS

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  • Wildcards!

    - by Tim Dexter
    Yes, its been a while, Im sorry, mumble, mumble ... no excuses. Well other than its been, as my son would say 'hecka busy.' On a brighter note I see Kan has been posting some cool stuff in my absence, long may he continue! I received a question today asking about using a wildcard in a template, something like: <?if:INVOICE = 'MLP*'?> where * is the wildcard Well that particular try does not work but you can do it without building your own wildcard function. XSL, the underpinning language of the RTF templates, has some useful string functions - you can find them listed here. I used the starts-with function to achieve a simple wildcard scenario but the contains can be used in conjunction with some of the others to build something more sophisticated. Assume I have a a list of friends and the amounts of money they owe me ... Im very generous and my interest rates a pretty competitive :0) <ROWSET> <ROW> <NAME>Andy</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Andrew</NAME> <AMT>60</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Aaron</NAME> <AMT>50</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Alice</NAME> <AMT>40</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bob</NAME> <AMT>10</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bill</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> Now, listing my friends is easy enough <for-each:ROW> <NAME> <AMT> <end for-each> but lets say I just want to see all my friends beginning with 'A'. To do that I can use an XPATH expression to filter the data and tack it on to the for-each expression. This is more efficient that using an 'if' statement just inside the for-each. <?for-each:ROW[starts-with(NAME,'A')]?> will find me all the A's. The square braces denote the start of the XPATH expression. starts-with is the function Im calling and Im passing the value I want to check i.e. NAME and the string Im looking for. Just substitute in the characters you are looking for. You can of course use the function in a if statement too. <?if:starts-with(NAME,'A')?><?attribute@incontext:color;'red'?><?end if?> Notice I removed the square braces, this will highlight text red if the name begins with an 'A' You can even use the function to do conditional calculations: <?sum (AMT[starts-with(../NAME,'A')])?> Sum only the amounts where the name begins with an 'A' Notice the square braces are back, its a function we want to apply to the AMT field. Also notice that we need to use ../NAME. The AMT and NAME elements are at the same level in the tree, so when we are at the AMT level we need the ../ to go up a level to then come back down to test the NAME value. I have built out the above functions in a sample template here. Huge prizes for the first person to come up with a 'true' wildcard solution i.e. if NAME like '*im*exter* demand cash now!

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  • VB Myth - Case Insensitivity is Awesome!

    - by Damon
    I was reading Andy Brown's article 10 Reasons Why Visual Basic is Better than C# and the first claim is that VB is superior because of case insensitivity.  I think the reasons he outlines are basically as follows: Your fingers get tired finding the shift key (e.g. typing PascalCase and camelCase members) You are much more likely to make mistakes while typing names When you accidentally leave caps lock on, it really matters These three arguments culminate in the conclusion: "It doesn't matter if you disagree with everything else in this article: case-sensitivity alone is sufficient reason to ditch C#!" Righto.  I've been using Visual Basic since version 5.0, I wrote a book about ASP.NET in Visual Basic, so I want everyone to know I'm definitely not a VB.NET hater.  I had to converted to C# because it was the language of preference at the places I've worked, so I'm used to both languages.  I love me some case sensitivity.  So first, let's debunk the claims. First, your fingers do not get tired of finding the shift key unless you are writing code in notepad and compiling everything on the command line.  Visual Studio pretty much takes away the need to use the shift key at all. For the most part, any programmer worth a damn doesn't have to type more than about 3-5 characters of any variable or method name before IntelliSense kicks in to help.  VB or C#, if you are not using the tab key for autocomplete then you are typing too much anyway, regardless of whether the shift key is involved or not.  Also, you've got to be a pretty hard-core candy ass if you're complaining at the end of the day that your little fingers are hurting from hitting the shift key. Second, I cannot logically refute the fact that if there are more stringent rules about case sensitivity it will lead to more mistakes.  As such, know that you will be more prone to mistakes in C#.  However, lets talk about the magnitude of the problem.  If you are using IntelliSense then you have auto-correction built in so you probably won't have much of a problem in the first place.  If you manage to bypass IntelliSense and type something wrong you normally are immediately presented with a red-squiggly to let you know something is amiss.  Normally, a person would look at the problem, figure out what the heck went wrong, and then avoid that problem again in the future.  Granted, I have met people who seem to lack this capability, but their problem is deeper than a decision between VB.NET and C#.  So let's make sure that we're all on the same page about this problem.  If you have two teams of developers, one that uses VB.NET and one that uses C#, do not expect to see the VB.NET team drinking beer at the end of the project in festive revelry while the C# team is crying over what the hell to do because their code is riddled with case-sensitivity problems that nobody can resolve. Lastly, if you leave your caps lock key on, turn it off.  Really, what kind of ass-hat would write an entire VB.NET application ENTIRELY IN CAPS?  I happen to be a fan of case sensitivity because it encourages precision and uniformity.  The last thing I need is a code base that looks like it was ransacked by LeEt HacKors wHo Can uSe wHateVer cASe tHey wanT.  I mean really, if you saw someone write this: PuBLIc Sub MyMethod . End Sub And upon asking them why BL was upper case, they responded "Oh, I accidentally hit the shift key there.  Fortunately for me VB.NET is a case insensitive language so I saved a couple of keystrokes by leaving it in there."  Or if you saw: PUBLIC SUB ANOTHERMETHOD . END SUB And the response to why it was uppercased was "Yeah, I accidentally had caps locks on, fortunately for me VB.NET doesn't care.  Really dodged a bullet there, glad I wasn't using C#."  Would you not think that a bit ridiculous?  If you want to convince C# developers that C# sucks, go for it.  But the case insensitivity argument is crap.

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