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• From Pocket to Instapaper

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced-  1. iPad app still didn’t show many of the saved links. 2. ability to rename articles on iPad still wasn’t restored.I’ve posted the message into their forum. They did not show my comment on their forum( I would name it censorship, not moderation), but a few days ago I’ve received an email, recommending “try logging out of the app on your iPad, and back in again.” Their suggestion helped,  but I don’t understand, why it is not posted as a recommendation on their support site.So I decided to try InstAPaper on my iPad, Previously I’ve used it for Kindle. I never considered it before on iPad, because there were no free demo and I was very satisfied with RIL free and then RIL Pro. Currently InstAPaper cost $3, so the price is not an issue.I’ve checked that it has most of features that I am using(e.g. renaming, folders) and I am quite happy with it now. Actually I am using Pocket (or RIL free) for old bookmarks( I have 1000+ stored on my iPad) and for new bookmarks I am using InstAPaper.Having a solid experience with RIL/Pocket I’ve created a list of suggestions to Marco Arment to implement.1. Some pages stored in InstAPaper have removed essential sections of the text. E.g in many blogs comments are not stored in  InstAPaper. Some pages lost almost all of important links (e.g. http://www.lib.rus.ec/a/32416 -sorry, in Russian). RIL/Pocket has 2 modes to store offline- Web view and Article view. Web View includes all links/images of the original page, but it’s very reliable. Article view suppose to strip unrelated information, but often corrupts the content. I prefer to use offline Web view.InstAPaper should also support offline Web view, in case if stripped view removes important part of content.2.  Black full screen Saving on iPad Safari is very annoying. After user pressed a bookmark, the saving has some delay and then for a few seconds prevents from reading the text.Would be better to show as message on the top part(as in Pocket ). I am surprised, that  a full screen popup was  implemented recently as a desired feature. 3.There are no comments allowed on http://blog.instapaper.com/. I would prefer to post some of these notes as comments on http://blog.instapaper.com/ rather than write them in my blog and then send link to Marco.(I found recommendation how to add support of comments on tumblr at http://www.tumblr.com/help, but then realized that Marko was the lead developer ofTumblr.)4. Also there is no support forum. I understand that maintenance of the forum ican be a hassle, but stackexchange fSome time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced- orums can be referred on  http://www.instapaper.com/main/support page, i.e.http://webapps.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper  or http://apple.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper 5. Tags are more convenient than folders. i.e. an ability for the same article to have more than one tag. Also creating of new folders is not supported offline, which is an annoying limitation.6. I would like to have a narrow list - additionally to existing list modes have a subject only list or subject+site list to show more list items on a screen.7. Limit of 500 offline articles sounds quite big, but my RIL list exceeded 1000, so it could be a issue in the future.8. Search button on iPad version is visible, but doesn’t work- it forces to buy Premium subscription. I think, that it’s not correct. If the button in a paid version is visible and enabled, it should  provide  a working functionality, e.g. search in article names only. And leave full-text search for the premium support.9..Copy URL is an important operation and deserves to be in a first level of Action menu, rather than in Share sub-menu.I’ve also have comment re post http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free. Marco Arment  explained, why he doesn’t provide free version of Instapaper.  I believe that he is loosing essential part of his customers. When I decided which of iPad application to choose, I’ve selected RIL, because I was able to play with free version, and I liked it. I didn’t have a chance to compare RIL and InstAPaper on iPad, so I’ve bought  RIL pro. For a user there is no point to pay even $3 , if there are similar free product, that user can try and see, is it suitable for him/her.I’ve also played with Readability. It doesn’t have folders or tags(which is very important for me), but nicely supports full text search

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• Stepping outside Visual Studio IDE [Part 1 of 2] with Eclipse

  - by mbcrump

  “If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress." – Barack Obama In my quest to become a better programmer, I’ve decided to start the process of learning Java. I will be primary using the Eclipse Language IDE. I will not bore you with the history just what is needed for a .NET developer to get up and running. I will provide links, screenshots and a few brief code tutorials. Links to documentation. The Official Eclipse FAQ’s Links to binaries. Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers the Galileo Package (based on Eclipse 3.5 SR2)  Sun Developer Network – Java Eclipse officially recommends Java version 5 (also known as 1.5), although many Eclipse users use the newer version 6 (1.6). That's it, nothing more is required except to compile and run java. Installation Unzip the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers and double click the file named Eclipse.exe. You will probably want to create a link for it on your desktop. Once, it’s installed and launched you will have to select a workspace. Just accept the defaults and you will see the following: Lets go ahead and write a simple program. To write a "Hello World" program follow these steps: Start Eclipse. Create a new Java Project: File->New->Project. Select "Java" in the category list. Select "Java Project" in the project list. Click "Next". Enter a project name into the Project name field, for example, "HW Project". Click "Finish" Allow it to open the Java perspective Create a new Java class: Click the "Create a Java Class" button in the toolbar. (This is the icon below "Run" and "Window" with a tooltip that says "New Java Class.") Enter "HW" into the Name field. Click the checkbox indicating that you would like Eclipse to create a "public static void main(String[] args)" method. Click "Finish". A Java editor for HW.java will open. In the main method enter the following line.      System.out.println("This is my first java program and btw Hello World"); Save using ctrl-s. This automatically compiles HW.java. Click the "Run" button in the toolbar (looks like a VCR play button). You will be prompted to create a Launch configuration. Select "Java Application" and click "New". Click "Run" to run the Hello World program. The console will open and display "This is my first java program and btw Hello World". You now have your first java program, lets go ahead and make an applet. Since you already have the HW.java open, click inside the window and remove all code. Now copy/paste the following code snippet. Java Code Snippet for an applet. 1: import java.applet.Applet; 2: import java.awt.Graphics; 3: import java.awt.Color; 4:  5: @SuppressWarnings("serial") 6: public class HelloWorld extends Applet{ 7:  8: String text = "I'm a simple applet"; 9:  10: public void init() { 11: text = "I'm a simple applet"; 12: setBackground(Color.GREEN); 13: } 14:  15: public void start() { 16: System.out.println("starting..."); 17: } 18:  19: public void stop() { 20: System.out.println("stopping..."); 21: } 22:  23: public void destroy() { 24: System.out.println("preparing to unload..."); 25: } 26:  27: public void paint(Graphics g){ 28: System.out.println("Paint"); 29: g.setColor(Color.blue); 30: g.drawRect(0, 0, 31: getSize().width -1, 32: getSize().height -1); 33: g.setColor(Color.black); 34: g.drawString(text, 15, 25); 35: } 36: } The Eclipse IDE should look like Click "Run" to run the Hello World applet. Now, lets test our new java applet. So, navigate over to your workspace for example: “C:\Users\mbcrump\workspace\HW Project\bin” and you should see 2 files. HW.class java.policy.applet Create a HTML page with the following code: 1: <HTML> 2: <BODY> 3: <APPLET CODE=HW.class WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=100> 4: </APPLET> 5: </BODY> 6: </HTML> Open, the HTML page in Firefox or IE and you will see your applet running.  I hope this brief look at the Eclipse IDE helps someone get acquainted with Java Development. Even if your full time gig is with .NET, it will not hurt to have another language in your tool belt. As always, I welcome any suggestions or comments.

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• Add SQL Azure database to Azure Web Role and persist data with entity framework code first.

  - by MagnusKarlsson

  In my last post I went for a warts n all approach to set up a web role on Azure. In this post I’ll describe how to add an SQL Azure database to the project. This will be described with an as minimal as possible amount of code and screen dumps. All questions are welcome in the comments area. Please don’t email since questions answered in the comments field is made available to other visitors. As an example we will add a comments section to the site we used in the previous post (Länk här). Steps: 1. Create a Comments entity and then use Scaffolding to set up controller and view, and add ConnectionString to web.config. 2. Create SQL Azure database in Management Portal and link the new database 3. Test it online!   1. Right click Models folder, choose add, choose “class…” . Name the Class Comment. 1.1 Replace the Code in the class with the following: using System.Data.Entity; namespace MvcWebRole1.Models { public class Comment {    public int CommentId { get; set; }    public string Name { get; set; }      public string Content { get; set; } } public class CommentsDb : DbContext { public DbSet<Comment> CommentEntries { get; set; } } } Now Entity Framework can create a database and a table named Comment. Build your project to assert there are no build errors.   1.2 Right click Controllers folder, choose add, choose “class…” . Name the Class CommentController and fill out the values as in the example below.     1.3 Click Add. Visual Studio now creates default View for CRUD operations and a Controller adhering to these and opens them. 1.3 Open Web.config and add the following connectionstring in <connectionStrings> node. <add name="CommentsDb” connectionString="data source=(LocalDB)\v11.0;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDbFileName=|DataDirectory|\CommentsDb.mdf;Initial Catalog=CommentsDb;MultipleActiveResultSets=True" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />   1.4 Save All and press F5 to start the application. 1.5 Go to http://127.0.0.1:81/Comments which will redirect you through CommentsController to the Index View which looks like this:     Click Create new. In the Create-view, add name and content and press Create.   1: // 2: // POST: /Comments/Create 3:  4: [HttpPost] 5: public ActionResult Create(Comment comment) 6: { 7: if (ModelState.IsValid) 8: { 9: db.CommentEntries.Add(comment); 10: db.SaveChanges(); 11: return RedirectToAction("Index"); 12: } 13:  14: return View(comment); 15: } 16:    The default View() is Index so that is the View you will come to. Looking like this: 1: // 2: // GET: /Comments/ 3: 4: public ActionResult Index() 5: { 6: return View(db.CommentEntries.ToList()); 7: } Resulting in the following screen dump(success!):   2. Now, go to the Management portal and Create a new db.   2.1 With the new database created. Click the DB icon in the left most menu. Then click the newly created database. Click DASHBOARD in the top menu. Finally click Connections strings in the right menu to get the connection string we need to add in our web.debug.config file.   2.2 Now, take a copy of the connection String earlier added to the web.config and paste in web.debug.conifg in the connectionstrings node. Replace everything within “ “ in the copied connectionstring with that you got from SQL Azure. You will have something like this:   2.3 Rebuild the application, right click the cloud project and choose “Package…” (if you haven’t set up publishing profile which we will do in our next blog post). Remember to choose the right config file, use debug for staging and release for production so your databases won’t collide. You should see something like this:   2.4 Go to Management Portal and click the Web Services menu, choose your service and click update in the bottom menu.   2.5 Link the newly created database to your application. Click the LINKED RESOURCES in the top menu and then click “Link” in the bottom menu. You should get something like this. 3. Alright then. Under the Dashboard you can find the link to your application. Click it to open it in a browser and then go to ~/Comments to try it out just the way we did locally. Success and end of this story!

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• Migrating Core Data to new UIManagedDocument in iOS 5

  - by samerpaul

  I have an app that has been on the store since iOS 3.1, so there is a large install base out there that still uses Core Data loaded up in my AppDelegate. In the most recent set of updates, I raised the minimum version to 4.3 but still kept the same way of loading the data. Recently, I decided it's time to make the minimum version 5.1 (especially with 6 around the corner), so I wanted to start using the new fancy UIManagedDocument way of using Core Data. The issue with this though is that the old database file is still sitting in the iOS app, so there is no migrating to the new document. You have to basically subclass UIManagedDocument with a new model class, and override a couple of methods to do it for you. Here's a tutorial on what I did for my app TimeTag.  Step One: Add a new class file in Xcode and subclass "UIManagedDocument" Go ahead and also add a method to get the managedObjectModel out of this class. It should look like:   @interface TimeTagModel : UIManagedDocument   - (NSManagedObjectModel *)managedObjectModel;   @end   Step two: Writing the methods in the implementation file (.m) I first added a shortcut method for the applicationsDocumentDirectory, which returns the URL of the app directory.  - (NSURL *)applicationDocumentsDirectory {     return [[[NSFileManagerdefaultManager] URLsForDirectory:NSDocumentDirectoryinDomains:NSUserDomainMask] lastObject]; }   The next step was to pull the managedObjectModel file itself (.momd file). In my project, it's called "minimalTime". - (NSManagedObjectModel *)managedObjectModel {     NSString *path = [[NSBundlemainBundle] pathForResource:@"minimalTime"ofType:@"momd"];     NSURL *momURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path];     NSManagedObjectModel *managedObjectModel = [[NSManagedObjectModel alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:momURL];          return managedObjectModel; }   After that, I need to check for a legacy installation and migrate it to the new UIManagedDocument file instead. This is the overridden method: - (BOOL)configurePersistentStoreCoordinatorForURL:(NSURL *)storeURL ofType:(NSString *)fileType modelConfiguration:(NSString *)configuration storeOptions:(NSDictionary *)storeOptions error:(NSError **)error {     // If legacy store exists, copy it to the new location     NSURL *legacyPersistentStoreURL = [[self applicationDocumentsDirectory] URLByAppendingPathComponent:@"minimalTime.sqlite"];          NSFileManager* fileManager = [NSFileManagerdefaultManager];     if ([fileManager fileExistsAtPath:legacyPersistentStoreURL.path])     {         NSLog(@"Old db exists");         NSError* thisError = nil;         [fileManager replaceItemAtURL:storeURL withItemAtURL:legacyPersistentStoreURL backupItemName:niloptions:NSFileManagerItemReplacementUsingNewMetadataOnlyresultingItemURL:nilerror:&thisError];     }          return [superconfigurePersistentStoreCoordinatorForURL:storeURL ofType:fileType modelConfiguration:configuration storeOptions:storeOptions error:error]; }   Basically what's happening above is that it checks for the minimalTime.sqlite file inside the app's bundle on the iOS device.  If the file exists, it tells you inside the console, and then tells the fileManager to replace the storeURL (inside the method parameter) with the legacy URL. This basically gives your app access to all the existing data the user has generated (otherwise they would load into a blank app, which would be disastrous). It returns a YES if successful (by calling it's [super] method). Final step: Actually load this database Due to how my app works, I actually have to load the database at launch (instead of shortly after, which would be ideal). I call a method called loadDatabase, which looks like this: -(void)loadDatabase {     static dispatch_once_t onceToken;          // Only do this once!     dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{         // Get the URL         // The minimalTimeDB name is just something I call it         NSURL *url = [[selfapplicationDocumentsDirectory] URLByAppendingPathComponent:@"minimalTimeDB"];         // Init the TimeTagModel (our custom class we wrote above) with the URL         self.timeTagDB = [[TimeTagModel alloc] initWithFileURL:url];           // Setup the undo manager if it's nil         if (self.timeTagDB.undoManager == nil){             NSUndoManager *undoManager = [[NSUndoManager  alloc] init];             [self.timeTagDB setUndoManager:undoManager];         }                  // You have to actually check to see if it exists already (for some reason you can't just call "open it, and if it's not there, create it")         if ([[NSFileManagerdefaultManager] fileExistsAtPath:[url path]]) {             // If it does exist, try to open it, and if it doesn't open, let the user (or at least you) know!             [self.timeTagDB openWithCompletionHandler:^(BOOL success){                 if (!success) {                     // Handle the error.                     NSLog(@"Error opening up the database");                 }                 else{                     NSLog(@"Opened the file--it already existed");                     [self refreshData];                 }             }];         }         else {             // If it doesn't exist, you need to attempt to create it             [self.timeTagDBsaveToURL:url forSaveOperation:UIDocumentSaveForCreatingcompletionHandler:^(BOOL success){                 if (!success) {                     // Handle the error.                     NSLog(@"Error opening up the database");                 }                 else{                     NSLog(@"Created the file--it did not exist");                     [self refreshData];                 }             }];         }     }); }   If you're curious what refreshData looks like, it sends out a NSNotification that the database has been loaded: -(void)refreshData {     NSNotification* refreshNotification = [NSNotificationnotificationWithName:kNotificationCenterRefreshAllDatabaseData object:self.timeTagDB.managedObjectContext  userInfo:nil];     [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotification:refreshNotification];     }   The kNotificationCenterRefreshAllDatabaseData is just a constant I have defined elsewhere that keeps track of all the NSNotification names I use. I pass the managedObjectContext of the newly created file so that my view controllers can have access to it, and start passing it around to one another. The reason we do this as a Notification is because this is being run in the background, so we can't know exactly when it finishes. Make sure you design your app for this! Have some kind of loading indicator, or make sure your user can't attempt to create a record before the database actually exists, because it will crash the app.

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• How to handle updated configuration when it's already been cloned for editing

  - by alexrussell

  Really sorry about the title that probably doesn't make much sense. Hopefully I can explain myself better here as it's something that's kinda bugged me for ages, and is now becoming a pressing concern as I write a bit of software with configuration. Most software comes with default configuration options stored in the app itself, and then there's a configuration file (let's say) that a user can edit. Once created/edited for the first time, subsequent updates to the application can not (easily) modify this configuration file for fear of clobbering the user's own changes to the default configuration. So my question is, if my application adds a new configurable parameter, what's the best way to aid discoverability of the setting and allow the user (developer) to override it as nicely as possible given the following constraints: I actually don't have a canonical default config in the application per se, it's more of a 'cascading filesystem'-like affair - the config template is stored in default/config.json and when the user wishes to edit the configuration, it's copied to user/config.json. If a user config is found it is used - there is no automatic overriding of a subset of keys, the whole new file is used and that's that. If there's no user config the default config is used. When a user wishes to edit the config they run a command to 'generate' it for them (which simply copies the config.json file from the default to the user directory). There is no UI for the configuration options as it's not appropriate to the userbase (think of my software as a library or something, the users are developers, the config is done in the user/config.json file). Due to my software being library-like there's no simple way to, on updating of the software, run some tasks automatically (so any ideas of look at the current config, compare to template config, add ing missing keys) aren't appropriate. The only solution I can think of right now is to say "there's a new config setting X" in release notes, but this doesn't seem ideal to me. If you want any more information let me know. The above specifics are not actually 100% true to my situation, but they represent the problem equally well with lower complexity. If you do want specifics, however, I can explain the exact setup. Further clarification of the type of configuration I mean: think of the Atom code editor. There appears to be a default 'template' config file somewhere, but as soon as a configuration option is edited ~/.atom/config.cson is generated and the setting goes in there. From now on is Atom is updated and gets a new configuration key, this file cannot be overwritten by Atom without a lot of effort to ensure that the addition/modification of the key does not clobber. In Atom's case, because there is a GUI for editing settings, they can get away with just adding the UI for the new setting into the UI to aid 'discoverability' of the new setting. I don't have that luxury. Clarification of my constraints and what I'm actually looking for: The software I'm writing is actually a package for a larger system. This larger system is what provides the configuration, and the way it works is kinda fixed - I just do a config('some.key') kinda call and it knows to look to see if the user has a config clone and if so use it, otherwise use the default config which is part of my package. Now, while I could make my application edit the user's configuration files (there is a convention about where they're stored), it's generally not done, so I'd like to live with the constraints of the system I'm using if possible. And it's not just about discoverability either, one large concern is that the addition of a configuration key won't actually work as soon as the user has their own copy of the original template. Adding the key to the template won't make a difference as that file is never read. As such, I think this is actually quite a big flaw in the design of the configuration cascading system and thus needs to be taken up with my upstream. So, thinking about it, based on my constraints, I don't think there's going to be a good solution save for either editing the user's configuration or using a new config file every time there are updates to the default configuration. Even the release notes idea from above isn't doable as, if the user does not follow the advice, suddenly I have a config key with no value (user-defined or default). So the new question is this: what is the general way to solve the problem of having a default configuration in template config files and allowing a user to make user-specific version of these in order to override the defaults? A per-key cascade (rather than per-file cascade) where the user only specifies their overrides? In this case, what happens if a configuration value is an array - do we replace or append to the default (or, more realistically, how does the user specify whether they wish to replace or append to)? It seems like configuration is kinda hard, so how is it solved in the wild?

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• Recursion in the form of a Recursive Func&lt;T, T&gt;

  - by ToStringTheory

  I gotta admit, I am kind of surprised that I didn’t realize I could do this sooner.  I recently had a problem which required a recursive function call to come up with the answer.  After some time messing around with a recursive method, and creating an API that I was not happy with, I was able to create an API that I enjoy, and seems intuitive. Introduction To bring it to a simple example, consider the summation to n: A mathematically identical formula is: In a .NET function, this can be represented by a function: Func<int, int> summation = x => x*(x+1)/2 Calling summation with an input integer will yield the summation to that number: var sum10 = summation(4); //sum10 would be equal to 10 But what if I wanted to get a second level summation…  First some to n, and then use that argument as the input to the same function, to find the second level summation: So as an easy example, calculate the summation to 3, which yields 6.  Then calculate the summation to 6 which yields 21. Represented as a mathematical formula - So what if I wanted to represent this as .NET functions.  I can always do: //using the summation formula from above var sum3 = summation(3); //sets sum3 to 6 var sum3_2 = summation(sum3); //sets sum3 to 21 I could always create a while loop to perform the calculations too: Func<int, int> summation = x => x*(x+1)/2; //for the interests of a smaller example, using shorthand int sumResultTo = 3; int level = 2; while(level-- > 0) { sumResultTo = summation(sumResultTo); } //sumResultTo is equal to 21 now. Or express it as a for-loop, method calls, etc…  I really didn’t like any of the options that I tried.  Then it dawned on me – since I was using a Func<T, T> anyways, why not use the Func’s output from one call as the input as another directly. Some Code So, I decided that I wanted a recursion class.  Something that I would be generic and reusable in case I ever wanted to do something like this again. It is limited to only the Func<T1, T2> level of Func, and T1 must be the same as T2. The first thing in this class is a private field for the function: private readonly Func<T, T> _functionToRecurse; So, I since I want the function to be unchangeable, I have defined it as readonly.  Therefore my constructor looks like: public Recursion(Func<T, T> functionToRecurse) { if (functionToRecurse == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("functionToRecurse", "The function to recurse can not be null"); } _functionToRecurse = functionToRecurse; } Simple enough.  If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments, and I will be sure to answer them. Next, I want enough. If be able to get the result of a function dependent on how many levels of recursion: private Func<T, T> GetXLevel(int level) { if (level < 1) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("level", level, "The level of recursion must be greater than 0"); } if (level == 1) return _functionToRecurse; return _GetXLevel(level - 1, _functionToRecurse); } So, if you pass in 1 for the level, you get just the Func<T,T> back.  If you say that you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, it calls a method which accepts the level it is at, and the function which it needs to use to recurse further: private Func<T, T> _GetXLevel(int level, Func<T, T> prevFunc) { if (level == 1) return y => prevFunc(_functionToRecurse(y)); return _GetXLevel(level - 1, y => prevFunc(_functionToRecurse(y))); } That is really all that is needed for this class. If I exposed the GetXLevel function publicly, I could use that to get the function for a level, and pass in the argument..  But I wanted something better.  So, I used the ‘this’ array operator for the class: public Func<T,T> this[int level] { get { if (level < 1) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("level", level, "The level of recursion must be greater than 0"); } return this.GetXLevel(level); } } So, using the same example above of finding the second recursion of the summation of 3: var summator = new Recursion<int>(x => (x * (x + 1)) / 2); var sum_3_level2 = summator[2](3); //yields 21 You can even find just store the delegate to the second level summation, and use it multiple times: var summator = new Recursion<int>(x => (x * (x + 1)) / 2); var sum_level2 = summator[2]; var sum_3_level2 = sum_level2(3); //yields 21 var sum_4_level2 = sum_level2(4); //yields 55 var sum_5_level2 = sum_level2(5); //yields 120 Full Code Don’t think I was just going to hold off on the full file together and make you do the hard work…  Copy this into a new class file: public class Recursion<T> { private readonly Func<T, T> _functionToRecurse; public Recursion(Func<T, T> functionToRecurse) { if (functionToRecurse == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("functionToRecurse", "The function to recurse can not be null"); } _functionToRecurse = functionToRecurse; } public Func<T,T> this[int level] { get { if (level < 1) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("level", level, "The level of recursion must be greater than 0"); } return this.GetXLevel(level); } } private Func<T, T> GetXLevel(int level) { if (level < 1) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("level", level, "The level of recursion must be greater than 0"); } if (level == 1) return _functionToRecurse; return _GetXLevel(level - 1, _functionToRecurse); } private Func<T, T> _GetXLevel(int level, Func<T, T> prevFunc) { if (level == 1) return y => prevFunc(_functionToRecurse(y)); return _GetXLevel(level - 1, y => prevFunc(_functionToRecurse(y))); } } Conclusion The great thing about this class, is that it can be used with any function with same input/output parameters.  I strived to find an implementation that I found clean and useful, and I finally settled on this.  If you have feedback – good or bad, I would love to hear it!

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• java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file When Deploying an Application to Weblogic Server

  - by lmestre

  The latest weeks we had a hard time trying to solve a deployment issue.* WebLogic Server 10.3.6* Target: WLS Cluster<21-10-2013 05:29:40 PM CLST> <Error> <Console> <BEA-240003> <Console encountered the following error weblogic.management.DeploymentException:        at weblogic.servlet.internal.WarDeploymentFactory.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(WarDeploymentFactory.java:69)        at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:48)        at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.createComponentMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:110)        at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.initializeMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:76)        at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.createApplicationMBean(MBeanConverter.java:89)        at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.createApplicationForAppDeployment(MBeanConverter.java:67)        at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.setupNew81MBean(MBeanConverter.java:315)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.compatibilityProcessor(ActivateOperation.java:81)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.setupPrepare(AbstractOperation.java:295)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.doPrepare(ActivateOperation.java:97)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.prepare(AbstractOperation.java:217)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handleDeploymentPrepare(DeploymentManager.java:747)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.prepareDeploymentList(DeploymentManager.java:1216)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handlePrepare(DeploymentManager.java:250)        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentServiceDispatcher.prepare(DeploymentServiceDispatcher.java:159)        at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.doPrepareCallback(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:171)        at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.access$000(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:13)        at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer$1.run(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:46)        at weblogic.work.SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl$WorkAdapterImpl.run(SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.java:545)        at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:256)        at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:221)Caused by: java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file - C:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\MyDomain\servers\MyServer\stage\myapp\myapp.war Message - error in opening zip file        at weblogic.servlet.utils.WarUtils.existsInWar(WarUtils.java:87)        at weblogic.servlet.utils.WarUtils.isWebServices(WarUtils.java:76)        at weblogic.servlet.internal.WarDeploymentFactory.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(WarDeploymentFactory.java:61) So the first idea you have with that error is that the war file is corrupted or has incorrect privileges.        We tried:1. Unzipping the  war file, the file was perfect.2. Checking the size, same size as in other environments.3. Checking the ownership of the file, same as in other environments.4. Checking the permissions of the file, same as other applications.Then we accepted the file was fine, so we tried enabling some deployment debugs, but no clues.We also tried:1. Delete all contents of <MyDomain/servers/<MyServer>/tmp> a and <MyDomain/servers/<MyServer>/cache> folders, the issue persisted.2. When renaming the application the deployment was sucessful3. When targeting to the Admin Server, deployment was also working.4. Using 'Copy this application onto every target for me' didn't help either.Finally, my friend 'Test Case' solved the issue again.I saw this name in the config.xml<jdbc-system-resource>    <name>myapp</name>    <target></target>    <descriptor-file-name>jdbc/myapp-jdbc.xml</descriptor-file-name>  </jdbc-system-resource> So, it turned out that customer had created a DataSource with the same name as the application 'myapp' in the above example.By deleting the datasource and created another exact DataSource with a different name the issue was solved.At this point, Do you know Why 'java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file' was occurring?Because all names is WebLogic Server need to be unique.References: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13709/setup.htm"Assigning Names to WebLogic Server ResourcesMake sure that each configurable resource in your WebLogic Server environment has a unique name. Each, domain, server, machine, cluster, JDBC data source, virtual host, or other resource must have a unique name." Enjoy!

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• On Reflector Pricing

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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• Best Practices Generating WebService Proxies for Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM)

  - by asantaga

  I've recently been building a REST Service wrapper for Oracle Sales Cloud and initially all was going well, however as soon as I added all of my Web Service proxies I started to get weird errors..  My project structure looks like this What I found out was if I only had the InteractionsService & OpportunityService WebService Proxies then all worked ok, but as soon as I added the LocationsService Proxy, I would start to see strange JAXB errors. Example of the error message Exception in thread "main" javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: Unable to create JAXBContextat com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.createJAXBContext(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:164)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.postProcess(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:94)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.RuntimeModeler.buildRuntimeModel(RuntimeModeler.java:281)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WSServiceDelegate.java:762)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WLSProvider.java:982)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.createSEIPortInfo(WSServiceDelegate.java:746)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.addSEI(WSServiceDelegate.java:737)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.getPort(WSServiceDelegate.java:361)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.internalGetPort(WLSProvider.java:934)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate$PortClientInstanceFactory.createClientInstance(WLSProvider.java:1039)...... Looking further down I see the error message is related to JAXB not being able to find an objectFactory for one of its types Caused by: java.security.PrivilegedActionException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.IllegalAnnotationsException: 6 counts of IllegalAnnotationExceptionsThere's no ObjectFactory with an @XmlElementDecl for the element {http://xmlns.oracle.com/apps/crmCommon/activities/activitiesService/}AssigneeRsrcOrgIdthis problem is related to the following location:at protected javax.xml.bind.JAXBElement com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee.assigneeRsrcOrgId at com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee This is very strange... My first thoughts are that when I generated the WebService Proxy I entered the package name as "oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.servicename" and left the generated types as blank. This way all the generated types get put into the same package hierarchy and when deployed they get merged... Sounds resaonable and appears to work but not in this case..  To resolve this I regenerate the proxy but this time setting : Package name : To the name of my package eg. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.interactionsRoot Package for Generated Types :  Package where the types will be generated to, e.g. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.SalesParty.types When I ran the application now, it all works , awesome eh???? Alas no, there is a serious side effect. The problem now is that to help coding I've created a collection of helper classes , these helper classes take parameters which use some of the "generic" datatypes, like FindCriteria. e.g. This wont work any more public static FindCriteria createCustomFindCriteria(FindCriteria pFc,String pAttributes) Here lies a gremlin of a problem.. I cant use this method anymore, this is because the FindCriteria datatype is now being defined two, or more times, in the generated code for my project. If you leave the Root Package for types blank it will get generated to com.oracle.xmlns, and if you populate it then it gets generated to your custom package.. The two datatypes look the same, sound the same (and if this were a duck would sound the same), but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME... Speaking to development, they recommend you should not be entering anything in the Root Packages section, so the mystery thickens why does it work.. Well after spending sometime with some colleagues of mine in development we've identified the issue.. Alas different parts of Oracle Fusion Development have multiple schemas with the same namespace, when the WebService generator generates its classes its not seeing the other schemas properly and not generating the Object Factories correctly...  Thankfully I've found a workaround Solution Overview When generating the proxies leave the Root Package for Generated Types BLANK When you have finished generating your proxies, use the JAXB tool XJC and generate Java classes for all datatypes  Create a project within your JDeveloper11g workspace and import the java classes into this project Final bit.. within the project dependencies ensure that the JAXB/XJC generated classes are "FIRST" in the classpath Solution Details Generate the WebServices SOAP proxies When generating the proxies your generation dialog should look like this Ensure the "unwrap" parameters is selected, if it isn't then that's ok, it simply means when issuing a "get" you need to extract out the Element Generate the JAXB Classes using XJC XJC provides a command line switch called -wsdl, this (although is experimental/beta) , accepts a HTTP WSDL and will generate the relevant classes. You can put these into a single batch/shell script xjc -wsdl https://fusionservername:443/appCmmnCompInteractions/InteractionService?wsdlxjc -wsdl https://fusionservername443/opptyMgmtOpportunities/OpportunityService?wsdl Create Project in JDeveloper to store the XJC "generated" JAXB classes Within the project folder create a filesystem folder called "src" and copy the generated files into this folder. JDeveloper11g should then see the classes and display them, if it doesnt try clicking the "refresh" button In your main project ensure that the JDeveloper XJC project is selected as a dependancy and IMPORTANT make sure it is at the top of the list. This ensures that the classes are at the front of the classpath And voilà.. Hopefully you wont see any JAXB generation errors and you can use common datatypes interchangeably in your project, (e.g. FindCriteria etc)

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• OpenGL 3 and the Radeon HD 4850x2

  - by rotard

  A while ago, I picked up a copy of the OpenGL SuperBible fifth edition and slowly and painfully started teaching myself OpenGL the 3.3 way, after having been used to the 1.0 way from school way back when. Making things more challenging, I am primarily a .NET developer, so I was working in Mono with the OpenTK OpenGL wrapper. On my laptop, I put together a program that let the user walk around a simple landscape using a couple shaders that implemented per-vertex coloring and lighting and texture mapping. Everything was working brilliantly until I ran the same program on my desktop. Disaster! Nothing would render! I have chopped my program down to the point where the camera sits near the origin, pointing at the origin, and renders a square (technically, a triangle fan). The quad renders perfectly on my laptop, coloring, lighting, texturing and all, but the desktop renders a small distorted non-square quadrilateral that is colored incorrectly, not affected by the lights, and not textured. I suspect the graphics card is at fault, because I get the same result whether I am booted into Ubuntu 10.10 or Win XP. I did find that if I pare the vertex shader down to ONLY outputting the positional data and the fragment shader to ONLY outputting a solid color (white) the quad renders correctly. But as SOON as I start passing in color data (whether or not I use it in the fragment shader) the output from the vertex shader is distorted again. The shaders follow. I left the pre-existing code in, but commented out so you can get an idea what I was trying to do. I'm a noob at glsl so the code could probably be a lot better. My laptop is an old lenovo T61p with a Centrino (Core 2) Duo and an nVidia Quadro graphics card running Ubuntu 10.10 My desktop has an i7 with a Radeon HD 4850 x2 (single card, dual GPU) from Saphire dual booting into Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP. The problem occurs in both XP and Ubuntu. Can anyone see something wrong that I am missing? What is "special" about my HD 4850x2? string vertexShaderSource = @" #version 330 precision highp float; uniform mat4 projection_matrix; uniform mat4 modelview_matrix; //uniform mat4 normal_matrix; //uniform mat4 cmv_matrix; //Camera modelview. Light sources are transformed by this matrix. //uniform vec3 ambient_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_direction; in vec4 in_position; in vec4 in_color; //in vec3 in_normal; //in vec3 in_tex_coords; out vec4 varyingColor; //out vec3 varyingTexCoords; void main(void) { //Get surface normal in eye coordinates //vec4 vEyeNormal = normal_matrix * vec4(in_normal, 0); //Get vertex position in eye coordinates //vec4 vPosition4 = modelview_matrix * vec4(in_position, 0); //vec3 vPosition3 = vPosition4.xyz / vPosition4.w; //Get vector to light source in eye coordinates //vec3 lightVecNormalized = normalize(diffuse_direction); //vec3 vLightDir = normalize((cmv_matrix * vec4(lightVecNormalized, 0)).xyz); //Dot product gives us diffuse intensity //float diff = max(0.0, dot(vEyeNormal.xyz, vLightDir.xyz)); //Multiply intensity by diffuse color, force alpha to 1.0 //varyingColor.xyz = in_color * diff * diffuse_color.xyz; varyingColor = in_color; //varyingTexCoords = in_tex_coords; gl_Position = projection_matrix * modelview_matrix * in_position; }"; string fragmentShaderSource = @" #version 330 //#extension GL_EXT_gpu_shader4 : enable precision highp float; //uniform sampler2DArray colorMap; //in vec4 varyingColor; //in vec3 varyingTexCoords; out vec4 out_frag_color; void main(void) { out_frag_color = vec4(1,1,1,1); //out_frag_color = varyingColor; //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, varyingTexCoords.st); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, vec3(varyingTexCoords.st, 0)); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture2DArray(colorMap, varyingTexCoords); }"; Note that in this code the color data is accepted but not actually used. The geometry is outputted the same (wrong) whether the fragment shader uses varyingColor or not. Only if I comment out the line varyingColor = in_color; does the geometry output correctly. Originally the shaders took in vec3 inputs, I only modified them to take vec4s while troubleshooting.

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• ASP.NET Multi-Select Radio Buttons

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  “HERESY!” you say, “Radio buttons are for single-select items!  If you want multi-select, use checkboxes!”  Well, I would agree, and that is why I consider this a significant bug that ASP.NET developers need to be aware of.  Here’s the situation. If you use ASP:RadioButton controls on your WebForm, then you know that in order to get them to behave properly, that is, to define a group in which only one of them can be selected by the user, you use the Group attribute and set the same value on each one.  For example: 1: <asp:RadioButton runat="server" ID="rdo1" Group="GroupName" checked="true" /> 2: <asp:RadioButton runat="server" ID="rdo2" Group="GroupName" /> With this configuration, the controls will render to the browser as HTML Input / Type=radio tags and when the user selects one, the browser will automatically deselect the other one so that only one can be selected (checked) at any time. BUT, if you user server-side code to manipulate the Checked attribute of these controls, it is possible to set them both to believe that they are checked. 1: rdo2.Checked = true; // Does NOT change the Checked attribute of rdo1 to be false. As long as you remain in server-side code, the system will believe that both radio buttons are checked (you can verify this in the debugger).  Therefore, if you later have code that looks like this 1: if (rdo1.Checked) 2: { 3: DoSomething1(); 4: } 5: else 6: { 7: DoSomethingElse(); 8: } then it will always evaluate the condition to be true and take the first action.  The good news is that if you return to the client with multiple radio buttons checked, the browser tries to clean that up for you and make only one of them really checked.  It turns out that the last one on the screen wins, so in this case, you will in fact end up with rdo2 as checked, and if you then make a trip to the server to run the code above, it will appear to be working properly.  However, if your page initializes with rdo2 checked and in code you set rdo1 to checked also, then when you go back to the client, rdo2 will remain checked, again because it is the last one and the last one checked “wins”. And this gets even uglier if you ever set these radio buttons to be disabled.  In that case, although the client browser renders the radio buttons as though only one of them is checked the system actually retains the value of both of them as checked, and your next trip to the server will really frustrate you because the browser showed rdo2 as checked, but your DoSomething1() routine keeps getting executed. The following is sample code you can put into any WebForm to test this yourself. 1: <body> 2: <form id="form1" runat="server"> 3: <h1>Radio Button Test</h1> 4: <hr /> 5: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdBlankPostback" Text="Blank Postback" /> 6: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 7: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdEnable" Text="Enable All" OnClick="cmdEnable_Click" /> 8: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 9: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdDisable" Text="Disable All" OnClick="cmdDisable_Click" /> 10: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 11: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdTest" Text="Test" OnClick="cmdTest_Click" /> 12: <br /><br /><br /> 13: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R1" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 1" Checked="true" /><br /> 14: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R2" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 2" /><br /> 15: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R3" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 3" /><br /> 16: <hr /> 17: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG2R1" GroupName="Group2" runat="server" Text="Group 2 Radio 1" /><br /> 18: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG2R2" GroupName="Group2" runat="server" Text="Group 2 Radio 2" Checked="true" /><br /> 19:  20: </form> 21: </body> 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3:  4: } 5:  6: protected void cmdEnable_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 7: { 8: rdoG1R1.Enabled = true; 9: rdoG1R2.Enabled = true; 10: rdoG1R3.Enabled = true; 11: rdoG2R1.Enabled = true; 12: rdoG2R2.Enabled = true; 13: } 14:  15: protected void cmdDisable_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 16: { 17: rdoG1R1.Enabled = false; 18: rdoG1R2.Enabled = false; 19: rdoG1R3.Enabled = false; 20: rdoG2R1.Enabled = false; 21: rdoG2R2.Enabled = false; 22: } 23:  24: protected void cmdTest_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 25: { 26: rdoG1R2.Checked = true; 27: rdoG2R1.Checked = true; 28: } 29: 30: protected void Page_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e) 31: { 32:  33: } After you copy the markup and page-behind code into the appropriate files.  I recommend you set a breakpoint on Page_Load as well as cmdTest_Click, and add each of the radio button controls to the Watch list so that you can walk through the code and see exactly what is happening.  Use the Blank Postback button to cause a postback to the server so you can inspect things without making any changes. The moral of the story is: if you do server-side manipulation of the Checked status of RadioButton controls, then you need to set ALL of the controls in a group whenever you want to change one.

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• BizTalk 2009 - Custom Functoid Wizard

  - by StuartBrierley

  When creating BizTalk maps you may find that there are times when you need perform tasks that the standard functoids do not cover.  At other times you may find yourself reapeating a pattern of standard functoids over and over again, adding visual complexity to an otherwise simple process.  In these cases you may find it preferable to create your own custom functoids.  In the past I have created a number of custom functoids from scratch, but recently I decided to try out the Custom Functoid Wizard for BizTalk 2009. After downloading and installing the wizard you should start Visual Studio and select to create a new BizTalk Server Functoid Project. Following the splash screen you will be presented with the General Properties screen, where you can set the classname, namespace, assembly name and strong name key file. The next screen is the first set of properties for the functoid.  First of all is the fuctoid ID; this must be a value above 6000. You should also then set the name, tooltip and description of the functoid.  The name will appear in the visual studio toolbox and the tooltip on hover over in the toolbox.  The descrition will be shown when you configure the functoid inputs when using it in a map; as such it should provide a decent level of information to allow the functoid to be used. Next you must set the category, exception mesage, icon and implementation language.  The category will affect the positioning of the functoid within the toolbox and also some of the behaviours of the functoid. We must then define the parameters and connections for our new functoid.  Here you can define the names and types of your input parameters along with the minimum and maximum number of input connections.  You will also need to define the types of connections accepted and the output type of the functoid. Finally you can click finish and your custom functoid project will be created. The results of this process can be seen in the solution explorer, where you will see that a project, functoid class file and a resource file have been created for you. If you open the class file you will see that the following code has been created for you: The "base" function sets all the properties that you previsouly detailed in the custom functoid wizard.  public TestFunctoids():base()  {    int functoidID;    // This has to be a number greater than 6000    functoidID = System.Convert.ToInt32(resmgr.GetString("FunctoidId"));    this.ID = functoidID;    // Set Resource strings, bitmaps    SetupResourceAssembly(ResourceName, Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());    SetName("FunctoidName");                     SetTooltip("FunctoidToolTip");    SetDescription("FunctoidDescription");    SetBitmap("FunctoidBitmap");    // Minimum and maximum parameters that the functoid accepts    this.SetMinParams(2);    this.SetMaxParams(2);    /// Function name that needs to be called when this Functoid is invoked.    /// Put this in GAC.    SetExternalFunctionName(GetType().Assembly.FullName,     "MyCompany.BizTalk.Functoids.TestFuntoids.TestFunctoids", "Execute");    // Category for this functoid.    this.Category = FunctoidCategory.String;    // Input and output Connection type    this.OutputConnectionType = ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord;    AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);   } The "Execute" function provides a skeleton function that contains the code to be executed by your new functoid.  The inputs and outputs should match those you defined in the Custom Functoid Wizard.   public System.Int32 Execute(System.Int32 Cool)   {    ResourceManager resmgr = new ResourceManager(ResourceName, Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());    try    {     // TODO: Implement Functoid Logic    }    catch (Exception e)    {     throw new Exception(resmgr.GetString("FunctoidException"), e);    }   } Opening the resource file you will see some of the various string values that you defined in the Custom Functoid Wizard - Name, Tooltip, Description and Exception. You can also select to look at the image resources.  This will display the embedded icon image for the functoid.  To change this right click the icon and select "Import from File". Once you have completed the skeleton code you can then look at trying out your functoid. To do this you will need to build the project, copy the compiled DLL to C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009\Developer Tools\Mapper Extensions and then refresh the toolbox in visual studio.

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• Problem with deleting table rows using ctrl+a for row selection

  - by Frank Nimphius

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The following code is commonly shown and documented for how to access the row key of selected table rows in an ADF Faces table configured for multi row selection. public void onRemoveSelectedTableRows(ActionEvent actionEvent) {    RichTable richTable = … get access to your table instance …    CollectionModel cm =(CollectionModel)richTable.getValue();    RowKeySet rowKeySet = (RowKeySet)richTable.getSelectedRowKeys();             for (Object key : rowKeySet) {       richTable.setRowKey(key);       JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rowData = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)cm.getRowData();       // do something with rowData e.g.update, print, copy   }    //optional, if you changed data, refresh the table         AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext = AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); adfFacesContext.addPartialTarget(richTable);   return null; } The code shown above works for 99.5 % of all use cases that deal with multi row selection enabled ADF Faces tables, except for when users use the ctrl+a key to mark all rows for delete. Just to make sure I am clear: if you use ctrl+a to mark rows to perform any other operation on them – like bulk updating all rows for a specific attribute – then this works with the code shown above. Even for bulk row delete, any other mean of row selection (shift+click and multiple ctrl+click) works like a charm and the rows are deleted. So apparently it is the use of ctrl+a that causes the problem when deleting multiple rows of an ADF Faces table. To implement code that works for all table selection use cases, including the one to delete all table rows in one go, you use the code shown below. public void onRemoveSelectedTableRows(ActionEvent actionEvent) {   RichTable richTable = … get access to your table instance …   CollectionModel cm = (CollectionModel)richTable.getValue();   RowKeySet rowKeySet = (RowKeySet)richTable.getSelectedRowKeys();   Object[] rowKeySetArray = rowKeySet.toArray();      for (Object key : rowKeySetArray){               richTable.setRowKey(key);     JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rowData = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)cm.getRowData();                              rowData.getRow().remove();   }   AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext = AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance();          adfFacesContext.addPartialTarget(richTable); }

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast

  - by Jeff

  (Repost from my personal blog.) This is another post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch soon. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love" If anything generally good for the craft has come out of the rise of ASP.NET MVC, it's that people are more likely to use dependency injection, and loosely couple the pieces parts of their applications. A lot of the emphasis on coding this way has been to facilitate unit testing, and that's awesome. Unit testing makes me feel a lot less like a hack, and a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Dependency injection is pretty straight forward. It says, "Given an instance of this class, I need instances of other classes, defined not by their concrete implementations, but their interfaces." Probably the first place a developer exercises this in when having a class talk to some kind of data repository. For a very simple example, pretend the FooService has to get some Foo. It looks like this: public class FooService {    public FooService(IFooRepository fooRepo)    {       _fooRepo = fooRepo;    }    private readonly IFooRepository _fooRepo;    public Foo GetMeFoo()    {       return _fooRepo.FooFromDatabase();    } } When we need the FooService, we ask the dependency container to get it for us. It says, "You'll need an IFooRepository in that, so let me see what that's mapped to, and put it in there for you." Why is this good for you? It's good because your FooService doesn't know or care about how you get some foo. You can stub out what the methods and properties on a fake IFooRepository might return, and test just the FooService. I don't want to get too far into unit testing, but it's the most commonly cited reason to use DI containers in MVC. What I wanted to mention is how there's another benefit in a project like mine, where I have to glue together a bunch of stuff. For example, when I have someone sign up for a new account on CoasterBuzz, I'm actually using POP Forums' new account mailer, which composes a bunch of text that includes a link to verify your account. The thing is, I want to use custom text and some other logic that's specific to CoasterBuzz. To accomplish this, I make a new class that inherits from the forum's NewAccountMailer, and override some stuff. Easy enough. Then I use Ninject, the DI container I'm using, to unbind the forum's implementation, and substitute my own. Ninject uses something called a NinjectModule to bind interfaces to concrete implementations. The forum has its own module, and then the CoasterBuzz module is loaded second. The CB module has two lines of code to swap out the mailer implementation: Unbind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>(); Bind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>().To<CbNewAccountMailer>(); Piece of cake! Now, when code asks the DI container for an INewAccountMailer, it gets my custom implementation instead. This is a lot easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. I could do some copy-paste, but then I'm not using well-tested code from the forum. I could write stuff from scratch, but then I'm throwing away a bunch of logic I've already written (in this case, stuff around e-mail, e-mail settings, mail delivery failures). There are other places where the DI container comes in handy. For example, CoasterBuzz does a number of custom things with user profiles, and special content for paid members. It uses the forum as the core piece to managing users, so I can ask the container to get me instances of classes that do user lookups, for example, and have zero care about how the forum handles database calls, configuration, etc. What a great world to live in, compared to ten years ago. Sure, the primary interest in DI is around the "separation of concerns" and facilitating unit testing, but as your library grows and you use more open source, it starts to be the glue that pulls everything together.

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• Struct Method for Loops Problem

  - by Annalyne

  I have tried numerous times how to make a do-while loop using the float constructor for my code but it seems it does not work properly as I wanted. For summary, I am making a TBRPG in C++ and I encountered few problems. But before that, let me post my code. #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <ctime> #include <cstdlib> using namespace std; int char_level = 1; //the starting level of the character. string town; //town string town_name; //the name of the town the character is in. string charname; //holds the character's name upon the start of the game int gems = 0; //holds the value of the games the character has. const int MAX_ITEMS = 15; //max items the character can carry string inventory [MAX_ITEMS]; //the inventory of the character in game int itemnum = 0; //number of items that the character has. bool GameOver = false; //boolean intended for the game over scr. string monsterTroop [] = {"Slime", "Zombie", "Imp", "Sahaguin, Hounds, Vampire"}; //monster name float monsterTroopHealth [] = {5.0f, 10.0f, 15.0f, 20.0f, 25.0f}; // the health of the monsters int monLifeBox; //life carrier of the game's enemy troops int enemNumber; //enemy number //inventory[itemnum++] = "Sword"; class RPG_Game_Enemy { public: void enemyAppear () { srand(time(0)); enemNumber = 1+(rand()%3); if (enemNumber == 1) cout << monsterTroop[1]; //monster troop 1 else if (enemNumber == 2) cout << monsterTroop[2]; //monster troop 2 else if (enemNumber == 3) cout << monsterTroop[3]; //monster troop 3 else if (enemNumber == 4) cout << monsterTroop[4]; //monster troop 4 } void enemDefeat () { cout << "The foe has been defeated. You are victorious." << endl; } void enemyDies() { //if the enemy dies: //collapse declaration cout << "The foe vanished and you are victorious!" << endl; } }; class RPG_Scene_Battle { public: RPG_Scene_Battle(float ini_health) : health (ini_health){}; float getHealth() { return health; } void setHealth(float rpg_val){ health = rpg_val;}; private: float health; }; //---------------------------------------------------------------// // Conduct Damage for the Scene Battle's Damage //---------------------------------------------------------------// float conductDamage(RPG_Scene_Battle rpg_tr, float damage) { rpg_tr.setHealth(rpg_tr.getHealth() - damage); return rpg_tr.getHealth(); }; // ------------------------------------------------------------- // void RPG_Scene_DisplayItem () { cout << "Items: \n"; for (int i=0; i < itemnum; ++i) cout << inventory[i] <<endl; }; In this code I have so far, the problem I have is the battle scene. For example, the player battles a Ghost with 10 HP, when I use a do while loop to subtract the HP of the character and the enemy, it only deducts once in the do while. Some people said I should use a struct, but I have no idea how to make it. Is there a way someone can display a code how to implement it on my game? Edit: I made the do-while by far like this: do RPG_Scene_Battle (player, 20.0f); RPG_Scene_Battle (enemy, 10.0f); cout << "Battle starts!" <<endl; cout << "You used a blade skill and deducted 2 hit points to the enemy!" conductDamage (enemy, 2.0f); while (enemy!=0) also, I made something like this: #include <iostream> using namespace std; int gems = 0; class Entity { public: Entity(float startingHealth) : health(startingHealth){}; // initialize health float getHealth(){return health;} void setHealth(float value){ health = value;}; private: float health; }; float subtractHealthFrom(Entity& ent, float damage) { ent.setHealth(ent.getHealth() - damage); return ent.getHealth(); }; int main () { Entity character(10.0f); Entity enemy(10.0f); cout << "Hero Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(character, 2.0f) <<endl; cout << "Monster Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(enemy, 2.0f) <<endl; cout << "Hero Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(character, 2.0f) <<endl; cout << "Monster Life: "; cout << subtractHealthFrom(enemy, 2.0f) <<endl; }; Struct method, they say, should solve this problem. How can I continously deduct hp from the enemy? Whenever I deduct something, it would return to its original value -_-

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• High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

  - by BuckWoody

  Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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• A Knights Tale

  - by Phil Factor

  There are so many lessons to be learned from the story of Knight Capital losing nearly half a billion dollars as a result of a deployment gone wrong. The Knight Capital Group (KCG N) was an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. According to the recent order (File No.3.15570) against Knight Capital by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission?, Knight had, for many years used some software which broke up incoming “parent” orders into smaller “child” orders that were then transmitted to various exchanges or trading venues for execution. A tracking ‘cumulative quantity’ function counted the number of ‘child’ orders and stopped the process once the total of child orders matched the ‘parent’ and so the parent order had been completed. Back in the mists of time, some code had been added to it  which was excuted if a particular flag was set. It was called ‘power peg’ and seems to have had a similar design and purpose, but, one guesses, would have shared the same tracking function. This code had been abandoned in 2003, but never deleted. In 2005, The tracking function was moved to an earlier point in the main process. It would seem from the account that, from that point, had that flag ever been set, the old ‘Power Peg’ would have been executed like Godzilla bursting from the ice, making child orders without limit without any tracking function. It wasn’t, presumably because the software that set the flag was removed. In 2012, nearly a decade after ‘Power Peg’ was abandoned, Knight prepared a new module to their software to cope with the imminent Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) for the New York Stock Exchange. By this time, the flag had remained unused and someone made the fateful decision to reuse it, and replace the old ‘power peg’ code with this new RLP code. Had the two actions been done together in a single automated deployment, and the new deployment tested, all would have been well. It wasn’t. To quote… “Beginning on July 27, 2012, Knight deployed the new RLP code in SMARS in stages by placing it on a limited number of servers in SMARS on successive days. During the deployment of the new code, however, one of Knight’s technicians did not copy the new code to one of the eight SMARS computer servers. Knight did not have a second technician review this deployment and no one at Knight realized that the Power Peg code had not been removed from the eighth server, nor the new RLP code added. Knight had no written procedures that required such a review.” (para 15) “On August 1, Knight received orders from broker-dealers whose customers were eligible to participate in the RLP. The seven servers that received the new code processed these orders correctly. However, orders sent with the repurposed flag to the eighth server triggered the defective Power Peg code still present on that server. As a result, this server began sending child orders to certain trading centers for execution. Because the cumulative quantity function had been moved, this server continuously sent child orders, in rapid sequence, for each incoming parent order without regard to the number of share executions Knight had already received from trading centers. Although one part of Knight’s order handling system recognized that the parent orders had been filled, this information was not communicated to SMARS.” (para 16) SMARS routed millions of orders into the market over a 45-minute period, and obtained over 4 million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397 million shares. By the time that Knight stopped sending the orders, Knight had assumed a net long position in 80 stocks of approximately $3.5 billion and a net short position in 74 stocks of approximately $3.15 billion. Knight’s shares dropped more than 20% after traders saw extreme volume spikes in a number of stocks, including preferred shares of Wells Fargo (JWF) and semiconductor company Spansion (CODE). Both stocks, which see roughly 100,000 trade per day, had changed hands more than 4 million times by late morning. Ultimately, Knight lost over $460 million from this wild 45 minutes of trading. Obviously, I’m interested in all this because, at one time, I used to write trading systems for the City of London. Obviously, the US SEC is in a far better position than any of us to work out the failings of Knight’s IT department, and the report makes for painful reading. I can’t help observing, though, that even with the breathtaking mistakes all along the way, that a robust automated deployment process that was ‘all-or-nothing’, and tested from soup to nuts would have prevented the disaster. The report reads like a Greek Tragedy. All the way along one wants to shout ‘No! not that way!’ and ‘Aargh! Don’t do it!’. As the tragedy unfolds, the audience weeps for the players, trapped by a cruel fate. All application development and deployment requires defense in depth. All IT goes wrong occasionally, but if there is a culture of defensive programming throughout, the consequences are usually containable. For financial systems, these defenses are required by statute, and ignored only by the foolish. Knight’s mistakes weren’t made by just one hapless sysadmin, but were progressive errors by an  IT culture spanning at least ten years.  One can spell these out, but I think they’re obvious. One can only hope that the industry studies what happened in detail, learns from the mistakes, and draws the right conclusions.

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• Extending Expression Blend 4 &amp; Blend for Visual Studio 2012

  - by Chris Skardon

  Just getting this off the bat, I presume this will also work for Blend 5, but I can’t confirm it… Anyhews, I imagine you’re here because you want to know how to create an addin for Blend, so let’s jump right in there! First, and foremost, we’re going to need to ensure our development environment has the right setup, so the checklist: Visual Studio 2012 Blend for Visual Studio 2012 OK, let’s create a new project (class library, .NET 4.5): Hello.Extension The ‘.Extension’ bit is very very important. The addin will not work unless it is named in this way. You can put whatever you want at the front, but it has to have the extension bit. OK, so now we have a solution with one project. To this project we need to add references to the following things: Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility (from c:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Blend\   -- x86 folder if you are on an x64 windows install) Microsoft.Expression.Framework (same location as above) PresentationCore PresentationFramework WindowsBase System.ComponentModel.Composition Got them? ACE. Let’s now add a project to contain our control, so, create a new WPF Application project, cunningly named something like ‘Hello.Control’… (I’m creating a WPF application here, because I’m too lazy to dig up the correct references, and this will add all the ones I need ) Once that is created, delete the App.xaml and MainWindow.xaml files, we won’t be needing them. You will also need to change the properties of the project itself, so it is only a class library. Once that is done, let’s add a new UserControl, which will be this: <UserControl x:Class="Hello.Control.HelloControl" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="300"> <Grid> <TextBlock Text="HELLO!!!"/> </Grid> </UserControl> Impressive eh? Now, let’s reference the WPF project from the Extension library. All that’s left now is to code up our extension… So, add a class to the Extension project (name wise doesn’t matter), and make it implement the IPackage interface from the Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility library: public class HelloExtension : IPackage { /**/ } We’ll implement the two methods we need to: public class HelloExtension : IPackage { public void Load(IServices services) { } public void Unload() { } } We’re only really concerned about the Load method in this case, as let’s face it, the extension we have doesn’t need to do a lot to bog off. The interesting thing about the Load method is that it receives an IServices instance. This allows us to get access to all the services that Expression provides, in this case we’re interested in one in particular, the ‘IWindowService’ So, let’s get that bad boy… private IWindowService _windowService; public void Load(IServices services) { _windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); } Nailed it… But why? The WindowService allows us to register our UserControl with Blend, which in turn allows people to activate and see it, which is a big plus point. So, let’s do that… We’ll create an ‘Initialize’ method to create our new control, and add it to the WindowService: private HelloControl _helloControl; public void Initialize() { _helloControl = new HelloControl(); if (_windowService.PaletteRegistry["HelloPanel"] == null) _windowService.RegisterPalette("HelloPanel", _helloControl, "Hello Window"); } First we check that we’re not already registered, and if we’re not we register, the first argument is the identifier used by the service to, well, identify your extension. The second argument is the actual control, the third argument is the name that people will see in the ‘Windows’ menu of Blend itself (so important note here – don’t put anything embarrassing or (need I say it?) sweary…) There are only two things to do now - Call ‘Initialize()’ from our Load method, and Export the class This is easy money – add [Export(typeof(IPackage))] to the top of our class… The full code will (should) look like this: [Export(typeof (IPackage))] public class HelloExtension : IPackage { private HelloControl _helloControl; private IWindowService _windowService; public void Load(IServices services) { _windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); Initialize(); } public void Unload() { } public void Initialize() { _helloControl = new HelloControl(); if (_windowService.PaletteRegistry["HelloControl"] == null) _windowService.RegisterPalette("HelloControl", _helloControl, "Hello Window"); } } If you build this and copy it to your ‘Extensions’ folder in Blend (c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 11.0\blend\) and start Blend, you should see ‘Hello Window’ listed in the Window menu: That as they say is it!

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• "Guiding" a Domain Expert to Retire from Programming

  - by James Kolpack

  I've got a friend who does IT at a local non-profit where they're using a custom web application which is no longer supported by the company who built it. (out of business, support was too expensive, I'm not sure...) Development on this app started around 10+ years ago so the technologies being harnessed are pretty out of date now - classic asp using vbscript and SQL Server 2000. The application domain is in the realm of government bookkeeping - so even though the development team is long gone, there are often new requirements of this software. Enter the... The domain expert. This is an middle aged accounting whiz without much (or any?) prior development experience. He studied the pages, code and queries and learned how to ape the style of the original team which, believe me, is mediocre at best. He's very clever and very tenacious but has no experience in software beyond what he's picked up from this app. Otherwise, he's a pleasant guy to talk to and definitely knows his domain. My friend in IT, and probably his superiors in the company, want him out of the code. They view him as wasting his expertise on coding tasks he shouldn't be doing. My friend got me involved with a few small contracts which I handled without much problem - other than somewhat of a communication barrier with the domain expert. He explained the requirements very quickly, assuming prior knowledge of the domain which I do not have. This is partially his normal style, and I think maybe a bit of resentment from my involvement. So, I think he feels like the owner of the code and has entrenched himself in a development position. So... his coding technique. One of his latest endeavors was to make a page that only he could reach (theoretically - the security model for the system is wretched) where he can enter a raw SQL query, run it, and save the query to run again later. A report that I worked on had been originally implemented by him using 6 distinct queries, 3 or 4 temp tables to coordinate the data between the queries, and the final result obtained by importing the data from the final query into Access and doing a pivot and some formatting. It worked - well, some of the results were incorrect - but at what a cost! (I implemented the report in a single query with at least 1/10th the amount of code.) He edits code in notepad. He doesn't seem to know about online reference material for the languages. I recently read an article on Dr. Dobbs titled "What Makes Bad Programmers Different" - and instantly thought of our domain expert. From the article: Their code is large, messy, and bug laden. They have very superficial knowledge of their problem domain and their tools. Their code has a lot of copy/paste and they have very little interest in techniques that reduce it. The fail to account for edge cases, while inefficiently dealing with the general case. They never have time to comment their code or break it into smaller pieces. Empirical evidence plays no little role in their decisions. 5.5 out of 6. My friend is wanting me to argue the case to their management - specifically, I got this email from their manager to respond to: ...Also, I need to talk to you about what effect there is from Domain Expert continuing to make edits to the live environment. If that is a problem for you I need to know so I can have his access blocked. Some examples would help. In my opinion, from a technical standpoint, it's dangerous to have him making changes without any oversight. On the other hand, I'm just doing one-off contracts at this point and don't have much desire to get involved deeply enough that I'm essentially arguing as one of the Bobs from Office Space. I'd like to help my friend out - but I feel like I'm getting in the middle of a political battle. More importantly - if I do get involved and suggest that his editing privileges be removed, it needs to be handled carefully so that doesn't feel belittled. He is beyond a doubt the foremost expert on this system. I'm hoping this is familiar territory for some other stackechangers, because I'm feeling a little bewildered. How should I respond? Should I argue that he shouldn't be allowed to touch the code? Should I phrase it as "no single developer, no matter how experienced, should be working on production code unchecked"? Should I argue to keep him involved with the code, but with a review process? Should I say "glad I could help, but uh, I'm busy now!" Other options? Thanks a bunch!

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• Adjusting server-side tickrate dynamically

  - by Stuart Blackler

  I know nothing of game development/this site, so I apologise if this is completely foobar. Today I experimented with building a small game loop for a network game (think MW3, CSGO etc). I was wondering why they do not build in automatic rate adjustment based on server performance? Would it affect the client that much if the client knew this frame is based on this tickrate? Has anyone attempted this before? Here is what my noobish C++ brain came up with earlier. It will improve the tickrate if it has been stable for x ticks. If it "lags", the tickrate will be reduced down by y amount: // GameEngine.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application. // #ifdef WIN32 #include <Windows.h> #else #include <sys/time.h> #include <ctime> #endif #include<iostream> #include <dos.h> #include "stdafx.h" using namespace std; UINT64 GetTimeInMs() { #ifdef WIN32 /* Windows */ FILETIME ft; LARGE_INTEGER li; /* Get the amount of 100 nano seconds intervals elapsed since January 1, 1601 (UTC) and copy it * to a LARGE_INTEGER structure. */ GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(&ft); li.LowPart = ft.dwLowDateTime; li.HighPart = ft.dwHighDateTime; UINT64 ret = li.QuadPart; ret -= 116444736000000000LL; /* Convert from file time to UNIX epoch time. */ ret /= 10000; /* From 100 nano seconds (10^-7) to 1 millisecond (10^-3) intervals */ return ret; #else /* Linux */ struct timeval tv; gettimeofday(&tv, NULL); uint64 ret = tv.tv_usec; /* Convert from micro seconds (10^-6) to milliseconds (10^-3) */ ret /= 1000; /* Adds the seconds (10^0) after converting them to milliseconds (10^-3) */ ret += (tv.tv_sec * 1000); return ret; #endif } int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { int sv_tickrate_max = 1000; // The maximum amount of ticks per second int sv_tickrate_min = 100; // The minimum amount of ticks per second int sv_tickrate_adjust = 10; // How much to de/increment the tickrate by int sv_tickrate_stable_before_increment = 1000; // How many stable ticks before we increase the tickrate again int sys_tickrate_current = sv_tickrate_max; // Always start at the highest possible tickrate for the best performance int counter_stable_ticks = 0; // How many ticks we have not lagged for UINT64 __startTime = GetTimeInMs(); int ticks = 100000; while(ticks > 0) { int maxTimeInMs = 1000 / sys_tickrate_current; UINT64 _startTime = GetTimeInMs(); // Long code here... cout << "."; UINT64 _timeTaken = GetTimeInMs() - _startTime; if(_timeTaken < maxTimeInMs) { Sleep(maxTimeInMs - _timeTaken); counter_stable_ticks++; if(counter_stable_ticks >= sv_tickrate_stable_before_increment) { // reset the stable # ticks counter counter_stable_ticks = 0; // make sure that we don't go over the maximum tickrate if(sys_tickrate_current + sv_tickrate_adjust <= sv_tickrate_max) { sys_tickrate_current += sv_tickrate_adjust; // let me know in console #DEBUG cout << endl << "Improving tickrate. New tickrate: " << sys_tickrate_current << endl; } } } else if(_timeTaken > maxTimeInMs) { cout << endl; if((sys_tickrate_current - sv_tickrate_adjust) > sv_tickrate_min) { sys_tickrate_current -= sv_tickrate_adjust; } else { if(sys_tickrate_current == sv_tickrate_min) { cout << "Please reduce sv_tickrate_min..." << endl; } else{ sys_tickrate_current = sv_tickrate_min; } } // let me know in console #DEBUG cout << "The server has lag. Reduced tickrate to: " << sys_tickrate_current << endl; } ticks--; } UINT64 __timeTaken = GetTimeInMs() - __startTime; cout << endl << endl << "Total time in ms: " << __timeTaken; cout << endl << "Ending tickrate: " << sys_tickrate_current; char test; cin >> test; return 0; }

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• OpenGL loading functions error [on hold]

  - by Ghilliedrone

  I'm new to OpenGL, and I bought a book on it for beginners. I finished writing the sample code for making a context/window. I get an error on this line at the part PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC, saying "Error: expected a ')'": typedef HGLRC(APIENTRYP PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC)(HDC, HGLRC, const int*); Replacing it or adding a ")" makes it error, but the error disappears when I use the OpenGL headers included in the books CD, which are OpenGL 3.0. I would like a way to make this work with the newest gl.h/wglext.h and without libraries. Here's the rest of the class if it's needed: #include <ctime> #include <windows.h> #include <iostream> #include <gl\GL.h> #include <gl\wglext.h> #include "Example.h" #include "GLWindow.h" typedef HGLRC(APIENTRYP PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC)(HDC, HGLRC, const int*); PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC wglCreateContextAttribsARB = NULL; bool GLWindow::create(int width, int height, int bpp, bool fullscreen) { DWORD dwExStyle; //Window Extended Style DWORD dwStyle; //Window Style m_isFullscreen = fullscreen;//Store the fullscreen flag m_windowRect.left = 0L; m_windowRect.right = (long)width; m_windowRect.top = 0L; m_windowRect.bottom = (long)height;//Set bottom to height // fill out the window class structure m_windowClass.cbSize = sizeof(WNDCLASSEX); m_windowClass.style = CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW; m_windowClass.lpfnWndProc = GLWindow::StaticWndProc; //We set our static method as the event handler m_windowClass.cbClsExtra = 0; m_windowClass.cbWndExtra = 0; m_windowClass.hInstance = m_hinstance; m_windowClass.hIcon = LoadIcon(NULL, IDI_APPLICATION); // default icon m_windowClass.hCursor = LoadCursor(NULL, IDC_ARROW); // default arrow m_windowClass.hbrBackground = NULL; // don't need background m_windowClass.lpszMenuName = NULL; // no menu m_windowClass.lpszClassName = (LPCWSTR)"GLClass"; m_windowClass.hIconSm = LoadIcon(NULL, IDI_WINLOGO); // windows logo small icon if (!RegisterClassEx(&m_windowClass)) { MessageBox(NULL, (LPCWSTR)"Failed to register window class", NULL, MB_OK); return false; } if (m_isFullscreen)//If we are fullscreen, we need to change the display { DEVMODE dmScreenSettings; //Device mode memset(&dmScreenSettings, 0, sizeof(dmScreenSettings)); dmScreenSettings.dmSize = sizeof(dmScreenSettings); dmScreenSettings.dmPelsWidth = width; //Screen width dmScreenSettings.dmPelsHeight = height; //Screen height dmScreenSettings.dmBitsPerPel = bpp; //Bits per pixel dmScreenSettings.dmFields = DM_BITSPERPEL | DM_PELSWIDTH | DM_PELSHEIGHT; if (ChangeDisplaySettings(&dmScreenSettings, CDS_FULLSCREEN) != DISP_CHANGE_SUCCESSFUL) { MessageBox(NULL, (LPCWSTR)"Display mode failed", NULL, MB_OK); m_isFullscreen = false; } } if (m_isFullscreen) //Is it fullscreen? { dwExStyle = WS_EX_APPWINDOW; //Window Extended Style dwStyle = WS_POPUP; //Windows Style ShowCursor(false); //Hide mouse pointer } else { dwExStyle = WS_EX_APPWINDOW | WS_EX_WINDOWEDGE; //Window Exteneded Style dwStyle = WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW; //Windows Style } AdjustWindowRectEx(&m_windowRect, dwStyle, false, dwExStyle); //Adjust window to true requested size //Class registered, so now create window m_hwnd = CreateWindowEx(NULL, //Extended Style (LPCWSTR)"GLClass", //Class name (LPCWSTR)"Chapter 2", //App name dwStyle | WS_CLIPCHILDREN | WS_CLIPSIBLINGS, 0, 0, //x, y coordinates m_windowRect.right - m_windowRect.left, m_windowRect.bottom - m_windowRect.top, //Width and height NULL, //Handle to parent NULL, //Handle to menu m_hinstance, //Application instance this); //Pass a pointer to the GLWindow here //Check if window creation failed, hwnd would equal NULL if (!m_hwnd) { return 0; } m_hdc = GetDC(m_hwnd); ShowWindow(m_hwnd, SW_SHOW); UpdateWindow(m_hwnd); m_lastTime = GetTickCount() / 1000.0f; return true; } LRESULT CALLBACK GLWindow::StaticWndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { GLWindow* window = nullptr; //If this is the create message if (uMsg == WM_CREATE) { //Get the pointer we stored during create window = (GLWindow*)((LPCREATESTRUCT)lParam)->lpCreateParams; //Associate the window pointer with the hwnd for the other events to access SetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_USERDATA, (LONG_PTR)window); } else { //If this is not a creation event, then we should have stored a pointer to the window window = (GLWindow*)GetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_USERDATA); if (!window) { //Do the default event handling return DefWindowProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam); } } //Call our window's member WndProc(allows us to access member variables) return window->WndProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam); } LRESULT GLWindow::WndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { switch (uMsg) { case WM_CREATE: { m_hdc = GetDC(hWnd); setupPixelFormat(); //Set the version that we want, in this case 3.0 int attribs[] = { WGL_CONTEXT_MAJOR_VERSION_ARB, 3, WGL_CONTEXT_MINOR_VERSION_ARB, 0, 0}; //Create temporary context so we can get a pointer to the function HGLRC tmpContext = wglCreateContext(m_hdc); //Make the context current wglMakeCurrent(m_hdc, tmpContext); //Get the function pointer wglCreateContextAttribsARB = (PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC)wglGetProcAddress("wglCreateContextAttribsARB"); //If this is NULL then OpenGl 3.0 is not supported if (!wglCreateContextAttribsARB) { MessageBox(NULL, (LPCWSTR)"OpenGL 3.0 is not supported", (LPCWSTR)"An error occured", MB_ICONERROR | MB_OK); DestroyWindow(hWnd); return 0; } //Create an OpenGL 3.0 context using the new function m_hglrc = wglCreateContextAttribsARB(m_hdc, 0, attribs); //Delete the temporary context wglDeleteContext(tmpContext); //Make the GL3 context current wglMakeCurrent(m_hdc, m_hglrc); m_isRunning = true; } break; case WM_DESTROY: //Window destroy case WM_CLOSE: //Windows is closing wglMakeCurrent(m_hdc, NULL); wglDeleteContext(m_hglrc); m_isRunning = false; //Stop the main loop PostQuitMessage(0); break; case WM_SIZE: { int height = HIWORD(lParam); //Get height and width int width = LOWORD(lParam); getAttachedExample()->onResize(width, height); //Call the example's resize method } break; case WM_KEYDOWN: if (wParam == VK_ESCAPE) //If the escape key was pressed { DestroyWindow(m_hwnd); } break; default: break; } return DefWindowProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam); } void GLWindow::processEvents() { MSG msg; //While there are messages in the queue, store them in msg while (PeekMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE)) { //Process the messages TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } } Here is the header: #pragma once #include <ctime> #include <windows.h> class Example;//Declare our example class class GLWindow { public: GLWindow(HINSTANCE hInstance); //default constructor bool create(int width, int height, int bpp, bool fullscreen); void destroy(); void processEvents(); void attachExample(Example* example); bool isRunning(); //Is the window running? void swapBuffers() { SwapBuffers(m_hdc); } static LRESULT CALLBACK StaticWndProc(HWND wnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND wnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); float getElapsedSeconds(); private: Example* m_example; //A link to the example program bool m_isRunning; //Is the window still running? bool m_isFullscreen; HWND m_hwnd; //Window handle HGLRC m_hglrc; //Rendering context HDC m_hdc; //Device context RECT m_windowRect; //Window bounds HINSTANCE m_hinstance; //Application instance WNDCLASSEX m_windowClass; void setupPixelFormat(void); Example* getAttachedExample() { return m_example; } float m_lastTime; };

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• Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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• Draw Bug 2D player Camera

  - by RedShft

  I have just implemented a 2D player camera for my game, everything works properly except the player on the screen jitters when it moves between tiles. What I mean by jitter, is that if the player is moving the camera updates the tileset to be drawn and if the player steps to the right, the camera snaps that way. The movement is not smooth. I'm guessing this is occurring because of how I implemented the function to calculate the current viewable area or how my draw function works. I'm not entirely sure how to fix this. This camera system was entirely of my own creation and a first attempt at that, so it's very possible this is not a great way of doing things. My camera class, pulls information from the current tileset and calculates the viewable area. Right now I am targettng a resolution of 800 by 600. So I try to fit the appropriate amount of tiles for that resolution. My camera class, after calculating the current viewable tileset relative to the players location, returns a slice of the original tileset to be drawn. This tileset slice is updated every frame according to the players position. This slice is then passed to the map class, which draws the tile on screen. //Map Draw Function //This draw function currently matches the GID of the tile to it's location on the //PNG file of the tileset and then draws this portion on the screen void Draw(SDL_Surface* background, int[] _tileSet) { enforce( tilesetImage != null, "Tileset is null!"); enforce( background != null, "BackGround is null!"); int i = 0; int j = 0; SDL_Rect DestR, SrcR; SrcR.x = 0; SrcR.y = 0; SrcR.h = 32; SrcR.w = 32; foreach(tile; _tileSet) { //This code is matching the current tiles ID to the tileset image SrcR.x = cast(short)(tileWidth * (tile >= 11 ? (tile - ((tile / 10) * 10) - 1) : tile - 1)); SrcR.y = cast(short)(tileHeight * (tile > 10 ? (tile / 10) : 0)); //Applying the tile to the surface SDL_BlitSurface( tilesetImage, &SrcR, background, &DestR ); //this keeps track of what column/row we are on i++; if ( i == mapWidth ) { i = 0; j++; } DestR.x = cast(short)(i * tileWidth); DestR.y = cast(short)(j * tileHeight); } } //Camera Class class Camera { private: //A rectangle representing the view area SDL_Rect viewArea; //In number of tiles int viewAreaWidth; int viewAreaHeight; //This is the x and y coordinate of the camera in MAP SPACE IN PIXELS vect2 cameraCoordinates; //The player location in map space IN PIXELS vect2 playerLocation; //This is the players location in screen space; vect2 playerScreenLoc; int playerTileCol; int playerTileRow; int cameraTileCol; int cameraTileRow; //The map is stored in a single array with the tile ids //this corresponds to the index of the starting and ending tile int cameraStartTile, cameraEndTile; //This is a slice of the current tile set int[] tileSetCopy; int mapWidth; int mapHeight; int tileWidth; int tileHeight; public: this() { this.viewAreaWidth = 25; this.viewAreaHeight = 19; this.cameraCoordinates = vect2(0, 0); this.playerLocation = vect2(0, 0); this.viewArea = SDL_Rect (0, 0, 0, 0); this.tileWidth = 32; this.tileHeight = 32; } void Init(vect2 playerPosition, ref int[] tileSet, int mapWidth, int mapHeight ) { playerLocation = playerPosition; this.mapWidth = mapWidth; this.mapHeight = mapHeight; CalculateCurrentCameraPosition( tileSet, playerPosition ); //writeln( "Tile Set Copy: ", tileSetCopy ); //writeln( "Orginal Tile Set: ", tileSet ); } void CalculateCurrentCameraPosition( ref int[] tileSet, vect2 playerPosition ) { playerLocation = playerPosition; playerTileCol = cast(int)((playerLocation.x / tileWidth) + 1); playerTileRow = cast(int)((playerLocation.y / tileHeight) + 1); //writeln( "Player Tile (Column, Row): ","(", playerTileCol, ", ", playerTileRow, ")"); cameraTileCol = playerTileCol - (viewAreaWidth / 2); cameraTileRow = playerTileRow - (viewAreaHeight / 2); CameraMapBoundsCheck(); //writeln( "Camera Tile Start (Column, Row): ","(", cameraTileCol, ", ", cameraTileRow, ")"); cameraStartTile = ( (cameraTileRow - 1) * mapWidth ) + cameraTileCol - 1; //writeln( "Camera Start Tile: ", cameraStartTile ); cameraEndTile = cameraStartTile + ( viewAreaWidth * viewAreaHeight ) * 2; //writeln( "Camera End Tile: ", cameraEndTile ); tileSetCopy = tileSet[cameraStartTile..cameraEndTile]; } vect2 CalculatePlayerScreenLocation() { cameraCoordinates.x = cast(float)(cameraTileCol * tileWidth); cameraCoordinates.y = cast(float)(cameraTileRow * tileHeight); playerScreenLoc = playerLocation - cameraCoordinates + vect2(32, 32);; //writeln( "Camera Coordinates: ", cameraCoordinates ); //writeln( "Player Location (Map Space): ", playerLocation ); //writeln( "Player Location (Screen Space): ", playerScreenLoc ); return playerScreenLoc; } void CameraMapBoundsCheck() { if( cameraTileCol < 1 ) cameraTileCol = 1; if( cameraTileRow < 1 ) cameraTileRow = 1; if( cameraTileCol + 24 > mapWidth ) cameraTileCol = mapWidth - 24; if( cameraTileRow + 19 > mapHeight ) cameraTileRow = mapHeight - 19; } ref int[] GetTileSet() { return tileSetCopy; } int GetViewWidth() { return viewAreaWidth; } }

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• Coherence Data Guarantees for Data Reads - Basic Terminology

  - by jpurdy

  When integrating Coherence into applications, each application has its own set of requirements with respect to data integrity guarantees. Developers often describe these requirements using expressions like "avoiding dirty reads" or "making sure that updates are transactional", but we often find that even in a small group of people, there may be a wide range of opinions as to what these terms mean. This may simply be due to a lack of familiarity, but given that Coherence sits at an intersection of several (mostly) unrelated fields, it may be a matter of conflicting vocabularies (e.g. "consistency" is similar but different in transaction processing versus multi-threaded programming). Since almost all data read consistency issues are related to the concept of concurrency, it is helpful to start with a definition of that, or rather what it means for two operations to be concurrent. Rather than implying that they occur "at the same time", concurrency is a slightly weaker statement -- it simply means that it can't be proven that one event precedes (or follows) the other. As an example, in a Coherence application, if two client members mutate two different cache entries sitting on two different cache servers at roughly the same time, it is likely that one update will precede the other by a significant amount of time (say 0.1ms). However, since there is no guarantee that all four members have their clocks perfectly synchronized, and there is no way to precisely measure the time it takes to send a given message between any two members (that have differing clocks), we consider these to be concurrent operations since we can not (easily) prove otherwise. So this leads to a question that we hear quite frequently: "Are the contents of the near cache always synchronized with the underlying distributed cache?". It's easy to see that if an update on a cache server results in a message being sent to each near cache, and then that near cache being updated that there is a window where the contents are different. However, this is irrelevant, since even if the application reads directly from the distributed cache, another thread update the cache before the read is returned to the application. Even if no other member modifies a cache entry prior to the local near cache entry being updated (and subsequently read), the purpose of reading a cache entry is to do something with the result, usually either displaying for consumption by a human, or by updating the entry based on the current state of the entry. In the former case, it's clear that if the data is updated faster than a human can perceive, then there is no problem (and in many cases this can be relaxed even further). For the latter case, the application must assume that the value might potentially be updated before it has a chance to update it. This almost aways the case with read-only caches, and the solution is the traditional optimistic transaction pattern, which requires the application to explicitly state what assumptions it made about the old value of the cache entry. If the application doesn't want to bother stating those assumptions, it is free to lock the cache entry prior to reading it, ensuring that no other threads will mutate the entry, a pessimistic approach. The optimistic approach relies on what is sometimes called a "fuzzy read". In other words, the application assumes that the read should be correct, but it also acknowledges that it might not be. (I use the qualifier "sometimes" because in some writings, "fuzzy read" indicates the situation where the application actually sees an original value and then later sees an updated value within the same transaction -- however, both definitions are roughly equivalent from an application design perspective). If the read is not correct it is called a "stale read". Going back to the definition of concurrency, it may seem difficult to precisely define a stale read, but the practical way of detecting a stale read is that is will cause the encompassing transaction to roll back if it tries to update that value. The pessimistic approach relies on a "coherent read", a guarantee that the value returned is not only the same as the primary copy of that value, but also that it will remain that way. In most cases this can be used interchangeably with "repeatable read" (though that term has additional implications when used in the context of a database system). In none of cases above is it possible for the application to perform a "dirty read". A dirty read occurs when the application reads a piece of data that was never committed. In practice the only way this can occur is with multi-phase updates such as transactions, where a value may be temporarily update but then withdrawn when a transaction is rolled back. If another thread sees that value prior to the rollback, it is a dirty read. If an application uses optimistic transactions, dirty reads will merely result in a lack of forward progress (this is actually one of the main risks of dirty reads -- they can be chained and potentially cause cascading rollbacks). The concepts of dirty reads, fuzzy reads, stale reads and coherent reads are able to describe the vast majority of requirements that we see in the field. However, the important thing is to define the terms used to define requirements. A quick web search for each of the terms in this article will show multiple meanings, so I've selected what are generally the most common variations, but it never hurts to state each definition explicitly if they are critical to the success of a project (many applications have sufficiently loose requirements that precise terminology can be avoided).

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• Migrating R Scripts from Development to Production

  - by Mark Hornick

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 “How do I move my R scripts stored in one database instance to another? I have my development/test system and want to migrate to production.” Users of Oracle R Enterprise Embedded R Execution will often store their R scripts in the R Script Repository in Oracle Database, especially when using the ORE SQL API. From previous blog posts, you may recall that Embedded R Execution enables running R scripts managed by Oracle Database using both R and SQL interfaces. In ORE 1.3.1., the SQL API requires scripts to be stored in the database and referenced by name in SQL queries. The SQL API enables seamless integration with database-based applications and ease of production deployment. Loading R scripts in the repository Before talking about migration, we’ll first introduce how users store R scripts in Oracle Database. Users can add R scripts to the repository in R using the function ore.scriptCreate, or SQL using the function sys.rqScriptCreate. For the sample R script     id <- 1:10     plot(1:100,rnorm(100),pch=21,bg="red",cex =2)     data.frame(id=id, val=id / 100) users wrap this in a function and store it in the R Script Repository with a name. In R, this looks like ore.scriptCreate("RandomRedDots", function () { line-height: 115%; font-family: "Courier New";">     id <- 1:10     plot(1:100,rnorm(100),pch=21,bg="red",cex =2)     data.frame(id=id, val=id / 100)) }) In SQL, this looks like begin sys.rqScriptCreate('RandomRedDots',  'function(){     id <- 1:10     plot(1:100,rnorm(100),pch=21,bg="red",cex =2)     data.frame(id=id, val=id / 100)   }'); end; / The R function ore.scriptDrop and SQL function sys.rqScriptDrop can be used to drop these scripts as well. Note that the system will give an error if the script name already exists. Accessing R scripts once they’ve been loaded If you’re not using a source code control system, it is possible that your R scripts can be misplaced or files modified, making what is stored in Oracle Database to only or best copy of your R code. If you’ve loaded your R scripts to the database, it is straightforward to access these scripts from the database table SYS.RQ_SCRIPTS. For example, select * from sys.rq_scripts where name='myScriptName'; From R, scripts in the repository can be loaded into the R client engine using a function similar to the following: ore.scriptLoad <- function(name) { query <- paste("select script from sys.rq_scripts where name='",name,"'",sep="") str.f <- OREbase:::.ore.dbGetQuery(query) assign(name,eval(parse(text = str.f)),pos=1) } ore.scriptLoad("myFunctionName") This function is also useful if you want to load an existing R script from the repository into another R script in the repository – think modular coding style. Just include this function in the body of the other function and load the named script. Migrating R scripts from one database instance to another To move a set of functions from one system to another, the following script loads the functions from one R script repository into the client R engine, then connects to the target database and creates the scripts there with the same names. scriptNames <- OREbase:::.ore.dbGetQuery("select name from sys.rq_scripts where name not like 'RQG$%' and name not like 'RQ$%'")$NAME for(s in scriptNames) { cat(s,"\n") ore.scriptLoad(s) } ore.disconnect() ore.connect("rquser","orcl","localhost","rquser") for(s in scriptNames) { cat(s,"\n") ore.scriptDrop(s) ore.scriptCreate(s,get(s)) } Best Practice When naming R scripts, keep in mind that the name can be up to 128 characters. As such, consider organizing scripts in a directory structure manner. For example, if an organization has multiple groups or applications sharing the same database and there are multiple components, use “/” to facilitate the function organization: line-height: 115%;">ore.scriptCreate("/org1/app1/component1/myFuntion1", myFunction1) ore.scriptCreate("/org1/app1/component1/myFuntion2", myFunction2) ore.scriptCreate("/org1/app2/component2/myFuntion2", myFunction2) ore.scriptCreate("/org2/app2/component1/myFuntion3", myFunction3) ore.scriptCreate("/org3/app2/component1/myFuntion4", myFunction4) Users can then query for all functions using the path prefix when looking up functions. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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