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• Down Tools Week Cometh: Kissing Goodbye to CVs/Resumes and Cover Letters

  - by Bart Read

  I haven't blogged about what I'm doing in my (not so new) temporary role as Red Gate's technical recruiter, mostly because it's been routine, business as usual stuff, and because I've been trying to understand the role by doing it. I think now though the time has come to get a little more radical, so I'm going to tell you why I want to largely eliminate CVs/resumes and cover letters from the application process for some of our technical roles, and why I think that might be a good thing for candidates (and for us). I have a terrible confession to make, or at least it's a terrible confession for a recruiter: I don't really like CV sifting, or reading cover letters, and, unless I've misread the mood around here, neither does anybody else. It's dull, it's time-consuming, and it's somewhat soul destroying because, when all is said and done, you're being paid to be incredibly judgemental about people based on relatively little information. I feel like I've dirtied myself by saying that - I mean, after all, it's a core part of my job - but it sucks, it really does. (And, of course, the truth is I'm still a software engineer at heart, and I'm always looking for ways to do things better.) On the flip side, I've never met anyone who likes writing their CV. It takes hours and hours of faffing around and massaging it into shape, and the whole process is beset by a gnawing anxiety, frustration, and insecurity. All you really want is a chance to demonstrate your skills - not just talk about them - and how do you do that in a CV or cover letter? Often the best candidates will include samples of their work (a portfolio, screenshots, links to websites, product downloads, etc.), but sometimes this isn't possible, or may not be appropriate, or you just don't think you're allowed because of what your school/university careers service has told you (more commonly an issue with grads, obviously). And what are we actually trying to find out about people with all of this? I think the common criteria are actually pretty basic: Smart Gets things done (thanks for these two Joel) Not an a55hole* (sorry, have to get around Simple Talk's swear filter - and thanks to Professor Robert I. Sutton for this one) *Of course, everyone has off days, and I don't honestly think we're too worried about somebody being a bit grumpy every now and again. We can do a bit better than this in the context of the roles I'm talking about: we can be more specific about what "gets things done" means, at least in part. For software engineers and interns, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Excellent coder For test engineers, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Good at finding problems in software Competent coder Team player, etc., to me, are covered by "not an a55hole". I don't expect people to be the life and soul of the party, or a wild extrovert - that's not what team player means, and it's not what "not an a55hole" means. Some of our best technical staff are quiet, introverted types, but they're still pleasant to work with. My problem is that I don't think the initial sift really helps us find out whether people are smart and get things done with any great efficacy. It's better than nothing, for sure, but it's not as good as it could be. It's also contentious, and potentially unfair/inequitable - if you want to get an idea of what I mean by this, check out the background information section at the bottom. Before I go any further, let's look at the Red Gate recruitment process for technical staff* as it stands now: (LOTS of) People apply for jobs. All these applications go through a brutal process of manual sifting, which eliminates between 75 and 90% of them, depending upon the role, and the time of year**. Depending upon the role, those who pass the sift will be sent an assessment or telescreened. For the purposes of this blog post I'm only interested in those that are sent some sort of programming assessment, or bug hunt. This means software engineers, test engineers, and software interns, which are the roles for which I receive the most applications. The telescreen tends to be reserved for project or product managers. Those that pass the assessment are invited in for first interview. This interview is mostly about assessing their technical skills***, although we're obviously on the look out for cultural fit red flags as well. If the first interview goes well we'll invite candidates back for a second interview. This is where team/cultural fit is really scoped out. We also use this interview to dive more deeply into certain areas of their skillset, and explore any concerns that may have come out of the first interview (these obviously won't have been serious or obvious enough to cause a rejection at that point, but are things we do need to look into before we'd consider making an offer). We might subsequently invite them in for lunch before we make them an offer. This tends to happen when we're recruiting somebody for a specific team and we'd like them to meet all the people they'll be working with directly. It's not an interview per se, but can prove pivotal if they don't gel with the team. Anyone who's made it this far will receive an offer from us. *We have a slightly quirky definition of "technical staff" as it relates to the technical recruiter role here. It includes software engineers, test engineers, software interns, user experience specialists, technical authors, project managers, product managers, and development managers, but does not include product support or information systems roles. **For example, the quality of graduate applicants overall noticeably drops as the academic year wears on, which is not to say that by now there aren't still stars in there, just that they're fewer and further between. ***Some organisations prefer to assess for team fit first, but I think assessing technical skills is a more effective initial filter - if they're the nicest person in the world, but can't cut a line of code they're not going to work out. Now, as I suggested in the title, Red Gate's Down Tools Week is upon us once again - next week in fact - and I had proposed as a project that we refactor and automate the first stage of marking our programming assessments. Marking assessments, and in fact organising the marking of them, is a somewhat time-consuming process, and we receive many assessment solutions that just don't make the cut, for whatever reason. Whilst I don't think it's possible to fully automate marking, I do think it ought to be possible to run a suite of automated tests over each candidate's solution to see whether or not it behaves correctly and, if it does, move on to a manual stage where we examine the code for structure, decomposition, style, readability, maintainability, etc. Obviously it's possible to use tools to generate potentially helpful metrics for some of these indices as well. This would obviously reduce the marking workload, and would provide candidates with quicker feedback about whether they've been successful - though I do wonder if waiting a tactful interval before sending a (nicely written) rejection might be wise. I duly scrawled out a picture of my ideal process, which looked like this: The problem is, as soon as I'd roughed it out, I realised that fundamentally it wasn't an ideal process at all, which explained the gnawing feeling of cognitive dissonance I'd been wrestling with all week, whilst I'd been trying to find time to do this. Here's what I mean. Automated assessment marking, and the associated infrastructure around that, makes it much easier for us to deal with large numbers of assessments. This means we can be much more permissive about who we send assessments out to or, in other words, we can give more candidates the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills to us. And this leads to a question: why not give everyone the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, to show that they're smart and can get things done? (Two or three of us even discussed this in the down tools week hustings earlier this week.) And isn't this a lot simpler than the alternative we'd been considering? (FYI, this was automated CV/cover letter sifting by some form of textual analysis to ideally eliminate the worst 50% or so of applications based on an analysis of the 20,000 or so historical applications we've received since 2007 - definitely not the basic keyword analysis beloved of recruitment agencies, since this would eliminate hardly anyone who was awful, but definitely would eliminate stellar Oxbridge candidates - #fail - or some nightmarishly complex Google-like system where we profile all our currently employees, only to realise that we're never going to get representative results because we don't have a statistically significant sample size in any given role - also #fail.) No, I think the new way is better. We let people self-select. We make them the masters (or mistresses) of their own destiny. We give applicants the power - we put their fate in their hands - by giving them the chance to demonstrate their skills, which is what they really want anyway, instead of requiring that they spend hours and hours creating a CV and cover letter that I'm going to evaluate for suitability, and make a value judgement about, in approximately 1 minute (give or take). It doesn't matter what university you attended, it doesn't matter if you had a bad year when you took your A-levels - here's your chance to shine, so take it and run with it. (As a side benefit, we cut the number of applications we have to sift by something like two thirds.) WIN! OK, yeah, sounds good, but will it actually work? That's an excellent question. My gut feeling is yes, and I'll justify why below (and hopefully have gone some way towards doing that above as well), but what I'm proposing here is really that we run an experiment for a period of time - probably a couple of months or so - and measure the outcomes we see: How many people apply? (Wouldn't be surprised or alarmed to see this cut by a factor of ten.) How many of them submit a good assessment? (More/less than at present?) How much overhead is there for us in dealing with these assessments compared to now? What are the success and failure rates at each interview stage compared to now? How many people are we hiring at the end of it compared to now? I think it'll work because I hypothesize that, amongst other things: It self-selects for people who really want to work at Red Gate which, at the moment, is something I have to try and assess based on their CV and cover letter - but if you're not that bothered about working here, why would you complete the assessment? Candidates who would submit a shoddy application probably won't feel motivated to do the assessment. Candidates who would demonstrate good attention to detail in their CV/cover letter will demonstrate good attention to detail in the assessment. In general, only the better candidates will complete and submit the assessment. Marking assessments is much less work so we'll be able to deal with any increase that we see (hopefully we will see). There are obviously other questions as well: Is plagiarism going to be a problem? Is there any way we can detect/discourage potential plagiarism? How do we assess candidates' education and experience? What about their ability to communicate in writing? Do we still want them to submit a CV afterwards if they pass assessment? Do we want to offer them the opportunity to tell us a bit about why they'd like the job when they submit their assessment? How does this affect our relationship with recruitment agencies we might use to hire for these roles? So, what's the objective for next week's Down Tools Week? Pretty simple really - we want to implement this process for the Graduate Software Engineer and Software Engineer positions that you can find on our website. I will be joined by a crack team of our best developers (Kevin Boyle, and new Red-Gater, Sam Blackburn), and recruiting hostess with the mostest Laura McQuillen, and hopefully a couple of others as well - if I can successfully twist more arms before Monday.* Hopefully by next Friday our experiment will be up and running, and we may have changed the way Red Gate recruits software engineers for good! Stay tuned and we'll let you know how it goes! *I'm going to play dirty by offering them beer and chocolate during meetings. Some background information: how agonising over the initial CV/cover letter sift helped lead us to bin it off entirely The other day I was agonising about the new university/good degree grade versus poor A-level results issue, and decided to canvas for other opinions to see if there was something I could do that was fairer than my current approach, which is almost always to reject. This generated quite an involved discussion on our Yammer site: I'm sure you can glean a pretty good impression of my own educational prejudices from that discussion as well, although I'm very open to changing my opinion - hopefully you've already figured that out from reading the rest of this post. Hopefully you can also trace a logical path from agonising about sifting to, "Uh, hang on, why on earth are we doing this anyway?!?" Technorati Tags: recruitment,hr,developers,testers,red gate,cv,resume,cover letter,assessment,sea change

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• Spritebatch drawing sprite with jagged borders

  - by Mutoh

  Alright, I've been on the making of a sprite class and a sprite sheet manager, but have come across this problem. Pretty much, the project is acting like so; for example: Let's take this .png image, with a transparent background. Note how it has alpha-transparent pixels around it in the lineart. Now, in the latter link's image, in the left (with CornflowerBlue background) it is shown the image drawn in another project (let's call it "Project1") with a simpler sprite class - there, it works. The right (with Purple background for differentiating) shows it drawn with a different class in "Project2" - where the problem manifests itself. This is the Sprite class of Project1: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace WindowsGame2 { class Sprite { Vector2 pos = new Vector2(0, 0); Texture2D image; Rectangle size; float scale = 1.0f; // --- public float X { get { return pos.X; } set { pos.X = value; } } public float Y { get { return pos.Y; } set { pos.Y = value; } } public float Width { get { return size.Width; } } public float Height { get { return size.Height; } } public float Scale { get { return scale; } set { if (value < 0) value = 0; scale = value; if (image != null) { size.Width = (int)(image.Width * scale); size.Height = (int)(image.Height * scale); } } } // --- public void Load(ContentManager Man, string filename) { image = Man.Load<Texture2D>(filename); size = new Rectangle( 0, 0, (int)(image.Width * scale), (int)(image.Height * scale) ); } public void Become(Texture2D frame) { image = frame; size = new Rectangle( 0, 0, (int)(image.Width * scale), (int)(image.Height * scale) ); } public void Draw(SpriteBatch Desenhista) { // Desenhista.Draw(image, pos, Color.White); Desenhista.Draw( image, pos, new Rectangle( 0, 0, image.Width, image.Height ), Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, scale, SpriteEffects.None, 0 ); } } } And this is the code in Project2, a rewritten, pretty much, version of the previous class. In this one I added sprite sheet managing and, in particular, removed Load and Become, to allow for static resources and only actual Sprites to be instantiated. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace Mobby_s_Adventure { // Actually, I might desconsider this, and instead use static AnimationLocation[] and instanciated ID and Frame; // For determining the starting frame of an animation in a sheet and being able to iterate through // the Rectangles vector of the Sheet; class AnimationLocation { public int Location; public int FrameCount; // --- public AnimationLocation(int StartingRow, int StartingColumn, int SheetWidth, int NumberOfFrames) { Location = (StartingRow * SheetWidth) + StartingColumn; FrameCount = NumberOfFrames; } public AnimationLocation(int PositionInSheet, int NumberOfFrames) { Location = PositionInSheet; FrameCount = NumberOfFrames; } public static int CalculatePosition(int StartingRow, int StartingColumn, SheetManager Sheet) { return ((StartingRow * Sheet.Width) + StartingColumn); } } class Sprite { // The general stuff; protected SheetManager Sheet; protected Vector2 Position; public Vector2 Axis; protected Color _Tint; public float Angle; public float Scale; protected SpriteEffects _Effect; // --- // protected AnimationManager Animation; // For managing the animations; protected AnimationLocation[] Animation; public int AnimationID; protected int Frame; // --- // Properties for easy accessing of the position of the sprite; public float X { get { return Position.X; } set { Position.X = Axis.X + value; } } public float Y { get { return Position.Y; } set { Position.Y = Axis.Y + value; } } // --- // Properties for knowing the size of the sprite's frames public float Width { get { return Sheet.FrameWidth * Scale; } } public float Height { get { return Sheet.FrameHeight * Scale; } } // --- // Properties for more stuff; public Color Tint { set { _Tint = value; } } public SpriteEffects Effect { set { _Effect = value; } } public int FrameID { get { return Frame; } set { if (value >= (Animation[AnimationID].FrameCount)) value = 0; Frame = value; } } // --- // The only things that will be constantly modified will be AnimationID and FrameID, anything else only // occasionally; public Sprite(SheetManager SpriteSheet, AnimationLocation[] Animations, Vector2 Location, Nullable<Vector2> Origin = null) { // Assign the sprite's sprite sheet; // (Passed by reference! To allow STATIC sheets!) Sheet = SpriteSheet; // Define the animations that the sprite has available; // (Passed by reference! To allow STATIC animation boundaries!) Animation = Animations; // Defaulting some numerical values; Angle = 0.0f; Scale = 1.0f; _Tint = Color.White; _Effect = SpriteEffects.None; // If the user wants a default Axis, it is set in the middle of the frame; if (Origin != null) Axis = Origin.Value; else Axis = new Vector2( Sheet.FrameWidth / 2, Sheet.FrameHeight / 2 ); // Now that we have the axis, we can set the position with no worries; X = Location.X; Y = Location.Y; } // Simply put, draw the sprite with all its characteristics; public void Draw(SpriteBatch Drafter) { Drafter.Draw( Sheet.Texture, Position, Sheet.Rectangles[Animation[AnimationID].Location + FrameID], // Find the rectangle which frames the wanted image; _Tint, Angle, Axis, Scale, _Effect, 0.0f ); } } } And, in any case, this is the SheetManager class found in the previous code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace Mobby_s_Adventure { class SheetManager { protected Texture2D SpriteSheet; // For storing the sprite sheet; // Number of rows and frames in each row in the SpriteSheet; protected int NumberOfRows; protected int NumberOfColumns; // Size of a single frame; protected int _FrameWidth; protected int _FrameHeight; public Rectangle[] Rectangles; // For storing each frame; // --- public int Width { get { return NumberOfColumns; } } public int Height { get { return NumberOfRows; } } // --- public int FrameWidth { get { return _FrameWidth; } } public int FrameHeight { get { return _FrameHeight; } } // --- public Texture2D Texture { get { return SpriteSheet; } } // --- public SheetManager (Texture2D Texture, int Rows, int FramesInEachRow) { // Normal assigning SpriteSheet = Texture; NumberOfRows = Rows; NumberOfColumns = FramesInEachRow; _FrameHeight = Texture.Height / NumberOfRows; _FrameWidth = Texture.Width / NumberOfColumns; // Framing everything Rectangles = new Rectangle[NumberOfRows * NumberOfColumns]; int ID = 0; for (int i = 0; i < NumberOfRows; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < NumberOfColumns; j++) { Rectangles[ID] = new Rectangle ( _FrameWidth * j, _FrameHeight * i, _FrameWidth, _FrameHeight ); ID++; } } } public SheetManager (Texture2D Texture, int NumberOfFrames): this(Texture, 1, NumberOfFrames) { } } } For even more comprehending, if needed, here is how the main code looks like (it's just messing with the class' capacities, nothing actually; the result is a disembodied feet walking in place animation on the top-left of the screen and a static axe nearby): using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; using System.Threading; namespace Mobby_s_Adventure { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; static List<Sprite> ToDraw; static Texture2D AxeSheet; static Texture2D FeetSheet; static SheetManager Axe; static Sprite Jojora; static AnimationLocation[] Hack = new AnimationLocation[1]; static SheetManager Feet; static Sprite Mutoh; static AnimationLocation[] FeetAnimations = new AnimationLocation[2]; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; this.TargetElapsedTime = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100); this.IsFixedTimeStep = true; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); // Loading logic ToDraw = new List<Sprite>(); AxeSheet = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sheet"); FeetSheet = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Feet Sheet"); Axe = new SheetManager(AxeSheet, 1); Hack[0] = new AnimationLocation(0, 1); Jojora = new Sprite(Axe, Hack, new Vector2(100, 100), new Vector2(5, 55)); Jojora.AnimationID = 0; Jojora.FrameID = 0; Feet = new SheetManager(FeetSheet, 8); FeetAnimations[0] = new AnimationLocation(1, 7); FeetAnimations[1] = new AnimationLocation(0, 1); Mutoh = new Sprite(Feet, FeetAnimations, new Vector2(0, 0)); Mutoh.AnimationID = 0; Mutoh.FrameID = 0; } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // Update logic Mutoh.FrameID++; ToDraw.Add(Mutoh); ToDraw.Add(Jojora); base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Purple); // Drawing logic spriteBatch.Begin(); foreach (Sprite Element in ToDraw) { Element.Draw(spriteBatch); } spriteBatch.Draw(Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sheet"), new Rectangle(50, 50, 55, 60), Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } } } Please help me find out what I'm overlooking! One thing that I have noticed and could aid is that, if inserted the equivalent of this code spriteBatch.Draw( Content.Load<Texture2D>("Image Location"), new Rectangle(X, Y, images width, height), Color.White ); in Project2's Draw(GameTime) of the main loop, it works. EDIT Ok, even if the matter remains unsolved, I have made some more progress! As you see, I managed to get the two kinds of rendering in the same project (the aforementioned Project2, with the more complex Sprite class). This was achieved by adding the following code to Draw(GameTime): protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Purple); // Drawing logic spriteBatch.Begin(); foreach (Sprite Element in ToDraw) { Element.Draw(spriteBatch); } // Starting here spriteBatch.Draw( Axe.Texture, new Vector2(65, 100), new Rectangle ( 0, 0, Axe.FrameWidth, Axe.FrameHeight ), Color.White, 0.0f, new Vector2(0, 0), 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0f ); // Ending here spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } (Supposing that Axe is the SheetManager containing the texture, sorry if the "jargons" of my code confuse you :s) Thus, I have noticed that the problem is within the Sprite class. But I only get more clueless, because even after modifying its Draw function to this: public void Draw(SpriteBatch Drafter) { /*Drafter.Draw( Sheet.Texture, Position, Sheet.Rectangles[Animation[AnimationID].Location + FrameID], // Find the rectangle which frames the wanted image; _Tint, Angle, Axis, Scale, _Effect, 0.0f );*/ Drafter.Draw( Sheet.Texture, Position, new Rectangle( 0, 0, Sheet.FrameWidth, Sheet.FrameHeight ), Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, Scale, SpriteEffects.None, 0 ); } to make it as simple as the patch of code that works, it still draws the sprite jaggedly!

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked CompareExchange()

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Two posts ago, I discussed the Interlocked Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods (here) for adding and subtracting values in a thread-safe, lightweight manner.  Then, last post I talked about the Interlocked Read() and Exchange() methods (here) for safely and efficiently reading and setting 32 or 64 bit values (or references).  This week, we’ll round out the discussion by talking about the Interlocked CompareExchange() method and how it can be put to use to exchange a value if the current value is what you expected it to be. Dirty reads can lead to bad results Many of the uses of Interlocked that we’ve explored so far have centered around either reading, setting, or adding values.  But what happens if you want to do something more complex such as setting a value based on the previous value in some manner? Perhaps you were creating an application that reads a current balance, applies a deposit, and then saves the new modified balance, where of course you’d want that to happen atomically.  If you read the balance, then go to save the new balance and between that time the previous balance has already changed, you’ll have an issue!  Think about it, if we read the current balance as $400, and we are applying a new deposit of $50.75, but meanwhile someone else deposits $200 and sets the total to $600, but then we write a total of $450.75 we’ve lost $200! Now, certainly for int and long values we can use Interlocked.Add() to handles these cases, and it works well for that.  But what if we want to work with doubles, for example?  Let’s say we wanted to add the numbers from 0 to 99,999 in parallel.  We could do this by spawning several parallel tasks to continuously add to a total: 1: double total = 0; 2:  3: Parallel.For(0, 10000, next => 4: { 5: total += next; 6: }); Were this run on one thread using a standard for loop, we’d expect an answer of 4,999,950,000 (the sum of all numbers from 0 to 99,999).  But when we run this in parallel as written above, we’ll likely get something far off.  The result of one of my runs, for example, was 1,281,880,740.  That is way off!  If this were banking software we’d be in big trouble with our clients.  So what happened?  The += operator is not atomic, it will read in the current value, add the result, then store it back into the total.  At any point in all of this another thread could read a “dirty” current total and accidentally “skip” our add.   So, to clean this up, we could use a lock to guarantee concurrency: 1: double total = 0.0; 2: object locker = new object(); 3:  4: Parallel.For(0, count, next => 5: { 6: lock (locker) 7: { 8: total += next; 9: } 10: }); Which will give us the correct result of 4,999,950,000.  One thing to note is that locking can be heavy, especially if the operation being locked over is trivial, or the life of the lock is a high percentage of the work being performed concurrently.  In the case above, the lock consumes pretty much all of the time of each parallel task – and the task being locked on is relatively trivial. Now, let me put in a disclaimer here before we go further: For most uses, lock is more than sufficient for your needs, and is often the simplest solution!    So, if lock is sufficient for most needs, why would we ever consider another solution?  The problem with locking is that it can suspend execution of your thread while it waits for the signal that the lock is free.  Moreover, if the operation being locked over is trivial, the lock can add a very high level of overhead.  This is why things like Interlocked.Increment() perform so well, instead of locking just to perform an increment, we perform the increment with an atomic, lockless method. As with all things performance related, it’s important to profile before jumping to the conclusion that you should optimize everything in your path.  If your profiling shows that locking is causing a high level of waiting in your application, then it’s time to consider lighter alternatives such as Interlocked. CompareExchange() – Exchange existing value if equal some value So let’s look at how we could use CompareExchange() to solve our problem above.  The general syntax of CompareExchange() is: T CompareExchange<T>(ref T location, T newValue, T expectedValue) If the value in location == expectedValue, then newValue is exchanged.  Either way, the value in location (before exchange) is returned. Actually, CompareExchange() is not one method, but a family of overloaded methods that can take int, long, float, double, pointers, or references.  It cannot take other value types (that is, can’t CompareExchange() two DateTime instances directly).  Also keep in mind that the version that takes any reference type (the generic overload) only checks for reference equality, it does not call any overridden Equals(). So how does this help us?  Well, we can grab the current total, and exchange the new value if total hasn’t changed.  This would look like this: 1: // grab the snapshot 2: double current = total; 3:  4: // if the total hasn’t changed since I grabbed the snapshot, then 5: // set it to the new total 6: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current); So what the code above says is: if the amount in total (1st arg) is the same as the amount in current (3rd arg), then set total to current + next (2nd arg).  This check and exchange pair is atomic (and thus thread-safe). This works if total is the same as our snapshot in current, but the problem, is what happens if they aren’t the same?  Well, we know that in either case we will get the previous value of total (before the exchange), back as a result.  Thus, we can test this against our snapshot to see if it was the value we expected: 1: // if the value returned is != current, then our snapshot must be out of date 2: // which means we didn't (and shouldn't) apply current + next 3: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current) != current) 4: { 5: // ooops, total was not equal to our snapshot in current, what should we do??? 6: } So what do we do if we fail?  That’s up to you and the problem you are trying to solve.  It’s possible you would decide to abort the whole transaction, or perhaps do a lightweight spin and try again.  Let’s try that: 1: double current = total; 2:  3: // make first attempt... 4: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current) 5: { 6: // if we fail, go into a spin wait, spin, and try again until succeed 7: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 8:  9: do 10: { 11: spinner.SpinOnce(); 12: current = total; 13: } 14: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current); 15: } 16:  This is not trivial code, but it illustrates a possible use of CompareExchange().  What we are doing is first checking to see if we succeed on the first try, and if so great!  If not, we create a SpinWait and then repeat the process of SpinOnce(), grab a fresh snapshot, and repeat until CompareExchnage() succeeds.  You may wonder why not a simple do-while here, and the reason it’s more efficient to only create the SpinWait until we absolutely know we need one, for optimal efficiency. Though not as simple (or maintainable) as a simple lock, this will perform better in many situations.  Comparing an unlocked (and wrong) version, a version using lock, and the Interlocked of the code, we get the following average times for multiple iterations of adding the sum of 100,000 numbers: 1: Unlocked money average time: 2.1 ms 2: Locked money average time: 5.1 ms 3: Interlocked money average time: 3 ms So the Interlocked.CompareExchange(), while heavier to code, came in lighter than the lock, offering a good compromise of safety and performance when we need to reduce contention. CompareExchange() - it’s not just for adding stuff… So that was one simple use of CompareExchange() in the context of adding double values -- which meant we couldn’t have used the simpler Interlocked.Add() -- but it has other uses as well. If you think about it, this really works anytime you want to create something new based on a current value without using a full lock.  For example, you could use it to create a simple lazy instantiation implementation.  In this case, we want to set the lazy instance only if the previous value was null: 1: public static class Lazy<T> where T : class, new() 2: { 3: private static T _instance; 4:  5: public static T Instance 6: { 7: get 8: { 9: // if current is null, we need to create new instance 10: if (_instance == null) 11: { 12: // attempt create, it will only set if previous was null 13: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _instance, new T(), (T)null); 14: } 15:  16: return _instance; 17: } 18: } 19: } So, if _instance == null, this will create a new T() and attempt to exchange it with _instance.  If _instance is not null, then it does nothing and we discard the new T() we created. This is a way to create lazy instances of a type where we are more concerned about locking overhead than creating an accidental duplicate which is not used.  In fact, the BCL implementation of Lazy<T> offers a similar thread-safety choice for Publication thread safety, where it will not guarantee only one instance was created, but it will guarantee that all readers get the same instance.  Another possible use would be in concurrent collections.  Let’s say, for example, that you are creating your own brand new super stack that uses a linked list paradigm and is “lock free”.  We could use Interlocked.CompareExchange() to be able to do a lockless Push() which could be more efficient in multi-threaded applications where several threads are pushing and popping on the stack concurrently. Yes, there are already concurrent collections in the BCL (in .NET 4.0 as part of the TPL), but it’s a fun exercise!  So let’s assume we have a node like this: 1: public sealed class Node<T> 2: { 3: // the data for this node 4: public T Data { get; set; } 5:  6: // the link to the next instance 7: internal Node<T> Next { get; set; } 8: } Then, perhaps, our stack’s Push() operation might look something like: 1: public sealed class SuperStack<T> 2: { 3: private volatile T _head; 4:  5: public void Push(T value) 6: { 7: var newNode = new Node<int> { Data = value, Next = _head }; 8:  9: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next) 10: { 11: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 12:  13: do 14: { 15: spinner.SpinOnce(); 16: newNode.Next = _head; 17: } 18: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next); 19: } 20: } 21:  22: // ... 23: } Notice a similar paradigm here as with adding our doubles before.  What we are doing is creating the new Node with the data to push, and with a Next value being the original node referenced by _head.  This will create our stack behavior (LIFO – Last In, First Out).  Now, we have to set _head to now refer to the newNode, but we must first make sure it hasn’t changed! So we check to see if _head has the same value we saved in our snapshot as newNode.Next, and if so, we set _head to newNode.  This is all done atomically, and the result is _head’s original value, as long as the original value was what we assumed it was with newNode.Next, then we are good and we set it without a lock!  If not, we SpinWait and try again. Once again, this is much lighter than locking in highly parallelized code with lots of contention.  If I compare the method above with a similar class using lock, I get the following results for pushing 100,000 items: 1: Locked SuperStack average time: 6 ms 2: Interlocked SuperStack average time: 4.5 ms So, once again, we can get more efficient than a lock, though there is the cost of added code complexity.  Fortunately for you, most of the concurrent collection you’d ever need are already created for you in the System.Collections.Concurrent (here) namespace – for more information, see my Little Wonders – The Concurent Collections Part 1 (here), Part 2 (here), and Part 3 (here). Summary We’ve seen before how the Interlocked class can be used to safely and efficiently add, increment, decrement, read, and exchange values in a multi-threaded environment.  In addition to these, Interlocked CompareExchange() can be used to perform more complex logic without the need of a lock when lock contention is a concern. The added efficiency, though, comes at the cost of more complex code.  As such, the standard lock is often sufficient for most thread-safety needs.  But if profiling indicates you spend a lot of time waiting for locks, or if you just need a lock for something simple such as an increment, decrement, read, exchange, etc., then consider using the Interlocked class’s methods to reduce wait. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked,CompareExchange,threading,concurrency

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part I)

  Ive spent the better part of the last two years doing nothing but K2 workflow development, which until very recently could only be done in Visual Studio 2005 so I am a bit behind the times. I seem to have skipped over using Visual Studio 2008 entirely, and I am now ready to stumble through all that Ive missed. Not that I will abandon my K2 ramblings, but I need to get back to some of the other technologies I am passionate about but havent had the option of working with them on a day-to-day basis as I have with K2 blackpearl. Specifically, I am going to be focusing my efforts on what is new in the Entity Framework and WPF in Visual Studio 2010, though you have to keep in mind that since I have skipped VS 2008, I may be giving VS 2010 credit for things that really have been around for a while (hey, if I havent seen it, it is new to me!). I have the following simple goals in mind for this exercise: Entity Framework Model an inherited class Entity Framework Model a lookup entity WPF Bind a list of entities WPF - on selection of an entity in the bound list, display values of the selected entity WPF For the lookup field, provide a dropdown of potential values to lookup All of these goals must be accomplished using as little code as possible, relying on the features we get out of the box in Visual Studio 2010. This isnt going to be rocket science here, Im not even looking to get or save this data from/to a data source, but I gotta start somewhere and hopefully it will grow into something more interesting. For this exercise, I am going to try to model some fictional data about football players and personnel (maybe turning this into some sort of NFL simulation game if I lose my job and can play with this all day), so Ill start with a Person class that has a name property, and extend that with a Player class to include a Position lookup property. The idea is that a Person can be a Player, Coach or whatever other personnel type may be associated with a football team but well only flesh out the Player aspect of a person for this. So to get started, I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a new WPF Application: To this project, I added a new ADO.NET Entity Data Model named PlayerModel (for now, not sure what will be an appropriate name so this may be revisited): I chose for it to be an empty model, as I dont have a database designed for this yet: Using the toolbox, I dragged out an entity for each of the items we identified earlier: Person, Player and Position, and gave them some simple properties (note that I kept the default Id property for each of them): Now to figure out how to link these things together the way I want to first, lets try to tell it that Player extends Person. I see that Inheritance is one of the items in the toolbox, but I cant seem to drag it out anywhere onto the canvas. However, when I right-click an element, I get the option to Add Inheritance to it, which gives us exactly what we want: Ok, now that we have that, how do we tell it that each player has a position? Well, despite association being in the toolbox, I have learned that you cant just drag and drop those elements so I right click Player and select Add -> Association to get the following dialog: I see the option here to Add foreign key properties to my entities Ive read somewhere this this is a new and highly-sought after feature so Ill see what it does. Selecting it includes a PositionId on the Player element for me, which seems pretty database-centric and I would like to see if I can live without it for now given that we also got the Position property out of this association. Ill bring it back into the fold if it ends up being useful later. Here is what we end up with now: Trying to compile this resulted in an error stating that the Player entity cannot have an Id, because the Person element it extends already has a property named Id. Makes sense, so I remove it and compile again. Success, but with a warning but success is a good thing so Ill pretend I didnt see that warning for now. It probably has to do with the fact that my Player entity is now pretty useless as it doesnt have any non-navigation properties. So things seem to match what we are going for, great now what the heck do we do with this? Lets switch gears and see what we get for free dealing with this model from the UI. Lets open up the MainWindow.xaml and see if we can connect to our entities as a data source. Hey, whats this? Have you read my mind, Visual Studio? Our entities are already listed in the Data Sources panel: I do notice, however, that our Player entity is missing. Is this due to that compilation warning? Ill add a bogus property to our player entity just to see if that is the case no, still no love. The warning reads: Error 2062: No mapping specified for instances of the EntitySet and AssociationSet in the EntityContainer PlayerModelContainer. Well if everything worked without any issues, then I wouldnt be stumbling through at all, so lets get to the bottom of this. My good friend google indicates that the warning is due to the model not being tied up to a database. Hmmm, so why dont Players show up in my data sources? A little bit of drill-down shows that they are, in fact, exposed under Positions: Well now that isnt quite what I want. While you could get to players through a position, it shouldnt be that way exclusively. Oh well, I can ignore that for now lets drag Players out onto the canvas after selecting List from the dropdown: Hey, what the heck? I wanted a list not a listview. Get rid of that list view that was just dropped, drop in a listbox and then drop the Players entity into it. That will bind it for us. Of course, there isnt any data to show, which brings us to the really hacky part of all this and that is to stuff some test data into our view source without actually getting it from any data source. To do this through code, we need to grab a reference to the positionsPlayersViewSource resource that was created for us when we dragged out our Players entity. We then set the source of that reference equal to a populated list of Players.  Well add a couple of players that way as well as a few positions via the positionsViewSource resource, and Ill ensure that each player has a position specified.  Ultimately, the code looks like this: System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource positionViewSource = ((System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource)(this.FindResource("positionsViewSource")));             List<Position> positions = new List<Position>();             Position newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 0;             newPosition.Name = "WR";             positions.Add(newPosition);             newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 1;             newPosition.Name = "RB";             positions.Add(newPosition);             newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 2;             newPosition.Name = "QB";             positions.Add(newPosition);             positionViewSource.Source = positions;             System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource playerViewSource = ((System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource)(this.FindResource("positionsPlayersViewSource")));             List<Player> players = new List<Player>();             Player newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 0;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude";             newPlayer.Position = positions[0];             players.Add(newPlayer);             newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 1;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude II";             newPlayer.Position = positions[1];             players.Add(newPlayer);             newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 2;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude III";             newPlayer.Position = positions[2];             players.Add(newPlayer);             playerViewSource.Source = players; Now that our views are being loaded with data, we can go about tying things together visually. Drop a text box (to show the selected players name) and a combo box (to show the selected players position). Drag the Positions entity from the data sources panel to the combo box to wire it up to the positions view source. Click the text box that was dragged, and find its Text property in the properties pane. There is a little glyph next to it that displays Advanced Properties when hovered over click this and then select Apply Data Binding. In the dialog that appears, we can select the current players name as the value to bind to: Similarly, we can wire up the combo boxs SelectedItem value to the current players position: When the application is executed and we navigate through the various players, we automatically get their name and position bound to the appropriate fields: All of this was accomplished with no code save for loading the test data, and I might add, it was pretty intuitive to do so via the drag and drop of entities straight from the data sources panel. So maybe all of this was old hat to you, but I was very impressed with this experience and I look forward to stumbling through the caveats of doing more complex data modeling and binding in this fashion. Next up, I suppose, will be figuring out how to get the entities to get real data from a data source instead of stuffing it with test data as well as trying to figure out why Players ended up being under Positions in the data sources panel.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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• Box2d Cocos2d circle crash on contact with ground

  - by Oliver Cooper

  this is my first question here so sorry if I do something wrong or this is too long. I have been reading this tutorial by Ray Wenderlich, I have modified it so it is flatter and gradually goes down hill. Basically I have a ball roll down a bumpy hill, but at the moment the ball only drops from about 100 pixels above. When ever the touch the app crashes (the app is a Mac Cocos2d Box2d app). The ball code is this: CGSize winSize = [CCDirector sharedDirector].winSize; self.oeva = [CCSprite spriteWithTexture:[[CCTextureCache sharedTextureCache] addImage:@"Ball.png"]rect:CGRectMake(0, 0, 64, 64)]; _oeva.position = CGPointMake(68, winSize.height/2); [self addChild:_oeva z:1]; b2BodyDef oevaBodyDef; oevaBodyDef.type = b2_dynamicBody; oevaBodyDef.position.Set(68/PTM_RATIO, (winSize.height/2)/PTM_RATIO); // oevaBodyDef.userData = _oeva; _oevaBody = world->CreateBody(&oevaBodyDef); b2BodyDef bodyDef; bodyDef.type = b2_dynamicBody; bodyDef.position.Set(60/PTM_RATIO, 400/PTM_RATIO); bodyDef.userData = _oeva; b2Body *body = world->CreateBody(&bodyDef); // Define another box shape for our dynamic body. b2CircleShape dynamicBox; dynamicBox.m_radius = 70/PTM_RATIO;//These are mid points for our 1m box // Define the dynamic body fixture. b2FixtureDef fixtureDef; fixtureDef.shape = &dynamicBox; fixtureDef.density = 1.0f; fixtureDef.friction = 0.3f; body->CreateFixture(&fixtureDef); That works fine. This is the terrain code, this also works fine: -(void)generateTerrainWithWorld: (b2World *) inputWorld: (int) hillSize;{ b2BodyDef bd; bd.position.Set(0, 0); body = inputWorld->CreateBody(&bd); b2PolygonShape shape; b2FixtureDef fixtureDef; currentSlope = 0; CGSize winSize = [CCDirector sharedDirector].winSize; float xf = 0; float yf = (arc4random() % 10)+winSize.height/3; int x = 200; for(int i = 0; i < maxHillPoints; ++i) { hillPoints[i] = CGPointMake(xf, yf); xf = xf+ (arc4random() % x/2)+x/2; yf = ((arc4random() % 30)+winSize.height/3)-currentSlope; currentSlope +=10; } int hSegments; for (int i=0; i<maxHillPoints-1; i++) { CGPoint p0 = hillPoints[i-1]; CGPoint p1 = hillPoints[i]; hSegments = floorf((p1.x-p0.x)/cosineSegmentWidth); float dx = (p1.x - p0.x) / hSegments; float da = M_PI / hSegments; float ymid = (p0.y + p1.y) / 2; float ampl = (p0.y - p1.y) / 2; CGPoint pt0, pt1; pt0 = p0; for (int j = 0; j < hSegments+1; ++j) { pt1.x = p0.x + j*dx; pt1.y = ymid + ampl * cosf(da*j); fullHillPoints[fullHillPointsCount++] = pt1; pt0 = pt1; } } b2Vec2 p1v, p2v; for (int i=0; i<fullHillPointsCount-1; i++) { p1v = b2Vec2(fullHillPoints[i].x/PTM_RATIO,fullHillPoints[i].y/PTM_RATIO); p2v = b2Vec2(fullHillPoints[i+1].x/PTM_RATIO,fullHillPoints[i+1].y/PTM_RATIO); shape.SetAsEdge(p1v, p2v); body->CreateFixture(&shape, 0); } } However when ever the two collide the app crashes. The crash error is: Thread 6 CVDisplayLink: Program received signal: "SIGABRT" The error occurs on line 96 of b2ContactSolver.cpp: b2Assert(kNormal > b2_epsilon); The error log is: Assertion failed: (kNormal 1.19209290e-7F), function b2ContactSolver, file /Users/coooli01/Documents/Xcode Projects/Cocos2d/Hill Slide/Hill Slide/libs/Box2D/Dynamics/Contacts/b2ContactSolver.cpp, line 96. Sorry if I rambled on for too long, i've been stuck on this for ages.

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• How do I get the C# Winforms Webbrowser control to show PDF content embedded in the html file as bin

  - by uniball

  I am using a Winforms webbrowser control to display HTML content stored in my SQL DB table. However, some of my contents are PDFs which I intend to store as binary data in the SQL DB and feed to the Webbrowser control. I wish to avoid the hassle of storing the binary content in a temporary file on the client machine and then create html container code to reference this temporary PDF file. Is there a way inwhich I can embed the PDF binary content into the html directly and show this html on the webbrowser control directly? I found these previous threads referring to a COM 'hack'. Is there a simpler, easier way? Thanks! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/290035/how-do-i-get-a-c-webbrowser-control-to-show-jpeg-files-raw Thanks, uniball

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• Add comment to subversion commit automatically

  - by Paul Alexander

  I've already got my subversion repository set up to require comments of a minimum length to accept a commit. However, I'd like to start tagging those comments with information from our bug tracking system when committed. I've already got the scripts set up to pull data from the bug tracker and just need a way to get that info into the subversion commit comments. How can append to the existing comment in subversion automatically? For reference, the subversion repository is hosted on a linux server with Ubuntu 9 something installed and I have complete root access to the machine.

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• "An internal error occurred." when loading pfx file with X509Certificate2

  - by tmp3128

  I'm trying use self-signed certificate (c#): X509Certificate2 cert = new X509Certificate2(Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/myhost.pfx"), "pass"); on a shared web hosting server and I got an error: System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: An internal error occurred. stack trace ends with System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException.ThrowCryptogaphicException(Int32 hr) +33 System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Utils._LoadCertFromFile(String fileName, IntPtr password, UInt32 dwFlags, Boolean persistKeySet, SafeCertContextHandle& pCertCtx) +0 System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate.LoadCertificateFromFile(String fileName, Object password, X509KeyStorageFlags keyStorageFlags) +237 System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate2..ctor(String fileName, String password) +131 On my dev machine it loads ok. The reason I load *.pfx not a *.cer file because I need a private key access (cer file loads Ok). I made pfx on my dev mochine like that: makecert -r -n "CN=myhost.com, [email protected]" -sky exchange -b 01/01/2009 -pe -sv myhost.pvk myhost.cer pvk2pfx -pvk myhost.pvk -spc myhost.cer -pfx myhost.pfx -po pass Please assist; PS: makecert is a v5.131.3790.0

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• WCF: VS2010 confuses system.xml.xmlelement with system.xml.linq.xelement?

  - by Chau

  I have created a WCF service with one method which returns a System.Xml.XmlElement: using System.Xml; ... public XmlElement Execute(...) { XmlNode node = ...; return (XmlElement)node; } When I try to access the service deployed on my server WCFServiceClient service = new WCFServiceClient("WSHttpBinding_IWCFService"); XmlElement node = service.Execute(...); I get the error: Cannot implicitly convert type 'System.Xml.Linq.XElement' to 'System.Xml.XmlElement' Searching my service solution, I cannot see any reference to System.Xml.Linq.XElement. Is it wrong of me to expect a System.Xml.Xmlelement or is VS 2010 fooling around with me? Thanks in advance.

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• MVC Partial View to Call Display Pop-up window using jquery

  - by Gavin campbell

  Hi I have a index page the renders objects from my database as a treeview, each item has a link href="/MessageGroupType/Edit/1002 that makes an Ajax call to display a partial view in a DIV. Within the partial view there is a delete button which calls my controller to delete the item. However, i do a check to make sure the item can be deleted, if the item cant be deleted then i wish a pop-up to appear back on the edit form telling the user they cant delete this record. In my Edit partial view i have the following code " type="text/javascript" $(function() { $("#dialog").dialog(); }); <% if (Boolean.Parse(ViewData["DisplayWindow"].ToString())){% This Mesage group Type Cannot be deleted as is linked to other message group Types <% }% So my main questions are Can i make a reference to a javascript script within my Partial View (i dont want my master page to be called on the partial view) When i dynamically load the partial view data into my DIV - can i then after calling my controller insert another DIV into the first DIV. I am i doing this the wrong way - so any pointers is appreciated Cheers

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• Error when connecting to AS400 (ISeries)

  - by Jimmy Engtröm

  I'm trying to connect to a AS400 server using the .net classes. I have added a reference to IBM.Data.DB.iSeries and I use the following code: var conn = new iDB2Connection("DataSource=111.111.111.111;UserID=xxx;Password=xxx; DataCompression=True;"); conn.Open(); But I get the following exceptions Running 64 bit: "The provider cannot run in 64-bit mode." Running 32 bit: An unexpected exception occurred. Type: System.DllNotFoundException, Message: Unable to load DLL 'cwbdc.dll': The operating system cannot run . (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800700B6). I have uninstalled the Client Access and installed it again. The cwbdc.dll does exist in the system32 and syswow64 . I have no problem connecting to the AS400 if I use odbc. I'm running a 64 bit verion of Windows 7. Any ideas? /Jimmy

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• .NET ExcelLibrary Export Problems - .XLS corruption

  - by hamlin11

  The library is located here: http://code.google.com/p/excellibrary/ I'm using some basic code to create an .XLS file. When I open the file in Excel 2007, I get the following errors: I click yes, then I get: And just for fun, here's the XML error details (not very helpful) Here's the code that I'm using to generate the Excel file: Dim ds As New DataSet Dim dt1 As New DataTable("table 1") dt1.Columns.Add("column A", GetType(String)) dt1.Columns.Add("column B", GetType(String)) dt1.Rows.Add("test 1", "Test 2") dt1.Rows.Add("test 3", "Test 4") ds.Tables.Add(dt1) ExcelLibrary.DataSetHelper.CreateWorkbook("c:/temp/test1.xls", ds) Note: I added a reference to the DLL provided by the project download page and have an "Imports ExcelLibrary.Office.Excel" to link up with it Any ideas on what the corruption is and/or how to fix it? Thanks

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• Opening spreadsheet returns InMemoryUploadedFile

  - by David542

  I have a user uploading a file to a website and I need to parse the spreadsheet. Here is my code: input_file = request.FILES.get('file-upload') wb = xlrd.open_workbook(input_file) The error I keep getting is: TypeError at /upload_spreadsheet/ coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, InMemoryUploadedFile found Why is this happening and what do I need to do to fix it? Thank you. For reference, this is how I open the file in the shell >>> import xlrd >>> xlrd.open_workbook('/Users/me/dave_example.xls') <xlrd.Book object at 0x10d9f7390>

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• Visual Studio 2010, TlbImp generates .net 4.0 interops in 2.0 projects

  - by DJScrib

  In a C# project we add a reference to a COM object via the Add References setup pointing to a COM object which results in the IDE auto-generating the interop assembly. So this is fine and good, but we are building based on .net 3.5 SP1 aka CLR 2.0, and the generated interops are using the 4.0 CLR making them incompatible. Is there a way to prevent this? I assume the other option is configure our build script to try using tlbimp.exe with the /references parameter? to point to mscorlib v2.0? Anyhow, I'm hoping there's a flag somewhere to allow this.

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• Explanation of SendMessage message numbers? (C#, Winforms)

  - by John

  I've successfully used the Windows SendMessage method to help me do various things in my text editor, but each time I am just copying and pasting code suggested by others, and I don't really know what it means. There is always a cryptic message number that is a parameter. How do I know what these code numbers mean so that I can actually understand what is happening and (hopefully) be a little more self-sufficient in the future? Thanks. Recent example: using System.Runtime.InteropServices; [DllImport("user32.dll")] static extern int SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, uint wMsg,UIntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam); SendMessage(myRichTextBox.Handle, (uint)0x00B6, (UIntPtr)0, (IntPtr)(-1));

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• Checkbox in a Microsoft Report (rdlc) table

  - by VanOrman

  I'm a newcomer to using Microsoft Reporting (RDLC) and I'm trying to display a table with a checkbox inside of it. The data I have is stored in bit fashion: I want this data to display on the report like this: I can get the data to display in a normal table without issue, but when I do, the bit values are formatted as "true" or "false". Does anyone know of a way to do this? I have googled around and found reference to other people with the same issue but no solutions. I am using a Report Viewer control to display the report in an ASP.NET website written in C#.

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• Reuse classes and objects for both WCF and non-WCF

  - by joebeazelman

  I have several classes such as Order, Customer, etc. These classes serve for holding data and nothing more. I want to be able to reuse these classes in other projects in the future, but for some reason I don't quite understand, WCF forces me to decorate the data members with the [DataMember] attribute, forcing me to reference WCF plumbing that I will never use in other projects. I would imagine that WCF lets you take any serializable class and use it as a content type. Am I understanding this correctly?

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• Using Response.Redirect with jQuery Thickbox

  - by Chris Stewart

  I'm using jQuery Thickbox to display an iframe (upload.aspx) that allows a user to upload a file. In the code behind for the upload.aspx I finish by sending: Response.Redirect("blah.aspx"); The page I redirect to is dynamic based on the results of the upload process. When this redirect happens, it happens inside the Thickbox and not the parent window as I'd like it to. Here's the calling ASP.NET page (home.aspx): <a href="upload.aspx?placeValuesBeforeTB_=savedValues&TB_iframe=true&height=300&width=500&modal=true" class="thickbox">Add New</a> And here's the submit button inside of the upload.aspx page: <asp:Button ID="btnUpload" runat="server" Text="Upload" OnClick="btnUpload_Click" OnClientClick="self.parent.tb_remove();" /> This is designed to close the modal window and send control to the code behind to perform the file upload, processing, etc. Has anyone experienced this before? How would I go about sending a redirect on the parent window?

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• Android: Haptic feedback: onClick() event vs hapticFeedbackEnabled in the view

  - by dreeves

  If you want a button to provide haptic feedback (ie, the phone vibrates very briefly so you can feel that you really pushed the button), what's the standard way to do that? It seems you can either explicitly set an onClick() event and call the vibrate() function, giving a number of milliseconds to vibrate, or you can set hapticFeedbackEnabled in the view. The documentation seems to indicate that the latter only works for long-presses or virtual on-screen keys: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#performHapticFeedback(int) If that's right, then I need to either make my button a virtual on-screen key or manually set the onClick() event. What do you recommend? Also, if I want the vibrating to happen immediately when the user's finger touches the button, as opposed to when their finger "releases" the button, what's the best way to accomplish that? Related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2228151/how-to-enable-haptic-feedback-on-button-view

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• user input of one php script pass to another php without modification in first php script

  - by ish12

  hi all.. Consider two php scripts(o.php & t.php) o.php contains both html and php. html here gets user input for eg:user name and password this information is passed to php using php-self. I want the user input of o.php passed to t.php without any modification in o.php. I ve used include and require in the t.php but the problem is it displays the output of o.php but i need only the user input values from o.php without displaying the output of o.php. Using functions or session in o.php we can pass user input but am in the situation tat i should not add or modify o.php. thanks in advance!!

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• UISplitViewController programmtically without nib/xib, thank you.

  - by Steve

  Hi, I usually create my projects without IB-stuff. The first thing I do is to strip off all references to xibs, outlets updated plist, etc and so forth. No problems, works great (in my world)! Now, I just installed 3.2 and tried to develop my first iPad app. Following same procedure as before, I created a UISplitView-based application project and stripped off all IB-stuff. Also, I followed the section in Apple's reference docs: "Creating a Split View Controller Programmatically", http://bit.ly/axgYAs, but nevertheless, the Master-view is never shown, only the Detail-view is (no matter what the orientation is). I really have tried to carefully look this through but I cannot understand what I have missed. Is there a working example of a UISplitViewController without the nibs floating around somewhere? I have googled but could not find any. Or do you know what I probably have missed? Regards, /Steve PS. Spare me the lesson why I should use the IB ;-) DS.

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• WPF DataGrid AutoColumn generation via ICustomTypeDescriptor.

  - by panamack

  In a test project I've managed to AutoGenerate WPF DataGrid columns in the following scenario, where the data is stored in a Dictionary and binding is performed via PropertyDescriptors: public class People:List<Person>{ ... } public class Person:Dictionary<string,string>,INotifyPropertyChanged,ICustomTypeDescriptor { } The problem I'm having is in my real life project I'm using MVVM so it's *People*ViewModel which inherits ViewModelBase and hence can't inherit List<Person>. I've tried implementing IList<Person> instead with an internal List<Person> and explicitly setting the DataContext to an IList<Person> reference but that didn't work. I've seen a similar post on binding a win forms DataGridView here, so I'm wondering if the same sort of logic applies in WPF and primarily, what exactly causes the ICustomTypeDescriptor implementation to be picked up when inheriting List<T> that is missing when you simply implement IList<T> instead.

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• What is the equivalent of Oracle’s REF CURSOR in MySQL when using JDBC?

  - by dacracot

  In Oracle I can declare a reference cursor... TYPE t_spool IS REF CURSOR RETURN spool%ROWTYPE; ...and use it to pass a cursor as the return value... FUNCTION end_spool RETURN t_spool AS v_spool t_spool; BEGIN COMMIT; OPEN v_spool FOR SELECT * FROM spool WHERE key = g_spool_key ORDER BY seq; RETURN v_spool; END end_spool; ...and then capture it as a result set using JDBC... private Connection conn; private CallableStatement stmt; private OracleResultSet rset; [...clip...] stmt = conn.prepareCall("{ ? = call " + call + "}"); stmt.registerOutParameter(1, OracleTypes.CURSOR); stmt.execute(); rset = (OracleResultSet)stmt.getObject(1); What is the equivalent in MySQL?

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• TTThumbsViewController + navigationController issue

  - by michael

  Hi, .. 2 questions. I am only using Three20 for a gallery in my app. When I push my .. : TTThumbsViewController from another view, the navigation bar is not the color I want it to be (as per the rest of my app). I have set up a TTDefaultStyleSheet as per this stackoverflow QA. Is there something special I have to do as I am only using the TTThumbsViewController? The thumbs view is also created with extra space at the top, as though it is leaving room for a navigation controller, without knowing that one is already there. How can I tell the TTThumbsViewController to use the existing uinavigationcontroller? Or behave as though it is? MYThumbsViewController *mYThumbsViewController = [MYThumbsViewController alloc]; [self.navigationController pushViewController:mYThumbsViewController animated:YES]; The problem depicted graphically: Thanks!

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• Cannot embed interop types from assembly "...\Microsoft.Search.Interop.dll" because it is missing th

  - by Andrei

  Hello all, I get this error when adding a reference to the Microsoft.Search.Interop.dll library in a new project that I created. Microsoft.Search.Interop.dll is a library that provides some useful API to communicate with Windows Search. I use it in order to add a folder to the system indexer. Did anybody else get this error, and if so, how should I go about solving it? I'm using VS2010 RC on a Windows Server 2008 if that is important. Thanks.

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