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• What developer conferences are you going to this year?

  - by mbcrump

  This short list is what I consider to be the “cream-of-the-crop” in developer conferences. This is also a list of the conferences that I plan on attending in 2011. If you feel your conference is just as good, then shoot me an email at [michael[at]michaelcrump[dot]net, and if possible I will check it out.   In-Person Event Las Vegas on April 18th-22nd, 2011 Redmond on October 17th-21st, 2011 Orlando on December 5th-9th, 2011 Visual Studio Live – I attended this event in November of last year and blogged about my experience. I am also planning on going back to the Orlando session in December of this year. So what did I like the most about this event? Being able to interact one-on-one with a majority of the speakers. If you read my blog post then you will see a list of the speakers that I met up with. I also made a lot of great connections with other professional developers all over the world. They are having an event in Las Vegas on April 18th-22nd. I noticed at this event that they have added a new track on mobile. Being a big fan of mobile, I feel that this is a great move. They also have a great selection for Silverlight Developers including Billy Hollis and Rocky Lhotka. For the full lineup of conference tracks, sessions and speakers visit http://bit.ly/VSLiveTrks. If you are interested in this then you can register here by February 16th. I must add that you can save $300 bucks by getting the early-bird special.   Virtual Conference SSWUG (DBTechCon) - holds the largest virtual conference in the information technology industry. It is also special to me because they selected a majority of my Silverlight content for the April conference. No traveling fees and all of the sessions are recorded so you can watch them on-demand for $189 bucks (early-bird special). For the entire speaker list then click here. The session list has also been published. If you are interested in this then you can register here.   In-Person Event Knoxville, TN on June 3rd/4th 2011. Codestock.org – If you live in the South then you have heard of CodeStock. To my knowledge, they have only had 3 events so far and they were a huge success. It was such a success that after the last event, everyone was telling me how good it was and how much they enjoyed it. They currently have a call for speakers going on right now, so if you have sessions then be sure to submit yours. So, what makes them stand out? Well for starters Michael Neal (organizer) developed an open API so conference attendees could build their own apps for the sessions. They also encouraged their speakers to go to other sessions instead of stay in a “speaker-room”. Another cool feature is that they are uploading videos from the conference so everyone can benefit. They are currently looking for sponsorship, so help out if you can.   In-Person Event Redmond, WA on October 28/29 2011 *NOT 100% SURE AT THIS POINT* PDC 11 – OK, so the logo should be pdc11 but its not out yet. This event is located on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. It is probably one of the most well known conferences for developers to attend. One of the big perks from this event is that you typically come away with free stuff. In 2010 they gave away Windows 7 Phones. I remember years earlier they gave away laptops. This of course isn’t the only reason to go, you may get to tour the Microsoft campus. Since pdc is a huge event, you can view all the events for free. Mike Taulty created a nice Silverlight application that consumes the OData feed. You can download it here. If everything goes as planned, I will be at all of these events. If you plan on going then send me a tweet and we will do lunch or dinner. I love meeting new developers and talking .net.  Subscribe to my feed

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• JPRT: A Build & Test System

  - by kto

  DRAFT A while back I did a little blogging on a system called JPRT, the hardware used and a summary on my java.net weblog. This is an update on the JPRT system. JPRT ("JDK Putback Reliablity Testing", but ignore what the letters stand for, I change what they mean every day, just to annoy people :\^) is a build and test system for the JDK, or any source base that has been configured for JPRT. As I mentioned in the above blog, JPRT is a major modification to a system called PRT that the HotSpot VM development team has been using for many years, very successfully I might add. Keeping the source base always buildable and reliable is the first step in the 12 steps of dealing with your product quality... or was the 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous... oh well, anyway, it's the first of many steps. ;\^) Internally when we make changes to any part of the JDK, there are certain procedures we are required to perform prior to any putback or commit of the changes. The procedures often vary from team to team, depending on many factors, such as whether native code is changed, or if the change could impact other areas of the JDK. But a common requirement is a verification that the source base with the changes (and merged with the very latest source base) will build on many of not all 8 platforms, and a full 'from scratch' build, not an incremental build, which can hide full build problems. The testing needed varies, depending on what has been changed. Anyone that was worked on a project where multiple engineers or groups are submitting changes to a shared source base knows how disruptive a 'bad commit' can be on everyone. How many times have you heard: "So And So made a bunch of changes and now I can't build!". But multiply the number of platforms by 8, and make all the platforms old and antiquated OS versions with bizarre system setup requirements and you have a pretty complicated situation (see http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/build/README-builds.html). We don't tolerate bad commits, but our enforcement is somewhat lacking, usually it's an 'after the fact' correction. Luckily the Source Code Management system we use (another antique called TeamWare) allows for a tree of repositories and 'bad commits' are usually isolated to a small team. Punishment to date has been pretty drastic, the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice in Wonderland' said 'Off With Their Heads', well trust me, you don't want to be the engineer doing a 'bad commit' to the JDK. With JPRT, hopefully this will become a thing of the past, not that we have had many 'bad commits' to the master source base, in general the teams doing the integrations know how important their jobs are and they rarely make 'bad commits'. So for these JDK integrators, maybe what JPRT does is keep them from chewing their finger nails at night. ;\^) Over the years each of the teams have accumulated sets of machines they use for building, or they use some of the shared machines available to all of us. But the hunt for build machines is just part of the job, or has been. And although the issues with consistency of the build machines hasn't been a horrible problem, often you never know if the Solaris build machine you are using has all the right patches, or if the Linux machine has the right service pack, or if the Windows machine has it's latest updates. Hopefully the JPRT system can solve this problem. When we ship the binary JDK bits, it is SO very important that the build machines are correct, and we know how difficult it is to get them setup. Sure, if you need to debug a JDK problem that only shows up on Windows XP or Solaris 9, you'll still need to hunt down a machine, but not as a regular everyday occurance. I'm a big fan of a regular nightly build and test system, constantly verifying that a source base builds and tests out. There are many examples of automated build/tests, some that trigger on any change to the source base, some that just run every night. Some provide a protection gateway to the 'golden' source base which only gets changes that the nightly process has verified are good. The JPRT (and PRT) system is meant to guard the source base before anything is sent to it, guarding all source bases from the evil developer, well maybe 'evil' isn't the right word, I haven't met many 'evil' developers, more like 'error prone' developers. ;\^) Humm, come to think about it, I may be one from time to time. :\^{ But the point is that by spreading the build up over a set of machines, and getting the turnaround down to under an hour, it becomes realistic to completely build on all platforms and test it, on every putback. We have the technology, we can build and rebuild and rebuild, and it will be better than it was before, ha ha... Anybody remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Man, I gotta get out more often.. Anyway, now the nightly build and test can become a 'fetch the latest JPRT build bits' and start extensive testing (the testing not done by JPRT, or the platforms not tested by JPRT). Is it Open Source? No, not yet. Would you like to be? Let me know. Or is it more important that you have the ability to use such a system for JDK changes? So enough blabbering on about this JPRT system, tell me what you think. And let me know if you want to hear more about it or not. Stay tuned for the next episode, same Bloody Bat time, same Bloody Bat channel. ;\^) -kto

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• SOA, Governance, and Drugs

  Why is IT governance important in service oriented architecture (SOA)? IT Governance provides a framework for making appropriate decisions based on company guidelines and accepted standards. This framework also outlines each stakeholder’s responsibilities and authority when making important architectural or design decisions. Furthermore, this framework of governance defines parameters and constraints that are used to give context and perspective when making decisions. The use of governance as it applies to SOA ensures that specific design principles and patterns are used when developing and maintaining services. When governance is consistently applied systems the following benefits are achieved according to Anne Thomas Manes in 2010. Governance makes sure that services conform to standard interface patterns, common data modeling practices, and promotes the incorporation of existing system functionality by building on top of other available services across a system. Governance defines development standards based on proven design principles and patterns that promote reuse and composition. Governance provides developers a set of proven design principles, standards and practices that promote the reduction in system based component dependencies.  By following these guidelines, individual components will be easier to maintain. For me personally, I am a fan of IT governance, and feel that it valuable part of any corporate IT department. However, depending on how it is implemented can really affect the value of using IT governance.  Companies need to find a way to ensure that governance does not become extreme in its policies and procedures. I know for me personally, I would really dislike working under a completely totalitarian or laissez-faire version of governance. Developers need to be able to be creative in their designs and too much governance can really impede the design process and prevent the most optimal design from being developed. On the other hand, with no governance enforced, no standards will be followed and accepted design patterns will be ignored. I have personally had to spend a lot of time working on this particular scenario and I have found that the concept of code reuse and composition is almost nonexistent.  Based on this, too much time and money is wasted on redeveloping existing aspects of an application that already exist within the system as a whole. I think moving forward we will see a staggered form of IT governance, regardless if it is for SOA or IT in general.  Depending on the size of a company and the size of its IT department,  I can see IT governance as a layered approach in that the top layer will be defined by enterprise architects that focus on abstract concepts pertaining to high level design, general  guidelines, acceptable best practices, and recommended design patterns.  The next layer will be defined by solution architects or department managers that further expand on abstracted guidelines defined by the enterprise architects. This layer will contain further definitions as to when various design patterns, coding standards, and best practices are to be applied based on the context of the solutions that are being developed by the department. The final layer will be defined by the system designer or a solutions architect assed to a project in that they will define what design patterns will be used in a solution, naming conventions, as well as outline how a system will function based on the best practices defined by the previous layers. This layered approach allows for IT departments to be flexible in that system designers have creative leeway in designing solutions to meet the needs of the business, but they must operate within the confines of the abstracted IT governance guidelines.  A real world example of this can be seen in the United States as it pertains to governance of the people in that the US government defines rules and regulations in the abstract and then the state governments take these guidelines and applies them based on the will of the people in each individual state. Furthermore, the county or city governments are the ones that actually enforce these rules based on how they are interpreted by local community.  To further define my example, the United States government defines that marijuana is illegal. Each individual state has the option to determine this regulation as it wishes in that the state of Florida determines that all uses of the drug are illegal, but the state of California legally allows the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes only. Based on these accepted practices each local government enforces these rules in that a police officer will arrest anyone in the state of Florida for having this drug on them if they walk down the street, but in California if a person has a medical prescription for the drug they will not get arrested.  REFERENCESThomas Manes, Anne. (2010). Understanding SOA Governance: http://www.soamag.com/I40/0610-2.php

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 2: Platforms and Features

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is part 2 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. In the previous post I discussed what reasons a company might have for creating a smartphone application.  In this installment I will cover some of history and state of the different platforms as well as features that can be leveraged for building enterprise smartphone applications. Platforms Before you start choosing a platform to develop your solutions on it is good to understand how we got here and what features you can leverage. History To my memory we owe all of this to a product called the Apple Newton that came out in 1987. It was the first PDA and back then I was much more of an Apple fan.  I was very impressed with this device even though it never really went anywhere.  The Palm Pilot by US Robotics was the next major advancement in PDA. It had a simple short hand window that allowed for quick stylus entry.. Later, Windows CE came out and started the broadening of the PDA market. After that it was the Palm and CE operating systems that started showing up on cell phones and for some time these were the two dominant operating systems that were distributed with devices from multiple hardware vendors. Current The iPhone was the first smartphone to take away the stylus and give us a multi-touch interface.  It was a revolution in usability and really changed the attractiveness of smartphones for the general public.  This brought us to the beginning of the current state of the market with the concept of an online store that makes it easy for customers to get new features and functionality on demand. With Android, Google made this more than a one horse race.  Not only did they come to compete, their low cost actually made them the leading OS.  Of course what made Android so attractive also is its major fault.  It is so open that it has been a target for malware which leaves consumers exposed.  Fortunately for Google though, most consumers aren’t aware of the threat that they are under. Although Microsoft had put out one of the first smart phone operating systems with CE it had to play catch up and finally came out with the Windows Phone.  They have gone for a market approach between those of iOS and Android.  They support multiple hardware vendors like Google, but they kept a certification process for applications that is similar to Apple.  They also created a user interface that was different enough to give it a clear separation from the other two platforms. The result of all this is hundreds of millions of smartphones being sold monthly across all three platforms giving us a wide range of choices and challenges when it comes to developing solutions. Features So what are the features that make these devices flexible enough be considered for use in the enterprise? The biggest advantage of today's devices is network connectivity.  The ability to access information from multiple sources at a moment’s notice is critical for businesses.  Add to that the ability to communicate over a variety of text, voice and video modes and we have a powerful starting point. Every smartphone has a cameras and they are not just useful for posting to Instagram. We are seeing more applications such as Bing vision that allow us to scan just about any printed code or text to find information.  These capabilities have been made available to developers in the form of standard libraries for reading barcodes of just about an flavor and optical character recognition (OCR) interpretation. Bluetooth give us the ability to communicate with multiple devices. Whether these are headsets, keyboard or printers the wireless communication capabilities are just starting to evolve.  The more these wireless communication protocols grow, the more opportunities we will see to transfer data between users and a variety of devices. Local storage of information that can be called up even when the device cannot reach the network is the other big capability.  This give users the ability to work offline as well and transmit information when connections are restored. These are the tools that we have to work with to build applications that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage for companies that implement them. Coming Up In the third installment I will cover key concerns that you face when building enterprise smartphone apps. del.icio.us Tags: smartphones,enterprise smartphone Apps,architecture,iOS,Android,Windows Phone

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• IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

  - by andrewbrust

  Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well.  On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX.  That evening I flew from New York to Seattle.  On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made.  Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago.  On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days.  But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts.  While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not.  HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser.  Try it and see.  Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production.  Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident.  Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic.  Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft.  So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources.  Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good.  In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out.  Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform.  They’re going to feel abandoned.  Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers.  Remember SPOT watches?  Live Spaces?  The original Live Mesh?  Microsoft discontinued each of these products.  The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy.  But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions.  Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer?  I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it.  If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment.  You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control.  Accountability is key.  The same goes for Microsoft.  If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns.  People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments.  The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches.  It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too.  When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility.  That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management.  Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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• Cygwin in Windows 7

  - by Algorist

  Hi, I am a fan of linux but due to worst intel wireless drivers in linux, I had to switch to windows 7. I have installed cygwin in windows and want to configure ssh, to remotely connect to my laptop. I googled and found this webpage, http://art.csoft.net/2009/09/02/cygwin-ssh-server-and-windows-7/ I am getting the following error when running ssh-host-config. bala@bala-PC ~ $ ssh-host-config yes *** Info: Creating default /etc/ssh_config file *** Query: Overwrite existing /etc/sshd_config file? (yes/no) yes *** Info: Creating default /etc/sshd_config file *** Info: Privilege separation is set to yes by default since OpenSSH 3.3. *** Info: However, this requires a non-privileged account called 'sshd'. *** Info: For more info on privilege separation read /usr/share/doc/openssh/READ ME.privsep. *** Query: Should privilege separation be used? (yes/no) no *** Info: Updating /etc/sshd_config file *** Warning: The following functions require administrator privileges! *** Query: Do you want to install sshd as a service? *** Query: (Say "no" if it is already installed as a service) (yes/no) yes *** Query: Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [] *** Info: On Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and above, the *** Info: SYSTEM account cannot setuid to other users -- a capability *** Info: sshd requires. You need to have or to create a privileged *** Info: account. This script will help you do so. *** Warning: The owner and the Administrators need *** Warning: to have .w. permission to /var/run. *** Warning: Here are the current permissions and ACLS: *** Warning: drwxr-xr-x 1 bala None 0 2010-01-17 22:34 /var/run *** Warning: # file: /var/run *** Warning: # owner: bala *** Warning: # group: None *** Warning: user::rwx *** Warning: group::r-x *** Warning: other:r-x *** Warning: mask:rwx *** Warning: *** Warning: Please change the user and/or group ownership, *** Warning: permissions, or ACLs of /var/run. *** ERROR: Problem with /var/run directory. Exiting. The permissions of this folder are shown as Read-only(Only applies to this folder) checked in gray. I tried to uncheck, but after I open the properties again, the box is again checked. Is there a way to change the permissions of this folder. Thank you

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• Does my fat-client application belong in the MVC pattern?

  - by boatingcow

  The web-based application I’m currently working on is growing arms and legs! It’s basically an administration system which helps users to keep track of bookings, user accounts, invoicing etc. It can also be accessed via a couple of different websites using a fairly crude API. The fat-client design loosely follows the MVC pattern (or perhaps MVP) with a php/MySQL backend, Front Controller, several dissimilar Page Controllers, a liberal smattering of object-oriented and procedural Models, a confusing bunch of Views and templates, some JavaScripts, CSS files and Flash objects. The programmer in me is a big fan of the principle of “Separation of Concerns” and on that note, I’m currently trying to figure out the best way to separate and combine the various concerns as the project grows and more people contribute to it. The problem we’re facing is that although JavaScript (or Flash with ActionScript) is normally written with the template, hence part of the View and decoupled from the Controller and Model, we find that it actually encompasses the entire MVC pattern... Swap an image with an onmouseover event - that’s Behaviour. Render a datagrid - we’re manipulating the View. Send the result of reordering a list via AJAX - now we’re in Control. Check a form field to see if an email address is in a valid format - we’re consulting the Model. Is it wise to let the database people write up the validation Model with jQuery? Can the php programmers write the necessary Control structures in JavaScript? Can the web designers really write a functional AJAX form for their View? Should there be a JavaScript overlord for every project? If the MVC pattern could be applied to the people instead of the code, we would end up with this: Model - the database boffins - “SELECT * FROM mind WHERE interested IS NULL” Control - pesky programmers - “class Something extends NothingAbstractClass{…}” View - traditionally the domain of the graphic/web designer - “” …and a new layer: Behaviour - interaction and feedback designer - “CSS3 is the new black…” So, we’re refactoring and I’d like to stick to best practice design, but I’m not sure how to proceed. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so would anyone have any hints or tips as to what pattern I should be looking at or any code samples from someone who’s already done the dirty work? As the programmer guy, how can I rewrite the app for backend and front end whilst keeping the two separate? And before you ask, yes I’ve looked at Zend, CodeIgnitor, Symfony, etc., and no, they don’t seem to cross the boundary between server logic and client logic!

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• Challenge: Neater way of currying or partially applying C#4's string.Join

  - by Damian Powell

  Background I recently read that .NET 4's System.String class has a new overload of the Join method. This new overload takes a separator, and an IEnumerable<T> which allows arbitrary collections to be joined into a single string without the need to convert to an intermediate string array. Cool! That means I can now do this: var evenNums = Enumerable.Range(1, 100) .Where(i => i%2 == 0); var list = string.Join(",",evenNums); ...instead of this: var evenNums = Enumerable.Range(1, 100) .Where(i => i%2 == 0) .Select(i => i.ToString()) .ToArray(); var list = string.Join(",", evenNums); ...thus saving on a conversion of every item to a string, and then the allocation of an array. The Problem However, being a fan of the functional style of programming in general, and method chaining in C# in particular, I would prefer to be able to write something like this: var list = Enumerable.Range(1, 100) .Where(i => i%2 == 0) .string.Join(","); This is not legal C# though. The closest I've managed to get is this: var list = Enumerable.Range(1, 100) .Where(i => i%2 == 0) .ApplyTo( Functional.Curry<string, IEnumerable<object>, string> (string.Join)(",") ); ...using the following extension methods: public static class Functional { public static TRslt ApplyTo<TArg, TRslt>(this TArg arg, Func<TArg, TRslt> func) { return func(arg); } public static Func<T1, Func<T2, TResult>> Curry<T1, T2, TResult>(this Func<T1, T2, TResult> func) { Func<Func<T1, T2, TResult>, Func<T1, Func<T2, TResult>>> curried = f => x => y => f(x, y); return curried(func); } } This is quite verbose, requires explicit definition of the parameters and return type of the string.Join overload I want to use, and relies upon C#4's variance features because we are defining one of the arguments as IEnumerable rather than IEnumerable. The Challenge Can you find a neater way of achieving this using the method-chaining style of programming?

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• Uploading a picture to facebook

  - by kielie

  Hi guys, I am trying to upload a image to a gallery on a facebook fan page, here is my code thus far, $ch = curl_init(); $data = array('type' => 'client_cred', 'client_id' => 'app_id','client_secret'=>'secret_key',' redirect_uri'=>'http://apps.facebook.com/my-application/'); // your connect url here curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); $rs = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); $ch = curl_init(); $data = explode("=",$rs); $token = $data[1]; $album_id = '1234'; $file= 'http://my.website.com/my-application/sketch.jpg'; $data = array(basename($file) => "@".realpath($file), //filename, where $row['file_location'] is a file hosted on my server "caption" => "test", "aid" => $album_id, //valid aid, as demonstrated above "access_token" => $token ); $ch2 = curl_init(); $url = "https://graph.facebook.com/".$album_id."/photos"; curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, false); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_POST, true); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); $op = curl_exec($ch2); When I echo $token, I seem to be getting the token, but when I run the script, I get this error, {"error":{"type":"OAuthAccessTokenException","message":"An access token is required to request this resource."} , I have NO idea why it is doing this! Basically what I am doing in that code is getting the access token with curl, and then, uploading the photo to my album also via curl, but I keep getting that error! Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

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• PHP mysqli wrapper: passing by reference with __call() and call_user_func_array()

  - by Dave

  Hi everyone. I'm a long running fan of stackoverflow, first time poster. I'd love to see if someone can help me with this. Let me dig in with a little code, then I'll explain my problem. I have the following wrapper classes: class mysqli_wrapper { private static $mysqli_obj; function __construct() // Recycles the mysqli object { if (!isset(self::$mysqli_obj)) { self::$mysqli_obj = new mysqli(MYSQL_SERVER, MYSQL_USER, MYSQL_PASS, MYSQL_DBNAME); } } function __call($method, $args) { return call_user_func_array(array(self::$mysqli_obj, $method), $args); } function __get($para) { return self::$mysqli_obj->$para; } function prepare($query) // Overloaded, returns statement wrapper { return new mysqli_stmt_wrapper(self::$mysqli_obj, $query); } } class mysqli_stmt_wrapper { private $stmt_obj; function __construct($link, $query) { $this->stmt_obj = mysqli_prepare($link, $query); } function __call($method, $args) { return call_user_func_array(array($this->stmt_obj, $method), $args); } function __get($para) { return $this->stmt_obj->$para; } // Other methods will be added here } My problem is that when I call bind_result() on the mysqli_stmt_wrapper class, my variables don't seem to be passed by reference and nothing gets returned. To illustrate, if I run this section of code, I only get NULL's: $mysqli = new mysqli_wrapper; $stmt = $mysqli->prepare("SELECT cfg_key, cfg_value FROM config"); $stmt->execute(); $stmt->bind_result($cfg_key, $cfg_value); while ($stmt->fetch()) { var_dump($cfg_key); var_dump($cfg_value); } $stmt->close(); I also get a nice error from PHP which tells me: PHP Warning: Parameter 1 to mysqli_stmt::bind_result() expected to be a reference, value given in test.php on line 48 I've tried to overload the bind_param() function, but I can't figure out how to get a variable number of arguments by reference. func_get_args() doesn't seem to be able to help either. If I pass the variables by reference as in $stmt->bind_result(&$cfg_key, &$cfg_value) it should work, but this is deprecated behaviour and throws more errors. Does anyone have some ideas around this? Thanks so much for your time.

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• Using the HTML 'label' tag with radio buttons

  - by GlenPeterson

  Does the label tag work with radio buttons? If so, how do you use it? I have a form that displays like this: First Name: (text field) Hair Color: (color drop-down) Description: (text area) Salutation: (radio buttons for Mr., Mrs., Miss) I'd like to use the label tag for each label in the left column to define its connection to the appropriate control in the right column. But If I use a radio button, the spec seems to indicate that suddenly the actual "Salutation" label for the form control no longer belongs in the label tag, but rather the options "Mr., Mrs., etc." go in the label tag. I've always been a fan of accessibility and the semantic web, but this design doesn't make sense to me. The label tag explicitly declares labels. The option tag selection options. How do you declare a label on the actual label for a set of radio buttons? UPDATE: Here is an example with code: <tr><th><label for"sc">Status:</label></th> <td>&#160;</td> <td><select name="statusCode" id="sc"> <option value="ON_TIME">On Time</option> <option value="LATE">Late</option> </select></td></tr> This works great. But unlike other form controls, radio buttons have a separate field for each value: <tr><th align="right"><label for="???">Activity:</label></th> <td>&#160;</td> <td align="left"><input type="radio" name="es" value="" id="es0" /> Active &#160; <input type="radio" name="es" value="ON_TIME" checked="checked" id="es1" /> Completed on Time &#160; <input type="radio" name="es" value="LATE" id="es2" /> Completed Late &#160; <input type="radio" name="es" value="CANCELED" id="es3" /> Canceled</td> </tr> What to do?

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• Best Practice: Legitimate Cross-Site Scripting

  - by Ryan

  While cross-site scripting is generally regarded as negative, I've run into several situations where it's necessary. I was recently working within the confines of a very limiting content management system. I needed to include database code within the page, but the hosting server didn't have anything usable available. I set up a couple barebones scripts on my own server, originally thinking that I could use AJAX to import the contents of my scripts directly into the template of the CMS (thus retaining dynamic images, menu items, CSS, etc.). I was wrong. Due to the limitations of XMLHttpRequest objects, it's not possible to grab content from a different domain. So I thought "iFrame" - even though I'm not a fan of frames, I thought that I could create a frame that matched the width and height of the content, so that it would appear native. Again, I was blocked by cross-site scripting "protections." While I could indeed load a remote file into the iFrame, I couldn't execute JavaScript to modify its size on either the host page or inside the loaded page. In this particular scenario, I wasn't able to point a subdomain to my server. I also couldn't create a script on the CMS server that could proxy content from my server, so my last thought was to use a remote JavaScript. A remote JavaScript works. It breaks when the user has JavaScript disabled, which is a downside; but it works. The "problem" I was having with using a remote JavaScript was that I had to use the JS function document.write() to output any content. Any output that isn't JS causes script errors. In addition to using document.write() for every line, you also have to ensure that the content is escaped - or else you end up with more script errors. My solution was as follows: My script received a GET parameter ("page") and then looked for the file ({$page}.php), and read the contents into a variable. However, I had to use awkward buffering techniques in order to actually execute the included scripts (for things like database interaction) then strip the final content of all line break characters ("\n") followed by escaping all required characters. The end result is that my original script (which outputs JavaScript) accesses seemingly "standard" scripts on my server and converts their standard output to JavaScript for displaying within the CMS template. While this solution works, it seems like there may be a better way to accomplish the same thing. What is the best way to make cross-site scripting work specifically for the purpose of including content from a completely different domain?

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• How to do a search from a list with non-prefix keywords

  - by aNui

  First of all, sorry if my english or my post got any mistakes. I am programming a program to search the name from the list and I need to find them if the keyword is not in front of the names (that's what I mean non-prefix) e.g. if I my list is the music instruments and I type "guit" to the search textbox. It should find the names "Guitar, Guitarrón, Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar, ..." or something like this Longdo Dictionary's search suggestion. here is my simple and stupid algorithm (that's all I can do) const int SEARCHROWLIMIT = 30; private string[] DoSearch(string Input, string[] ListToSearch) { List<string> FoundNames = new List<string>(); int max = 0; bool over = false; for (int k = 0; !over; k++) { foreach (string item in ListToSearch) { max = (max > item.Length) ? max : item.Length; if (k > item.Length) continue; if (k >= max) { over = true; break; } if (!Input.Equals("Search") && item.Substring(k, item.Length - k).StartsWith(Input, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { bool exist = false; int i = 0; while (!exist && i < FoundNames.Count) { if (item.Equals(FoundNames[i])) { exist = true; break; } i++; } if (!exist && FoundNames.Count < SEARCHROWLIMIT) FoundNames.Add(item); else if (FoundNames.Count >= SEARCHROWLIMIT) over = true; } } } return FoundNames.ToArray(); } I think this algorithm is too slow for a large number of names and after several trial-and-error, I decided to add SEARCHROWLIMIT to breaks the operation And I also think there're some readymade methods that can do that. And another problem is I need to search music instruments by a category like strings, percussions, ... and by the country of origins. So I need to search them with filter by type and country. please help me. P.S. Me and my friends are just student from Thailand and developing the project to compete in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2010 and please become fan on our facebook page [KRATIB][3]. And we're so sorry we don't have much information in English but you can talk to us in English.

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• How to do a search from a list with non-prefix keywords[Solved]

  - by aNui

  The Problem is Solved. Thanks for every answers. First of all, sorry if my english or my post got any mistakes. I am programming a program to search the name from the list and I need to find them even if the keyword is not in front of the names (that's what I mean non-prefix) e.g. if I my list is the music instruments and I type "guit" to the search textbox. It should find the names "Guitar, Guitarrón, Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar, ..." or something like this Longdo Dictionary's search suggestion. here is my simple and stupid algorithm (that's all I can do) const int SEARCHROWLIMIT = 30; private string[] DoSearch(string Input, string[] ListToSearch) { List<string> FoundNames = new List<string>(); int max = 0; bool over = false; for (int k = 0; !over; k++) { foreach (string item in ListToSearch) { max = (max > item.Length) ? max : item.Length; if (k > item.Length) continue; if (k >= max) { over = true; break; } if (!Input.Equals("Search") && item.Substring(k, item.Length - k).StartsWith(Input, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { bool exist = false; int i = 0; while (!exist && i < FoundNames.Count) { if (item.Equals(FoundNames[i])) { exist = true; break; } i++; } if (!exist && FoundNames.Count < SEARCHROWLIMIT) FoundNames.Add(item); else if (FoundNames.Count >= SEARCHROWLIMIT) over = true; } } } return FoundNames.ToArray(); } I think this algorithm is too slow for a large number of names and after several trial-and-error, I decided to add SEARCHROWLIMIT to breaks the operation And I also think there're some readymade methods that can do that. And another problem is I need to search music instruments by a category like strings, percussions, ... and by the country of origins. So I need to search them with filter by type and country. please help me. P.S. Me and my friends are just student from Thailand and developing the project to compete in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2010 and please become fan on our facebook page [KRATIB][3]. And we're so sorry we don't have much information in English but you can talk to us in English.

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• Mocking a concrete class : templates and avoiding conditional compilation

  - by AshirusNW

  I'm trying to testing a concrete object with this sort of structure. class Database { public: Database(Server server) : server_(server) {} int Query(const char* expression) { server_.Connect(); return server_.ExecuteQuery(); } private: Server server_; }; i.e. it has no virtual functions, let alone a well-defined interface. I want to a fake database which calls mock services for testing. Even worse, I want the same code to be either built against the real version or the fake so that the same testing code can both: Test the real Database implementation - for integration tests Test the fake implementation, which calls mock services To solve this, I'm using a templated fake, like this: #ifndef INTEGRATION_TESTS class FakeDatabase { public: FakeDatabase() : realDb_(mockServer_) {} int Query(const char* expression) { MOCK_EXPECT_CALL(mockServer_, Query, 3); return realDb_.Query(); } private: // in non-INTEGRATION_TESTS builds, Server is a mock Server with // extra testing methods that allows mocking Server mockServer_; Database realDb_; }; #endif template <class T> class TestDatabaseContainer { public: int Query(const char* expression) { int result = database_.Query(expression); std::cout << "LOG: " << result << endl; return result; } private: T database_; }; Edit: Note the fake Database must call the real Database (but with a mock Server). Now to switch between them I'm planning the following test framework: class DatabaseTests { public: #ifdef INTEGRATION_TESTS typedef TestDatabaseContainer<Database> TestDatabase ; #else typedef TestDatabaseContainer<FakeDatabase> TestDatabase ; #endif TestDatabase& GetDb() { return _testDatabase; } private: TestDatabase _testDatabase; }; class QueryTestCase : public DatabaseTests { public: void TestStep1() { ASSERT(GetDb().Query(static_cast<const char *>("")) == 3); return; } }; I'm not a big fan of that compile-time switching between the real and the fake. So, my question is: Whether there's a better way of switching between Database and FakeDatabase? For instance, is it possible to do it at runtime in a clean fashion? I like to avoid #ifdefs. Also, if anyone has a better way of making a fake class that mimics a concrete class, I'd appreciate it. I don't want to have templated code all over the actual test code (QueryTestCase class). Feel free to critique the code style itself, too. You can see a compiled version of this code on codepad.

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• Dealing with personal failure

  - by codeelegance

  A while ago I was given the task of updating and extending the functionality of a software project. I was given a year to make the needed changes working solo. A month into development I came to the conclusion that it would take longer to change the existing product than to rewrite it from the ground up. I'd never attempted a complete rewrite so I talked with my boss about it and he was thrilled with the idea. I'm a fan of agile development but had never had the opportunity to take advantage of all of the prescribed practices so when I set to work I tried to incorporate as many as I could. I didn't have direct access to the customer and my coworkers (non-programmers) knew the business domain but were already so busy they didn't really have time to participate in design meetings so I resigned to working in the dark and occasionally calling one of them over to my desk to get feedback on my progress. I used TDD and refactored mercilessly and even tried taking a domain driven design approach. Things went well for a while. As the deadline came closer and the complexity of the project grew my productivity start slipping. I found myself cutting corners and ignoring the practices I had established as the pressure increased to meet the deadline. I also started working late nights and weekends to keep up with the load. In the end it made little difference how hard I worked. The project missed its deadline and what was completed wasn't enough to give to the customer. I had failed. Not only had I not finished on time but the previous version had sat untouched for almost a year so it wouldn't be of any help. Luckily we had another product that offered some of the same functionality. My boss decided to cancel the project entirely and moved all our orphaned customers to the other product. I spent weeks (along with everyone else at the company) manning the phones providing technical support for those customers. After it was all over, my boss was gracious enough not to fire me for nearly ruining the company. I was moved to the other product and have been trying to redeem myself ever since. Where did I go wrong? Has anyone else had to deal with this kind of defeat? How did you recover?

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• Mercurial local repository backup

  - by Ricket

  I'm a big fan of backing things up. I keep my important school essays and such in a folder of my Dropbox. I make sure that all of my photos are duplicated to an external drive. I have a home server where I keep important files mirrored across two drives inside the server (like a software RAID 1). So for my code, I have always used Subversion to back it up. I keep the trunk folder with a stable copy of my application, but then I create a branch named with my username, and inside there is my working copy. I make very few changes between commits to that branch, with the understanding that the code in there is my backup. Now I'm looking into Mercurial, and I must admit I haven't truly used it yet so I may have this all wrong. But it seems to me that you have a server-side repository, and then you clone it to a working directory in the form of a local repository. Then as you work on something, you make commits to that local repository, and when things are in a state to be shared with others, you hg push to the parent repository on the server. Between pushes of stable, tested, bug-free code, where is the backup? After doing some thinking, I've come to the conclusion that it is not meant for backup purposes and it assumes you've handled that on your own. I guess I need to keep my Mercurial local repositories in my dropbox or some other backed-up location, since my in-progress code is not pushed to the server. Is this pretty much it, or have I missed something? If you use Mercurial, how do you backup your local repositories? If you had turned on your computer this morning and your hard drive went up in flames (or, more likely, the read head went bad, or the OS corrupted itself, ...), what would be lost? If you spent the past week developing a module, writing test cases for it, documenting and commenting it, and then a virus wipes your local repository away, isn't that the only copy? So then on the flip side, do you create a remote repository for every local repository and push to it all the time? How do you find a balance? How do you ensure your code is backed up? Where is the line between using Mercurial as backup, and using a local filesystem backup utility to keep your local repositories safe?

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• ScrollTo and toggle div

  - by user1466260

  I'm a big fan ov 8020.com and my goal is to create a porfolio with the same functionality like the one they have. Here is my markup This section should be hidden <section id="work-container"> <div id="work-list-51" class="work-details"> <h1> <div class="close-project"> </div> <div id="work-list-52" class="work-details"> <h1> <div class="close-project"> </div> <div id="work-list-53" class="work-details"> <h1> <div class="close-project"> </div> </section> This section will hold the thumbnails. When you click a thumbnail you will scroll to the top and the div will slidetoggle. <ul id="work-list"> <li id="work-list-51"><a data-page="51" href="#work-list-51"> <img width="230" height="230" alt="Mariann Rosa" src="sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/field/image/mariann.jpg"> </a></li> <li id="work-list-52"><a data-page="52" href="#work-list-52"> <img width="230" height="230" alt="Mariann Rosa" src="sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/field/image/mariann.jpg"> </a></li> <li id="work-list-53"><a data-page="53" href="#work-list-53"> <img width="230" height="230" alt="Mariann Rosa" src="sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/field/image/mariann.jpg"> </a></li> </ul> I have come this far: $(document).ready(function(){ $("#work-list a").click(function(event){ event.preventDefault(); $('html, body').animate ( {scrollTop: $('#top').offset().top}, 800 ); }); $('#work-list a').click(function(e) { $('#work-container > div').hide(); $(this.hash).slideToggle(1600); }); }); It scrolls to top and the div becomes visible but it does not work correctly :)

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• Can you get a Func<T> (or similar) from a MethodInfo object?

  - by Dan Tao

  I realize that, generally speaking, there are performance implications of using reflection. (I myself am not a fan of reflection at all, actually; this is a purely academic question.) Suppose there exists some class that looks like this: public class MyClass { public string GetName() { return "My Name"; } } Bear with me here. I know that if I have an instance of MyClass called x, I can call x.GetName(). Furthermore, I could set a Func<string> variable to x.GetName. Now here's my question. Let's say I don't know the above class is called MyClass; I've got some object, x, but I have no idea what it is. I could check to see if that object has a GetName method by doing this: MethodInfo getName = x.GetType().GetMethod("GetName"); Suppose getName is not null. Then couldn't I furthermore check if getName.ReturnType == typeof(string) and getName.GetParameters().Length == 0, and at this point, wouldn't I be quite certain that the method represented by my getName object could definitely be cast to a Func<string>, somehow? I realize there's a MethodInfo.Invoke, and I also realize I could always create a Func<string> like: Func<string> getNameFunc = () => getName.Invoke(x, null); I guess what I'm asking is if there's any way to go from a MethodInfo object to the actual method it represents, incurring the performance cost of reflection in the process, but after that point being able to call the method directly (via, e.g., a Func<string> or something similar) without a performance penalty. What I'm envisioning might look something like this: // obviously this would throw an exception if GetActualInstanceMethod returned // something that couldn't be cast to a Func<string> Func<string> getNameFunc = (Func<string>)getName.GetActualInstanceMethod(x); (I realize that doesn't exist; I'm wondering if there's anything like it.) If what I'm asking doesn't make sense, or if I'm being unclear, I'll be happy to attempt to clarify.

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• [C#] How to do a search from a list with non-prefix keywords

  - by aNui

  First of all, sorry if my english or my post got any mistakes. I am programming a program to search the name from the list and I need to find them if the keyword is not in front of the names (that's what I mean non-prefix) e.g. if I my list is the music instruments and I type "guit" to the search textbox. It should find the names "Guitar, Guitarrón, Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar, ..." or something like this Longdo Dictionary's search suggestion. here is my simple and stupid algorithm (that's all I can do) const int SEARCHROWLIMIT = 30; private string[] DoSearch(string Input, string[] ListToSearch) { List<string> FoundNames = new List<string>(); int max = 0; bool over = false; for (int k = 0; !over; k++) { foreach (string item in ListToSearch) { max = (max > item.Length) ? max : item.Length; if (k > item.Length) continue; if (k >= max) { over = true; break; } if (!Input.Equals("Search") && item.Substring(k, item.Length - k).StartsWith(Input, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { bool exist = false; int i = 0; while (!exist && i < FoundNames.Count) { if (item.Equals(FoundNames[i])) { exist = true; break; } i++; } if (!exist && FoundNames.Count < SEARCHROWLIMIT) FoundNames.Add(item); else if (FoundNames.Count >= SEARCHROWLIMIT) over = true; } } } return FoundNames.ToArray(); } I think this algorithm is too slow for a large number of names and after several trial-and-error, I decided to add SEARCHROWLIMIT to breaks the operation And I also think there're some readymade methods that can do that. And another problem is I need to search music instruments by a category like strings, percussions, ... and by the country of origins. So I need to search them with filter by type and country. please help me. P.S. Me and my friends are just student from Thailand and developing the project to compete in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2010 and please become fan on our facebook page [KRATIB][3]. And we're so sorry we don't have much information in English but you can talk to us in English.

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• SharePoint - Summing Calculated Columns By Groups (DVWP)

  - by Mark Rackley

  I had a problem… okay.. okay.. so I have many problems… but let’s focus on one in particular or this blog post would never end… okay? Thank you…. So, I had an electronic timesheet where users entered hours for each day of the week. It also had a “Week Total” column which was a calculated column of the sum. The calculated column looked like this: Pretty easy.. nothing spectacular. So, what’s the problem? WELL……………….. There is a row in the timesheet for each task a person worked on in a given week. So, if you worked on 4 tasks, you would have 4 rows of data, and 4 week totals for that week: This is all fine and dandy, but I want to know what the total was for the entire week. Yes.. I realize the answer is 24 from my example… I mean, I know how to add! I just want SharePoint to display it for me for the executives (we all know, they have math problems).  You may be thinking, hey genius (in a sarcastic tone of course), why don’t you just go to the view and total on the “Week Total” field. What a brilliant idea! Why didn’t I think of that… let’s go to the view and do just that…. Ohhhhhh… you can’t total on a Calculated Column.. it’s not even an option…  Yeah… I had the same moment. So, what do you do? Well… what do you think I did? 1) Googled “SharePoint total calculated column” 2) Said it couldn’t be done 3) Took a nap 4) Asked the question on twitter? The correct answer of course is number 4… followed by number 3… although I may have told my boss number 2 so that I look more brilliant than I am? It’s safe to say I did NOT try to find the solution on my own doing step 1… that would be just WAY to easy… So, anyway, I posted the question on Twitter and it turns out several people had suggestions from using jQuery to using DVWPs. I tend to be a big fan of the DVWP except for the disgusting process of deploying them to another farm.. ugh… just shoot me…. so, that is the solution I went with. Laura Rogers (@WonderLaura) has a super duper easy to follow video on the subject over at EndUserSharePoint.com: SharePoint: Displaying Calculated Column SUMS in a View (Screencast) Laura’s video was very easy to follow and was ALMOST exactly what I needed. She does a great job walking you through every step of summing up a calculated field which was PART of my problem. The other part was my list is grouped by date! So, I wanted to see for a given week, the summed “Week Total” of hours. Laura got me on the right track with her video and I dug a little deeper into the DVWP to accomplish my task. So, here are the steps you follow: 1. Click on the "chevron” (I didn’t know it was actually called that until I heard Laura say it).. I always call it the “little-button-in-the-top-right-corner-with-the-greater-than-sign”.. but “chevron” is much shorter. So, click on the chevron, click on “Sort and Group”. The Add the field you want to group by, in my example it is the “Monday Date” of the timesheet entry. Make sure to check the check boxes for “Show Group Header” AND “Show Group Footer”. Click “OK”. The view now shows the count of each grouped set of data: Interesting, this looks very similar to Laura’s video… right? So, let’s take a look at the code for the Count: Count : <xsl:value-of select="count($nodeset)" /> Wow, also very similar… except in Laura’s video it looks like: Count : <xsl:value-of select="count($Rows)" /> So.. the only difference is that instead of $Rows we have $nodeset. It turns out the $nodeset will go through each Row in the group just like $Rows goes through each row in the entire view. So, using the exact same logic as in Laura’s blog except replacing $Rows with $nodeset we get the functionality of being able to sum up the values for a group. So, I want to replace “Count: #” with the total hours, this is done using the following changes to the above code: Week Total : <xsl:value-of select="sum($nodeset/@Monday)+sum($nodeset/@Tuesday) +sum($nodeset/@Wednesday)+sum($nodeset/@Thursday)+sum($nodeset/@Friday) +sum($nodeset/@Saturday)+sum($nodeset/@Sunday)" /> Our final output has the summed hours for each group! So… long story short… follow Laura’s blog, then group your list, then replace “$Rows” with “$nodeset”. One caveat, this will not work if you group by a person field. For some reason the person field does not go through each row in the group. I haven’t dug into this much yet. Maybe if I find some time… whatever that is… Anyway, Laura did all the work, I just took it one small step forward… as always, feel free to leave any additional insights you may have. We’re all learning here!

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• I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

  - by George Clingerman

  One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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• Analytic functions – they’re not aggregates

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL 2012 brings us a bunch of new analytic functions, together with enhancements to the OVER clause. People who have known me over the years will remember that I’m a big fan of the OVER clause and the types of things that it brings us when applied to aggregate functions, as well as the ranking functions that it enables. The OVER clause was introduced in SQL Server 2005, and remained frustratingly unchanged until SQL Server 2012. This post is going to look at a particular aspect of the analytic functions though (not the enhancements to the OVER clause). When I give presentations about the analytic functions around Australia as part of the tour of SQL Saturdays (starting in Brisbane this Thursday), and in Chicago next month, I’ll make sure it’s sufficiently well described. But for this post – I’m going to skip that and assume you get it. The analytic functions introduced in SQL 2012 seem to come in pairs – FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE, LAG and LEAD, CUME_DIST and PERCENT_RANK, PERCENTILE_CONT and PERCENTILE_DISC. Perhaps frustratingly, they take slightly different forms as well. The ones I want to look at now are FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE, and PERCENTILE_CONT and PERCENTILE_DISC. The reason I’m pulling this ones out is that they always produce the same result within their partitions (if you’re applying them to the whole partition). Consider the following query: SELECT     YEAR(OrderDate),     FIRST_VALUE(TotalDue)         OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)               ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID               RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING                         AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING),     LAST_VALUE(TotalDue)         OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)               ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID               RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING                         AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING),     PERCENTILE_CONT(0.95)         WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue)         OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)),     PERCENTILE_DISC(0.95)         WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue)         OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader ; This is designed to get the TotalDue for the first order of the year, the last order of the year, and also the 95% percentile, using both the continuous and discrete methods (‘discrete’ means it picks the closest one from the values available – ‘continuous’ means it will happily use something between, similar to what you would do for a traditional median of four values). I’m sure you can imagine the results – a different value for each field, but within each year, all the rows the same. Notice that I’m not grouping by the year. Nor am I filtering. This query gives us a result for every row in the SalesOrderHeader table – 31465 in this case (using the original AdventureWorks that dates back to the SQL 2005 days). The RANGE BETWEEN bit in FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE is needed to make sure that we’re considering all the rows available. If we don’t specify that, it assumes we only mean “RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW”, which means that LAST_VALUE ends up being the row we’re looking at. At this point you might think about other environments such as Access or Reporting Services, and remember aggregate functions like FIRST. We really should be able to do something like: SELECT     YEAR(OrderDate),     FIRST_VALUE(TotalDue)         OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)               ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID               RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING                         AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader GROUP BY YEAR(OrderDate) ; But you can’t. You get that age-old error: Msg 8120, Level 16, State 1, Line 5 Column 'Sales.SalesOrderHeader.OrderDate' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause. Msg 8120, Level 16, State 1, Line 5 Column 'Sales.SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderID' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause. Hmm. You see, FIRST_VALUE isn’t an aggregate function. None of these analytic functions are. There are too many things involved for SQL to realise that the values produced might be identical within the group. Furthermore, you can’t even surround it in a MAX. Then you get a different error, telling you that you can’t use windowed functions in the context of an aggregate. And so we end up grouping by doing a DISTINCT. SELECT DISTINCT     YEAR(OrderDate),         FIRST_VALUE(TotalDue)              OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)                   ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID                   RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING                             AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING),         LAST_VALUE(TotalDue)             OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)                   ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID                   RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING                             AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING),     PERCENTILE_CONT(0.95)          WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue)         OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)),     PERCENTILE_DISC(0.95)         WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue)         OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader ; I’m sorry. It’s just the way it goes. Hopefully it’ll change the future, but for now, it’s what you’ll have to do. If we look in the execution plan, we see that it’s incredibly ugly, and actually works out the results of these analytic functions for all 31465 rows, finally performing the distinct operation to convert it into the four rows we get in the results. You might be able to achieve a better plan using things like TOP, or the kind of calculation that I used in http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2011/08/23/t-sql-thoughts-about-the-95th-percentile.aspx (which is how PERCENTILE_CONT works), but it’s definitely convenient to use these functions, and in time, I’m sure we’ll see good improvements in the way that they are implemented. Oh, and this post should be good for fellow SQL Server MVP Nigel Sammy’s T-SQL Tuesday this month.

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• Getting hp-snmp-agents on HP ProLiant DL360 on Lenny working

  - by mark

  After receiving our HP ProLiant DL360 I'd like to integrate the machine into our Munin system and thus enable ProLiant specific information to be exposed via SNMP. I'm running Debian Lenny with kernel 2.6.26-2-vserver-amd64 . I've followed http://downloads.linux.hp.com/SDR/getting_started.html and the HP repository has been added to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/HP-ProLiantSupportPack.list . Setting up Lenny SNMP itself is not a problem, I configure it to have a public v1 community string to read all data and it works. I install hp-snmp-agents and run hpsnmpconfig and it adds additional lines to the top of /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf : dlmod cmaX /usr/lib64/libcmaX64.so snmpd gets restarted. Via lsof I can see that libcmaX64 was loaded and is used by snmpd, put I do not get any additional information out of snmp. I use snmpwalk -v 1 -c public ... and I can see many OIDs but I do not see the new ones I'd expect, most notably temperatures, fan speed and such. The OIDs I'm expecting are e.g. 1.3.6.1.4.1.232.6.2.6.8.1.4.1 , this is from the existing munin plugins from http://exchange.munin-monitoring.org/plugins/snmp__hp_temp/version/1 . snmpd[19007]: cmaX: Parsing shared as a type was unsucessful snmpd[19007]: cmaX: listening for subagents on port 25375 snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 1 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 2 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 3 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 5 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 6 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 8 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 9 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: sent ColdStarts on ports 25376 to 25393 snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 10 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 11 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 14 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 15 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 16 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 21 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 22 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 23 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 1 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 2 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 3 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 5 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 6 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 8 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 9 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 10 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 11 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 14 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 15 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 16 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 21 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 22 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 23 will be sent on port 25376 to hp Advanced Server Management_Peer snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 18 handler has disconnected snmpd[19007]: cmaX: subMIB 18 will be sent on port 25393 to cpqnicd snmpd[19007]: NET-SNMP version 5.4.1 This doesn't look particular bad for me, it's just informational I guess. I've compared the walking OID output with and without the module and there's no difference in the OID served back at all. Are there any other prerequisites I'm missing? I've also noticed that from the time I installed hp-snmp-agents it adds a lot of additional daemons and that my load suddenly jumps to 1. I've uninstalled the package for now. Is this expected behavior?

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