Search Results

Search found 14403 results on 577 pages for 'visual b'.

Page 505/577 | < Previous Page | 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 509 510 511 512  | Next Page >

• How do I import my first sprites?

  - by steven_desu

  Continuing from this question (new question - now unrelated) So I have a thorough background in programming already (algorithms, math, logic, graphing problems, etc.) however I've never attempted to code a game before. In fact, I've never had anything more than minimal input from a user during the execution of a program. Generally input was given from a file or passed through console, all necessary functions were performed, then the program terminated with an output. I decided to try and get in on the world of game development. From several posts I've seen around gamedev.stackexchange.com XNA seems to be a favorite, and it was recommended to me when I asked where to start. I've downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2010 along with the XNA Framework and now I can't seem to get moving in the right direction. I started out looking on Google for "xna game studio tutorial", "xna game development beginners", "my first xna game", etc. I found lots of crap. The official "Introduction to Game Studio 4.0" gave me this (plus my own train of thought happily pasted on top thanks to MSPaint): http://tinypic.com/r/2w1sgvq/7 The "Get Additional Help" link (my best guess, since there was no "Continue" or "Next" link) lead me to this page: http://tinypic.com/r/2qa0dgx/7 I tried every page. The forum was the only thing that seemed helpful, however searching for "beginner", "newbie", "getting started", "first project", and similar on the forums turned up many threads with specific questions that are a bit above my level ("beginner to collision detection", for instance) Disappointed I returned to the XNA Game Studio home page. Surely their own website would have some introduction, tutorial, or at least a useful link to a community. EVERYTHING on their website was about coding Windows Phone 7.... Everything. http://tinypic.com/r/10eit8i/7 http://tinypic.com/r/120m9gl/7 Giving up on any official documentation after a while, I went back to Google. I managed to locate www.xnadevelopment.com. The website is built around XNA Game Studio 3.0, but how different can 3.0 be from 4.0?.... Apparently different enough. http://tinypic.com/r/5d8mk9/7 http://tinypic.com/r/25hflli/7 Figuring that this was the correct folder, I right-clicked.... http://tinypic.com/r/24o94yu/7 Hmm... maybe by "Add Content Reference" they mean "Add a reference to an existing file (content)"? Let's try it (after all- it's my only option) http://tinypic.com/r/2417eqt/7 At this point I gave up. I'm back. My original goal in my last question was to create a keyboard-navigable 3D world (no physics necessary, no logic or real game necessary). After my recent failures my goal has been revised. I want to display an image on the screen. Hopefully in time I'll be able to move it with the keyboard.

  Read the article

• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

  Read the article

• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

  Read the article

• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

  Read the article

• Telesharp – An Application Repository for .NET applications

  - by cibrax

  A year ago, we released SO-Aware as our first product in Tellago Studios. SO-Aware represented a new way to manage web services and all the related artifacts like configuration, tests or monitoring data in the Microsoft stack. It was based on the idea of using a lightweight SOA governance approach with a central repository exposed through RESTful services. At that point, we thought the same idea could be extended to enterprise applications in general by providing a generic repository for many of the runtime or design time artifacts generated during the development like configuration, application description or topology (a high level view of the components that made up a system), logging information or binaries. It took us several months to give a form to that idea and implement it as a product, but it is finally here and I am very proud to announce the release today under the name of “TeleSharp”. Telesharp provides in a nutshell the following features, 1. Configure your application topology in a central repository. Application topology in this context means that you can decompose your application and describe it in terms of components and how they interact each other. For example, you can tell that the CRM system is made up of a couple of WCF services and a ASP.NET MVC front end. 2. Centralize configuration for your applications and components.  You can import existing .NET configuration sections into the repository and associate them to the different components. In addition, environment overrides are supported for the configuration sections. We provide tooling and extensions in Visual Studio for managing all the configuration, and a set of powershell commands for automating the configuration deployment. 3. Browse all the assemblies and types remotely in your application servers in a web browser using an interface similar to any of the existing .NET reflection tools. You can easily determine this way whether the server is running the correct version of your applications. 4. Centralize logging and exception management into the repository. You get different reports and a pivot viewer experience for browsing all the different logging information generated by your applications. In addition, TeleSharp provides different providers for pushing the logging information to the central repository using well-known frameworks like ELMAH, Log4Net, EntLib or even Windows ETW.  The central repository itself is implemented as a set of OData services that any application can easily consume using regular Http. You can read more details in this introductory post If you think this product can be a good fit in your organization, you can request a trial version in our Tellago Studios website.

  Read the article

• 2011 - ALMs for your development team and the people they work with.

  - by David V. Corbin

  Welcome to 2011, it is already shaping up to be a very exciting year. The title of the post is not about charitable giving, although that is also a great topic. Application Lifecycle Management and the Systems that support the environment is, and 2011 will be a year where I expect many teams to invest heavily in this area. For those not familiar with ALM, it can be simplified down to "A comprehensive view of all of the iteas, requirements, activities and artifacts that impact an application over the course of its lifecycle, from concept until decommissioning". Obviously, this encompases a large number of different areas even for relatively small and medium sized projects. In recent years, many teams have adapted methodoligies which address individual aspects of this; but the majority of this adoption has resulted in "islands of improvement" rather than the desired comprehensive outcome...Until now! Last year Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2010 along with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition, and with these two in combination the situation has drastically changed. At last there is a single environment that is capable of handling all aspects of ALM, and is also capable of dealing with migration and integration with existing systems to make the transition to a single solution much easier. Thse possibilities (and practicalities) are nothing short of amazing, Architecture thru Testing integration? YES. Being able to correlate specific requirement items (and their history) to actual code (and code history)? YES. Identification of which tests will be potentially impacted by a given code change? YES. Resiliant Automated Testing of User Interfaces? YES. Automatic Deployment Management? YES. Integraton Level testing as part of (designated) Builds? YES. I could easily double or triple the above list, but these items should be enough to get you thinking about the "pain points" your team and organization currently face and the fact that there IS a way to relieve the pain. Over the course of the year, I am hoping to bring together some of the "best of breed" information, along with hosting (and participating in) discussions with various experts in the field. There are already a number of groups (including many on LinkedIn) that have an ALM focus, and I encourage everyone out to check them out. I will be posting a list of the ones I find most helpful in the not too distant future. As I said at the beginning, 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting (and productive) year. Why wait to start investigating and adopting ALM? ps: For those interested in becoming an "Alms Giver" in the charitable sense, I highly recommend checking out GiveCamp. A group of developers, designers and others get together to create a solution for a charity in just under 48 hours. I will be attending the GiveCamp in New York City on Jan 14-16, more information is available at nycgivecamp.org/

  Read the article

• how to convert avi (xvid) to mkv or mp4 (h264)

  - by bcsteeve

  Very noob when it comes to video. I'm trying to make sense of what I"m finding via Google... but its mostly Greek to me. I have a bunch of Avi files that won't play in my WD TV Play box. Mediainfo tells me they are xvid. Specs for the box show that should be fine... but digging through forums says its hit-and-miss. So I'd like to try converting them to h264 encoded MKV or mp4 files. I gather avconv is the tool, but reading the manual just has me really really confused. I tried the very basic example of: avconv -i file.avi -c copy file.mp4 it took less than 4 seconds. And it worked... sort of. It "played" in that something came up on the screen... but there was horrible artifacting and scenes would just sort of melt into each other. I want to preserve quality if possible. I'm not concerned about file size. I'm not terribly concerned with the time it takes either, provided I can do them in a batch. Can someone familiar with the process please give me a command with the options? Thank you for your help. I'm posting the mediainfo in case it helps: General Complete name : \\SERVER\Video\Public\test.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 189 MiB Duration : 11mn 18s Overall bit rate : 2 335 Kbps Writing application : Lavf52.32.0 Video ID : 0 Format : MPEG-4 Visual Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5 Format settings, BVOP : 2 Format settings, QPel : No Format settings, GMC : No warppoints Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263) Muxing mode : Packed bitstream Codec ID : XVID Codec ID/Hint : XviD Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate : 2 129 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 480 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate : 29.970 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Compression mode : Lossy Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.206 Stream size : 172 MiB (91%) Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04) Audio ID : 1 Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 3 Mode : Joint stereo Mode extension : MS Stereo Codec ID : 55 Codec ID/Hint : MP3 Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 192 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Compression mode : Lossy Stream size : 15.5 MiB (8%) Alignment : Aligned on interleaves Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.72 video frame)

  Read the article

• NuGet JustMock

  - by mehfuzh

  As most of us already know JustMock got  a free edition. The free edition is not a stripped down of the features of the full edition but I would rather say its a strip down of the type you can mock. Technically, free version runs on  proxy as full version runs on proxy + profiler. In full version, It switches to profiler when you are mocking final methods or sealed class or anything else that can not be done using inheritance. Like in full version you can mock non public methods , in free version you can still do it but it has to be virtual for protected or must be done through InternalsVisibleTo attribute for internal virtual methods (If you have access to the source and can apply the attribute). Now, you can get a copy of free edition from the product page. Install it and off you go. But it is also exposed to NuGet. Those of you are not familiar with NuGet (that will be odd). But still NuGet is the centralized package manager from Microsoft that cuts the workflow of manual inclusion of  libraries in your project. I think NuGet in future will limit the scope of  “.vsi” packages and installers because of its ease (except in some cases). Its similar to ruby gems. In ruby, virtually you can install any library in this way “gems  install <target_library>” and you are off to go. It will check the dependencies, install them or less prompt with the steps you need to do.   Now sticking to the post, to get started you first need to install NuGet package manager. Once you have completed the step pressing “Ctrl + W, Ctrl + Z” it will bring up an console like one below:   Once you are here, you just have to type “install-package justmock” Next, it will should print the confirmation when the installation is complete: Moving to visual studio solution explorer, you will now see:   Finally, NuGet is still in its early ages and steps that are shown here may not remain the same in coming releases, but feel free to enjoy what is out there right now. Regarding JustMock free edition, there is a nice post by Phil Japikse at Introducing JustMock Free Edition. I think its worth checking if not already.   Have fun and happy holidays!

  Read the article

• Creating a Strong Bridge to the Post PC World

  - by Webgui

  Moving from location to location requires strong roads.  When crossing a barrier though, like a body of water or valley, we are required to build a strong bridge to get us from point A to point B in a way that is fast, safe, and easy.Yet we are not talking here about driving a car or riding a bus.  As we in the computing world are evidencing the move to the post-PC era, modernizing and migrating legacy applications to harness the power of HTML5 web, cloud and mobile is one of the most difficult challenges enterprises have faced.  Constant technological changes have weakened the business value of legacy systems, which have been developed over the years through huge investments.  There are several risks of course in this move.  Do you choose to simply rewrite code of legacy apps and transform them to HTML5 one by one?  This is quite expensive (according to research firm Gartner, the cost is $6 - $26 per line of code).  Of course, the pace of the rewriting process is very slow – around 170 lines per day for each developer – which slows down business productivity in a world in which no organization can afford to fall behind.  Other questions include whether the new cloud-based apps will have the same functionality as the trusted applications that worked for you for years.  How will the user experience be affected?  And of course, what about data security?  So we are faced with the challenge of building a sturdy bridge to stabilize our move in order to allow us to confidently and easily move our legacy applications into the post-PC era.   We at Gizmox are excited to release the first downloadable Community Technology Preview (CTP) of our Instant CloudMove Transposition Studio.Developers: To download the tool, and try it out for yourself, please visit http://www.visualwebgui.com/download.aspx.The CTP is the first and only tool-based solution allowing any Microsoft Visual Studio developer to extend VB6 and .NET enterprise client/server applications into HTML5 web, cloud and mobile applications, including the ability to upgrade their code and UI while doing so.   It is the only solution to fully replicate enterprise desktop applications behavior in the post-PC era.  With Instant CloudMove, the transposed application is available on any mobile or tablet device, browser and across any client operating system. Moreover, the extended application logic and data remains on the server behind the fire-wall and therefore the application’s front end is secured-by-design.   We would love for you to try out the tool for yourselves and let us know what you think.  How are you finding the move?

  Read the article

• Difference between the terms Material & Effect

  - by codey

  I'm making an effect system right now (I think, because it may be a material system... or both!). The effects system follows the common (e.g. COLLADA, DirectX) effect framework abstraction of Effects have Techniques, Techniques have Passes, Passes have States & Shader Programs. An effect, according to COLLADA, defines the equations necessary for the visual appearance of geometry and screen-space image processing. Keeping with the abstraction, effects contain techniques. Each effect can contain one or many techniques (i.e. ways to generate the effect), each of which describes a different method for rendering that effect. The technique could be relate to quality (e.g. high precision, high LOD, etc.), or in-game-situation (e.g. night/day, power-up-mode, etc.). Techniques hold a description of the textures, samplers, shaders, parameters, & passes necessary for rendering this effect using one method. Some algorithms require several passes to render the effect. Pipeline descriptions are broken into an ordered collection of Pass objects. A pass provides a static declaration of all the render states, shaders, & settings for "one rendering pipeline" (i.e. one pass). Meshes usually contain a series of materials that define the model. According to the COLLADA spec (again), a material instantiates an effect, fills its parameters with values, & selects a technique. But I see material defined differently in other places, such as just the Lambert, Blinn, Phong "material types/shaded surfaces", or as Metal, Plastic, Wood, etc. In game dev forums, people often talk about implementing a "material/effect system". Is the material not an instance of an effect? Ergo, if I had effect objects, stored in a collection, & each effect instance object with there own parameter setting, then there is no need for the concept of a material... Or am I interpreting it wrong? Please help by contributing your interpretations as I want to be clear on a distinction (if any), & don't want to miss out on the concept of a material if it should be implemented to follow the abstraction of the DirectX FX framework & COLLADA definitions closely.

  Read the article

• Developer – Cross-Platform: Fact or Fiction?

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a guest blog post by Jeff McVeigh. Jeff McVeigh is the general manager of Performance Client and Visual Computing within Intel’s Developer Products Division. His team is responsible for the development and delivery of leading software products for performance-centric application developers spanning Android*, Windows*, and OS* X operating systems. During his 17-year career at Intel, Jeff has held various technical and management positions in the fields of media, graphics, and validation. He also served as the technical assistant to Intel’s CTO. He holds 20 patents and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s not a homogenous world. We all know it. I have a Windows* desktop, a MacBook Air*, an Android phone, and my kids are 100% Apple. We used to have 2.5 kids, now we have 2.5 devices. And we all agree that diversity is great, unless you’re a developer trying to prioritize the limited hours in the day. Then it’s a series of trade-offs. Do we become brand loyalists for Google or Apple or Microsoft? Do we specialize on phones and tablets or still consider the 300M+ PC shipments a year when we make our decisions on where to spend our time and resources? We weigh the platform options, monetization opportunities, APIs, and distribution models. Too often, I see developers choose one platform, or write to the lowest common denominator, which limits their reach and market success. But who wants to be ?me too”? Cross-platform coding is possible in some environments, for some applications, for some level of innovation—but it’s not all-inclusive, yet. There are some tricks of the trade to develop cross-platform, including using languages and environments that ?run everywhere.” HTML5 is today’s answer for web-enabled platforms. However, it’s not a panacea, especially if your app requires the ultimate performance or native UI look and feel. There are other cross-platform frameworks that address the presentation layer of your application. But for those apps that have a preponderance of native code (e.g., highly-tuned C/C++ loops), there aren’t tons of solutions today to help with code reuse across these platforms using consistent tools and libraries. As we move forward with interim solutions, they’ll improve and become more robust, based, in no small part, on our input. What’s your answer to the cross-platform challenge? Are you fully invested in HTML5 now? What are your barriers? What’s your vision to navigate the cross-platform landscape?  Here is the link where you can head next and learn more about how to answer the questions I have asked: https://software.intel.com/en-us Republished with permission from here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Intel

  Read the article

• Regular Expression Transformation

  The regular expression transformation exposes the power of regular expression matching within the pipeline. One or more columns can be selected, and for each column an individual expression can be applied. The way multiple columns are handled can be set on the options page. The AND option means all columns must match, whilst the OR option means only one column has to match. If rows pass their tests then rows are passed down the successful match output. Rows that fail are directed down the alternate output. This transformation is ideal for validating data through the use of regular expressions. You can enter any expression you like, or select a pre-configured expression within the editor. You can expand the list of pre-configured expressions yourself. These are stored in a Xml file, %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\nnn\DTS\PipelineComponents\RegExTransform.xml, where nnn represents the folder version, 90 for 2005, 100 for 2008 and 110 for 2012. If you want to use regular expressions to manipulate data, rather than just validating it, try the RegexClean Transformation. The component is provided as an MSI file, however for 2005/200 you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox by hand. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component?, just select Regular Expression Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. Downloads The Regular Expression Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Regular Expression Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Regular Expression Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Regular Expression Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012Version 2.0.0.87 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008Version 2.0.0.87 - Release for SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. (10 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.93 - Added option for you to choose AND or OR logic when multiple columns have been selected. Previously behaviour was OR only. (31 Jul 2008) Version 1.0.0.76 - Installer update and improved exception handling. (28 Jan 2008) Version 1.0.0.41 - Update for user interface stability fixes. (2 Aug 2006) Version 1.0.0.24 - SQL Server 2005 RTM Refresh. SP1 Compatibility Testing. (12 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.9 - Public Release for SQL Server 2005 IDW 15 June CTP (29 Aug 2005) Screenshots  

  Read the article

• CAM v2.0 ships – all new foundation version

  - by drrwebber

  The latest release of the CAM editor toolset is now available on Sourceforge.net – search NIEM. In this all new version the support from Oracle has enabled a transformation of the editor underpinning Java framework and results in 3x performance improvement and 50% better memory utilization. The result of nearly six months of improvements are catalogued in the release notes. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor/files/CAM%20Editor/Releases/2.0/CAM_Editor_2-0_Release_Notes.pdf/download However here I’d like to talk about the strategic vision and highlight specific new go to features that make a difference for exchange schema designers and with a focus on the NIEM community. So why is this a foundation version? Basically the new drag and drop designer tool allows you to tailor your own dictionary collection of components and then simply select and position those into your resulting exchange structure. This is true global reuse enabled from a canonical domain dictionary collection. So instead of grappling with XSD Schema syntax, or UML model nuances – this is straightforward direct WYSIWYG visual engineering – using familiar sets of business components. Then the toolkit writes the complex XSD Schema for you, along with test samples, documentation, XMI/UML models, Mindmaps and more. So how do you get a set of business components? The toolkit allows you to harvest these from existing schema collections or enterprise data models, or as in the case of NIEM, existing domain dictionary collections. I’ve been using this for the latest IEEE/OASIS/NIST initiative on a Common Data Format (CDF) for elections management systems. So you can download those from OASIS and see how this can transform how you build actual business exchanges – improving the quality, consistency and usability – and dramatically allowing automated generation of artifacts you only dreamed of before – such as a model of your entire major exchange collection components. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=election So what we have here is a foundation version – setting the scene and the basis for changing how people can generate and manage information exchanges. A foundation built using the OASIS CAM standard combined with aspects of the NIEM Naming and Design Rules and the UN/CEFACT Core Components specifications and emerging work on OASIS CIQ name and address and ANSI/ISO code list schema. We still have a raft of work to do to integrate this into SOA best practices and extend the dictionary capabilities to assist true community development. Answering questions such as: - How good is my canonical component collection? - How much reuse is really occurring? - What inconsistencies and extensions are there in the dictionary components? Expect us to begin tackling these areas now that the foundation is in place. The immediate need is to develop training and self-start materials – so we will be focusing there for the next couple of months and especially leading up to the IJIS industry event in July in New Jersey, and the NIEM NTE event in August in Philadelphia. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor

  Read the article

• Business Choices and Evony

  - by Robert May

  Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted.  I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example.  A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.  As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They obviously offshore all development and have little oversight over that offshore development, and they probably have a small team at that.  Evidenced by the poor grammar throughout the game. They're seeking to maximize revenue and pushing to do as little development as possible, which would mean a small team. They're horribly understaffed in the customer support department as evidenced by never replying to this forum and never responding to bug reports or help requests (I've had one open with no response AT ALL for over a month . . .) They have way inadequate testing, no CI, and probably no automated unit tests.  You can see this by the poor grammar throughout the game and the type of bugs that show up. They aren't following a formal development process (no Agile, Waterfall, or anything else) as evidenced by their lack of predictable release cycle and lack of visibility. I'm guessing that the internal code base is terrible, otherwise, there wouldn't be an "Age II" that had nothing more than a new visual interface and a few rule tweaks.  This is also evidenced by the itty bitty scope of bug fixes and their inability to really fix bugs. Their Architect sucks.  Really, 42k user is all you can handle on a single server?  Could you REALLY not come up with a better way to scale to handle users?  They've built isolated worlds, instead of a single continuous world. Back to milking people for money--to really progress, you have to spend money. All of this adds up to knowing, deliberate actions on the part of management.  They CHOOSE to do this (like AOL choosing to send more discs instead of improve quality). So, what can we learn? This game will never really improve, since the bosses don't care, they're only in it for the money. The game will never have good support.  Again, the owners don't care. Giving them money only perpetuates this scam (and yes, I've given them money, way too much money. :() They don't care if you quit.  There's a new sucker born every day. Don't EVER go to work for them.  I've worked both with and for people like this and the culture is NEVER good. Ah well. Technorati Tags: Evony

  Read the article

• Why CoffeeScript is tough to maintain

  - by Renso

  I recently started trying out CoffeeScript only to find out that it caused more headaches. The abstraction level of jQuery was perfect, it did not dictate to coders how to design their code, it just works. However, I recently posted a request to the CoffeeScript team to consider introducing curly braces to help with more complex code to control the flow of logic. For example a if-then-else with many nested levels can be near impossible to debug without tracing through it when using CoffeeScript. Also with IDEs like Visual Studio, regular JavaScript intellicense and auto-formatting make it easy to appropriate indent nested levels without any work on the part of the developer and reading it is not that hard, especially with some extensions that show vertical lines in the code editor to help see what is nested within what part of the code.However with CoffeeScript that is not the case. The samples given in the CoffeeScript web site are of course just simple examples to explain the features and one gets excited pretty quick over the powerful shortcuts. I tried to convert a piece of JavaScript over to CoffeeScript and gave up since you need to first of all remove ALL non CoffeeScript coding constructs for it to even compile. However js2coffee can help with that. However to keep track of nested levels became something that was simply not manageable using CoffeeScript.Furthermore, any coding language that controls the flow of logic by indentation is extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. I liked CoffeeScript a lot, but the fact that the logical flow of the code is controlled by how much you indent code, spaces or tabs, is not reliable as there is no way the programmer has an easy way of knowing what parts of the code will get hit when the code spans a page.When I suggested introducing curly braces in CoffeeScript the team, one contributor advised me that my code needs to be re-designed! Needless to say that is absurd. When I included a piece of the code he asked my if it was legacy code. It's like saying to a Java programmer, sorry you cannot use Java because we don't agree with how you write your code.jashkenas from the CoffeeScript blog gave some great suggestions and made the point that introducing curly braces would be very problematic for them as they use them to denote objects. Makes sense, but I would still love to see some way to replace code flow control with spaces and indentation to something more concrete and human readable.

  Read the article

• Data Generator Source Adapter

  This component needs little explanation. It generates random integer (DT_I4) and string (DT_WSTR) data and places them in the pipeline. You specify how many columns of each you would like and for any string columns you pass a fixed length value. You then need to specify how many rows in total you require to be generated. This component is used by us to do testing of the pipeline and components downstream. Previously we would have used a script component (as a source) to generate the rows but found ourselves rewriting the code too often so created this component. Screenshots SQL Server 2005 Integration Services SQL Server 2008/2012 Integration Services The component is provided as an MSI file, however to complete the installation, you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Data Generator Source from the list. Downloads The Data Generator Source Adapter is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Data Generator Source Adapter for SQL Server 2005 Data Generator Source Adapter for SQL Server 2008 Data Generator Source Adapter for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.30 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.29 - SQL Server 2008 February 2008 CTP. Includes support for upgrade of 2005 packages. Simplified user interface. (4 Mar 2008) Version 2.0.0.27 - SQL Server 2008 November 2007 CTP. String columns will now use the default system code page. Previously string columns always used 1252. (15 Feb 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.23 - SQL Server 2005 RTM Refresh. SP1 Compatibility Testing. (12 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.0 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 16 Sept CTP. Public release. (6 Oct 2005)

  Read the article

• Oracle Manageability Presentations at Collaborate 2012

  - by Get_Specialized!

  Attending the Collaborate 2012 event, April 22-26th in Las Vegas, and interested in learning more about becoming specialized on Oracle Manageability? Be sure and checkout these sessions below presented by subject matter experts while your onsite. Set up a meeting or be one of the first Oracle Partners onsite to ask me, and we'll request one of the limited FREE Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c partner certification exam vouchers for you. Can't travel this year? the  COLLABORATE 12 Plug Into Vegas may be another option for you to attend from your own desk presentations like session #489 Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: What's Changed? What's New? presented by Oracle Specialized Partners like ROLTA   Session ID Title Presented by Day/Time 920 Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control: New Features and Best Practices Dell Sun 9536 Release 12 Apps DBA 101 Justadba, LLC Mon 932 Monitoring Exadata with Cloud Control Oracle Mon 397 OEM Cloud Control Hands On Performance Tuning Mon 118 Oracle BI Sys Mgmt Best Practices & New Features Rittman Mead Consulting Mon 548 High Availability Boot Camp: RAC Design, Install, Manage Database Administration, Inc Mon 926 The Only Complete Cloud Management Solution -- Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle Mon 328 Virtualization Boot Camp Dell Mon 292 Upgrading to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c - Best Practices Southern Utah University Mon 793 Exadata 101 - What You Need to Know Rolta Tues 431 & 1431 Extreme Database Administration: New Features for Expert DBAs Oracle Tue Wed 521 What's New for Oracle WebLogic Management: Capabilities that Scripting Cannot Provide Oracle Thu 338 Oracle Real Application Testing: A look under the hood PayPal Tue 9398 Reduce TCO Using Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle Tue 312 Configuring and Managing a Private Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Dell Tue 866 Making OEM Sing and Dance with EMCLI Portland General Electric Tue 533 Oracle Exadata Monitoring: Engineered Systems Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle Wed 100600 Optimizing EnterpriseOne System Administration Oracle Wed 9565 Optimizing EBS on Exadata Centroid Systems Wed 550 Database-as-a-Service: Enterprise Cloud in Three Simple Steps Oracle Wed 434 Managing Oracle: Expert Panel on Techniques and Best Practices Oracle Partners: Dell, Keste, ROLTA, Pythian Wed 9760 Cloud Computing Directions: Understanding Oracle's Cloud AT&T Wed 817 Right Cloud: Use Oracle Technologies to Avoid False Cloud Visual Integrator Consulting Wed 163 Forgetting something? Standardize your database monitoring environment with Enterprise Manager 11g Johnson Controls Wed 489 Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: What's Changed? What's New? ROLTA Thu    

  Read the article

• How can I dynamically load the correct sprite from a sprite sheet?

  - by Leonard Challis

  I am making a simple card game in unity. The game is based on a standard 52-card pack, with identical backs for unique faces. In my particular game different cards are worth different values and have various special abilities. The game will have 52 cards on the table (on the draw position or in the face-down deck or in someone's hand) at all times, so this number won't change. I thought that making a Card prefab and instantiating 52 of these manually would be a bad idea. Even doing it in code, I thought, would be a bit OTT, and that I should just instantiate visual cards when they are face-up to the player. I have a sprite sheet of the 52 cards and the back, which is imported as a Sprite in multiple mode, sliced in to a grid containing all the cards needed to play the game. The problem I now face is that, through my GameController script I want to generate a shuffled pack of cards, deal some to each player and then show those cards to a player. However, I am not sure of the best way, or even if it's possible, to do this dynamically with the sprite sheets as they are. For instance if I have the following: private CardRank rank; private CardSuite suite; private void Start() { this.rank = CardRank.Ace; this.suite = CardSuite.Spades; } This class would be instantiated by the game manager. I would have 52 of these in code. Whenever I have to visually show a card in the scene, I would use a card prefab, which is essentially a game object with a SpriteRenderer on it. I would need to dynamically load the correct sprite for this object from the spritesheet. The sliced sprites from the sprite sheet actually have names in the format AS (Ace of Spades), 7H (Seven of Hearts), etc - though this was a manual thing I did myself of course. I have also tried various alternative solutions, including creating animations, having separate sprites not in a spritesheet and having an array of available sprites in an array with a specific index for each card, but none seem as elegant as trying to load the correct sprite at runtime, as I'm trying to. So, how do I load a specific sprite from a spritesheet at runtime? I'm open to suggestions, even those that make me think differently about how to approach the problem.

  Read the article

• Send an E-mail Quickly with the GmailThis! Bookmarklet

  - by Asian Angel

  Sometimes you need to send out a quick e-mail for a project that you are working on, something really important that you just remembered, or perhaps just a note to yourself. If you use Gmail and like keeping things simple then join us as we look at the GmailThis! Bookmarklet. GmailThis! in Action To get set up all that you need to do is visit the webpage (link provided below) and drag the bookmarklet to your “Bookmarks Toolbar”. For our example we decided to go with the “personal note” approach. As you can see here we selected/highlighted a portion of the text and then clicked on our new bookmarklet. The bookmarklet will automatically copy and paste the name of the webpage, the URL, and any text that you selected/highlighted into the new e-mail. A nice feature that we liked was that it opened in a new temporary window to help focus on composing our letter. This is what you will see when you have finished your letter and clicked “Send”. The window will automatically close itself after a few seconds so that you do not even have to worry with it afterwards. Looking at our “Inbox” there is our new e-mail looking oh so nice. Conclusion If you need to send out a quick e-mail using your Gmail account then this bookmarklet makes it as quick and simple as possible. This is definitely one to add to your bookmarklets collection. Links Get the GmailThis! Bookmarklet for your browser Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Send and Receive Hotmail from Your Gmail AccountShare Your Favorite Webpages with the AddThis BookmarkletPower Up and Manage Your Windows Send To Menu with Send To ToysTurn off New Mail Notification for PocoMail Junk Mail FolderCreate an Email Template in Outlook 2003 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar Manage Photos Across Different Social Sites With Dropico Test Drive Windows 7 Online

  Read the article

• Pro SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Solutions

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Oh yeah baby, it’s out finally! This book is what I wanted to write for so long now, but never really got a chance to. For SharePoint 2007, I authored the SharePoint section of “Smart BI Solutions with SQL Server 2008” for MS Press. But never really got the time, to author a full book that this topic deserved. Until SharePoint 2010, we actually have a full book on this topic. So first things first, I didn’t actually write it. My role was limited to the overall concept, the outline, the layout, completion of it, code samples, identifying what we need in here, vouching for technical accuracy, identifying authors etc. The real work was done by Srini (5 chapters), and Steve (1 chapter). So credit given where it is due. But, with that said, this is a pretty good book. It has always been a challenge to find the superman that knows both, data ware housing concepts, and SharePoint concepts. The data ware housing concepts include basic stuff you need to know to work in the BI area such as cubes, MDX queries, etc. So chapter 1 covers that – and if you’re a hardcore DBA, feel free to skip Chapter 1. Then beyond that, we take every single SharePoint 2010 BI topic, and slice and dice it in detail. The topics we deal with are - Visio Services Reporting services Business Connectivity Services Excel Services PerformancePoint Services And in covering each of these topics, we ensure that a general layout was followed for each topic, to ensure completeness of content. We make sure we cover Setup related issues and advice Point and click usage Code usage, i.e. extensibility using visual studio and a walkthrough of the administration side of things, including powershell. (Yes, I insisted on that in being there in every chapter). Writing a book is always a lot of work, so we hope you find it useful. And it should go very well with the other book I just reviewed, which is Microsoft ADO.NET 4, step by step. Comment on the article ....

  Read the article

• Office 2010 Professional Plus (Top 10 reasons to upgrade)

  - by mbcrump

  Being a huge nerd, I decided that I would go ahead and upgrade to the latest and greatest office. That being, Office 2010 Professional Plus. The biggest concern that I had was loosing all my mail settings from Outlook 2007. Thankfully, it upgrade gracefully and worked like a charm. So lets start this top 10 list. 1) You can upgrade without fear of loosing all your stuff! As you can tell by the screenshot below, you can select what you want to do. I selected to remove all previous versions.    2) Outlook conversations: Just like GMail, you can now group emails by conversations. This is simply awesome and a must have. 3) The ability to ignore conversations. If you are on a email thread that has nothing to do with you. Simply “ignore” the conversation and all emails go into the deleted folder. 4) Quick Steps, do you send an email to the same team member or group constantly. With quick steps, its just one click away. 5) Spell check in the Subject line! 6)  Easier Screenshots, built in just click the button. No more ALT-Printscreen for those that are not aware of the awesome SnagIT 10 that's out. 7) Open in protected view. When you open a document from an email attachment, it lets you know the file may be unsafe. You can click a button to enable editing. This is great for preventing macros.       8) Excel has always had a variety of charts and graphs available to visually depict data and trends. With Excel 2010, though, Microsoft has added a new feature called Sparklines, which allows you to place a mini-graph or trend line in a single cell. The Sparklines are a cool way to quickly and simply add a visual element without having to go through the effort of inserting a graph or chart that overwhelms the worksheet. 9) Contact actions. If you hover over a name in the form or fields on an email, you get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on the person such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call. 10) Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu – I love the jumplist. I don’t know how much that I would actually use it but it just rocks.

  Read the article

• WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference

  - by JuergenKress

  The WebLogic Server 11gR1 Administration interactive quick reference is a multimedia tool for various terms and concepts used in WebLogic Server architecture. This tool is available for administrators for online or offline use. This is built as a multimedia web page which provides descriptions of WebLogic Server Architectural components, and references to relevant documentation. This tool offers valuable reference information for any complex concept or product in an intuitive and useful manner. Each interactive type presents data that may be available in the documentation (in the case of Oracle products), but presents it in a way that is more intuitive and useful to a user of Oracle products because it displays data the way it is used in a real world, best practice scenario. For example, the architectural diagram interactive type provides an image of an architectural diagram that is typically larger than a single slide or paper. The image is scrollable and provides zoom capabilities to easily and clearly view any part of the image. The image itself contains a hotspot map that you can click to get more information about a feature, including reference links to the documentation in question. Linking the visual image of the component and where it fits in the overall architecture of the product, or technology in use, to the technical explanation and how-to materials related to that component is something not offered by the documentation. In a future release, the poster will also enable you to drill down even further into the individual subsystems in nested diagrams to look at the details of that subsystem. In short, the interactive posters are good at showing you the big picture, then quickly and easily getting you to the detailed information you need. In an instant, you can see where a technical component fits into an overall architecture, and zero in on the nitty-gritty details that show you how to do it yourself. Note: This is a first initial release with more features in development. Currently known information: Only Firefox 8.0 and higher is known to work with this product. This product may work with Chrome and Safari browsers, but is known to have issues in Internet Explorer at this time. Smartphones, such as iPads and iPhones, are partially supported WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. BlogTwitterLinkedInMixForumWiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic server quick reference,weblogic overview,weblogic 12c,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• Turnkey with LightSwitch

  - by Laila

  Microsoft has long wanted to find a replacement for Microsoft Access. The best attempt yet, which is due out in, or before, September is Visual Studio LightSwitch, with which it is said to be as 'easy as flipping a switch' to use Silverlight to create simple form-driven business applications. It is easy to get confused by the various initiatives from Microsoft. No, this isn't WebMatrix. There is no 'Razor', for this isn't meant for cute little ecommerce sites, but is designed to build simple database-applications of the card-box type. It is more clearly a .NET-based solution to the problem that every business seems to suffer from; the plethora of Access-based, and Excel-based 'private' and departmental database-applications. These are a nightmare for any IT department since they are often 'stealth' applications built by the business in the teeth of opposition from the IT Department zealots. As they are undocumented, it is scarily easy to bring a whole department into disarray by decommissioning a PC tucked under a desk somewhere. With LightSwitch, it is easy to re-write such applications in a standard, maintainable, way, using a SQL Server database, deployed somewhere reasonably safe such as Azure. Even Sharepoint or Windows Communication Foundation can be used as data sources. Oracle's ApEx has taken off remarkably well, and has shaken the perception that, for the business user, Oracle must remain a mystic force accessible only to the priests and acolytes. Microsoft, by comparison had only Access, which was first released in 1992, the year of the Madonna conical bustier. It looks just as dated. Microsoft badly needed an entirely new solution to the same business requirement that led to Access's and Foxpro's long-time popularity, but which had the same allure as ApEx. LightSwitch is sound in its ideas, and comfortingly conventional in its architecture. By giving an easy access to SQL Server databases, and providing a 'thumb and blanket' migration path to Access-heads, LightSwitch seems likely to offer a simple way of pulling more Microsoft users into the .NET community. If Microsoft puts its weight behind it, then it will give some glimmer of hope to the many Silverlight developers that Microsoft is capable of seeing through its .NET revolution.

  Read the article

• C# Dev - I've tried Lisps, but I don't get it.

  - by Jonathan Mitchem

  After a few months of learning about and playing with lisps, both CL and a bit of Clojure, I'm still not seeing a compelling reason to write anything in it instead of C#. I would really like some compelling reasons, or for someone to point out that I'm missing something really big. The strengths of a Lisp (per my research): Compact, expressive notation - More so than C#, yes... but I seem to be able to express those ideas in C# too. Implicit support for functional programming - C# with LINQ extension methods: mapcar = .Select( lambda ) mapcan = .Select( lambda ).Aggregate( (a,b) = a.Union(b) ) car/first = .First() cdr/rest = .Skip(1) .... etc. Lambda and higher-order function support - C# has this, and the syntax is arguably simpler: "(lambda (x) ( body ))" versus "x = ( body )" "#(" with "%", "%1", "%2" is nice in Clojure Method dispatch separated from the objects - C# has this through extension methods Multimethod dispatch - C# does not have this natively, but I could implement it as a function call in a few hours Code is Data (and Macros) - Maybe I haven't "gotten" macros, but I haven't seen a single example where the idea of a macro couldn't be implemented as a function; it doesn't change the "language", but I'm not sure that's a strength DSLs - Can only do it through function composition... but it works Untyped "exploratory" programming - for structs/classes, C#'s autoproperties and "object" work quite well, and you can easily escalate into stronger typing as you go along Runs on non-Windows hardware - Yeah, so? Outside of college, I've only known one person who doesn't run Windows at home, or at least a VM of Windows on *nix/Mac. (Then again, maybe this is more important than I thought and I've just been brainwashed...) The REPL for bottom-up design - Ok, I admit this is really really nice, and I miss it in C#. Things I'm missing in a Lisp (due to a mix of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Resharper): Namespaces. Even with static methods, I like to tie them to a "class" to categorize their context (Clojure seems to have this, CL doesn't seem to.) Great compile and design-time support the type system allows me to determine "correctness" of the datastructures I pass around anything misspelled is underlined realtime; I don't have to wait until runtime to know code improvements (such as using an FP approach instead of an imperative one) are autosuggested GUI development tools: WinForms and WPF (I know Clojure has access to the Java GUI libraries, but they're entirely foreign to me.) GUI Debugging tools: breakpoints, step-in, step-over, value inspectors (text, xml, custom), watches, debug-by-thread, conditional breakpoints, call-stack window with the ability to jump to the code at any level in the stack (To be fair, my stint with Emacs+Slime seemed to provide some of this, but I'm partial to the VS GUI-driven approach) I really like the hype surrounding Lisps and I gave it a chance. But is there anything I can do in a Lisp that I can't do as well in C#? It might be a bit more verbose in C#, but I also have autocomplete. What am I missing? Why should I use Clojure/CL?

  Read the article

• Is there a pedagogical game engine?

  - by K.G.

  I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems. I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point! I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered. There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration // y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y; } To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read. In summary, here's my white whale: For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?" In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection. Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL. Thanks for everything! Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 509 510 511 512  | Next Page >