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  • The Krewe App Post-Mortem

    - by Chris Gardner
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/05/23/the-krewe-app-post-mortem.aspxNow that teched has come and gone, I thought I would use this opportunity to do a little post-mortem on The Krewe app. It is one thing to test the app at home. It is a completely different animal to see how it responds in the environment TechEd creates. At a future time, I will list all the things that I would like to change with the app. At this point, I will find some good way to get community feedback. I want to break all this down screen by screen. We'll start with the screen I got right. The first of these is the events calendar. This is the one screen that, to you guys, just worked. However, there was an issue here. When I wrote v1 for last year, I was lazy and placed everything in CST. This caused problems with the achievements, which I will explain later. Furthermore, the event locations were not check-in locations. This created another problem with the achievements. Next, we get to the Twitter page. For what this page does, it works great. For those that don't know, I have an Azure Worker Role that polls Twitter pretty close to the rate limit. I cache these results in my database, and serve them upon request. This gives me great control over the content. I just have to remember to flush past tweets after a period, to save database growth. The next screen is the check-in screen. This screen has been the bane of my existence since I first created the thing. Last year, I used a background task to check people out of locations after they traveled. This year, I removed the background task in favor of a foursquare model. You are checked out after 3 hours or when you check-in to some other location. This seemed to work well, until those pesky achievements came into the mix. Again, more on this later. Next, I want to address the Connect and Connections screens together. I wanted to use some of the capabilities of the phone, and NFC seemed a natural choice. From this, I came up with the gamification aspects of the app. Since we are, fundamentally, a networking organization, I wanted to encourage people to actually network. Users could make and share a profile, similar to a virtual business card. I just had to figure out how to get people to use the feature. Why not just give someone a business card? Thus, the achievements were born. This was such a good idea. It would have been a great idea, if I have come up with it about two months earlier... When I came up with these ideas, I had about 2 weeks to implement them. Version 1 of the app was, basically, a pure consumption app. We provided data and centralized it. With version 2, the app became a much more interactive experience. The API was not ready for this change in such a short period of time. Most of this became apparent when I started implementing the achievements. The achievements based on count and specific person when fairly easy. The problem came with tying them to locations and events. This took some true SQL kung fu. This also showed me the rookie mistake of putting CST, not UTC, in the database. Once I got all of that cleaned up, I had to find a way to get the achievement system to talk to the phone. I knew I needed to be able to dynamically add achievements. I wouldn't know the precise location of some things until I got to Houston. I wanted the server to approve the achievements. This, unfortunately, required a decent data connection. Some achievements required GPS levels of location accuracy in areas of network triangulation. All of this became a huge nightmare. My flagship feature was based on some silly assumptions. Still, I managed to get 31 people to get the first achievement (Make 1 Connection.) Quite a few of those managed to get to the higher levels. Soon, I will post a list of the feature and changes that need to happen to the API. This includes things like proper objects for communication, geo-fencing, and caching. However, that is for another day.

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  • Cannot set a credential for principal 'sa'

    - by hailey
    I was trying to change the SA password on my development server this morning and got an error. Msg 15535, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot set a credential for principal 'sa'. It was a little frustrating to get an error for a seemingly simple task but then agian maybe I screwed something up.  After doing a couple of searches i found a Microsoft KB (support.microsoft.com/kb/956177) "You receive an exception in SQL Server 2008 when you try to modify the properties of the SQL Server Administrator account by using SQL Server Management Studio".  It was for SQL 2008 but it worked for my SQL 2005 sp3 server just fine.  You have to click the Map to Credential check box but you don't have to add any credetials just click the OK button to complete and that's it.

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  • Le tablet PC de Microsoft se dévoile, une vidéo présente Courier en action

    Mise à jour du 09.03.2010 par Katleen Le tablet PC de Microsoft se dévoile, une vidéo présente Courier en action Les nouvelles sur Courier, la tablette de Microsoft, sont rares et se font attendre. Cependant, quelques rumeurs jugées fiables viennent d'apparaître et laissent entendre que l'appareil sera un véritable « journal digital ». Voulu portatif au maximum, il ne dépassera pas la taille d'une photographie 10x15 lorsqu'il sera refermé et pèsera environ 500 grammes. De plus, Courier sera basé sur Tegra 2 et fonctionera sous le même OS que le Zune HD (Pink). Son interface pourrait être open-source, et centrée sur le dessin et l'écriture avec la reconnaissance de l'écriture ma...

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  • Help with algorithmic complexity in custom merge sort implementation

    - by bitcycle
    I've got an implementation of the merge sort in C++ using a custom doubly linked list. I'm coming up with a big O complexity of n^2, based on the merge_sort() slice operation. But, from what I've read, this algorithm should be n*log(n), where the log has a base of two. Can someone help me determine if I'm just determining the complexity incorrectly, or if the implementation can/should be improved to achieve n*log(n) complexity? If you would like some background on my goals for this project, see my blog. I've added comments in the code outlining what I understand the complexity of each method to be. Clarification - I'm focusing on the C++ implementation with this question. I've got another implementation written in Python, but that was something that was added in addition to my original goal(s).

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  • Emploi : les conditions de travail sont-elles correctes dans les services IT ? Les cadres informatiq

    Mise à jour du 17.06.2010 par Katleen Emploi : les conditions de travail sont-elles correctes dans les services IT ? Les cadres informatique ont le moral en berne Alors que les chiffres relatifs aux embauches dans les secteurs de l'informatique et des nouvelles technologies fluctuent depuis quelques mois, entre timide reprise et petites rechutes, la situation reste globalement morose pour les cadres. Même s'ils n'expriment pas de grosses inquiétudes concernant leur poste, ils sont catastrophés par le contexte du marché de l'emploi. L'Ifop vient de publier le dernier baromètre réalisé pour le compte de Cadremploi, sur la base des réponses de 203 salariés. 63% des interrogés disent être ...

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  • Win a free pass for Silverlight Tour in Vancouver, D-10!!

    - by pluginbaby
    As you may know, the Silverlight Tour Training is coming to Vancouver in may. If you plan to attend, this might be interesting: you can win one free pass to this Vancouver Silverlight 4 workshop in May 3-6, 2010 ($1,995 CAD value) by visiting the SilverlightShow.net community website and participate in the draw! (the pass does not include travel and hotel, only the course). Take the chance to get an intensive course on Silverlight 4 in this four-day training! Learn the ins and outs of design, development and server-side programming with Silverlight in an exciting way, through a mix of lessons, demonstrations and hands-on labs. Enter the draw before April 1st, 2010! The winner will be announced on April 2nd, 2010 in www.silverlightshow.net. Good Luck! Technorati Tags: Silverlight training,Silverlight Tour

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  • Are technical books easy to read on the Kindle (or other small screens) [closed]

    - by Peter Recore
    Possible Duplicate: eBook editions of programming books I am considering getting a kindle or other e reader. (Kindle is my top choice for the eink vs lcd factor) I have been able to try reading fiction on a Kindle, and it seemed pretty nice, even with the small screen. However, most books I buy are actually technical books, which tend to have figures, code samples, and other odd things. How well do the various ereaders handle books like this? In particular, does the kindle render code samples or figures in an easy to read way?

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  • Doing unit and integration tests with the Web API HttpClient

    - by cibrax
    One of the nice things about the new HttpClient in System.Net.Http is the support for mocking responses or handling requests in a http server hosted in-memory. While the first option is useful for scenarios in which we want to test our client code in isolation (unit tests for example), the second one enables more complete integration testing scenarios that could include some more components in the stack such as model binders or message handlers for example.   The HttpClient can receive a HttpMessageHandler as argument in one of its constructors. public class HttpClient : HttpMessageInvoker { public HttpClient(); public HttpClient(HttpMessageHandler handler); public HttpClient(HttpMessageHandler handler, bool disposeHandler); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } For the first scenario, you can create a new HttpMessageHandler that fakes the response, which you can use in your unit test. The only requirement is that you somehow inject an HttpClient with this custom handler in the client code. public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } In an unit test, you can do something like this. var fakeResponse = new HttpResponse(); var fakeHandler = new FakeHttpMessageHandler(fakeResponse); var httpClient = new HttpClient(fakeHandler); var customerService = new CustomerService(httpClient); // Do something // Asserts .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } CustomerService in this case is the class under test, and the one that receives an HttpClient initialized with our fake handler. For the second scenario in integration tests, there is a In-Memory host “System.Web.Http.HttpServer” that also derives from HttpMessageHandler and you can use with a HttpClient instance in your test. This has been discussed already in these two great posts from Pedro and Filip. 

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  • Is it okay to be generalist?

    - by Londoner
    I work at a ~50 employee company (UK), where all the technical people do a bit of everything. Specialising in anything for very long (6 months) is discouraged. For example, last week, I built a new Debian webserver, refactored some Perl, sat on a sales phone call, did a tape backup, reviewed code, built and deployed an RPM, gave opinions about x, y, z... With such a work scheme, I have gained a general knowledge how many things work, and pretty specific knowledge. I maybe program for 5 hours a week, despite officially being a developer. Does anyone else work like this, (or is this company unique)? Is it a problem to have skills developed in this way? (i.e. know a bit about everything in a certain domain, rather than know everything about say, one programming language?) Is it okay to be a generalist?

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  • How Windows 8's Backup System Differs From Windows 7's

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Windows 8 contains a completely revamped backup system. Windows 8’s File History replaces Windows 7’s Windows Backup – if you use Windows Backup and update to Windows 8, you’ll find quite a few differences. Microsoft redesigned Windows’ backup features because less than 5% of PCs used Windows Backup. The new File History system is designed to be simple to set up and work automatically in the background. This post will focus on the differences between File History and the Windows Backup feature you may be familiar with from Windows 7 – check out our full walkthrough of File History for more information. HTG Explains: What The Windows Event Viewer Is and How You Can Use It HTG Explains: How Windows Uses The Task Scheduler for System Tasks HTG Explains: Why Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows?

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  • Terms and conditions for a commerce site

    - by Mantorok
    I am developing a website for my partner who is currently a sole trader, presently selling on ebay but we have opted to create our own site. I've noticed that there are many sites allowing you to purchase base-line T&Cs to be used on websites, I'm tempted to give these a go but I've heard nothing on whether they are any good or not, I know in this position it's best to seek legal advice, but the budget is tight so we really can't afford that. Has anyone had experience with these sites? e.g. http://www.netlawman.co.uk/ecomm-it/website-terms-and-conditions.php?gclid=CPL4g8D3q6cCFQoa4Qodhj5UBg. Thanks

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  • How to Delete Your Metro Application’s Usage History in Windows 8

    - by Taylor Gibb
    Windows 8 includes an all new Task Manager, which brings a whole bunch of new features. One of my favorites is the App history tab, which allows geeks like us to monitor our applications resource usage. Sometimes you may wish to reset the counters though, so here’s how. Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder? Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows

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  • Python's Django or Delphi's IntraWeb?

    - by Azad Salahli
    Well, forgive me if it is an off-topic question. I have no knowledge about web programming, so I apologize in advance, if it is a stupid question. I will start to build a web based application. To be more specific, I will make a webpage which will have components like buttons, textboxes and etc. It will use a database to store information. My question is, which one is better to learn for that purpose? Python's Django or Delphi's IntraWeb? I know both Delphi and Python(although I know Delphi better).

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  • Begining a simple game development. [closed]

    - by Vinod Maurya
    Hi, I have searched a lot about beginning the game development but I didn't found the appropriate answer which I am looking in fact I got more confused. What I want to know is which game engine, modeling programs (I know only 2, please tell me if there is some other) to use? For the beginning, I want to use some free game engines for learning purpose. I am an absolute beginner in game development. I have a good programming experience in C++, VB, Java, C#. Thanks.

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  • Micro QR Code Generator with minimal error correction

    - by Florian Peschka
    I am searching a Micro QR Code Generator that fulfills the following requirements: At least 20 characters encoded Minimal error correction (required to get the 20 characters stuffed in) I already searched google, but it seems all micro qr generators automatically use maximum error correction, which is very unhandy for my task, as we need the 20 characters completety. I can't use standard QR because there are certain requirements that need the code to be smaller than a certain dimension when printed... I hope someone can help me. PS: I'm not sure that this is the right board to post this question on, so feel free to redirect me to a better board if you have an idea. PPS: If nothing can be found and I'm forced to write one on my own: Where can I find detailed information on how to write a QR code generator?

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  • Drawing territories border in 2d map

    - by Gabriel A. Zorrilla
    I'm programming a little web strategy game. In the country map I pretend to display each country with a national color. The issue is how to render the borders in a simple and efficient way. Right now I'm planning to set a field to each tile called "border" with values from 0 to 8. The algorithm would check for EVERY tile is its adjacent has a different "owner". If the tile is inside the territory, the border value would be 0, because would not have adjacent any tile with different owner, if not, would vary between 1 (north) clockwise to 9 (north-west) and then draw the border. I find this simple but too processor-intensive. Are there any other "pro" choices to render territories borders?

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  • GDC 2012: From Console to Chrome

    GDC 2012: From Console to Chrome (Pre-recorded GDC content) Cutting-edge HTML5 brings high performance console-style 3d games to the browser, but developing a modern HTML5 game engine can be a challenge. Adapting to HTML5 and Javascript can be bewildering to game programmers coming from C / C++. This talk is an overview of the tools, techniques, and topics you need to be familiar with to adapt to programming high performance 3D games for the web. Topics will include cutting edge HTML5 APIs, writing high performance Javascript, and profiling / debugging tools. Speaker: Lilli Thompson From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 3845 80 ratings Time: 01:02:14 More in Science & Technology

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  • In Scrum, should tasks such as development environment set-up and capability development be managed as subtasks within actual user stories?

    - by Asim Ghaffar
    Sometimes in projects we need to spend time on tasks such as: exploring alternate frameworks and tools learning the framework and tools selected for the project setting up the servers and project infrastructure (version control, build environments, databases, etc) If we are using User Stories, where should all this work go? One option is to make them all part of first user story (e.g. make the homepage for application). Another option is to do a spike for these tasks. A third option is to make task part of an Issue/Impediment (e.g. development environment not selected yet) rather than a user Story.

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  • Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • No VB6 to VS2010 direct upgrade path

    - by Chris Williams
    From the "is this really news?" department... From looking at the currently available versions of 2010, there is no direct upgrade path from VB6 to VS2010. Anyone still using VB6 and wishing to upgrade to VS2010 has two options:  Use the upgrade tool from an earlier version of VS (like 2005 or 2008) and then run the upgrade in VS2010 to get the rest of the way... or rewrite your code. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader which is the better option. I'd like to take a moment to point out the obvious: A) If you're still using VB6 at this point, you probably don't care about VS2010 compatibility. B) Running your code through 2 upgrade wizards isn't going to result in anything resembling best practices. C) Bemoaning the lack of support in 2010 for a 12 year old version of an extinct programming language helps nobody. This public service announcement is brought to you by the letter C. Thank you.

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  • OWSM Policy Repository in JDeveloper - Tips & Tricks - 11g

    - by Prakash Yamuna
    In this blog post I discussed about the OWSM Policy Repository that is embedded in JDeveloper. However some times people may run into issues with the embedded repository. Here is screen snapshot that shows the error you may run into (click on the image for larger image): If you run into "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: WSM-04694 : An invalid directory was provided to connect to a file-base MDS repository." this caused due to spaces in the folder name. Here is a quick way to workaround this issue by running "Jdeveloper.exe - su". Hope people find this useful!

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  • Gilda Garretón, a Java Developer and Parallelism Computing Researcher

    - by Yolande
    In a new interview titled “Gilda Garretón, a Java Developer and Parallelism Computing Research,” Garretón shares her first-hand experience developing with Java and Java 7 for very large-scale integration (VLSI) of computer-aided design (CAD). Garretón gives an insightful overview of how Java is contributing to the parallelism development and to the Electric VLSI Design Systems, an open source VLSI CAD application used as a research platform for new CAD algorithms as well as the research flow for hardware test chips.  Garretón considers that parallelism programming is hard and complex, yet important developments are taking place.  "With the addition of the concurrent package in Java SE 6 and the Fork/Join feature in Java SE 7, developers have a chance to rely more on existing frameworks and dedicate more time to the essence of their parallel algorithms." Read the full article here  

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  • Recommendation for a platform to teach game development to kids [closed]

    - by Moshe Kravchik
    My 11 years old son decided he want to create a Web game. He does not know much about programming and I never did any game development so I'm not the best teacher of the topic. On one hand I really want him to get into building things and doing his own game sounds perfect. So I'd like to find a way to keep him interested and progressing by himself. This means that I'm looking for a platform that is: 1. Simple for understanding and use, intuitive interface 2. Powerful 3. Good tools, preferrably free 4. Significant community for questions and tips 5. Localization - my son's English is quite poor (native Hebrew). We looked at Alice, but it was too limited in its abilities and isn't really a Web game building platform. HTML/CSS and Javascript - too low level for a kid to keep the interest. What would you recommend?

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  • List of Commonly Used Value Types in XNA Games

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). Of concern to XNA programmers is the fact that it runs automatically after a fixed amount of GC-managed memory has been allocated (currently 1MB on both systems). Many beginning XNA programmers are unaware of what constitutes GC-managed memory, though. So here’s a quick overview. In .NET, there are two different “types” of types: value types and reference types. Only reference types are managed by the garbage collector. Value types are not managed by the garbage collector and are instead managed in other ways that are implementation dependent. For purposes of XNA programming, the important point is that they are not managed by the GC and thus do not, by themselves, increment that internal 1 MB allocation counter. (n.b. Structs are value types. If you have a struct that has a reference type as a member, then that reference type, when instantiated, will still be allocated in the GC-managed memory and will thus count against the 1 MB allocation counter. Putting it in a struct doesn’t change the fact that it gets allocated on the GC heap, but the struct itself is created outside of the GC’s purview). Both value types and reference types use the keyword ‘new’ to allocate a new instance of them. Sometimes this keyword is hidden by a method which creates new instances for you, e.g. XmlReader.Create. But the important thing to determine is whether or not you are dealing with a value types or a reference type. If it’s a value type, you can use the ‘new’ keyword to allocate new instances of that type without incrementing the GC allocation counter (except as above where it’s a struct with a reference type in it that is allocated by the constructor, but there are no .NET Framework or XNA Framework value types that do this so it would have to be a struct you created or that was in some third-party library you were using for that to even become an issue). The following is a list of most all of value types you are likely to use in a generic XNA game: AudioCategory (used with XACT; not available on WP7) AvatarExpression (Xbox 360 only, but exposed on Windows to ease Xbox development) bool BoundingBox BoundingSphere byte char Color DateTime decimal double any enum (System.Enum itself is a class, but all enums are value types such that there are no GC allocations for enums) float GamePadButtons GamePadCapabilities GamePadDPad GamePadState GamePadThumbSticks GamePadTriggers GestureSample int IntPtr (rarely but occasionally used in XNA) KeyboardState long Matrix MouseState nullable structs (anytime you see, e.g. int? something, that ‘?’ denotes a nullable struct, also called a nullable type) Plane Point Quaternion Ray Rectangle RenderTargetBinding sbyte (though I’ve never seen it used since most people would just use a short) short TimeSpan TouchCollection TouchLocation TouchPanelCapabilities uint ulong ushort Vector2 Vector3 Vector4 VertexBufferBinding VertexElement VertexPositionColor VertexPositionColorTexture VertexPositionNormalTexture VertexPositionTexture Viewport So there you have it. That’s not quite a complete list, mind you. For example: There are various structs in the .NET framework you might make use of. I left out everything from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.PackedVector namespace, since everything in there ventures into the realm of advanced XNA programming anyway (n.b. every single instantiable thing in that namespace is a struct and thus a value type; there are also two interfaces but interfaces cannot be instantiated at all and thus don’t figure in to this discussion). There are so many enums you’re likely to use (PlayerIndex, SpriteSortMode, SpriteEffects, SurfaceFormat, etc.) that including them would’ve flooded the list and reduced its utility. So I went with “any enum” and trust that you can figure out what the enums are (and it’s rare to use ‘new’ with an enum anyway). That list also doesn’t include any of the pre-defined static instances of some of the classes (e.g. BlendState.AlphaBlend, BlendState.Opaque, etc.) which are already allocated such that using them doesn’t cause any new allocations and therefore doesn’t increase that 1 MB counter. That list also has a few misleading things. VertexElement, VertexPositionColor, and all the other vertex types are structs. But you’re only likely to ever use them as an array (for use with VertexBuffer or DynamicVertexBuffer), and all arrays are reference types (even arrays of value types such as VertexPositionColor[ ] or int[ ]). * So that’s it for now. The note below may be a bit confusing (it deals with how the GC works and how arrays are managed in .NET). If so, you can probably safely ignore it for now but feel free to ask any questions regardless. * Arrays of value types (where the value type doesn’t contain any reference type members) are much faster for the GC to examine than arrays of reference types, so there is a definite benefit to using arrays of value types where it makes sense. But creating arrays of value types does cause the GC’s allocation counter to increase. Indeed, allocating a large array of a value type is one of the quickest ways to increment the allocation counter since a .NET array is a sequential block of memory. An array of reference types is just a sequential block of references (typically 4 bytes each) while an array of value types is a sequential block of instances of that type. So for an array of Vector3s it would be 12 bytes each since each float is 4 bytes and there are 3 in a Vector3; for an array of VertexPositionNormalTexture structs it would typically be 32 bytes each since it has two Vector3s and a Vector2. (Note that there are a few additional bytes taken up in the creation of an array, typically 12 but sometimes 16 or possibly even more, which depend on the implementation details of the array type on the particular platform the code is running on).

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  • Why is String Templating Better Than String Concatenation from an Engineering Perspective?

    - by stephen
    I once read (I think it was in "Programming Pearls") that one should use templates instead of building the string through the use of concatenation. For example, consider the template below (using C# razor library) <in a properties file> Browser Capabilities Type = @Model.Type Name = @Model.Browser Version = @Model.Version Supports Frames = @Model.Frames Supports Tables = @Model.Tables Supports Cookies = @Model.Cookies Supports VBScript = @Model.VBScript Supports Java Applets = @Model.JavaApplets Supports ActiveX Controls = @Model.ActiveXControls and later, in a separate code file private void Button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { BrowserInfoTemplate = Properties.Resources.browserInfoTemplate; // see above string browserInfo = RazorEngine.Razor.Parse(BrowserInfoTemplate, browser); ... } From a software engineering perspective, how is this better than an equivalent string concatentation, like below: private void Button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { System.Web.HttpBrowserCapabilities browser = Request.Browser; string s = "Browser Capabilities\n" + "Type = " + browser.Type + "\n" + "Name = " + browser.Browser + "\n" + "Version = " + browser.Version + "\n" + "Supports Frames = " + browser.Frames + "\n" + "Supports Tables = " + browser.Tables + "\n" + "Supports Cookies = " + browser.Cookies + "\n" + "Supports VBScript = " + browser.VBScript + "\n" + "Supports JavaScript = " + browser.EcmaScriptVersion.ToString() + "\n" + "Supports Java Applets = " + browser.JavaApplets + "\n" + "Supports ActiveX Controls = " + browser.ActiveXControls + "\n" ... }

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