Search Results

Search found 2081 results on 84 pages for 'dotnet crazy kid'.

Page 56/84 | < Previous Page | 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63  | Next Page >

• How do I disable the network connection from .Net without needing admin priveledges?

  - by Brad Mathews

  I may be SOL on this but I thought I would give throw it out for possible solutions. I am writing a computer access control service to help me control my kids' computer use. Plan on open sourcing it when I have it working. It is written in VB.Net and needs to work on XP through 7. I am running into all sorts of security and desktop access issues on Windows 7. The service needs to run as admin to execute the NetSh command to disable the network. But I cannot interact with the desktop from the service so I IPC to a UI to handle other stuff, but I still cannot detect from the service if the desktop is locked. Argghh! I could get it all working from a hidden windows form app if I could just lick the one piece that needs admin permissions: disabling the network. It does no good if a kid logs on and denies the popup asking if the program should run as administrator and he says no. Also windows 7 will not start a program set to run as admin using HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Anyone know how to get this working? Or have an outside the box solution? Thanks! Brad

  Read the article

• CF - How to get mouse position when ContextMenu pops up ??

  - by no9

  I have a problem i cannot solve. In my view (that shows a map) i created a contextMenu. When context menu is invoked i need to get the position where the user has clicked on the map. Here is my problem: In the view i already have onMouseDown event that gets me the coordinates where the user clicked. private void MapView_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { this.lastMouseDownX = e.X; this.lastMouseDownY = e.Y; } When the contextMenu is invoked i need the same data, but the problem is that contextMenu only has EventArgs that dont keep the data i need. Furthermore ... contextMenu is invoked when user presses and holds mouse for a second and when its invoked the code does not enter onMouseDown event ! It just goes into popup event on my context menu.... I tried putting this in my popup event, but the coordinates are not ok. Y coordinate is way off the chart. private void servicesContextMenu_Popup(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.lastMouseUpX = Control.MousePosition.X; this.lastMouseUpX = Control.MousePosition.Y; } I also tried this, but with no success ... the problem remains ... when contextMenu is invoked the code does not fire onMouseDown event. http://www.mofeel.net/58-microsoft-public-dotnet-framework-compactframework/19285.aspx Help?

  Read the article

• Advice on a DB that can be uploaded to a website by a smart client for collecting survey feedback

  - by absfabs

  Hello, I'm hoping you can help. I'm looking for a zero config multi-user datbase that my winforms application can easily upload to a webserver folder (together with 1 or 2 classic asp pages) and am looking for some suggestions/recommendations. The idea is that the database will be used to collect feedback entered by people filling in the asp pages. The pages will write to the database using javascript. The database will subsequently be downloaded again for processing once the responses are in. In Summary: It will mostly run in MS Windows environments. I have a modest budget for this and do not mind paying for such a database. No runtime licensing costs. Should be xcopy - Once uploaded to a website folder it should be operational. It should not have a dotnet CLR dependency. It should support a resonable level of concurrent access. Average respondent count would be around 20-30 but one never knows. Should be a reasonable size so that uploads/downloads to and from the site will be reasonably fast. Would appreciate your suggestions/comments Many thanks Abz To clarify - this is a desktop commercial application for feedback management in a vertical market. It uses SQL Server as the backing store. The application currently provides feedback management from email and paper feedback. I now want to add web feedback capability. Getting users to to make their SQL servers accessible to a website is not at option at this time as I am want to make getting up and running as painless as possible. I intend to release a web based implementation of the software in the near future but for now am looking at the above as a pragmatic way to provide web based feedback collection.

  Read the article

• How could I parse this HTML file?

  - by Sergio Tapia

  <div id="main"> <style type="text/css"> </style> <script language="JavaScript"> </script> <p style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0.5em;"><b>Media from&nbsp;<a onclick="(new Image()).src='/rg/find-media-title/media_strip/images/b.gif?link=/title/tt0087538/';" href="/title/tt0087538/">The Karate Kid</a> (1984)</b></p> <style type="text/css"> </style> <table style="border-collapse: collapse;"> </table> </div> I need to somehow extract the href value of the (new Image()). How exactly would I accomplish this with HtmlAgilityPack? I'm new to it, and so far I haven't found a useful tutorial on how to effectively use it for parsing. Thanks for the help!

  Read the article

• How do you protect a common resource using mutexes?

  - by Steve

  I have a common resource, which I want 1 and only 1 instance of my application (or it's COM API) to have access to at any time. I have tried to protect this resource using mutexes, but when multiple threads of a host dotnet application try to access the COM object, the mutex doesn't seem to be released. This is the code I have used to protect my resource. repeat Mutex := CreateMutex(nil, True, PChar('Connections')); until (Mutex <> 0) and (GetLastError <> ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS); try //use resource here! finally CloseHandle(Mutex); end; If I run the threads simultaneously, the first thread get's through (obviously, being the first one to create the mutex), but subsequent threads are caught in the repeat loop. If I run each thread at 5 second intervals, then all is ok. I suspect I'm not using mutexes correctly here, but I have found very little documentation about how to do this. Any ideas?

  Read the article

• Low-Hanging Fruit: Obfuscating non-critical values in JavaScript

  - by Piskvor

  I'm making an in-browser game of the type "guess what place/monument/etc. is in this satellite/aerial view", using Google Maps JS API v3. However, I need to protect against cheaters - you have to pass a google.maps.LatLng and a zoom level to the map constructor, which means a cheating user only needs to view source to get to this data. I am already unsetting every value I possibly can without breaking the map (such as center and the manipulation functions like setZoom()), and initializing the map in an anonymous function (so the object is not visible in global namespace). Now, this is of course in-browser, client-side, untrusted JavaScript; I've read much of the obfuscation tag and I'm not trying to make the script bullet-proof (it's just a game, after all). I only need to make the obfuscation reasonably hard against the 1337 Java5kryp7 haxz0rz - "kid sister encryption", as Bruce Schneier puts it. Anything harder than base64 encoding would deter most cheaters by eliminating the lowest-hanging fruit - if the cheater is smart and determined enough to use a JS debugger, he can bypass anything I can do (as I need to pass the value to Google Maps API in plaintext), but that's unlikely to happen on a mass scale (there will also be other, not-code-related ways to prevent cheating). I've tried various minimizers and obfuscators, but those will mostly deal with code - the values are still shown verbatim. TL;DR: I need to obfuscate three values in JavaScript. I'm not looking for bullet-proof armor, just a sneeze-guard. What should I use?

  Read the article

• Issue on dojo onlick event on html button

  - by Cuong Le

  I am a new kid with dojo, I got weird issue which I take lots of time and have not yet found out, assume I have 4 buttons: <button id="btnMoveFirst" data-dojo-type="dijit.form.Button" iconclass="plusIcon"> &lt; &lt;</button> <button id="btnMovePrev" data-dojo-type="dijit.form.Button" iconclass="plusIcon"> &lt;</button> <button id="btnMoveNext" data-dojo-type="dijit.form.Button" iconclass="plusIcon"> &gt;</button> <button id="btnMoveLast" data-dojo-type="dijit.form.Button" iconclass="plusIcon"> &gt; &gt;</button> And use dojo with event onclick as below: dojo.connect(dijit.registry.byId('btnMoveFirst'), "onclick", function(evt){ alert('test1'); }); dojo.connect(dijit.registry.byId('btnMovePrev'), "onclick", function(evt){ alert('test2'); }); dojo.connect(dijit.registry.byId('btnMoveNext'), "onclick", function(evt){ alert('test3'); }); dojo.connect(dijit.registry.byId('btnMoveLast'), "onclick", function(evt){ alert('test4'); }); But when I click any one of 4 buttons, or even any button in form, I got 4 alerts instead of only correct one. Does anyone know this?

  Read the article

• Liquid Layout: 100% max-width img not applied - why?

  - by MEM

  I'm totally new to this liquid layout stuff. I've notice, as most of us, that while most of my layout components "liquify", images, unfortunately, don't. So I'm trying to use the max-width: 100% on images as suggested on several places. However, and despite the definition of max-width and min-height of the img container, the img don't scale. Sample code: CSS img { max-width: 100%; } article { float: left; margin: 30px 1%; max-width: 31%; min-height: 350px; } HTML <article> <header> <h2>some header</h2> </header> <img src="/images/thumb1.jpg" alt="thumb"> <p>Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Proin vel ante a orci tempus eleifend.</p> </article> Please have a look on the following link: http://tinyurl.com/d849f8x If you see it on a wide resolution, you will notice that the "kid image", for example, don't scale. Any clue about what could the issue be, why does that image not scale? Test case: Browsers: Firefox 15.0 / Chrome 21.0 IOS: MAC OS X Lion - 10.7.3 Resolution: 1920x1200 What I get: I get an image that doesn't scale until the end of it's container. The img width won't fit the article element that contains it. What I do expect: I expect the image to enlarge, until it reaches the end it's container. Visually, I'm expecting the image to be as wide as the paragraph immediately below, in a way that, the right side of the image stays vertically aligned with the right side of the paragraph below.

  Read the article

• What is the IoC / "Springy" way to handle MVP in GWT? (Hint, probably not the Spring Roo 1.1 way)

  - by Ehrann Mehdan

  This is the Spring Roo 1.1 way of doing a factory that returns a GWT Activity (Yes, Spring Framework) public Activity getActivity(ProxyPlace place) { switch (place.getOperation()) { case DETAILS: return new EmployeeDetailsActivity((EntityProxyId<EmployeeProxy>)place.getProxyId(), requests, placeController, ScaffoldApp.isMobile() ? EmployeeMobileDetailsView.instance() : EmployeeDetailsView.instance()); case EDIT: return makeEditActivity(place); case CREATE: return makeCreateActivity(); } throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unknown operation " + place.getOperation()); } It seems to me that we just went back hundred of years if we use a switch case with constants to make a factory. Now this is official auto generated Spring roo 1.1 with GWT / GAE integration, I kid you not I can only assume this is some executives empty announcements because this is definitly not Spring It seems VMWare and Google were too fast to get something out and didn't quite finish it, isn't it? Am I missing something or this is half baked and by far not the way Spring + GWT MVP should work? Do you have a better example of how Spring, GWT (2.1 MVP approach) and GAE should connect? I would hate to do all the plumbing of managing history and activities like this. (no annotations? IOC?) I also would hate to reinvent the wheel and write my own Spring enhancement just to find someone else did the same, or worse, find out that SpringSource and Google will release roo 1.2 soon and make it right

  Read the article

• Regular Expression to replace a pattern at runtime(C#3.0)

  - by deepak.kumar.goyal

  I have a requirement. I have some files in a folder among which some file names looks like say **EUDataFiles20100503.txt, MigrateFiles20101006.txt.** Basically these are the files that I need to work upon. Now I have a config file where it is mentioned as the file pattern type as EUDataFilesYYYYMMDD, MigrateFilesYYYYMMDD. Basically the idea is that, the user can configure the file pattern and based on the pattern mentioned, I need to search for those files that are present in the folder. i.e. at runtime the YYYYMMDD will get replaced by the Year Month and Date Values. It does not matter what dates will be there(but not with time stamp ; only dates)). And the EUDataFiles or MigrateFiles names will be there.(they are fixed) i.e. If the folder has a file name as EUDataFile20100504.txt(i.e. Year 2010, Month 05, Day 04) , I should ignore this file as it is not EUDataFiles20100504.txt (kindly note that the name is plural - File(s) and not file for which the system will ignore the file). Similarly, if the Pattern given as EUDataFilesYYYYMMDD and if the file present is of type EUDataFilesYYYYDDMM then also the system should ignore. How can I solve this problem? Is it doable using regular expression(Replacing the pattern at runtime)? If so can anyone be good enough in helping me out? I am using C#3.0 and dotnet framework 3.5. Thanks

  Read the article

• A feeling that I'm not that good developer

  - by Karim

  Hi, Im having a strange feeling, but let me first introduce myself as a software developer. I started to program when I was still a kid, I had about 10 or 11 years. I really enjoy my work and never get bored from it. It's amazing how somebody could be paid for what he really likes to do and would be doing it anyway even for free. WHen I first started to program, I was feeling proud of what I was doing, each application I built was for me a success and after 2-3 year I had a feeling that I'm a coding guru. It was a nice feeling ;-) But the more I was in the field, the more types of software I started to develop I was starting to have a feeling that I'm completely wrong in that I'm guru. I felt that I'm not even a mediocre developer. Each new field I start to work on is giving me this feeling. Like when I once developed a device driver for a client, I saw how much I need to learn about device drivers. When I developed a video filter for an application, I saw how much do I still need to learn about DirectShow, Color Spaces, and all the theory behind that. The worst thing was when I started to learn algorithms. It was several years ago. I knew then the basic structures and algorithms like the sorting, some types of trees, some hashtables, strings etc.. and when I really wanted to learn a group of structures I learned about 5-6 new types and saw that in fact even this small group has several hundred subtypes of structures. It's depressing how little time people have in their lives to learn all this stuff. I'm now a software developer with about 10 years of experience and I still feel that I'm not a proficient developer when I think about things that others do in the industry. Is this normal what I'm experiencing or is it a sign of a destructive excessive ambition? Thanks in advance for any comments.

  Read the article

• Career day in kindergarten

  - by Péter Török

  I was invited to the kindergarten group of my elder daughter to talk and answer the kids' questions about my profession. There are 26 kids of age 4-6 in the group, plus 3 teachers who are fairly scared of anything related to programming and IT themselves, but bold enough to learn new tricks. I would have about 20-30 minutes, without projector or anything. They have an old computer though, which by its look may be a 486, and I am not even sure if it's functioning. My research turned up excellent earlier threads, with lots of good tips: How would you explain your job to a 5-year old? Career Day: how do I make “computer programmer” sound cool to 8 year olds? What things can I teach a group of children about programming in one day? My situation is different from each of the above though: the latter ones are concerned with older children, while the first one is about talking to a single kid (or elder person)—a group of 20 is a whole different challenge. How can I teach the kids and their teachers about programming in a fun way?

  Read the article

• Ways to implement tags - pros and cons of each

  - by bobobobo

  Related Using SO as an example, what is the most sensible way to manage tags if you anticipate they will change often? Way 1: Seriously denormalized (comma delimited) table posts +--------+-----------------+ | postId | tags | +--------+-----------------+ | 1 | c++,search,code | Here tags are comma delimited. Pros: Tags are retrieved at once with a single select query. Updating tags is simple. Easy and cheap to update. Cons: Extra parsing on tag retrieval, difficult to count how many posts use which tags. (alternatively, if limited to something like 5 tags) table posts +--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | postId | tag_1 | tag_2 | tag_3 | tag_4 | tag_5 | +--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | 1 | c++ |search | code | | | Way 2: "Slightly normalized" (separate table, no intersection) table posts +--------+-------------------+ | postId | title | +--------+-------------------+ | 1 | How do u tag? | table taggings +--------+---------+ | postId | tagName | +--------+---------+ | 1 | C++ | | 1 | search | Pros: Easy to see tag counts (count(*) from taggings where tagName='C++'). Cons: tagName will likely be repeated many, many times. Way 3: The cool kid's (normalized with intersection table) table posts +--------+---------------------------------------+ | postId | title | +--------+---------------------------------------+ | 1 | Why is a raven like a writing desk? | table tags +--------+---------+ | tagId | tagName | +--------+---------+ | 1 | C++ | | 2 | search | | 3 | foofle | table taggings +--------+---------+ | postId | tagId | +--------+---------+ | 1 | 1 | | 1 | 2 | | 1 | 3 | Pros: No repeating tag names. More girls will like you. Cons: More expensive to change tags than way #1.

  Read the article

• Error while reading custom configuration file(app.config)

  - by Newbie

  I am making a custom configuration in my winform application. (It will represent a country-corrency list) First the CountryList class namespace UtilityMethods { public class CountryList : ConfigurationSection { public CountryList() { // // TODO: Add constructor logic here // } [ConfigurationProperty("CountryCurrency", IsRequired = true)] public Hashtable CountryCurrencies { get { return CountryCurrency.GetCountryCurrency(); } } } } The GetCountryCurrency() method is defined in CountryCurrency class as under namespace UtilityMethods { public static class CountryCurrency { public static Hashtable GetCountryCurrency() { Hashtable ht = new Hashtable(); ht.Add("India", "Rupees"); ht.Add("USA", "Dollar"); return ht; } } } The app.config file looks like <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name ="CountryList1" type ="UtilityMethods.CountryList,CountryList,Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral"/> </configSections> <appSettings /> </configuration> And I am calling this from a button_click's event as try { CountryList cList = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("CountryList") as CountryList; Hashtable ht = cList.CountryCurrencies; } catch (Exception ex) { string h = ex.Message; } Upon running the application and clicking on the button I am getting this error Could not load type 'UtilityMethods.CountryList' from assembly 'System.Configuration, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' Please help (dotnet framework : 3.5 Language: C#)

  Read the article

• Calling web service from seems to hang

  - by anothershrubery

  I am trying to call an asmx web service from an Android app. Just literally started some Android development today. I've been following various solutions I have found on the net and on here and it seems it is more difficult than anticipated. I have tried various solutions and using KSoap2 seems to be the easiest way to implement this, well it would be if I could get it working. I have the following code which works up until a point: private class CallWebService extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void> { private static final String SOAP_ACTION = "http://tempuri.org/GetUser"; private static final String METHOD_NAME = "GetUser"; private static final String NAMESPACE = "http://tempuri.org/"; private static final String URL = "http://160.10.1.79:59315/Service1.asmx"; TextView tv; @Override protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) { tv=(TextView)findViewById(R.id.txtMessage); try { SoapObject request = new SoapObject(NAMESPACE, METHOD_NAME); SoapSerializationEnvelope envelope = new SoapSerializationEnvelope(SoapEnvelope.VER11); envelope.dotNet=true; envelope.setOutputSoapObject(request); HttpTransportSE androidHttpTransport = new HttpTransportSE(URL); androidHttpTransport.call(SOAP_ACTION, envelope); Object result = (Object)envelope.getResponse(); tv.setText(result.toString()); } catch (Exception e) { tv.setText(e.getMessage()); } return null; } } It seems to hang at the line androidHttpTransport.call(SOAP_ACTION, envelope); Any ideas why? Is this the correct approach? Should I be looking in another direction?

  Read the article

• Begin game programming basics

  - by AJ

  My 14 year old kid brother wants to learn to program games. He has never programmed but would like to learn programming. His interest lies with games and game programming and he understands that it can be difficult but he wants to do that. So, obviously, I turned to SO folks to know what you feel on how he should go about it. Remember, please suggest on Areas that beginners can choose, how to begin in that area, what to read in the beginning, initial languages in the beginning etc. Once the beginning part is taken care of, you may also suggest the intermediate and advanced stuff but this question is about very beginning level. If there are areas like Web games Vs. console games Vs generic computer games, then please advice on the areas. As I said he has never programmed, he might want to try all the areas and choose the one he likes the best. I hope this is not too much to ask for someone who is in this field but if this question is huge, please advice on how to break it into multiple questions. ~Thanks.

  Read the article

• Trapping messages in .NET

  - by user350632

  How can i trap a Windows system message (like WM_SETTEXT) that was sent by some window (VLC player window in my case)? I've tried to inherit NativeWindow class and override WndProc like this: class VLCFilter : NativeWindow { System.IntPtr iHandle; const int WM_SETTEXT = 0x000C; public VLCFilter() { Process p = Process.GetProcessesByName("vlc")[0]; iHandle = p.MainWindowHandle; } protected override void WndProc(ref Message aMessage) { base.WndProc(ref aMessage); if (aMessage.HWnd != iHandle) return false; if (aMessage.Msg == WM_SETTEXT) { MessageBox.Show("VLC window text changed!"); } } } I have checked with Microsoft Spy++ that WM_SETTEXT message is sent by VLC player but my code doesn't seem to get the work done. I've refered mainly to: http://www.codeproject.com/kb/dotnet/devicevolumemonitor.aspx I'm trying to make this work for some time with no success. What am I doing wrong? What I am not doing? Maybe there is easier way to do this? My initial goal is to catch when VLC player (that could be playing somewhere in the background and is not emmbed in my application) repeats its playback (have noticed that WM_SETTEXT message is sent then and I'm trying to find it out like this).

  Read the article

• best REGEXP friendly Text Editors + most powerful REGEXP syntax?

  - by John

  I am fluent with Microsoft Visual 2005 regular expressions and they are a big time saver. I seem to learn them best by having a vaguely organized cheat sheet thrown at me, at which point I read just a little and play with them until I understand what's going on. That learning approach has worked well for me, for now. I would really like to take this to the next level though. Basically -- What is the REGEXP convention that is generally regarded as the most open-ended and powerful? VS2005 Regexps seem kind of gimped, so maybe I'm a kid playing in a sandbox. Are there text editors out there that can perform a highlight all matches, list lines containing string, or some kind of powerful function like that in conjunction with the very strongest REGEXP language? If not I can just use multiple programs and a weird technique but I'd like to avoid that. I wonder if a stronger REGEXP language or a "stronger" regEXP writer might be able to have his search match all results on all lines even by clicking a "find next" by adding some simple criteria to the search. Anyway, please provide advice!

  Read the article

• Pick up relevant information from a string using regular expression C#3.0

  - by Newbie

  Hi, I have a situation. I have been given some file name which can be like <filename>YYYYMMDD<fileextension> some valid file names that will satisfy the above pattern are as under xxx20100326.xls, xxx2v20100326.csv, x_20100326.xls, xy2z_abc_20100326_xyz.csv, abc.xyz.20100326.doc, ab2.v.20100326.doc, abc.v.20100326_xyz.xls In what ever be the above defined case, I need to pick up the dates only. So for all the cases, the output will be 20100326. I am trying to achieve the same but no luck. Here is what I have done so far string testdata = "x2v20100326.csv"; string strYYYY = @"\d{4}"; string strMM = @"(1[0-2]|0[1-9])"; string strDD = @"(3[0-1]|[1-2][0-9]|0[1-9])"; string regExPattern = @"\A" + strYYYY + strMM + strDD + @"\Z"; Regex regex = new Regex(regExPattern); Match match = regex.Match(testdata); if (match.Success) { string result = match.Groups[0].Value; } I am using c#3.0 and dotnet framework 3.5 Please help. It is very urgent Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• C# form - checkboxes do not respond to plus/minus keys - easy workaround?

  - by Scott

  On forms created with pre dotNET VB and C++ (MFC), a checkbox control responded to the plus/minus key without custom programming. When focus was on the checbox control, pressing PLUS would check the box, no matter what the previous state (checked/unchecked), while pressing MINUS would uncheck it, no matter the previous state. C# winform checkboxes do not seem to exhibit this behavior. Said behavior was very, very handy for automation, whereby the automating program would set focus to a checkbox control and issue a PLUS or MINUS to check or uncheck it. Without this capability, that cannot be done, as the automation program (at least the one I am using) is unable to query the current state of the checkbox (so it can decide whether to issue a SPACE key to toggle the state to the desired one). I've gone over the properties of a checkbox in the Visual Studio 2008 IDE and could not find anything that would restore/enable response to PLUS/MINUS. Since I am in control of the sourcecode for the WinForms in question, I could replace all checkbox controls with a custom checkbox control, but blech, I'd like to avoid that - heck, I don't think I could even consider that given the amount of refactoring that would need to be done. So the bottom line is: does anyone know of a way to get this behavior back more easily than a coding change?

  Read the article

• Should I Teach My Son Programming? What approaches should I take? [closed]

  - by DaveDev

  I was wondering if it's a good idea to teach object oriented programming to my son? I was never really good at math as a kid, but I think since I've started programming it's given me a greater ability to understand math by being better able to visualise relationships between abstract models. I thought it might give him a better advantage in learning & applying logical & mathematical concepts throughout his life if he was able to take advantage of the tools available to programmers. what would be the best programming fields, techniques and/or concepts? What approach should I take? what concepts should I avoid? what fields of mathematics would he find this benfits him most? He's only 2 now so it wouldn't be for another few years before I do this, (and even at that, only from a very high level point of view). I thought I'd put it to the programming community and see what you guys thought? Possible Duplicate: What are some recommended programming resources for pre-teens?

  Read the article

• Replacing “if”s with your own number system

  - by Michael Williamson

  During our second code retreat at Red Gate, the restriction for one of the sessions was disallowing the use of if statements. That includes other constructs that have the same effect, such as switch statements or loops that will only be executed zero or one times. The idea is to encourage use of polymorphism instead, and see just how far it can be used to get rid of “if”s. The main place where people struggled to get rid of numbers from their implementation of Conway’s Game of Life was the piece of code that decides whether a cell is live or dead in the next generation. For instance, for a cell that’s currently live, the code might look something like this: if (numberOfNeighbours == 2 || numberOfNeighbours == 3) { return CellState.LIVE; } else { return CellState.DEAD; } The problem is that we need to change behaviour depending on the number of neighbours each cell has, but polymorphism only allows us to switch behaviour based on the type of a value. It follows that the solution is to make different numbers have different types: public interface IConwayNumber { IConwayNumber Increment(); CellState LiveCellNextGeneration(); } public class Zero : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return new One(); } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.DEAD; } } public class One : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return new Two(); } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.LIVE; } } public class Two : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return new ThreeOrMore(); } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.LIVE; } } public class ThreeOrMore : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return this; } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.DEAD; } } In the code that counts the number of neighbours, we use our new number system by starting with Zero and incrementing when we find a neighbour. To choose the next state of the cell, rather than inspecting the number of neighbours, we ask the number of neighbours for the next state directly: return numberOfNeighbours.LiveCellNextGeneration(); And now we have no “if”s! If C# had double-dispatch, or if we used the visitor pattern, we could move the logic for choosing the next cell out of the number classes, which might feel a bit more natural. I suspect that reimplementing the natural numbers is still going to feel about the same amount of crazy though.

  Read the article

• ASP.NET Web API - Screencast series Part 2: Getting Data

  - by Jon Galloway

  We're continuing a six part series on ASP.NET Web API that accompanies the getting started screencast series. This is an introductory screencast series that walks through from File / New Project to some more advanced scenarios like Custom Validation and Authorization. The screencast videos are all short (3-5 minutes) and the sample code for the series is both available for download and browsable online. I did the screencasts, but the samples were written by the ASP.NET Web API team. In Part 1 we looked at what ASP.NET Web API is, why you'd care, did the File / New Project thing, and did some basic HTTP testing using browser F12 developer tools. This second screencast starts to build out the Comments example - a JSON API that's accessed via jQuery. This sample uses a simple in-memory repository. At this early stage, the GET /api/values/ just returns an IEnumerable<Comment>. In part 4 we'll add on paging and filtering, and it gets more interesting.   The get by id (e.g. GET /api/values/5) case is a little more interesting. The method just returns a Comment if the Comment ID is valid, but if it's not found we throw an HttpResponseException with the correct HTTP status code (HTTP 404 Not Found). This is an important thing to get - HTTP defines common response status codes, so there's no need to implement any custom messaging here - we tell the requestor that the resource the requested wasn't there.  public Comment GetComment(int id) { Comment comment; if (!repository.TryGet(id, out comment)) throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); return comment; } This is great because it's standard, and any client should know how to handle it. There's no need to invent custom messaging here, and we can talk to any client that understands HTTP - not just jQuery, and not just browsers. But it's crazy easy to consume an HTTP API that returns JSON via jQuery. The example uses Knockout to bind the JSON values to HTML elements, but the thing to notice is that calling into this /api/coments is really simple, and the return from the $.get() method is just JSON data, which is really easy to work with in JavaScript (since JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is the native serialization format in Javascript). $(function() { $("#getComments").click(function () { // We're using a Knockout model. This clears out the existing comments. viewModel.comments([]); $.get('/api/comments', function (data) { // Update the Knockout model (and thus the UI) with the comments received back // from the Web API call. viewModel.comments(data); }); }); }); That's it! Easy, huh? In Part 3, we'll start modifying data on the server using POST and DELETE.

  Read the article

• Language Club – Battle of the Dynamic Languages

  - by Ben Griswold

  After dedicating the last eight weeks to learning Ruby, it’s time to move onto another language.  I really dig Ruby.  I really enjoy its dynamism and expressiveness and always-openness and it’s been the highlight of our coding club for me so far. But that’s just my take on the language.  I know a lot of coders who’s stomachs turn with the mere thought of Ruby.  They say it’s Ruby’s openness which has them feeling uneasy.  I’d say “write a bunch of tests and get over it,” but I figure there must be more to it than always open classes and possible method collisions. Yes, there’s something else to it alright. The folks who didn’t fall head over heals for Ruby are already in love with Python.  You might remember that Python was the first language we tackled in our coding club.  My time with Python was okay but it didn’t feel as natural to me as Ruby.  But let’s say we started with Ruby and then moved onto Python.  Would I see Python in a different light right now.  Might I even prefer Python over Ruby?  I suppose it’s possible but it’s pretty tough to test that theory – unless we visit Python for a second time. That’s right. The language club is going to focus on Python again and in my attempt to learn Python – yet again – in the open, I’ll be posting my solutions here just as I did for Ruby.  We don’t always have second chances so I going about this relearning with two primary goals in mind:  First, I’m going to use IronPython and the IronPython tools which provide a Python code editor, a file-based project system, and an interactive Python interpreter, all inside Visual Studio 2010.  As a note, the IronPython tools are now part of the main IronPython installer which is Version 2.7 Alpha 1 (not the latest stable version, 2.6.1) and I’d be crazy not to use them.  Second, I’d like to make sure I’m still learning Python without a complete MS skew so I’m going to run my code through Eclipse using the PyDev plugin as well.  Heck, I might use IDLE too. I already have this setup on my machine so it’s no big deal. Okay, that’s it for now.  I worked on the first ten Euler problems last night and the solutions will be posted shortly. Wish me luck.

  Read the article

• Getting Current with Visual Studio 2010 for Web Developers

  - by plitwin

  I don't know about you, but I find it kind of crazy at times figuring out if I have the latest of everything there is for the Visual Studio 2010 developer from Microsoft. (This does not include any third-party components, just recommended updates from Microsoft.) And the be honest, the msn.microsoft.com and asp.net sites are not that helpful in figuring this out.In an effort to help, I have enumerated here what the latest VS 2010 setup should include, complete with download links. When you install everything here, you will be able to develop ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 3 applications and web sites in addition to the other stuff your version of Visual Studio supports (e.g., Silverlight, WPF, etc.). These downloads will also include NuGet and the Entity Framework 4.1, so there is no need to download this software separately.Visual Studio 2010. First of all, you need to purchase and install Visual Studio 2010 itself. For the free Express version, you can download it from Visual Web Developer 2010 ExpressVisual Studio Service Pack 1 (released Spring 2011).This is a must-have download that fixes a bunch of bugs and a number of enhancements too including preliminary support for HTML5 and CSS3. See #4 below for better support of these web technologies. Download and install from VS 2010 SP1 download page. You can find details on the features of the service pack here. ASP.NET MVC3 Tools Update (released Spring 2011)If you are using ASP.NET MVC 3, then you should also download install this update for Visual Studio from ASP.NET MVC3 Tools Update download page. This update improves Visual Studio's support for MVC 3, including better scaffolding, NuGet, Entity Framework 4.1, and more. A good overview of the updates can be found in Phil Haack's blog post.Web Standards Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (released June 2011)This is an update to VS 2010 SP1 that "brings VS 2010 intellisense & validation as close to W3C specification as we could get via means of an extension". Download and install from Web Standards Update download page. A good description of the changes can be found in the Visual Web Developer Team blog post.Note: I don't control these download pages, so it is possible they will change. If so, I will do my best to update these links. This information was current as of June 24, 2011.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63  | Next Page >