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• Part 2: Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

  - by albertpascual

  Seems like my previous post inspired by the work of Michael “Doc” Norton was a great success for the amount of emails I have received. Yet amazed how many people didn’t want to discuss their questions in the comments  sections. I would encourage people to be more public, still I would like to reply to all of you on this public media. I still welcome those emails. What I found out is that many people feels like me, they want to be developers and still be compensated for their experience without wanting to take a job as a manager. Their perfect day is a full day of coding and learning. Many believe their companies will never pay a manager’s salary to a developer no matter what. Most of you ask how to get the ball rolling. And is the later that I’m addressing here, the previous group, will never try. What companies understand developers value and where can I find them? This is a very difficult question to ask, I don’t have a list of those companies or departments, I have seen in my past signs in companies bending backwards to compensate, in more ways the monetary, a developer that is a good resource to them. Allowing the person to move out of the state and still let them work for the company from home is a sign that company goes by individual cases. Allowing them to go to conference that will not benefit the company is another big sign. Simple signs like flexible hours and letting some people work from home. To see those signs you need to be working in that company for awhile and look at the departments where the manager is taking care of their employees in individual cases. Look for the department where people get quiet extra perks, where some people in the department work from home or remotely. In my experience, but not always true, medium to big companies, are prompt to recognize good developers. Then again, some companies just don’t get it and is when you see many technical people managing developers. For all the people that email me stating that developers can also be very good managers, I do not disagree, I just think that a good developers loves writing code, when you remove that part the better salary isn’t enough to keep a developer happy. Burned out developers appreciate being promoted to managers. How do I know I work in a bad company? In my experience I have been a consultant and seen many companies, a few signs I have learned about companies that will not recognize good developers are: When the turn over is pretty high, when developers are moving out in a big rate, no rocket scientist needs to tap you in the shoulder. When the company is looking always to outsource their development resources. The product is not that interesting nor the company cares too much for their final result and support. Code sweat shops. You’ll know when you start working in one of those. Run for the hills! Where do I start? Disclaimer: I have only based this post on Michael “Doc” Norton, this is just my interpretation and ideas. First thing is to look at Michael “Doc” Norton presentation Take Control of Your Development Career http://docondev.blogspot.com/ That should be the first thing any developer should look and follow like it was a pattern. I would personally recommend to find some language or pattern you are interested with and learn it, learn something that will make you happy. Second, join a User Group and get involve in the community. There are hundreds of user groups, and I’m sure you’ll find one in your city or near you town. Code Camps are Developers Meet Ups are also good resources. Third, I would join a open source project you are interested or better yet, create a new open source project with the new technology that you have learn and get coding. Fourth, create a Twitter account and follow the people that talks about the technology you are interested on. If you follow this 4 steps above I think you’ll be on your way, after they are complete, when you release your Open Source project you can say that you accomplished the first steps. Now, do not expect anything to change in your career life, you are changing and should not expect anything in return, besides borrowing some time from sleeping and your family. Creating a good schedule may help you, I find wasted time in many places that I use. Flying for work is actually one of those that allows me to do my best work on a airplane, don’t need to borrow time from anywhere else. Making sure you always have a light, charged laptop is so important. Next steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern or my interpretation of. First, help run a user group or better yet, start a new user group. I’ll add, as well, go to one conference a year and free development events around your city; Code Camps, Geek Dinners, etc. There are many free events sponsored by different companies for developers to get to know their products, I highly recommend those as the way to get connected. Second, chose a mentor, this is a very hard thing to do I experienced, find an expert in the technology you are learning that has the time for you, it is difficult, I wish you best of luck. Third, learn another technology or pattern, open your horizons a little bit more. Why not, if you had fun previously, keep doing it. Fourth, get involved in forums to answer and ask questions, getting notice in public forums is rewarding for your ego after such a long journey. Final steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern Teach what you know, become humble on your knowledge, find as many opportunities to teach and to get involved with the community, bring all that to your day job. Mr. Norton talks about getting naked, expose yourself to others in your knowledge and what you do not know. You are never too important for small opportunities, yet don’t  be afraid to take anything big and learn from the experience. Anytime you have the opportunity to talk to somebody that has reach the point the community knows his or her name, means that you should learn from it. Take opportunities that won’t make you money, yet will make you happy. Sometimes you need to spend money and time. Register talks in Code Camps and Dev Meet Ups, those are free, also go to Conference, Development Summits and Geek Diners for example. One day, people will pay you to attend. When will all these pay off? I don’t know. I’m still in the path, there are a few things that during your journey you may get little acknowledgements that you are in the correct path. In my case I think those are the little signs that tells you about your journey. I got awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for ASP.NET in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I got selected to speak at the DevConnections in Las Vegas in 2010 and Orlando 2011. I do believe that I do have a long way to go, yet what I do makes me happy and I hope I can keep doing for years to come. Every year I can see an improvement on my code, and more frameworks and languages are under my belt, I learn to embrace them all as well as in my daily job, I have been able to work in a few projects beyond my department. I’m a learner and believer of the Michael “Doc” Norton pattern. Looking forward to learn more about it to be able to apply it better. In my short journey I now see my mistakes, I did a few things right, I have been listening the intelligent people and not being afraid to move along the technology changes. In my professional life, I have tried to avoid being placed in only one technology and product. I have always share my code and never confused anybody that wanted to take over any of my projects, I didn’t think anything I created as my own nor care too much when politics didn’t see my vision. I stayed flexible, ready and visible, yet humble. I keep my head just below the clouds, and avoided managers meetings. I credit my manager for my success, and I faulted publicly only myself for the failures. Hope this helps. Cheers, Al Follow me in Twitter  Read my previous post tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/09/part-2-career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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• Software Engineering Practices &ndash; Different Projects should have different maturity levels

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve had a lot of discussions at the office lately about the drastically different sets of software engineering practices used on our various projects, if what we are doing is appropriate, and what factors should you be considering when determining what practices are most appropriate in a given context. I wanted to write up my thoughts in a little more detail on this subject, so here we go: If you compare any two software projects (specifically comparing their codebases) you’ll often see very different levels of maturity in the software engineering practices employed. By software engineering practices, I’m specifically referring to the quality of the code and the amount of technical debt present in the project. Things such as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Behavior Driven Development, proper adherence to the SOLID principles, etc. are all practices that you would expect at the mature end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum would be the quick-and-dirty solutions that are done using something like an Access Database, Excel Spreadsheet, or maybe some quick “drag-and-drop coding”. For this blog post I’m going to refer to this as the Software Engineering Maturity Spectrum (SEMS). I believe there is a time and a place for projects at every part of that SEMS. The risks and costs associated with under-engineering solutions have been written about a million times over so I won’t bother going into them again here, but there are also (unnecessary) costs with over-engineering a solution. Sometimes putting multiple layers, and IoC containers, and abstracting out the persistence, etc is complete overkill if a one-time use Access database could solve the problem perfectly well. A lot of software developers I talk to seem to automatically jump to the very right-hand side of this SEMS in everything they do. A common rationalization I hear is that it may seem like a small trivial application today, but these things always grow and stick around for many years, then you’re stuck maintaining a big ball of mud. I think this is a cop-out. Sure you can’t always anticipate how an application will be used or grow over its lifetime (can you ever??), but that doesn’t mean you can’t manage it and evolve the underlying software architecture as necessary (even if that means having to toss the code out and re-write it at some point…maybe even multiple times). My thoughts are that we should be making a conscious decision around the start of each project approximately where on the SEMS we want the project to exist. I believe this decision should be based on 3 factors: 1. Importance - How important to the business is this application? What is the impact if the application were to suddenly stop working? 2. Complexity - How complex is the application functionality? 3. Life-Expectancy - How long is this application expected to be in use? Is this a one-time use application, does it fill a short-term need, or is it more strategic and is expected to be in-use for many years to come? Of course this isn’t an exact science. You can’t say that Project X should be at the 73% mark on the SEMS and expect that to be helpful. My point is not that you need to precisely figure out what point on the SEMS the project should be at then translate that into some prescriptive set of practices and techniques you should be using. Rather my point is that we need to be aware that there is a spectrum, and that not everything is going to be (or should be) at the edges of that spectrum, indeed a large number of projects should probably fall somewhere within the middle; and different projects should adopt a different level of software engineering practices and maturity levels based on the needs of that project. To give an example of this way of thinking from my day job: Every couple of years my company plans and hosts a large event where ~400 of our customers all fly in to one location for a multi-day event with various activities. We have some staff whose job it is to organize the logistics of this event, which includes tracking which flights everybody is booked on, arranging for transportation to/from airports, arranging for hotel rooms, name tags, etc The last time we arranged this event all these various pieces of data were tracked in separate spreadsheets and reconciliation and cross-referencing of all the data was literally done by hand using printed copies of the spreadsheets and several people sitting around a table going down each list row by row. Obviously there is some room for improvement in how we are using software to manage the event’s logistics. The next time this event occurs we plan to provide the event planning staff with a more intelligent tool (either an Excel spreadsheet or probably an Access database) that can track all the information in one location and make sure that the various pieces of data are properly linked together (so for example if a person cancels you only need to delete them from one place, and not a dozen separate lists). This solution would fall at or near the very left end of the SEMS meaning that we will just quickly create something with very little attention paid to using mature software engineering practices. If we examine this project against the 3 criteria I listed above for determining it’s place within the SEMS we can see why: Importance – If this application were to stop working the business doesn’t grind to a halt, revenue doesn’t stop, and in fact our customers wouldn’t even notice since it isn’t a customer facing application. The impact would simply be more work for our event planning staff as they revert back to the previous way of doing things (assuming we don’t have any data loss). Complexity – The use cases for this project are pretty straightforward. It simply needs to manage several lists of data, and link them together appropriately. Precisely the task that access (and/or Excel) can do with minimal custom development required. Life-Expectancy – For this specific project we’re only planning to create something to be used for the one event (we only hold these events every 2 years). If it works well this may change (see below). Let’s assume we hack something out quickly and it works great when we plan the next event. We may decide that we want to make some tweaks to the tool and adopt it for planning all future events of this nature. In that case we should examine where the current application is on the SEMS, and make a conscious decision whether something needs to be done to move it further to the right based on the new objectives and goals for this application. This may mean scrapping the access database and re-writing it as an actual web or windows application. In this case, the life-expectancy changed, but let’s assume the importance and complexity didn’t change all that much. We can still probably get away with not adopting a lot of the so-called “best practices”. For example, we can probably still use some of the RAD tooling available and might have an Autonomous View style design that connects directly to the database and binds to typed datasets (we might even choose to simply leave it as an access database and continue using it; this is a decision that needs to be made on a case-by-case basis). At Anvil Digital we have aspirations to become a primarily product-based company. So let’s say we use this tool to plan a handful of events internally, and everybody loves it. Maybe a couple years down the road we decide we want to package the tool up and sell it as a product to some of our customers. In this case the project objectives/goals change quite drastically. Now the tool becomes a source of revenue, and the impact of it suddenly stopping working is significantly less acceptable. Also as we hold focus groups, and gather feedback from customers and potential customers there’s a pretty good chance the feature-set and complexity will have to grow considerably from when we were using it only internally for planning a small handful of events for one company. In this fictional scenario I would expect the target on the SEMS to jump to the far right. Depending on how we implemented the previous release we may be able to refactor and evolve the existing codebase to introduce a more layered architecture, a robust set of automated tests, introduce a proper ORM and IoC container, etc. More likely in this example the jump along the SEMS would be so large we’d probably end up scrapping the current code and re-writing. Although, if it was a slow phased roll-out to only a handful of customers, where we collected feedback, made some tweaks, and then rolled out to a couple more customers, we may be able to slowly refactor and evolve the code over time rather than tossing it out and starting from scratch. The key point I’m trying to get across is not that you should be throwing out your code and starting from scratch all the time. But rather that you should be aware of when and how the context and objectives around a project changes and periodically re-assess where the project currently falls on the SEMS and whether that needs to be adjusted based on changing needs. Note: There is also the idea of “spectrum decay”. Since our industry is rapidly evolving, what we currently accept as mature software engineering practices (the right end of the SEMS) probably won’t be the same 3 years from now. If you have a project that you were to assess at somewhere around the 80% mark on the SEMS today, but don’t touch the code for 3 years and come back and re-assess its position, it will almost certainly have changed since the right end of the SEMS will have moved farther out (maybe the project is now only around 60% due to decay). Developer Skills Another important aspect to this whole discussion is around the skill sets of your architects and lead developers. When talking about the progression of a developers skills from junior->intermediate->senior->… they generally start by only being able to write code that belongs on the left side of the SEMS and as they gain more knowledge and skill they become capable of working at a higher and higher level along the SEMS. We all realize that the learning never stops, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you can comfortably develop at the right-end of the SEMS (the exact practices and techniques that translates to is constantly changing, but that’s not the point here). A critical skill that I’d love to see more evidence of in our industry is the most senior guys not only being able to work at the right-end of the SEMS, but more importantly be able to consciously work at any point along the SEMS as project needs dictate. An even more valuable skill would be if you could make the conscious decision to move a projects code further right on the SEMS (based on changing needs) and do so in an incremental manner without having to start from scratch. An exercise that I’m planning to go through with all of our projects here at Anvil in the near future is to map out where I believe each project currently falls within this SEMS, where I believe the project *should* be on the SEMS based on the business needs, and for those that don’t match up (i.e. most of them) come up with a plan to improve the situation.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 06, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 06, 2011Popular ReleasesStyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.SSH.NET Library: 2011.1.6: Fixes CommandTimeout default value is fixed to infinite. Port Forwarding feature improvements Memory leaks fixes New Features Add ErrorOccurred event to handle errors that occurred on different thread New and improve SFTP features SftpFile now has more attributes and some operations Most standard operations now available Allow specify encoding for command execution KeyboardInteractiveConnectionInfo class added for "keyboard-interactive" authentication. Add ability to specify bo...UltimateJB: Ultimate JB 2.03 PL3 KAKAROTO: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 2.43 !!! Conclusion : - ultimateJB DEFAULT => Pas de spoof mais disponible pour les PS3 suivantes : 3.41_kiosk 3.41 3.40 3.30 3.21 3.15 3.10 3.01 2.76 2.70 2.60 2.53 2.43.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...VidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffASP.NET MVC CMS ( Using CommonLibrary.NET ): CommonLibrary.NET CMS 0.9.5 Alpha: CommonLibrary CMSA simple yet powerful CMS system in ASP.NET MVC 2 using C# 4.0. ActiveRecord based components for Blogs, Widgets, Pages, Parts, Events, Feedback, BlogRolls, Links Includes several widgets ( tag cloud, archives, recent, user cloud, links twitter, blog roll and more ) Built using the http://commonlibrarynet.codeplex.com framework. ( Uses TDD, DDD, Models/Entities, Code Generation ) Can run w/ In-Memory Repositories or Sql Server Database See Documentation tab for Ins...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.9 BETA: 2.2.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the Gobl...xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...DbDocument: DbDoc Initial Version: DbDoc Initial versionASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 1.0: - Norwegian translation - French translation - German translation - WBFS dump for analysis - Scalable full HQ cover - Support for log file - Load game images improved - Support for image splitting - Diff for images after transfer - Support for scrubbing modes - Search functionality for log - Recurse depth for Files/Load - Show progress while downloading game cover - Supports more databases for cover download - Game cover loading routines improvedAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.1: Fix: Fixed a bug where pressing Save As would not select the Mastery Directory by default Unexpected errors are now always reported to the user before closing AutoLoL down.* Extracted champion data to Data directory** Added disclaimer to notify users this application has nothing to do with Riot Games Inc. Updated Codeplex image * An error report will be shown to the user which can help the developers to find out what caused the error, this should improve support ** We are working on ...TortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.1.8: TortoiseHg 1.1.8 is a minor bug fix release, with minor improvementsBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.6 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.6 with the following new feature: * TextDecorations property is implemented in Title for Chart. * TitleTextDecorations property is implemented in Axis. * MinPointHeight property is now applicable for Column and Bar Charts. Also this release includes few bug fixes: * ToolTipText property of DataSeries was not getting applied from Style. * Chart threw exception if IndicatorEnabled property was set to true and Too...New Projects.NET Framework Extensions Packages: Lightweight NuGet packages with reusable source code extending core .NET functionality, typically in self-contained source files added to your projects as internal classes that can be easily kept up-to-date with NuGet..NET Random Mock Extensions: .NET Random Mock Extensions allow to generate by 1 line of code object implementing any interface or class and fill its properties with random values. This can be usefull for generating test data objects for View or unit testing while you have no real domain object model.ancc: anccASP.NET Social Controls: ASP.NET Social Controls is a small collection of server controls designed to make integrating social sharing utilities such as ShareThis, AddThis and AddToAny easier, more manageable, and X/HTML-compliant, with configuration files and per-instance settings.Autofac for WindowsPhone7: This project hosts the releases for Autofac built for WindowsPhone7AutoSensitivity: AutoSensitivity allows you to define different mouse sensitivities (speeds) for your tocuhpad and mouse and automatically switch between them (based on mouse connect / disconnect).BaseCode: basecodeCaliburn Micro Silverlight Navigation: Caliburn Micro Silverlight Navigation adds navigation to Caliburn Micro UI Framework by applying the ViewModel-First principle. Debian 5 Agent for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Debian 5 System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent. Debian 5 Management Pack For System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Debian 5 Management Pack for SCOM 2007 R2. It will be useless without the Agent (in another project).Eventbrite Helper for WebMatrix: The Eventbrite Helper for WebMatrix makes it simple to promote your Eventbrite events in your WebMatrix site. With a few lines of code you will be able to display your events on your web site with integration with Windows Live Calendar and Google Calendar.Eye Check: EyeCheck is an eye health testing project. It contains a set of tests to examine eye health. It's developed in C# using the Silverlight technology.Hooly Search: This ASP.NET project lets you browse through and search text within holy booksIssueVision.ST: A Silverlight LOB sample using Self-tracking Entities, WCF Services, WIF, MVVM Light toolkit, MEF, and T4 Templates.Lawyer Officer: Projeto desenvolvido como meu trabalho de conclusão de curso para formação em bacharelado em sistemas da informação da FATEF-São VicenteLINQtoROOT: Translates LINQ queries from the .NET world in to CERN's ROOT language (C++) and then runs them (locally or on a PROOF server).OA: ??????????Open Manuscript System: Open Manuscript Systems (OMS) is a research journal management and publishing system with manuscript tracking that has been developed in this project to expand and improve access to research.ProjectCNPM_Vinhlt_Teacher: Ðây là b?n CNPM demo c?a nhóm 6,K52a3 HUS VN. b?n demo này cung là project dâu ti?n tri?n khai phát tri?n th? nghi?m trên mô hình m?ng - Nhi?u member cùng phát tri?n cùng lúc QuanLyNhanKhau: WPF test.RazorPad: RazorPad is a quick and simple stand-alone editing environment that allows anyone (even non-developers) to author Razor templates. It is developed in WPF using C# and relies on the System.WebPages.Razor libraries (included in the project download). Rovio Tour Guide: More details to follow soon....long story short building a robotic tour guide using the Rovio roving webcam platform for proof of concept.ScrumPilot: ScrumPilot is a viewer of events coming from Team Foundation Server The main goal of this project is to help team to follow in real time the Checkins and WorkItems changing. Team can do comments to each event and they can preview some TFS artifacts.S-DMS: S-DMS?????????（Document Manage System）Sharepoint Documentation Generator: New MOSS feature to automatically generate documentation/tables for fields, content types, lists, users, etc...ShengjieGao's projects: ?????Stylish DOS Box: Since the introduction of Windows 3.11 I am trying to avoid the DOS box and use any applet provided with GUI in Windows system. Yet, I realize that there is no week passed by without me opening the DOS box! This project will give the DOS Box a new look.Table2DTO: Auto generate code to build objects (DTOs, Models, etc) from a data table.Techweb: Alon's and Simon's 236607 homework assignments.TLC5940 Driver for Netduino: An Netduino Library for the TI TLC5940 16-Channel PWM Chip. Tratando Exceptions da Send Port na Orchestration: Quando a Send Port é do tipo Request-Response manipular o exception é intuitivo, já que basta colocar um escopo e adicionar um exception do tipo System.Exception. Mas quando a porta é one-way a coisa complica um pouco.UAC Runner: UAC Runner is a small application which allows the running of applications as an administrator from the command line using Windows UAC.Ubuntu 10 Agent for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Ubuntu 10 System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent.Ubuntu 10 Management Pack For System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Ubuntu 10 Management Pack for SCOM 2007 R2. It will be useless without the Agent (in another project). It is based on Red Hat 5 Management Pack. See the Download section to download the MPs and the source files (XML) Whe Online Storage: Whe Online Storage, is an 3. party online storage system and tools for free source. C#, .NET 4.0, SilverlightWindows Phone MVP: An MVP implementation for Windows Phone.

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• Eclipse Helios on OS X Snow Leopard crashes frequently when editing certain PHP files

  - by William

  I use Eclipse Helios (Eclipse Platform: 3.6.0.I20100608-0911, Eclipse IDE for PHP Developers: 1.3.0.20100617-0520) all the time on OS X (Snow Leopard), and it seems I only run into trouble whenever I'm editing a PHP file that's part of the WordPress blogging framework. When I move my cursor to a variable or function name, that often triggers the beach ball of death. I suspect Eclipse is trying to look up that variable/function and for some reason that causes an endless loop. Sometimes it's not just variables or functions. Just today I was trying to replace all occurrences of a quoted string. Every time I clicked "Replace All", the program would freeze immediately after the string was replaced and the text cursor was moved to the replaced position. I think the moving of the text cursor is important, because I got the same result when I searched for the string (thus moving the cursor), but NOT when I searched for a nonexistent string. I tried disabling everything in my preferences related to marked occurrences, hovering, code assistance, etc. Nothing helps. I use Eclipse for all my projects, and I find that it's only WordPress projects where this happens. Here's my eclipse.ini file: -startup ../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar --launcher.library ../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx_1.1.0.v20100503 -product org.eclipse.epp.package.php.product --launcher.defaultAction openFile -showsplash org.eclipse.platform --launcher.XXMaxPermSize 512m --launcher.defaultAction openFile -vmargs -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 -XstartOnFirstThread -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10 -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70 -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode -XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing -XX:CompileThreshold=5 -Xms128m -Xmx512m -Xss2m -Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns -XstartOnFirstThread -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts -framework ../../../plugins/org.eclipse.osgi.services_3.2.100.v20100503.jar I have 4GB of RAM, so I don't know if the problem is I'm underutilizing my resources. Here's what I see over and over in the error log: !ENTRY org.eclipse.jface 2 0 2011-01-16 16:26:21.533 !MESSAGE Keybinding conflicts occurred. They may interfere with normal accelerator operation. !SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.jface 2 0 2011-01-16 16:26:21.533 !MESSAGE A conflict occurred for ALT+COMMAND+Q P: Binding(ALT+COMMAND+Q P, ParameterizedCommand(Command(org.eclipse.ui.views.showView,Show View, Shows a particular view, Category(org.eclipse.ui.category.views,Views,Commands for opening views,true), org.eclipse.ui.handlers.ShowViewHandler@2a46d1, [Lorg.eclipse.ui.internal.commands.Parameter;@18f50c2,,true), [Lorg.eclipse.core.commands.Parameterization;@1ff1855), org.eclipse.ui.defaultAcceleratorConfiguration, org.eclipse.ui.contexts.window,,cocoa,system) Binding(ALT+COMMAND+Q P, ParameterizedCommand(Command(org.eclipse.ui.views.showView,Show View, Shows a particular view, Category(org.eclipse.ui.category.views,Views,Commands for opening views,true), org.eclipse.ui.handlers.ShowViewHandler@2a46d1, [Lorg.eclipse.ui.internal.commands.Parameter;@18f50c2,,true), [Lorg.eclipse.core.commands.Parameterization;@96b40c), org.eclipse.ui.defaultAcceleratorConfiguration, org.eclipse.ui.contexts.window,,cocoa,system) !ENTRY org.eclipse.core.net 1 0 2011-01-16 16:26:22.217 !MESSAGE System property http.proxyHost has been set to 127.0.0.1 by an external source. This value will be overwritten using the values from the preferences !ENTRY org.eclipse.core.net 1 0 2011-01-16 16:26:22.217 !MESSAGE System property http.proxyPort has been set to 8888 by an external source. This value will be overwritten using the values from the preferences !ENTRY org.eclipse.core.net 1 0 2011-01-16 16:26:22.218 !MESSAGE System property https.proxyHost has been set to 127.0.0.1 by an external source. This value will be overwritten using the values from the preferences !ENTRY org.eclipse.core.net 1 0 2011-01-16 16:26:22.219 !MESSAGE System property https.proxyPort has been set to 8888 by an external source. This value will be overwritten using the values from the preferences I did some experimenting with the particular script that's giving me trouble. It's a hybrid of HTML and PHP, so Eclipse has to do both HTML and PHP validation. I wondered if the HTML validation had something to do with it, so I created a new file, copied the contents over, and messed with the doctype element. I found that if I replaced the well-formed XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype element with a generic doctype (as such: <!DOCTYPE html>), then I did not crash the program just by moving the cursor around. I set all HTML validation rules to "Ignore", but it still didn't solve my problems. For now, I'm just going to echo the doctype using PHP instead of entering it literally. That seems to prevent crashes. I notice that when I move the cursor around the document, Eclipse displays the "xpath" to my current location at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes there's a delay while it figures out my current path. Perhaps when it's validating against the Strict doctype, it has problems quickly calculating the xpath as I move the cursor around? Maybe it has a stack overflow that causes it to crash.

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• LINQ to Twitter Maintenance Feedback

  - by Joe Mayo

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WinAZ/archive/2013/06/16/linq-to-twitter-maintenance-feedback.aspxIt’s always fun to receive positive feedback on your work. If you receive a sufficient amount of positive feedback, you know you’re doing something right. Sometimes, people provide negative feedback too. There are a couple ways to handle it: come back fighting or engage for clarification. The way you handle the negative feedback depends on what your goals are. Feedback Approaches If you know the feedback is incorrect and you need to promote your idea or product, you might want to come back fighting. The feedback might just be comments by a troll or competitor wanting to spread FUD. However, this could be the totally wrong approach if you misjudge the source and intentions of the feedback. In a lot of cases, feedback is a golden opportunity. Sometimes, a problem exists that you either don’t know about or don’t realize the true impact of the problem. If you decide to come back fighting, you might loose the opportunity to learn something new. However, if you engage the person providing the feedback, looking for clarification, you might learn something very important. Negative feedback and it’s clarification can lead to the collection of useful and actionable data. In my case, something that prompted this blog post, I noticed someone who tweeted a negative comment about LINQ to Twitter. Normally, any less than stellar comments are usually from folks that need help – so I help if I can. This was different. I was like “Don’t use LINQ to Twitter”. This is an open source project, the comment didn’t come from a competing project, and  sounded more like an expression of frustration. So I engaged. Not only did the person respond, but I got some decent quality feedback. What’s also interesting is a couple other side conversations sprouted on the subject, which gave me more useful data. LINQ to Twitter Thread Actions Essentially, this particular issue centered around maintenance. There are actually several sub-issues at play here: dependencies, error handling, debugging, and visibility. I’ll describe each one and my interpretation. Dependencies Dependencies are where a library has references to other libraries. This means that when you build your application, you need DLLs for the entire dependency graph for your application. There are several potential problems with this that include more libraries for configuration management, potential versioning mismatches, and lack of cross-platform support. In the early days of LINQ to Twitter, I allowed developers to contribute and add dependencies, but it became very problematic (for reasons stated). It was like a ball and chain that kept me from moving forward. So, I refactored and pulled other open-source into my project to eliminate external dependencies. This lets me fix the code in my project without relying on someone else to upgrade or fix their DLL. The motivation for this was from early negative feedback that translated as important data and acted on it. Today, LINQ to Twitter has zero dependencies. Note: Rejecting good code from community members who worked hard to make your project better is a painful experience in itself. I have to point out that any contribution was not in vain because they had a positive influence on my subsequent refactoring that resulted in a better developer experience. Error Handling Error handling has been a problem in the past. I have this combination of supporting both synchronous and asynchronous (APM) processing that can be complex at times. Within the last 6 months, I did a fair amount of refactoring to detect errors and process them properly. I also refactored TwitterQueryException so it includes important data from Twitter. During this refactoring, I’ve made breaking changes that I felt would improve the development experience (small things like renaming a callback property to Exception, rather than Error). I think the async error handling is much better than it was a year ago. For all the work I’ve done, there is more to do. I think that a combination of more error handling support, e.g. improving semantics, and education through documentation and samples will improve the error handling story. Because of what I’ve done so far, it isn’t bad, but I see opportunities for improvement. Debugging Debugging can be painful. Here’s why: you have multiple layers of technology to navigate and figure out where the real problem is – Twitter API, Security, HTTP, LINQ to Twitter, and application. You can probably add your own nuances to that list, but the point is that debugging in this environment can be complex. I think that my plans for error handling will contribute to making the debugging process easier. However, there’s more I can do in the way of documentation and guidance. Some of the questions to be answered revolve around when something goes wrong, how does the developer figure out that there is a problem, what the problem is, and what to do about it. One example that has gone a long way to helping LINQ to Twitter developers is the 401 FAQ. A 401 Unauthorized is the error that the Twitter API returns when a use isn’t able to authenticate and is one of the most difficult problems faced by LINQ to Twitter developers. What I did was read guidance from Twitter and collect techniques from my own development and actions helping other developers to compile an extensive list of reasons for the 401 and ways to fix the problem. At one time, over half of the questions I answered in the forums were to help solve 401 issues. After publishing the 401 FAQ, I rarely get a 401 question and it’s because the person didn’t know about the FAQ. If the person is too lazy to read the FAQ, that’s not my issue, but the results in support issues have been dramatic. I think debugging can benefit from the education and documentation approach, but I’m always open to suggestions on whatever else I can do. Visibility Visibility is a nuance of the error handling/debugging discussion but is deeply rooted in comfort and control. The questions to ask in this area are what is happening as my code runs and how testable is the code. In support of these areas, LINQ to Twitter does have logging and TwitterContext properties that help see what’s happening on requests. The logging functionality allows any developer to connect a TextWriter to the Log property of TwitterContext to see what’s happening. Further, TwitterContext has a Headers property to see the headers Twitter returns and a RawResults property to show the Json string Twitter returns. From a testing perspective, I’ve been able to write hundreds of unit tests, over 600 when this post is published, and growing. If you write your own library, you have full control over all of these aspects. The tradeoff here is that while you have access to the LINQ to Twitter source code and modify it for all the visibility, LINQ to Twitter *will* change (which is good) and you will have to figure out how to merge that with your changes (which is hard). The fact is that this is a limitation of any 3rd party library, not just LINQ to Twitter. So, it’s a design decision where the tradeoff is between control and productivity. That said, there are things I can do with LINQ to Twitter to make the visibility story more compelling. I think there are opportunities to improve diagnostics. This would be a ton of work because it would need to provide multi-level logging that can be tuned for production and support any logging provider you want to attach. I’ve considered approaches such as how the new Semantic Logging application block connects to Windows Error Reporting as a potential target. Whatever I do would need to be extensible without creating native external dependencies. e.g. how many 3rd party libraries force a dependency on a logging framework that you don’t use. So, this won’t be an easy feat, but I believe it can be part of the roadmap. I think that a lot of developers are unaware of existing visibility features, so the first step would be to provide more documentation and guidance. My thought are that this would lead to more feedback that will help improve this area. Summary Recent feedback highlights some of items that are important to LINQ to Twitter developers, such as dependencies, error handling, debugging, and visibility. I know that there are maintenance issues that have been problems for LINQ to Twitter developers in the past. I’ve done a lot of work in this area, such as improving error handling, adding visibility features, and providing extensive API documentation. That said, there is more to be done to make LINQ to Twitter the best Twitter API experience available for .NET developers and I welcome anyone’s thoughts on what I’ve written here or new improvements. @JoeMayo

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• Java Generics, JPA 2, J2EE, JSF 2, GWT, Ajax, Oracle's Java Strategies, Flex, iPhone, Agile ALM, Gra

  - by Kim Won

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – India's Biggest Polyglot Conference and Workshops for IT Software Professionals Bangalore, April 9, 2010: The GIDS.Java Conference and Workshops has announced the complete program of over 50 sessions on the present and future of the Java language and VM, how they are evolving to meet the community's ever-changing needs, and some of the cutting-edge tools, technologies & techniques used for building robust enterprise Java applications today. The GIDs.Java track at Great Indian Developer Summit takes place 22 and 23 April 2010, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.Java at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. During 22 and 23 April 2010, GIDS.Java offers a multi-track conference, workshops, expo show floor, and networking opportunities. The first keynote at GIDS.Java "Pointy Haired Bosses and Pragmatic Programmers" is led by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. He speaks about how each of us has a professional responsibility to be objective and make decisions that will help us and our teams be productive and deliver results. Venkat will pick on some fallacies, lay down facts, and discuss how to stay professional and objective in our daily efforts. The second keynote of the day explains the practical features that make the Cloud so interesting, and why everyone should start using it in their everyday life. Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services Technology Evangelist, will detail technical examples, business details all mixed with a lot of Italian humor to ensure audience enjoy this talk without a single line of code. The third keynote of the day gives an exciting overview of directions in the Java space for Oracle, featuring concrete signs of Oracles heavy investment, a clear concise strategy overview, and deep dives into some of the most interesting pieces of technology being developed in the Java Platform Group today; such as JavaEE, JDK7, JavaFX, and our exciting new visual tools. Featuring demos by a Java evangelism team star, Simon Ritter, this talk takes you top to bottom in Java Technology. Featured talks at GID.Web include: Good, Bad, and Ugly of Java Generics, Venkat Subramaniam Pure Java Ajax: An Overview of GWT 2.0, Marty Hall How JPA 2.0 Makes a Good Thing Even Better, Mike Keith Building Enterprise RIAs with Adobe Flex and Java, Sujit Reddy G Integrated Ajax Support in JSF 2.0, Marty Hall Design Patterns in Java and Groovy, Venkat Subramaniam A Gentle Introduction to iPhone and Obj-C for Java Developers, Matthew McCullough Cloud Computing: Azure for Java Developers, Janakiram MSV Ajax Support in the Prototype JavaScript Library, Marty Hall First steps to IT Heaven Through the Cloud. Part III: .Java, Simone Brunozi Building Web 2.0 User Interfaces for Web Service Models using JSF, Frank Nimphius and Jobinesh P Acceptance Test Driven Development, John Tobin and Mohammed Mohsinali Architecting Your Java Applications for the Cloud, Praveen Srivatsa Effective Java, Venkat Subramaniam The Amazing Groovy Weight-loss Plan, Scott Davis Enterprise Modeling - from Conceptual Planning to Technical Blueprints, J Sripad Java Collections Renaissance, Donald Raab and Vlad Zakharov Power 7 and IBM J9VM, Himanshu Goyal A Whistle-stop Tour of Maven 3.0, Matthew McCullough Mass Volume Opportunities for Java Developers, Jouko Nuottila Emerging Technology Complex Event Processing, Duvvuri Srinivas Agile ALM for Distributed Development, Karthi Swaminathan Dim Sum Grails - A Sampler of Practical Non Database-Driven Grails Applications, Scott Davis Diagnosing Performance Bottlenecks in J2EE, Deepak Kaul Business Driven Identity Management, Suneet Agera Combining Java EE with OSGi using Eclipse Gemini, Mike Keith Workshop: Essence of Functional Programming, Venkat Subramaniam Workshop: Agile Development, Tools, and Teams and Scrum Certification, Stephen Forte Workshop: Cloud Computing Boot Camp on the Google App Engine, Matthew McCullough Workshop: Building Your First Amazon App, Simone Brunozzi Workshop: The 180-min AJAX and JSON Spike Class, Scott Davis Workshop: PHP + Adobe Flex = Killer RIA, Shyamprasad P Workshop: User Expereince Evaluation Model Walkthrough, Sanna Häiväläinen Workshop: Building Data Centric Applications using Adobe Flex and Java, Prashant Singh Workshop: Monetizing your Apps with PayPal X Payments Platform, Khurram Khan, Praveen Alavilli Sponsors of Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 include: Platinum sponsors Microsoft, Oracle Forum Nokia and Adobe; Gold sponsors Intel and SAP; Silver sponsors Quest Software, PayPal, Telerik and AMT. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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• ListView items not responding to tap

  - by Justin Williams

  I'm just getting my feet wet with Android and have built a UI that contains a TabHost with three tabs. Each tab is powered by its own Activity. The first Tab contains a listview with a prepopulated set of rows and is built from a custom ArrayAdapter. The problem I'm running into is that none of the ListView rows are tappable. In other words, when I tap on them there is no orange selection. If I use the scroll ball on my Nexus One it will select, but any touch gestures don't seem to be responding. All the UI is being handled using XML files with a main.xml housing the TabHost - LinearLayout - TabWidget/FrameLayout and a nearby_activity.xml file containing my ListView UI <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent"> <TextView android:id="@+id/android:empty" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:text="@string/nearby_no_events" /> <ListView android:id="@android:id/list" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="0dip" android:layout_weight="1.0" android:choiceMode="multipleChoice" android:divider="#d9d9d9" android:dividerHeight="1px" android:cacheColorHint="#eee" /> </LinearLayout> And the relevant code from my Activity that is set to show in the selected tab. public class NearbyActivity extends ListActivity { private ArrayList<Event> m_events = null; private EventAdapter m_adapter = null; public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.nearby_activity); getEvents(); this.m_adapter = new EventAdapter(this, R.layout.eventrow, m_events); setListAdapter(this.m_adapter); } private void getEvents() { m_events = new ArrayList<Event>(); for (int i = 0; i < 100 ; i++) { Event e = new Event(); e.setEventName("Event " + i); e.setVenueName("Staples Center"); e.setStartDate(new Date()); m_events.add(e); } } private class EventAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<Event> { private ArrayList<Event> items; public EventAdapter(Context context, int textViewResourceId, ArrayList<Event> items) { super(context, textViewResourceId, items); this.items = items; } @Override public View getView (int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { View v = convertView; if (v == null) { LayoutInflater vi = (LayoutInflater)getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE); v = vi.inflate(R.layout.eventrow, null); } Event e = items.get(position); if (e != null) { TextView nameText = (TextView)v.findViewById(R.id.eventName); TextView venueNameText = (TextView)v.findViewById(R.id.venueName); if (nameText != null) { nameText.setText(e.getEventName()); } if(venueNameText != null) { venueNameText.setText(e.getVenueName()); } } return v; } } } My listview row's are populated by an XML file as well. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="?android:attr/listPreferredItemHeight" android:orientation="vertical" android:padding="4dip"> <TextView android:id="@+id/eventName" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_alignParentTop="true" android:inputType="text" android:singleLine="true" android:ellipsize="marquee" android:textSize="18sp" android:textColor="#000" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/venueName" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_below="@id/eventName" android:layout_alignParentBottom="true" android:layout_marginRight="55dip" android:singleLine="true" android:ellipsize="end" android:scrollHorizontally="true" android:textSize="13sp" android:textColor="#313131" android:layout_alignWithParentIfMissing="true" android:gravity="center_vertical" /> </RelativeLayout> Thanks for any help you can offer.

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• Unable to launch onscreen keyboard (osk.exe) from a 32-bit process on Win7 x64

  - by Steven Robbins

  90% of the time I am unable to launch osk.exe from a 32bit process on Win7 x64. Originally the code was just using: Process.Launch("osk.exe"); Which won't work on x64 because of the directory virtualization. Not a problem I thought, I'll just disable virtualization, launch the app, and enable it again, which I thought was the correct way to do things. I also added some code to bring the keyboard back up if it has been minimized (which works fine) - the code (in a sample WPF app) now looks as follows: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Data; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Imaging; using System.Windows.Navigation;using System.Diagnostics; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; namespace KeyboardTest { /// <summary> /// Interaction logic for MainWindow.xaml /// </summary> public partial class MainWindow : Window { [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)] private static extern bool Wow64DisableWow64FsRedirection(ref IntPtr ptr); [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern bool Wow64RevertWow64FsRedirection(IntPtr ptr); private const UInt32 WM_SYSCOMMAND = 0x112; private const UInt32 SC_RESTORE = 0xf120; [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] static extern IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, UInt32 Msg, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam); private string OnScreenKeyboadApplication = "osk.exe"; public MainWindow() { InitializeComponent(); } private void KeyboardButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { // Get the name of the On screen keyboard string processName = System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(OnScreenKeyboadApplication); // Check whether the application is not running var query = from process in Process.GetProcesses() where process.ProcessName == processName select process; var keyboardProcess = query.FirstOrDefault(); // launch it if it doesn't exist if (keyboardProcess == null) { IntPtr ptr = new IntPtr(); ; bool sucessfullyDisabledWow64Redirect = false; // Disable x64 directory virtualization if we're on x64, // otherwise keyboard launch will fail. if (System.Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem) { sucessfullyDisabledWow64Redirect = Wow64DisableWow64FsRedirection(ref ptr); } // osk.exe is in windows/system folder. So we can directky call it without path using (Process osk = new Process()) { osk.StartInfo.FileName = OnScreenKeyboadApplication; osk.Start(); osk.WaitForInputIdle(2000); } // Re-enable directory virtualisation if it was disabled. if (System.Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem) if (sucessfullyDisabledWow64Redirect) Wow64RevertWow64FsRedirection(ptr); } else { // Bring keyboard to the front if it's already running var windowHandle = keyboardProcess.MainWindowHandle; SendMessage(windowHandle, WM_SYSCOMMAND, new IntPtr(SC_RESTORE), new IntPtr(0)); } } } } But this code, most of the time, throws the following exception on osk.Start(): The specified procedure could not be found at System.Diagnostics.Process.StartWithShellExecuteEx(ProcessStartInfo startInfo) I've tried putting long Thread.Sleep commands in around the osk.Start line, just to make sure it wasn't a race condition, but the same problem persists. Can anyone spot where I'm doing something wrong, or provide an alternative solution for this? It seems to work fine launching Notepad, it just won't play ball with the onscreen keyboard.

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• Test whether pixel is inside the blobs for ofxOpenCV

  - by mia

  I am doing an application of the concept of the dodgeball and need to test of the pixel of the ball is in the blobs capture(which is the image of the player) I am stucked and ran out of idea of how to implement it. I manage to do a little progress which have the blobs but I not sure how to test it. Please help. I am a newbie who in a desperate condition. Thank you. This is some of my code. void testApp::setup(){ #ifdef _USE_LIVE_VIDEO vidGrabber.setVerbose(true); vidGrabber.initGrabber(widthS,heightS); #else vidPlayer.loadMovie("fingers.mov"); vidPlayer.play(); #endif widthS = 320; heightS = 240; colorImg.allocate(widthS,heightS); grayImage.allocate(widthS,heightS); grayBg.allocate(widthS,heightS); grayDiff.allocate(widthS,heightS); ////<---what I want bLearnBakground = true; threshold = 80; //////////circle////////////// counter = 0; radius = 0; circlePosX = 100; circlePosY=200; } void testApp::update(){ ofBackground(100,100,100); bool bNewFrame = false; #ifdef _USE_LIVE_VIDEO vidGrabber.grabFrame(); bNewFrame = vidGrabber.isFrameNew(); #else vidPlayer.idleMovie(); bNewFrame = vidPlayer.isFrameNew(); #endif if (bNewFrame){ if (bLearnBakground == true){ grayBg = grayImage; // the = sign copys the pixels from grayImage into grayBg (operator overloading) bLearnBakground = false; } #ifdef _USE_LIVE_VIDEO colorImg.setFromPixels(vidGrabber.getPixels(),widthS,heightS); #else colorImg.setFromPixels(vidPlayer.getPixels(),widthS,heightS); #endif grayImage = colorImg; grayDiff.absDiff(grayBg, grayImage); grayDiff.threshold(threshold); contourFinder.findContours(grayDiff, 20, (340*240)/3, 10, true); // find holes } ////////////circle//////////////////// counter = counter + 0.05f; if(radius>=50){ circlePosX = ofRandom(10,300); circlePosY = ofRandom(10,230); } radius = 5 + 3*(counter); } void testApp::draw(){ // draw the incoming, the grayscale, the bg and the thresholded difference ofSetColor(0xffffff); //white colour grayDiff.draw(10,10);// draw start from point (0,0); // we could draw the whole contour finder // or, instead we can draw each blob individually, // this is how to get access to them: for (int i = 0; i < contourFinder.nBlobs; i++){ contourFinder.blobs[i].draw(10,10); } ///////////////circle////////////////////////// //let's draw a circle: ofSetColor(0,0,255); char buffer[255]; float a = radius; sprintf(buffer,"radius = %i",a); ofDrawBitmapString(buffer, 120, 300); if(radius>=50) { ofSetColor(255,255,255); counter = 0; } else{ ofSetColor(255,0,0); } ofFill(); ofCircle(circlePosX,circlePosY,radius); }

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• MVC design in Cocoa - are all 3 always necessary? Also: naming conventions, where to put Controller

  - by Nektarios

  I'm new to MVC although I've read a lot of papers and information on the web. I know it's somewhat ambiguous and there are many different interpretations of MVC patterns.. but the differences seem somewhat minimal My main question is - are M, V, and C always going to be necessary to be doing this right? I haven't seen anyone address this in anything I've read. Examples (I'm working in Cocoa/Obj-c although that shouldn't much matter).. 1) If I have a simple image on my GUI, or a text entry field that is just for a user's convenience and isn't saved or modified, these both would be V (view) but there's no M (no data and no domain processing going on), and no C to bridge them. So I just have some aspects that are "V" - seems fine 2) I have 2 different and visible windows that each have a button on them labeled as "ACTIVATE FOO" - when a user clicks the button on either, both buttons press in and change to say "DEACTIVATE FOO" and a third window appears with label "FOO". Clicking the button again will change the button on both windows to "ACTIVATE FOO" and will remove the third "FOO" window. In this case, my V consists of the buttons on both windows, and I guess also the third window (maybe all 3 windows). I definitely have a C, my Controller object will know about these buttons and windows and will get their clicks and hold generic states regarding windows and buttons. However, whether I have 1 button or 10 button, my window is called "FOO" or my window is called "BAR", this doesn't matter. There's no domain knowledge or data here - just control of views. So in this example, I really have "V" and "C" but no "M" - is that ok? 3) Final example, which I am running in to the most. I have a text entry field as my View. When I enter text in this, say a number representing gravity, I keep it in a Model that may do things like compute physics of a ball while taking in to account my gravity parameter. Here I have a V and an M, but I don't understand why I would need to add a C - a controller would just accept the signals from the View and pass it along to the Model, and vice versa. Being as the C is just a pure passthrough, it's really "junk" code and isn't making things any more reusable in my opinion. In most situations, when something changes I will need to change the C and M both in nearly identical ways. I realize it's probably an MVC beginner's mistake to think most situations call for only V and M.. leads me in to next subject 4) In Cocoa / Xcode / IB, I guess my Controllers should always be an instantiated object in IB? That is, I lay all of my "V" components in IB, and for each collection of View objects (things that are related) I should have an instantiated Controller? And then perhaps my Models should NOT be found in IB, and instead only found as classes in Xcode that tie in with Controller code found there. Is this accurate? This could explain why you'd have a Controller that is not really adding value - because you are keeping consistent.. 5) What about naming these things - for my above example about FOO / BAR maybe something that ends in Controller would be the C, like FancyWindowOpeningController, etc? And for models - should I suffix them with like GravityBallPhysicsModel etc, or should I just name those whatever I like? I haven't seen enough code to know what's out there in the wild and I want to get on the right track early on Thank you in advance for setting me straight or letting me know I'm on the right track. I feel like I'm starting to get it and most of what I say here makes sense, but validation of my guessing would help me feel confident..

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• Opening of the spWeb.ContentTypes gives SOAP Exception 0x80004004

  - by mdi

  Hi everybody! I have the code which going through the sharepoint contenttypes and changes needed field display names. On my local server everything works fine, but on the client side it gives me an error: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004004 (E_ABORT)) --- System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80004004): Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004004 (E_ABORT)) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.OpenWebInternal(String bstrUrl, Guid& pguidID, String& pbstrRequestAccessEmail, UInt32& pwebVersion, String& pbstrServerRelativeUrl, UInt32& pnLanguage, UInt32& pnLocale, String& pbstrDefaultTheme, String& pbstrDefaultThemeCSSUrl, String& pbstrAlternateCSSUrl, String& pbstrCustomizedCssFileList, String& pbstrCustomJSUrl, String& pbstrAlternateHeaderUrl, String& pbstrMasterUrl, String& pbstrCustomMasterUrl, String& pbstrSiteLogoUrl, String& pbstrSiteLogoDescription, Object& pvarUser, Boolean& pvarIsAuditor, Int32& plSiteFlags) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.OpenWebInternal(String bstrUrl, Guid& pguidID, String& pbstrRequestAccessEmail, UInt32& pwebVersion, String& pbstrServerRelativeUrl, UInt32& pnLanguage, UInt32& pnLocale, String& pbstrDefaultTheme, String& pbstrDefaultThemeCSSUrl, String& pbstrAlternateCSSUrl, String& pbstrCustomizedCssFileList, String& pbstrCustomJSUrl, String& pbstrAlternateHeaderUrl, String& pbstrMasterUrl, String& pbstrCustomMasterUrl, String& pbstrSiteLogoUrl, String& pbstrSiteLogoDescription, Object& pvarUser, Boolean& pvarIsAuditor, Int32& plSiteFlags) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.OpenWebInternal(String bstrUrl, Guid& pguidID, String& pbstrRequestAccessEmail, UInt32& pwebVersion, String& pbstrServerRelativeUrl, UInt32& pnLanguage, UInt32& pnLocale, String& pbstrDefaultTheme, String& pbstrDefaultThemeCSSUrl, String& pbstrAlternateCSSUrl, String& pbstrCustomizedCssFileList, String& pbstrCustomJSUrl, String& pbstrAlternateHeaderUrl, String& pbstrMasterUrl, String& pbstrCustomMasterUrl, String& pbstrSiteLogoUrl, String& pbstrSiteLogoDescription, Object& pvarUser, Boolean& pvarIsAuditor, Int32& plSiteFlags) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb.InitWebPublic() at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb.get_ServerRelativeUrl() at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb.get_Url() at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentTypeCollection.FetchCollection() at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentTypeCollection..ctor(SPWeb web, Boolean bAll) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb.get_ContentTypes() the code is below: SPWebApplication webApp = SPWebService.ContentService.WebApplications[someGuid]; foreach (SPSite spSite in webApp.Sites) { using (SPWeb spWeb = spSite.RootWeb) { try { foreach (SPContentType spContentType in spWeb.ContentTypes) { ... }}}.. Could anybody provide me with workaround or with the reason of the problem.

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• Binary operator overloading on a templated class (C++)

  - by GRB

  Hi all, I was recently trying to gauge my operator overloading/template abilities and as a small test, created the Container class below. While this code compiles fine and works correctly under MSVC 2008 (displays 11), both MinGW/GCC and Comeau choke on the operator+ overload. As I trust them more than MSVC, I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Here is the code: #include <iostream> using namespace std; template <typename T> class Container { friend Container<T> operator+ <> (Container<T>& lhs, Container<T>& rhs); public: void setobj(T ob); T getobj(); private: T obj; }; template <typename T> void Container<T>::setobj(T ob) { obj = ob; } template <typename T> T Container<T>::getobj() { return obj; } template <typename T> Container<T> operator+ <> (Container<T>& lhs, Container<T>& rhs) { Container<T> temp; temp.obj = lhs.obj + rhs.obj; return temp; } int main() { Container<int> a, b; a.setobj(5); b.setobj(6); Container<int> c = a + b; cout << c.getobj() << endl; return 0; } This is the error Comeau gives: Comeau C/C++ 4.3.10.1 (Oct 6 2008 11:28:09) for ONLINE_EVALUATION_BETA2 Copyright 1988-2008 Comeau Computing. All rights reserved. MODE:strict errors C++ C++0x_extensions "ComeauTest.c", line 27: error: an explicit template argument list is not allowed on this declaration Container<T> operator+ <> (Container<T>& lhs, Container<T>& rhs) ^ 1 error detected in the compilation of "ComeauTest.c". I'm having a hard time trying to get Comeau/MingGW to play ball, so that's where I turn to you guys. It's been a long time since my brain has melted this much under the weight of C++ syntax, so I feel a little embarrassed ;). Thanks in advance. EDIT: Eliminated an (irrelevant) lvalue error listed in initial Comeau dump.

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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• Too nervous to install

  - by The Prop

  Yesterday I (a professional rugby prop of somewhat limited intellect) landed in http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/ and found myself stranded in a town with no signposts. The locals don't need signposts - they know their way around - so who gives a hoot about visitors? Well I'm a visitor and I'm lost. Here's my plea to the good burgesses of Codeplex-sans-signs: HELP!! Let me back-track and explain what landed me at the bottom of this tangled ruck. There's a "Download" button positioned near the top-right of the Codeplex web page, right? Like the Sword of Damocles, a down-arrow to the left of the button indicates, presumably, what a download would include: CURRENT 1.4.0 Stable DATE Fri May 7 2010 at 7:00 AM STATUS Stable With a simple-minded confidence that has since deserted me (the confidence - not the simple-mindedness), I clicked "Download". This introduced 3 new files to my computer: HtmlAgilityPack.dll, HtmlAgilityPack.pdb, and HtmlAgilityPack.XML This is when the first stab of doubt penetrated that globe between my cauliflower ears that I call a head. Where's the dot cs? Somewhere in Codeplex, I'd read advice to another lost soul to "download and build the HTMLAgilityPack solution". As I've done so many times as an All Black prop, I glared at the opposition front row - ah, I mean the 3 new files. Shouldn't one of them have a ".cs" on the back of his jersey - er, on the end of its name? Or is this just how they play the game in Codeplex-sans-signs? Undaunted (props have more courage than sense) I packed into my first C# scrum. The half-back feeds the ball in, and the front rows collapse - er, the debugging stops at this line of my code: "HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();" Then the Referee blows his whistle and announces one of those verdicts that's utterly indecipherable to your average loose-head prop: Locating source for 'C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs'. Checksum: MD5 {62 bc f3 7e 9a 92 a6 32 7 d6 5b f8 76 59 7b 5b} The file 'C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs' does not exist. Looking in script documents for 'C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs'... Looking in the projects for 'C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs'. The file was not found in a project. Looking in directory 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\vc7\atlmfc'... Looking in directory 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\vc7\crt'... The debugger will ask the user to find the file: C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs. The user pressed Cancel [a brain-stemmer from the prop] in the Find Source dialog. The debug source files settings for the active solution have been modified so that the debugger will not ask the user to find the file: C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs. The debugger could not locate the source file 'C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs'. Even if it had been the first 50 stanzas of "Eskimo Nell", I couldn't have been more shocked. I'm so shocked, my jaws clamp shut around the opposition hooker's ear. He thumbs me in the iris. With a cornea-torn eye I peer at the Codeplex site. My brain stem sparks and I punch the "View all downloads" link. It sparks four more times on each download link, and.. lo! FOUR files this time: HAPExplorer.zip, HtmlAgilityPack.1.4.0.Source.zip, HtmlAgilityPack.1.4.0.zip, HtmlAgilityPack.Documentation.chm But... is this not the same place arrived at recently by my flat-mate Chaz, journalist extraordinaire? (Chaz, if you're reading this, I'm not plugging for nothing - just write kindly about me in your next report, okay?) Didn't these same four files flummox Chaz The Great? He told me about it. Chaz left a message with Codeplex and then solved the problem by just walking away. Typical journalist, huh. But I'm not like that. I don't walk away. I'm made of the sort of stubborn stuff that becomes an All Black prop. Hence this impassioned plea: GOOD TOWNSFOLK OF CODEPLEX-SANS-SIGNS, WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT? Can somebody point me to Main Street? How does a simpleton install 'C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\HtmlDocument.cs'? I'm willing to prostrate myself and grovel to the first kind face that passes in front of my rapidly clouding sight. So help me, I'd even tug my forelock if I had one! Should I hold forth my rod over the wilderness, and create a folder called 'C:\Source\htmlagilitypack\Trunk\HtmlAgilityPack\' or some such? If so, what files should I move into it? ANYTHING else a dum-ass should know about? - and I mean ANYTHING - you just don't know how witless a punch-drunk prop can be.. %( Whenever I've installed other programs they've given me an ".exe" or ".msi" that I can click on and it's all done for me like magic. HEY... there's nothing of that nature here, is there? Am I missing something? Something for dummies to click? (From the waiting rooms of Dr I. Sight Phixes) (signed) The Prop

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• Android: Strange out of memory issue

  - by Chrispix

  I am not sure where to start to explain this one. I have a list view with a couple image buttons on each row. When you click the list row, it launches a new activity. If you review some of my other posts, I have had to build my own tabs because of an issue w/ the camera layout. The activity that gets launched for result is a map. If I click on my button to launch the image preview (load an image off the sd card) the application returns from the activity back to the listview activity to the result handler to relaunch my new activity which is nothing more than an image widget. So here is the issue, the image preview on the list view is being done w/ the cursor & listadapter. This makes it pretty simple, but I am not sure how I can put a resized (i.e. smaller bit size not pixel) image as the src for the imgbutton on the fly. So I just resized the image that came off the phone camera. The issue is that I get an out of memory error when it tries to go back and re-launch the 2nd activity. ** My question : is there a way I can build the list adapter easily row by row, where I can resize on the fly (bit wise)? - this would be preferable as I also need to make some changes to the properties of the widgets/elements in each row as I am unable to select a row w/ touch screen b/c of focus issue. (I can use roller ball). ** I know I can do an out of band resize and save of my image, but that is not really what I want to do, but some sample code for that would be nice if that is your suggestion. As soon as I disabled the image on the listview it worked fine again. FYI : This is how I was doing it : String[] from = new String[] { DBHelper.KEY_BUSINESSNAME, DBHelper.KEY_ADDRESS, DBHelper.KEY_CITY, DBHelper.KEY_GPSLONG, DBHelper.KEY_GPSLAT, DBHelper.KEY_IMAGEFILENAME + ""}; to = new int[] { R.id.businessname, R.id.address, R.id.city, R.id.gpslong, R.id.gpslat, R.id.imagefilename }; notes = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, R.layout.notes_row, c, from, to); setListAdapter(notes); Where R.id.imagefilename is a ButtonImage Here is my LogCat 01-25 05:05:49.877: ERROR/dalvikvm-heap(3896): 6291456-byte external allocation too large for this process. 01-25 05:05:49.877: ERROR/(3896): VM won't let us allocate 6291456 bytes 01-25 05:05:49.877: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): Uncaught handler: thread main exiting due to uncaught exception 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.nativeDecodeStream(Native Method) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.decodeStream(BitmapFactory.java:304) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.decodeFile(BitmapFactory.java:149) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.decodeFile(BitmapFactory.java:174) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.graphics.drawable.Drawable.createFromPath(Drawable.java:729) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ImageView.resolveUri(ImageView.java:484) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ImageView.setImageURI(ImageView.java:281) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.SimpleCursorAdapter.setViewImage(SimpleCursorAdapter.java:183) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.SimpleCursorAdapter.bindView(SimpleCursorAdapter.java:129) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.CursorAdapter.getView(CursorAdapter.java:150) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.AbsListView.obtainView(AbsListView.java:1057) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ListView.makeAndAddView(ListView.java:1616) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ListView.fillSpecific(ListView.java:1177) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.ListView.layoutChildren(ListView.java:1454) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.AbsListView.onLayout(AbsListView.java:937) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.setChildFrame(LinearLayout.java:1119) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.layoutHorizontal(LinearLayout.java:1108) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onLayout(LinearLayout.java:922) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onLayout(FrameLayout.java:294) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.setChildFrame(LinearLayout.java:1119) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.layoutVertical(LinearLayout.java:999) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onLayout(LinearLayout.java:920) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onLayout(FrameLayout.java:294) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.View.layout(View.java:5611) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:771) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1103) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:88) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:3742) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:515) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:739) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:497) 01-25 05:05:49.917: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3896): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 01-25 05:10:01.127: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(3943): ERROR: thread attach failed I also have a new error when displaying an image : 01-25 22:13:18.594: DEBUG/skia(4204): xxxxxxxxxxx jpeg error 20 Improper call to JPEG library in state %d 01-25 22:13:18.604: INFO/System.out(4204): resolveUri failed on bad bitmap uri: 01-25 22:13:18.694: ERROR/dalvikvm-heap(4204): 6291456-byte external allocation too large for this process. 01-25 22:13:18.694: ERROR/(4204): VM won't let us allocate 6291456 bytes 01-25 22:13:18.694: DEBUG/skia(4204): xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx allocPixelRef failed

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #2 - Balancing the forces

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/02/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---2---balancing-the-forces.aspxCategorizing requirements is the prerequisite for ecconomic architectural decisions. Not all requirements are created equal. However, to truely understand and describe the requirement forces pulling on software development, I think further examination of the requirements aspects is varranted. Aspects of Functionality There are two sides to Functionality requirements. It´s about what a software should do. I call that the Operations it implements. Operations are defined by expressions and control structures or calls to frameworks of some sort, i.e. (business) logic statements. Operations calculate, transform, aggregate, validate, send, receive, load, store etc. Operations are about behavior; they take input and produce output by considering state. I´m not using the term “function” here, because functions - or methods or sub-programs - are not necessary to implement Operations. Functions belong to a different sub-aspect of requirements (see below). Operations alone are not enough, though, to make a customer happy with regard to his/her Functionality requirements. Only correctly implemented Operations provide full value. This should make clear, why testing is so important. And not just manual tests during development of some operational feature, but automated tests. Because only automated tests scale when over time the number of operations increases. Without automated tests there is no guarantee formerly correct operations are still correct after more got added. To retest all previous operations manually is infeasible. So whoever relies just on manual tests is not really balancing the two forces Operations and Correctness. With manual tests more weight is put on the side of the scale of Operations. That might be ok for a short period of time - but in the long run it will bite you. You need to plan for Correctness in the long run from the first day of your project on. Aspects of Quality As important as Functionality is, it´s not the driver for software development. No software has ever been written to just implement some operation in code. We don´t need computers just to do something. All computers can do with software we can do without them. Well, at least given enough time and resources. We could calculate the most complex formulas without computers. We could do auctions with millions of people without computers. The only reason we want computers to help us with this and a million other Operations is… We don´t want to wait for the results very long. Or we want less errors. Or we want easier accessability to complicated solutions. So the main reason for customers to buy/order software is some Quality. They want some Functionality with a higher Quality (e.g. performance, scalability, usability, security…) than without the software. But Qualities come in at least two flavors: Most important are Primary Qualities. That´s the Qualities software truely is written for. Take an online auction website for example. Its Primary Qualities are performance, scalability, and usability, I´d say. Auctions should come within reach of millions of people; setting up an auction should be very easy; finding a suitable auction and bidding on it should be as fast as possible. Only if those Qualities have been implemented does security become relevant. A secure auction website is important - but not as important as a fast auction website. Nobody would want to use the most secure auction website if it was unbearably slow. But there would be people willing to use the fastest auction website even it was lacking security. That´s why security - with regard to online auction software - is not a Primary Quality, but just a Secondary Quality. It´s a supporting quality, so to speak. It does not deliver value by itself. With a password manager software this might be different. There security might be a Primary Quality. Please get me right: I don´t want to denigrate any Quality. There´s a long list of non-functional requirements at Wikipedia. They are all created equal - but that does not mean they are equally important for all software projects. When confronted with Quality requirements check with the customer which are primary and which are secondary. That will help to make good economical decisions when in a crunch. Resources are always limited - but requirements are a bottomless ocean. Aspects of Security of Investment Functionality and Quality are traditionally the requirement aspects cared for most - by customers and developers alike. Even today, when pressure rises in a project, tunnel vision will focus on them. Any measures to create and hold up Security of Investment (SoI) will be out of the window pretty quickly. Resistance to customers and/or management is futile. As long as SoI is not placed on equal footing with Functionality and Quality it´s bound to suffer under pressure. To look closer at what SoI means will help to become more conscious about it and make customers and management aware of the risks of neglecting it. SoI to me has two facets: Production Efficiency (PE) is about speed of delivering value. Customers like short response times. Short response times mean less money spent. So whatever makes software development faster supports this requirement. This must not lead to duct tape programming and banging out features by the dozen, though. Because customers don´t just want Operations and Quality, but also Correctness. So if Correctness gets compromised by focussing too much on Production Efficiency it will fire back. Customers want PE not just today, but over the whole course of a software´s lifecycle. That means, it´s not just about coding speed, but equally about code quality. If code quality leads to rework the PE is on an unsatisfactory level. Also if code production leads to waste it´s unsatisfactory. Because the effort which went into waste could have been used to produce value. Rework and waste cost money. Rework and waste abound, however, as long as PE is not addressed explicitly with management and customers. Thanks to the Agile and Lean movements that´s increasingly the case. Nevertheless more could and should be done in many teams. Each and every developer should keep in mind that Production Efficiency is as important to the customer as Functionality and Quality - whether he/she states it or not. Making software development more efficient is important - but still sooner or later even agile projects are going to hit a glas ceiling. At least as long as they neglect the second SoI facet: Evolvability. Delivering correct high quality functionality in short cycles today is good. But not just any software structure will allow this to happen for an indefinite amount of time.[1] The less explicitly software was designed the sooner it´s going to get stuck. Big ball of mud, monolith, brownfield, legacy code, technical debt… there are many names for software structures that have lost the ability to evolve, to be easily changed to accomodate new requirements. An evolvable code base is the opposite of a brownfield. It´s code which can be easily understood (by developers with sufficient domain expertise) and then easily changed to accomodate new requirements. Ideally the costs of adding feature X to an evolvable code base is independent of when it is requested - or at least the costs should only increase linearly, not exponentially.[2] Clean Code, Agile Architecture, and even traditional Software Engineering are concerned with Evolvability. However, it seems no systematic way of achieving it has been layed out yet. TDD + SOLID help - but still… When I look at the design ability reality in teams I see much room for improvement. As stated previously, SoI - or to be more precise: Evolvability - can hardly be measured. Plus the customer rarely states an explicit expectation with regard to it. That´s why I think, special care must be taken to not neglect it. Postponing it to some large refactorings should not be an option. Rather Evolvability needs to be a core concern for every single developer day. This should not mean Evolvability is more important than any of the other requirement aspects. But neither is it less important. That´s why more effort needs to be invested into it, to bring it on par with the other aspects, which usually are much more in focus. In closing As you see, requirements are of quite different kinds. To not take that into account will make it harder to understand the customer, and to make economic decisions. Those sub-aspects of requirements are forces pulling in different directions. To improve performance might have an impact on Evolvability. To increase Production Efficiency might have an impact on security etc. No requirement aspect should go unchecked when deciding how to allocate resources. Balancing should be explicit. And it should be possible to trace back each decision to a requirement. Why is there a null-check on parameters at the start of the method? Why are there 5000 LOC in this method? Why are there interfaces on those classes? Why is this functionality running on the threadpool? Why is this function defined on that class? Why is this class depending on three other classes? These and a thousand more questions are not to mean anything should be different in a code base. But it´s important to know the reason behind all of these decisions. Because not knowing the reason possibly means waste and having decided suboptimally. And how do we ensure to balance all requirement aspects? That needs practices and transparency. Practices means doing things a certain way and not another, even though that might be possible. We´re dealing with dangerous tools here. Like a knife is a dangerous tool. Harm can be done if we use our tools in just any way at the whim of the moment. Over the centuries rules and practices have been established how to use knifes. You don´t put them in peoples´ legs just because you´re feeling like it. You hand over a knife with the handle towards the receiver. You might not even be allowed to cut round food like potatos or eggs with it. The same should be the case for dangerous tools like object-orientation, remote communication, threads etc. We need practices to use them in a way so requirements are balanced almost automatically. In addition, to be able to work on software as a team we need transparency. We need means to share our thoughts, to work jointly on mental models. So far our tools are focused on working with code. Testing frameworks, build servers, DI containers, intellisense, refactoring support… That´s all nice and well. I don´t want to miss any of that. But I think it´s not enough. We´re missing mental tools, tools for making thinking and talking about software (independently of code) easier. You might think, enough of such tools already exist like all those UML diagram types or Flow Charts. But then, isn´t it strange, hardly any team is using them to design software? Or is that just due to a lack of education? I don´t think so. It´s a matter value/weight ratio: the current mental tools are too heavy weight compared to the value they deliver. So my conclusion is, we need lightweight tools to really be able to balance requirements. Software development is complex. We need guidance not to forget important aspects. That´s like with flying an airplane. Pilots don´t just jump in and take off for their destination. Yes, there are times when they are “flying by the seats of their pants”, when they are just experts doing thing intuitively. But most of the time they are going through honed practices called checklist. See “The Checklist Manifesto” for very enlightening details on this. Maybe then I should say it like this: We need more checklists for the complex businss of software development.[3] But that´s what software development mostly is about: changing software over an unknown period of time. It needs to be corrected in order to finally provide promised operations. It needs to be enhanced to provide ever more operations and qualities. All this without knowing when it´s going to stop. Probably never - until “maintainability” hits a wall when the technical debt is too large, the brownfield too deep. Software development is not a sprint, is not a marathon, not even an ultra marathon. Because to all this there is a foreseeable end. Software development is like continuously and foreever running… ? And sometimes I dare to think that costs could even decrease over time. Think of it: With each feature a software becomes richer in functionality. So with each additional feature the chance of there being already functionality helping its implementation increases. That should lead to less costs of feature X if it´s requested later than sooner. X requested later could stand on the shoulders of previous features. Alas, reality seems to be far from this despite 20+ years of admonishing developers to think in terms of reusability.[1] ? Please don´t get me wrong: I don´t want to bog down the “art” of software development with heavyweight practices and heaps of rules to follow. The framework we need should be lightweight. It should not stand in the way of delivering value to the customer. It´s purpose is even to make that easier by helping us to focus and decreasing waste and rework. ?

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• The Changing Face of PASS

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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• Trying to get these list items to display inline

  - by Joel

  I have several unordered lists that I want to display like this: <ul> <li><img></li> <li><p></li> //inline </ul> //linebreak <ul> <li><img></li> <li><p></li> //inline </ul> ...etc I'm not able to get the li items to be inline with eachother. They are stacking vertically. I have stripped away most styling but still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong: html: <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/matepe.jpg" width="247" height="228" alt="Matepe" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The matepe is a 24 key instrument that is played by the Kore-Kore people in North-Eastern Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It utilizes four fingers-each playing an individual melody. These melodies also interwieve to create resultant melodies that can be manipulated thru accenting different fingers. The matepe is used in Rattletree as the bridge from the physical world to the spirit world. The matepe is used in the Kore-Kore culture to summon the Mhondoro spirits which are thought to be able to communicate directly with Mwari (God) without the need of an intermediary.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/soprano_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="170" alt="Soprano" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The highest voice of the Rattletree Marimba orchestra is the Soprano marimba. The soprano is used to whip up the energy on the dancefloor and help people reach ecstatic state with it's high and clear singing voice. The range of these sopranos goes much lower than 'typical' Zimbabwean style sopranos. The sopranos play the range of the right hand of the matepe and go two notes higher and five notes lower. Rattletree uses two sopranos.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/bari_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="170" alt="Baritone" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The Baritone is the next lower voice in the orchestra. The bari is where the funk is. Generally bubbling over the Bass line, the baritone creates the syncopations and polyrhythms that messes with the 'minds' of the dancers and helps seperate the listener from the physical realm of thought. The range of the baritone covers the full range of the left hand side of the matepe.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/darren_littlebass.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="195" alt="Bass"/><strong>Bass Marimba</strong></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The towering Bass Marimba is the foundation of the Rattletree Marimba sound. Putting out frequencies as low as 22hZ, the bass creates the drive that gets the dancefloor moving. It is 5.5' tall, 9' long, and 4' deep. It is played by standing on a platform and struck with mallets that have lacross-ball size heads (they are actually made with rubber dog balls). The Bass marimba's range covers the lowest five notes of the matepe and goes another five notes lower.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/wayne_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="177" alt="Drums"/><strong>Drumset</strong></li> <li class="textbox"><p>All the intricate polyrhythms are held together tastefully with the drumset. The drums provides the consistancy and grounding that the dancers need to keep going all night. While the steady kick and high-hat provide that grounding function, the toms and snare and allowed to be another voice in the poylrhythmic texture-helping the dancers abandon the concept of a "one" within this cyclical music.</p></li> </ul> css: ul.instrument { text-align:left; display:inline; } ul.instrument li { list-style-type: none; } li.imagebox { } li.textbox { } li.textbox p{ width: 247px; }

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• Remove box2d bodies after collision deduction android?

  - by jubin

  Can any one explain me how to destroy box2d body when collide i have tried but my application crashed.First i have checked al collisions then add all the bodies in array who i want to destroy.I am trying to learning this tutorial My all the bodies are falling i want these bodies should destroy when these bodies will collide my actor monkey but when it collide it destroy but my aplication crashed.I have googled and from google i got the application crash reasons we should not destroy body in step funtion but i am removing body in the last of tick method. could any one help me or provide me code aur check my code why i am getting this prblem or how can i destroy box2d bodies. This is my code what i am doing. Please could any one check my code and tell me what is i am doing wrong for removing bodies. The code is for multiple box2d objects falling on my actor monkey it should be destroy when it will fall on the monkey.It is destroing but my application crahes. static class Box2DLayer extends CCLayer { protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected static final float WALK_FACTOR = 3.0f; protected static final float MAX_WALK_IMPULSE = 0.2f; protected static final float ANIM_SPEED = 0.3f; int isLeft=0; String dir=""; int x =0; float direction; CCColorLayer objectHint; // protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected World _world; protected static Body spriteBody; CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); private static int count = 200; protected static Body monkey_body; private static Body bodies; CCSprite monkey; float animDelay; int animPhase; CCSpriteSheet danceSheet = CCSpriteSheet.spriteSheet("phases.png"); CCSprite _block; List<Body> toDestroy = new ArrayList<Body>(); //CCSpriteSheet _spriteSheet; private static MyContactListener _contactListener = new MyContactListener(); public Box2DLayer() { this.setIsAccelerometerEnabled(true); CCSprite bg = CCSprite.sprite("jungle.png"); addChild(bg,0); bg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); bg.setPosition(0,0); CGSize s = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); // Use scaled width and height so that our boundaries always match the current screen float scaledWidth = s.width/PTM_RATIO; float scaledHeight = s.height/PTM_RATIO; Vector2 gravity = new Vector2(0.0f, -30.0f); boolean doSleep = false; _world = new World(gravity, doSleep); // Create edges around the entire screen // Define the ground body. BodyDef bxGroundBodyDef = new BodyDef(); bxGroundBodyDef.position.set(0.0f, 0.0f); // The body is also added to the world. Body groundBody = _world.createBody(bxGroundBodyDef); // Register our contact listener // Define the ground box shape. PolygonShape groundBox = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 bottomLeft = new Vector2(0f,0f); Vector2 topLeft = new Vector2(0f,scaledHeight); Vector2 topRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,scaledHeight); Vector2 bottomRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,0f); // bottom groundBox.setAsEdge(bottomLeft, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // top groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, topRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // left groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, bottomLeft); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // right groundBox.setAsEdge(topRight, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); CCSprite floorbg = CCSprite.sprite("grassbehind.png"); addChild(floorbg,1); floorbg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorbg.setPosition(0,0); CCSprite floorfront = CCSprite.sprite("grassfront.png"); floorfront.setTag(2); this.addBoxBodyForSprite(floorfront); addChild(floorfront,3); floorfront.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorfront.setPosition(0,0); addChild(danceSheet); //CCSprite monkey = CCSprite.sprite(danceSheet, CGRect.make(0, 0, 48, 73)); //addChild(danceSprite); monkey = CCSprite.sprite("arms_up.png"); monkey.setTag(2); monkey.setPosition(200,100); BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(200 / PTM_RATIO, 300 / PTM_RATIO); monkey_body = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); monkey_body.setUserData(monkey); PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.setAsBox(monkey.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, monkey.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; monkey_body.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); //Vector2 force = new Vector2(10, 10); //monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, spriteBodyDef.position); addChild(monkey,10000); this.schedule(tickCallback); this.schedule(createobjects, 2.0f); objectHint = CCColorLayer.node(ccColor4B.ccc4(255,0,0,128), 200f, 100f); addChild(objectHint, 15000); objectHint.setVisible(false); _world.setContactListener(_contactListener); } private UpdateCallback tickCallback = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { tick(d); } }; private UpdateCallback createobjects = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { secondUpdate(d); } }; private void secondUpdate(float dt) { this.addNewSprite(); } public void addBoxBodyForSprite(CCSprite sprite) { BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.StaticBody; //spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(sprite.getPosition().x / PTM_RATIO, sprite.getPosition().y / PTM_RATIO); spriteBody = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); spriteBody.setUserData(sprite); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.set(verts); //spriteShape.setAsBox(sprite.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, //sprite.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; spriteShapeDef.isSensor=true; spriteBody.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); } public void addNewSprite() { count=0; Random rand = new Random(); int Number = rand.nextInt(10); switch(Number) { case 0: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png"); break; case 1: _block = CCSprite.sprite("backpack.png");break; case 2: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 3: _block = CCSprite.sprite("pineapple.png");break; case 4: _block = CCSprite.sprite("bananabunch.png");break; case 5: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; case 6: _block = CCSprite.sprite("canteen.png");break; case 7: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png");break; case 8: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 9: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; } int padding=20; //_block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(100, 100)); // Determine where to spawn the target along the Y axis CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().displaySize(); int minY = (int)(_block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int maxY = (int)(winSize.width - _block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int rangeY = maxY - minY; int actualY = rand.nextInt(rangeY) + minY; // Create block and add it to the layer float xOffset = padding+_block.getContentSize().width/2+((_block.getContentSize().width+padding)*count); _block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(actualY, 750)); _block.setTag(1); float w = _block.getContentSize().width; objectHint.setVisible(true); objectHint.changeWidth(w); objectHint.setPosition(actualY-w/2, 460); this.addChild(_block,10000); // Create ball body and shape BodyDef ballBodyDef1 = new BodyDef(); ballBodyDef1.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; ballBodyDef1.position.set(actualY/PTM_RATIO, 480/PTM_RATIO); bodies = _world.createBody(ballBodyDef1); bodies.setUserData(_block); PolygonShape circle1 = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; circle1.set(verts); FixtureDef ballShapeDef1 = new FixtureDef(); ballShapeDef1.shape = circle1; ballShapeDef1.density = 10.0f; ballShapeDef1.friction = 0.0f; ballShapeDef1.restitution = 0.1f; bodies.createFixture(ballShapeDef1); count++; //Remove(); } @Override public void ccAccelerometerChanged(float accelX, float accelY, float accelZ) { //Apply the directional impulse /*float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*accelY*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, monkey_body.getWorldCenter());*/ walk(accelY); //Remove(); } private void walk(float accelY) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub direction = accelY; } private void Remove() { for (Iterator<MyContact> it1 = _contactListener.mContacts.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { MyContact contact = it1.next(); Body bodyA = contact.fixtureA.getBody(); Body bodyB = contact.fixtureB.getBody(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (bodyA.getUserData() != null && bodyB.getUserData() != null) { CCSprite spriteA = (CCSprite) bodyA.getUserData(); CCSprite spriteB = (CCSprite) bodyB.getUserData(); // Is sprite A a cat and sprite B a car? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... if (spriteA.getTag() == 1 && spriteB.getTag() == 2) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyA); //_world.destroyBody(bodyA); // removeChild(spriteA, true); toDestroy.add(bodyA); } // Is sprite A a car and sprite B a cat? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... else if (spriteA.getTag() == 2 && spriteB.getTag() == 1) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyB); toDestroy.add(bodyB); } } } // Loop through all of the box2d bodies we want to destroy... for (Iterator<Body> it1 = toDestroy.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { Body body = it1.next(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (body.getUserData() != null) { // We know that the user data is a sprite since we set // it that way, so cast it... CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite) body.getUserData(); // Remove the sprite from the scene _world.destroyBody(body); removeChild(sprite, true); } // Destroy the Box2D body as well // _contactListener.mContacts.remove(0); } } public synchronized void tick(float delta) { synchronized (_world) { _world.step(delta, 8, 3); //_world.clearForces(); //addNewSprite(); } CCAnimation danceAnimation = CCAnimation.animation("dance", 1.0f); // Iterate over the bodies in the physics world Iterator<Body> it = _world.getBodies(); while(it.hasNext()) { Body b = it.next(); Object userData = b.getUserData(); if (userData != null && userData instanceof CCSprite) { //Synchronize the Sprites position and rotation with the corresponding body CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite)userData; if(sprite.getTag()==1) { //b.applyLinearImpulse(force, pos); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); sprite.setRotation(-1.0f * ccMacros.CC_RADIANS_TO_DEGREES(b.getAngle())); } else { //Apply the directional impulse float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*direction*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); b.applyLinearImpulse(force, b.getWorldCenter()); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); animDelay -= 1.0f/60.0f; if(animDelay <= 0) { animDelay = ANIM_SPEED; animPhase++; if(animPhase > 2) { animPhase = 1; } } if(direction < 0 ) { isLeft=1; } else { isLeft=0; } if(isLeft==1) { dir = "left"; } else { dir = "right"; } float standingLimit = (float) 0.1f; float vX = monkey_body.getLinearVelocity().x; if((vX > -standingLimit)&& (vX < standingLimit)) { // Log.v("sasd", "standing"); } else { } } } } Remove(); } } Sorry for my english. Thanks in advance.

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• Array sorting efficiency... Beginner need advice

  - by SoleSoft

  I'll start by saying I am very much a beginner programmer, this is essentially my first real project outside of using learning material. I've been making a 'Simon Says' style game (the game where you repeat the pattern generated by the computer) using C# and XNA, the actual game is complete and working fine but while creating it, I wanted to also create a 'top 10' scoreboard. The scoreboard would record player name, level (how many 'rounds' they've completed) and combo (how many buttons presses they got correct), the scoreboard would then be sorted by combo score. This led me to XML, the first time using it, and I eventually got to the point of having an XML file that recorded the top 10 scores. The XML file is managed within a scoreboard class, which is also responsible for adding new scores and sorting scores. Which gets me to the point... I'd like some feedback on the way I've gone about sorting the score list and how I could have done it better, I have no other way to gain feedback =(. I know .NET features Array.Sort() but I wasn't too sure of how to use it as it's not just a single array that needs to be sorted. When a new score needs to be entered into the scoreboard, the player name and level also have to be added. These are stored within an 'array of arrays' (10 = for 'top 10' scores) scoreboardComboData = new int[10]; // Combo scoreboardTextData = new string[2][]; scoreboardTextData[0] = new string[10]; // Name scoreboardTextData[1] = new string[10]; // Level as string The scoreboard class works as follows: - Checks to see if 'scoreboard.xml' exists, if not it creates it - Initialises above arrays and adds any player data from scoreboard.xml, from previous run - when AddScore(name, level, combo) is called the sort begins - Another method can also be called that populates the XML file with above array data The sort checks to see if the new score (combo) is less than or equal to any recorded scores within the scoreboardComboData array (if it's greater than a score, it moves onto the next element). If so, it moves all scores below the score it is less than or equal to down one element, essentially removing the last score and then places the new score within the element below the score it is less than or equal to. If the score is greater than all recorded scores, it moves all scores down one and inserts the new score within the first element. If it's the only score, it simply adds it to the first element. When a new score is added, the Name and Level data is also added to their relevant arrays, in the same way. What a tongue twister. Below is the AddScore method, I've added comments in the hope that it makes things clearer O_o. You can get the actual source file HERE. Below the method is an example of the quickest way to add a score to follow through with a debugger. public static void AddScore(string name, string level, int combo) { // If the scoreboard has not yet been filled, this adds another 'active' // array element each time a new score is added. The actual array size is // defined within PopulateScoreBoard() (set to 10 - for 'top 10' if (totalScores < scoreboardComboData.Length) totalScores++; // Does the scoreboard even need sorting? if (totalScores > 1) { for (int i = totalScores - 1; i > - 1; i--) { // Check to see if score (combo) is greater than score stored in // array if (combo > scoreboardComboData[i] && i != 0) { // If so continue to next element continue; } // Check to see if score (combo) is less or equal to element 'i' // score && that the element is not the last in the // array, if so the score does not need to be added to the scoreboard else if (combo <= scoreboardComboData[i] && i != scoreboardComboData.Length - 1) { // If the score is lower than element 'i' and greater than the last // element within the array, it needs to be added to the scoreboard. This is achieved // by moving each element under element 'i' down an element. The new score is then inserted // into the array under element 'i' for (int j = totalScores - 1; j > i; j--) { // Name and level data are moved down in their relevant arrays scoreboardTextData[0][j] = scoreboardTextData[0][j - 1]; scoreboardTextData[1][j] = scoreboardTextData[1][j - 1]; // Score (combo) data is moved down in relevant array scoreboardComboData[j] = scoreboardComboData[j - 1]; } // The new Name, level and score (combo) data is inserted into the relevant array under element 'i' scoreboardTextData[0][i + 1] = name; scoreboardTextData[1][i + 1] = level; scoreboardComboData[i + 1] = combo; break; } // If the method gets the this point, it means that the score is greater than all scores within // the array and therefore cannot be added in the above way. As it is not less than any score within // the array. else if (i == 0) { // All Names, levels and scores are moved down within their relevant arrays for (int j = totalScores - 1; j != 0; j--) { scoreboardTextData[0][j] = scoreboardTextData[0][j - 1]; scoreboardTextData[1][j] = scoreboardTextData[1][j - 1]; scoreboardComboData[j] = scoreboardComboData[j - 1]; } // The new number 1 top name, level and score, are added into the first element // within each of their relevant arrays. scoreboardTextData[0][0] = name; scoreboardTextData[1][0] = level; scoreboardComboData[0] = combo; break; } // If the methods get to this point, the combo score is not high enough // to be on the top10 score list and therefore needs to break break; } } // As totalScores < 1, the current score is the first to be added. Therefore no checks need to be made // and the Name, Level and combo data can be entered directly into the first element of their relevant // array. else { scoreboardTextData[0][0] = name; scoreboardTextData[1][0] = level; scoreboardComboData[0] = combo; } } } Example for adding score: private static void Initialize() { scoreboardDoc = new XmlDocument(); if (!File.Exists("Scoreboard.xml")) GenerateXML("Scoreboard.xml"); PopulateScoreBoard("Scoreboard.xml"); // ADD TEST SCORES HERE! AddScore("EXAMPLE", "10", 100); AddScore("EXAMPLE2", "24", 999); PopulateXML("Scoreboard.xml"); } In it's current state the source file is just used for testing, initialize is called within main and PopulateScoreBoard handles the majority of other initialising, so nothing else is needed, except to add a test score. I thank you for your time!

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• Syncing Data with a Server using Silverlight and HTTP Polling Duplex

  - by dwahlin

  Many applications have the need to stay in-sync with data provided by a service. Although web applications typically rely on standard polling techniques to check if data has changed, Silverlight provides several interesting options for keeping an application in-sync that rely on server “push” technologies. A few years back I wrote several blog posts covering different “push” technologies available in Silverlight that rely on sockets or HTTP Polling Duplex. We recently had a project that looked like it could benefit from pushing data from a server to one or more clients so I thought I’d revisit the subject and provide some updates to the original code posted. If you’ve worked with AJAX before in Web applications then you know that until browsers fully support web sockets or other duplex (bi-directional communication) technologies that it’s difficult to keep applications in-sync with a server without relying on polling. The problem with polling is that you have to check for changes on the server on a timed-basis which can often be wasteful and take up unnecessary resources. With server “push” technologies, data can be pushed from the server to the client as it changes. Once the data is received, the client can update the user interface as appropriate. Using “push” technologies allows the client to listen for changes from the data but stay 100% focused on client activities as opposed to worrying about polling and asking the server if anything has changed. Silverlight provides several options for pushing data from a server to a client including sockets, TCP bindings and HTTP Polling Duplex.  Each has its own strengths and weaknesses as far as performance and setup work with HTTP Polling Duplex arguably being the easiest to setup and get going.  In this article I’ll demonstrate how HTTP Polling Duplex can be used in Silverlight 4 applications to push data and show how you can create a WCF server that provides an HTTP Polling Duplex binding that a Silverlight client can consume.   What is HTTP Polling Duplex? Technologies that allow data to be pushed from a server to a client rely on duplex functionality. Duplex (or bi-directional) communication allows data to be passed in both directions.  A client can call a service and the server can call the client. HTTP Polling Duplex (as its name implies) allows a server to communicate with a client without forcing the client to constantly poll the server. It has the benefit of being able to run on port 80 making setup a breeze compared to the other options which require specific ports to be used and cross-domain policy files to be exposed on port 943 (as with sockets and TCP bindings). Having said that, if you’re looking for the best speed possible then sockets and TCP bindings are the way to go. But, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to duplex communication. The first time I heard about HTTP Polling Duplex (initially available in Silverlight 2) I wasn’t exactly sure how it was any better than standard polling used in AJAX applications. I read the Silverlight SDK, looked at various resources and generally found the following definition unhelpful as far as understanding the actual benefits that HTTP Polling Duplex provided: "The Silverlight client periodically polls the service on the network layer, and checks for any new messages that the service wants to send on the callback channel. The service queues all messages sent on the client callback channel and delivers them to the client when the client polls the service." Although the previous definition explained the overall process, it sounded as if standard polling was used. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie provided me with a more clear definition several years back that explains the benefits provided by HTTP Polling Duplex quite well (used with his permission): "The [HTTP Polling Duplex] duplex support does use polling in the background to implement notifications – although the way it does it is different than manual polling. It initiates a network request, and then the request is effectively “put to sleep” waiting for the server to respond (it doesn’t come back immediately). The server then keeps the connection open but not active until it has something to send back (or the connection times out after 90 seconds – at which point the duplex client will connect again and wait). This way you are avoiding hitting the server repeatedly – but still get an immediate response when there is data to send." After hearing Scott’s definition the light bulb went on and it all made sense. A client makes a request to a server to check for changes, but instead of the request returning immediately, it parks itself on the server and waits for data. It’s kind of like waiting to pick up a pizza at the store. Instead of calling the store over and over to check the status, you sit in the store and wait until the pizza (the request data) is ready. Once it’s ready you take it back home (to the client). This technique provides a lot of efficiency gains over standard polling techniques even though it does use some polling of its own as a request is initially made from a client to a server. So how do you implement HTTP Polling Duplex in your Silverlight applications? Let’s take a look at the process by starting with the server. Creating an HTTP Polling Duplex WCF Service Creating a WCF service that exposes an HTTP Polling Duplex binding is straightforward as far as coding goes. Add some one way operations into an interface, create a client callback interface and you’re ready to go. The most challenging part comes into play when configuring the service to properly support the necessary binding and that’s more of a cut and paste operation once you know the configuration code to use. To create an HTTP Polling Duplex service you’ll need to expose server-side and client-side interfaces and reference the System.ServiceModel.PollingDuplex assembly (located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Server on my machine) in the server project. For the demo application I upgraded a basketball simulation service to support the latest polling duplex assemblies. The service simulates a simple basketball game using a Game class and pushes information about the game such as score, fouls, shots and more to the client as the game changes over time. Before jumping too far into the game push service, it’s important to discuss two interfaces used by the service to communicate in a bi-directional manner. The first is called IGameStreamService and defines the methods/operations that the client can call on the server (see Listing 1). The second is IGameStreamClient which defines the callback methods that a server can use to communicate with a client (see Listing 2).   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "Silverlight", CallbackContract = typeof(IGameStreamClient))] public interface IGameStreamService { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void GetTeamData(); } Listing 1. The IGameStreamService interface defines server operations that can be called on the server.   [ServiceContract] public interface IGameStreamClient { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void ReceiveTeamData(List<Team> teamData); [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, AsyncPattern=true)] IAsyncResult BeginReceiveGameData(GameData gameData, AsyncCallback callback, object state); void EndReceiveGameData(IAsyncResult result); } Listing 2. The IGameStreamClient interfaces defines client operations that a server can call.   The IGameStreamService interface is decorated with the standard ServiceContract attribute but also contains a value for the CallbackContract property.  This property is used to define the interface that the client will expose (IGameStreamClient in this example) and use to receive data pushed from the service. Notice that each OperationContract attribute in both interfaces sets the IsOneWay property to true. This means that the operation can be called and passed data as appropriate, however, no data will be passed back. Instead, data will be pushed back to the client as it’s available.  Looking through the IGameStreamService interface you can see that the client can request team data whereas the IGameStreamClient interface allows team and game data to be received by the client. One interesting point about the IGameStreamClient interface is the inclusion of the AsyncPattern property on the BeginReceiveGameData operation. I initially created this operation as a standard one way operation and it worked most of the time. However, as I disconnected clients and reconnected new ones game data wasn’t being passed properly. After researching the problem more I realized that because the service could take up to 7 seconds to return game data, things were getting hung up. By setting the AsyncPattern property to true on the BeginReceivedGameData operation and providing a corresponding EndReceiveGameData operation I was able to get around this problem and get everything running properly. I’ll provide more details on the implementation of these two methods later in this post. Once the interfaces were created I moved on to the game service class. The first order of business was to create a class that implemented the IGameStreamService interface. Since the service can be used by multiple clients wanting game data I added the ServiceBehavior attribute to the class definition so that I could set its InstanceContextMode to InstanceContextMode.Single (in effect creating a Singleton service object). Listing 3 shows the game service class as well as its fields and constructor.   [ServiceBehavior(ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple, InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)] public class GameStreamService : IGameStreamService { object _Key = new object(); Game _Game = null; Timer _Timer = null; Random _Random = null; Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient> _ClientCallbacks = new Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient>(); static AsyncCallback _ReceiveGameDataCompleted = new AsyncCallback(ReceiveGameDataCompleted); public GameStreamService() { _Game = new Game(); _Timer = new Timer { Enabled = false, Interval = 2000, AutoReset = true }; _Timer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(_Timer_Elapsed); _Timer.Start(); _Random = new Random(); }} Listing 3. The GameStreamService implements the IGameStreamService interface which defines a callback contract that allows the service class to push data back to the client. By implementing the IGameStreamService interface, GameStreamService must supply a GetTeamData() method which is responsible for supplying information about the teams that are playing as well as individual players.  GetTeamData() also acts as a client subscription method that tracks clients wanting to receive game data.  Listing 4 shows the GetTeamData() method. public void GetTeamData() { //Get client callback channel var context = OperationContext.Current; var sessionID = context.SessionId; var currClient = context.GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>(); context.Channel.Faulted += Disconnect; context.Channel.Closed += Disconnect; IGameStreamClient client; if (!_ClientCallbacks.TryGetValue(sessionID, out client)) { lock (_Key) { _ClientCallbacks[sessionID] = currClient; } } currClient.ReceiveTeamData(_Game.GetTeamData()); //Start timer which when fired sends updated score information to client if (!_Timer.Enabled) { _Timer.Enabled = true; } } Listing 4. The GetTeamData() method subscribes a given client to the game service and returns. The key the line of code in the GetTeamData() method is the call to GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>().  This method is responsible for accessing the calling client’s callback channel. The callback channel is defined by the IGameStreamClient interface shown earlier in Listing 2 and used by the server to communicate with the client. Before passing team data back to the client, GetTeamData() grabs the client’s session ID and checks if it already exists in the _ClientCallbacks dictionary object used to track clients wanting callbacks from the server. If the client doesn’t exist it adds it into the collection. It then pushes team data from the Game class back to the client by calling ReceiveTeamData().  Since the service simulates a basketball game, a timer is then started if it’s not already enabled which is then used to randomly send data to the client. When the timer fires, game data is pushed down to the client. Listing 5 shows the _Timer_Elapsed() method that is called when the timer fires as well as the SendGameData() method used to send data to the client. void _Timer_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e) { int interval = _Random.Next(3000, 7000); lock (_Key) { _Timer.Interval = interval; _Timer.Enabled = false; } SendGameData(_Game.GetGameData()); } private void SendGameData(GameData gameData) { var cbs = _ClientCallbacks.Where(cb => ((IContextChannel)cb.Value).State == CommunicationState.Opened); for (int i = 0; i < cbs.Count(); i++) { var cb = cbs.ElementAt(i).Value; try { cb.BeginReceiveGameData(gameData, _ReceiveGameDataCompleted, cb); } catch (TimeoutException texp) { //Log timeout error } catch (CommunicationException cexp) { //Log communication error } } lock (_Key) _Timer.Enabled = true; } private static void ReceiveGameDataCompleted(IAsyncResult result) { try { ((IGameStreamClient)(result.AsyncState)).EndReceiveGameData(result); } catch (CommunicationException) { // empty } catch (TimeoutException) { // empty } } LIsting 5. _Timer_Elapsed is used to simulate time in a basketball game. When _Timer_Elapsed() fires the SendGameData() method is called which iterates through the clients wanting to be notified of changes. As each client is identified, their respective BeginReceiveGameData() method is called which ultimately pushes game data down to the client. Recall that this method was defined in the client callback interface named IGameStreamClient shown earlier in Listing 2. Notice that BeginReceiveGameData() accepts _ReceiveGameDataCompleted as its second parameter (an AsyncCallback delegate defined in the service class) and passes the client callback as the third parameter. The initial version of the sample application had a standard ReceiveGameData() method in the client callback interface. However, sometimes the client callbacks would work properly and sometimes they wouldn’t which was a little baffling at first glance. After some investigation I realized that I needed to implement an asynchronous pattern for client callbacks to work properly since 3 – 7 second delays are occurring as a result of the timer. Once I added the BeginReceiveGameData() and ReceiveGameDataCompleted() methods everything worked properly since each call was handled in an asynchronous manner. The final task that had to be completed to get the server working properly with HTTP Polling Duplex was adding configuration code into web.config. In the interest of brevity I won’t post all of the code here since the sample application includes everything you need. However, Listing 6 shows the key configuration code to handle creating a custom binding named pollingDuplexBinding and associate it with the service’s endpoint.   <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="pollingDuplexBinding"> <binaryMessageEncoding /> <pollingDuplex maxPendingSessions="2147483647" maxPendingMessagesPerSession="2147483647" inactivityTimeout="02:00:00" serverPollTimeout="00:05:00"/> <httpTransport /> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <services> <service name="GameService.GameStreamService" behaviorConfiguration="GameStreamServiceBehavior"> <endpoint address="" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="pollingDuplexBinding" contract="GameService.IGameStreamService"/> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services>   Listing 6. Configuring an HTTP Polling Duplex binding in web.config and associating an endpoint with it. Calling the Service and Receiving “Pushed” Data Calling the service and handling data that is pushed from the server is a simple and straightforward process in Silverlight. Since the service is configured with a MEX endpoint and exposes a WSDL file, you can right-click on the Silverlight project and select the standard Add Service Reference item. After the web service proxy is created you may notice that the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file only contains an empty configuration element instead of the normal configuration elements created when creating a standard WCF proxy. You can certainly update the file if you want to read from it at runtime but for the sample application I fed the service URI directly to the service proxy as shown next: var address = new EndpointAddress("http://localhost.:5661/GameStreamService.svc"); var binding = new PollingDuplexHttpBinding(); _Proxy = new GameStreamServiceClient(binding, address); _Proxy.ReceiveTeamDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveTeamDataReceived; _Proxy.ReceiveGameDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived; _Proxy.GetTeamDataAsync(); This code creates the proxy and passes the endpoint address and binding to use to its constructor. It then wires the different receive events to callback methods and calls GetTeamDataAsync().  Calling GetTeamDataAsync() causes the server to store the client in the server-side dictionary collection mentioned earlier so that it can receive data that is pushed.  As the server-side timer fires and game data is pushed to the client, the user interface is updated as shown in Listing 7. Listing 8 shows the _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method responsible for handling the data and calling UpdateGameData() to process it.   Listing 7. The Silverlight interface. Game data is pushed from the server to the client using HTTP Polling Duplex. void _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived(object sender, ReceiveGameDataReceivedEventArgs e) { UpdateGameData(e.gameData); } private void UpdateGameData(GameData gameData) { //Update Score this.tbTeam1Score.Text = gameData.Team1Score.ToString(); this.tbTeam2Score.Text = gameData.Team2Score.ToString(); //Update ball visibility if (gameData.Action != ActionsEnum.Foul) { if (tbTeam1.Text == gameData.TeamOnOffense) { AnimateBall(this.BB1, this.BB2); } else //Team 2 { AnimateBall(this.BB2, this.BB1); } } if (this.lbActions.Items.Count > 9) this.lbActions.Items.Clear(); this.lbActions.Items.Add(gameData.LastAction); if (this.lbActions.Visibility == Visibility.Collapsed) this.lbActions.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; } private void AnimateBall(Image onBall, Image offBall) { this.FadeIn.Stop(); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeInAnimation, onBall); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeOutAnimation, offBall); this.FadeIn.Begin(); } Listing 8. As the server pushes game data, the client’s _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method is called to process the data. In a real-life application I’d go with a ViewModel class to handle retrieving team data, setup data bindings and handle data that is pushed from the server. However, for the sample application I wanted to focus on HTTP Polling Duplex and keep things as simple as possible.   Summary Silverlight supports three options when duplex communication is required in an application including TCP bindins, sockets and HTTP Polling Duplex. In this post you’ve seen how HTTP Polling Duplex interfaces can be created and implemented on the server as well as how they can be consumed by a Silverlight client. HTTP Polling Duplex provides a nice way to “push” data from a server while still allowing the data to flow over port 80 or another port of your choice.   Sample Application Download

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• Implementing an async "read all currently available data from stream" operation

  - by Jon

  I recently provided an answer to this question: C# - Realtime console output redirection. As often happens, explaining stuff (here "stuff" was how I tackled a similar problem) leads you to greater understanding and/or, as is the case here, "oops" moments. I realized that my solution, as implemented, has a bug. The bug has little practical importance, but it has an extremely large importance to me as a developer: I can't rest easy knowing that my code has the potential to blow up. Squashing the bug is the purpose of this question. I apologize for the long intro, so let's get dirty. I wanted to build a class that allows me to receive input from a console's standard output Stream. Console output streams are of type FileStream; the implementation can cast to that, if needed. There is also an associated StreamReader already present to leverage. There is only one thing I need to implement in this class to achieve my desired functionality: an async "read all the data available this moment" operation. Reading to the end of the stream is not viable because the stream will not end unless the process closes the console output handle, and it will not do that because it is interactive and expecting input before continuing. I will be using that hypothetical async operation to implement event-based notification, which will be more convenient for my callers. The public interface of the class is this: public class ConsoleAutomator { public event EventHandler<ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs> StandardOutputRead; public void StartSendingEvents(); public void StopSendingEvents(); } StartSendingEvents and StopSendingEvents do what they advertise; for the purposes of this discussion, we can assume that events are always being sent without loss of generality. The class uses these two fields internally: protected readonly StringBuilder inputAccumulator = new StringBuilder(); protected readonly byte[] buffer = new byte[256]; The functionality of the class is implemented in the methods below. To get the ball rolling: public void StartSendingEvents(); { this.stopAutomation = false; this.BeginReadAsync(); } To read data out of the Stream without blocking, and also without requiring a carriage return char, BeginRead is called: protected void BeginReadAsync() { if (!this.stopAutomation) { this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.BeginRead( this.buffer, 0, this.buffer.Length, this.ReadHappened, null); } } The challenging part: BeginRead requires using a buffer. This means that when reading from the stream, it is possible that the bytes available to read ("incoming chunk") are larger than the buffer. Remember that the goal here is to read all of the chunk and call event subscribers exactly once for each chunk. To this end, if the buffer is full after EndRead, we don't send its contents to subscribers immediately but instead append them to a StringBuilder. The contents of the StringBuilder are only sent back whenever there is no more to read from the stream. private void ReadHappened(IAsyncResult asyncResult) { var bytesRead = this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.EndRead(asyncResult); if (bytesRead == 0) { this.OnAutomationStopped(); return; } var input = this.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding.GetString( this.buffer, 0, bytesRead); this.inputAccumulator.Append(input); if (bytesRead < this.buffer.Length) { this.OnInputRead(); // only send back if we 're sure we got it all } this.BeginReadAsync(); // continue "looping" with BeginRead } After any read which is not enough to fill the buffer (in which case we know that there was no more data to be read during the last read operation), all accumulated data is sent to the subscribers: private void OnInputRead() { var handler = this.StandardOutputRead; if (handler == null) { return; } handler(this, new ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs(this.inputAccumulator.ToString())); this.inputAccumulator.Clear(); } (I know that as long as there are no subscribers the data gets accumulated forever. This is a deliberate decision). The good This scheme works almost perfectly: Async functionality without spawning any threads Very convenient to the calling code (just subscribe to an event) Never more than one event for each time data is available to be read Is almost agnostic to the buffer size The bad That last almost is a very big one. Consider what happens when there is an incoming chunk with length exactly equal to the size of the buffer. The chunk will be read and buffered, but the event will not be triggered. This will be followed up by a BeginRead that expects to find more data belonging to the current chunk in order to send it back all in one piece, but... there will be no more data in the stream. In fact, as long as data is put into the stream in chunks with length exactly equal to the buffer size, the data will be buffered and the event will never be triggered. This scenario may be highly unlikely to occur in practice, especially since we can pick any number for the buffer size, but the problem is there. Solution? Unfortunately, after checking the available methods on FileStream and StreamReader, I can't find anything which lets me peek into the stream while also allowing async methods to be used on it. One "solution" would be to have a thread wait on a ManualResetEvent after the "buffer filled" condition is detected. If the event is not signaled (by the async callback) in a small amount of time, then more data from the stream will not be forthcoming and the data accumulated so far should be sent to subscribers. However, this introduces the need for another thread, requires thread synchronization, and is plain inelegant. Specifying a timeout for BeginRead would also suffice (call back into my code every now and then so I can check if there's data to be sent back; most of the time there will not be anything to do, so I expect the performance hit to be negligible). But it looks like timeouts are not supported in FileStream. Since I imagine that async calls with timeouts are an option in bare Win32, another approach might be to PInvoke the hell out of the problem. But this is also undesirable as it will introduce complexity and simply be a pain to code. Is there an elegant way to get around the problem? Thanks for being patient enough to read all of this. Update: I definitely did not communicate the scenario well in my initial writeup. I have since revised the writeup quite a bit, but to be extra sure: The question is about how to implement an async "read all the data available this moment" operation. My apologies to the people who took the time to read and answer without me making my intent clear enough.

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• Array help Index out of range exeption was unhandled

  - by Michael Quiles

  I am trying to populate combo boxes from a text file using comma as a delimiter everything was working fine, but now when I debug I get the "Index out of range exeption was unhandled" warning. I guess I need a fresh pair of eyes to see where I went wrong, I commented on the line that gets the error //Fname = fields[1]; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Printing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.IO; namespace Sullivan_Payroll { public partial class xEmpForm : Form { bool complete = false; public xEmpForm() { InitializeComponent(); } private void xEmpForm_Resize(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.xCenterPanel.Left = Convert.ToInt16((this.Width - this.xCenterPanel.Width) / 2); this.xCenterPanel.Top = Convert.ToInt16((this.Height - this.xCenterPanel.Height) / 2); Refresh(); } private void exitToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { //Exits the application this.Close(); } private void xEmpForm_FormClosing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e) //use this on xtrip calculator { DialogResult Response; if (complete == true) { Application.Exit(); } else { Response = MessageBox.Show("Are you sure you want to Exit?", "Exit", MessageBoxButtons.YesNo, MessageBoxIcon.Question, MessageBoxDefaultButton.Button2); if (Response == DialogResult.No) { complete = false; e.Cancel = true; } else { complete = true; Application.Exit(); } } } private void xEmpForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { //file sources string fileDept = "source\\Department.txt"; string fileSex = "source\\Sex.txt"; string fileStatus = "source\\Status.txt"; if (File.Exists(fileDept)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileDept)) { string dept = ""; while ((dept = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xDeptComboBox.Items.Add(dept); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Department file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } if (File.Exists(fileSex)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileSex)) { string sex = ""; while ((sex = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xSexComboBox.Items.Add(sex); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Sex file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } if (File.Exists(fileStatus)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileStatus)) { string status = ""; while ((status = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xStatusComboBox.Items.Add(status); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Status file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } } private void xFileSaveMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { { const string fileNew = "source\\New Staff.txt"; string recordIn; FileStream outFile = new FileStream(fileNew, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write); StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(outFile); for (int count = 0; count <= this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Count - 1; count++) { this.xEmployeeListBox.SelectedIndex = count; recordIn = this.xEmployeeListBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); writer.WriteLine(recordIn); } writer.Close(); outFile.Close(); this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xSexComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; MessageBox.Show("your file is saved"); } } private void xViewFacultyMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { const string fileStaff = "source\\Staff.txt"; const char DELIM = ','; string Lname, Fname, Depart, Stat, Sex, Salary, cDept, cStat, cSex; double Gtotal; string recordIn; string[] fields; cDept = this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); cStat = this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); cSex = this.xSexComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); FileStream inFile = new FileStream(fileStaff, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(inFile); recordIn = reader.ReadLine(); while (recordIn != null) { fields = recordIn.Split(DELIM); Lname = fields[0]; Fname = fields[1]; // this is where the error appears Depart = fields[2]; Stat = fields[3]; Sex = fields[4]; Salary = fields[5]; Fname = fields[1].TrimStart(null); Depart = fields[2].TrimStart(null); Stat = fields[3].TrimStart(null); Sex = fields[4].TrimStart(null); Salary = fields[5].TrimStart(null); Gtotal = double.Parse(Salary); if (Depart == cDept && cStat == Stat && cSex == Sex) { this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Add(recordIn); } recordIn = reader.ReadLine(); } reader.Close(); inFile.Close(); if (this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Count >= 1) { this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = true; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = true; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = true; } else { this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = false; MessageBox.Show("Records not found"); } } private void xEditClearMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Clear(); this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xSexComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = false; } } } Source file -- Anderson, Kristen, Accounting, Assistant, Female, 43155 Ball, Robin, Accounting, Instructor, Female, 42723 Chin, Roger, Accounting, Full, Male,59281 Coats, William, Accounting, Assistant, Male, 45371 Doepke, Cheryl, Accounting, Full, Female, 52105 Downs, Clifton, Accounting, Associate, Male, 46887 Garafano, Karen, Finance, Associate, Female, 49000 Hill, Trevor, Management, Instructor, Male, 38590 Jackson, Carole, Accounting, Instructor, Female, 38781 Jacobson, Andrew, Management, Full, Male, 56281 Lewis, Karl, Management, Associate, Male, 48387 Mack, Kevin, Management, Assistant, Male, 45000 McKaye, Susan, Management, Instructor, Female, 43979 Nelsen, Beth, Finance, Full, Female, 52339 Nelson, Dale, Accounting, Full, Male, 54578 Palermo, Sheryl, Accounting, Associate, Female, 45617 Rais, Mary, Finance, Instructor, Female, 27000 Scheib, Earl, Management, Instructor, Male, 37389 Smith, Tom, Finance, Full, Male, 57167 Smythe, Janice, Management, Associate, Female, 46887 True, David, Accounting, Full, Male, 53181 Young, Jeff, Management, Assistant, Male, 43513

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• Implementing a robust async stream reader

  - by Jon

  I recently provided an answer to this question: C# - Realtime console output redirection. As often happens, explaining stuff (here "stuff" was how I tackled a similar problem) leads you to greater understanding and/or, as is the case here, "oops" moments. I realized that my solution, as implemented, has a bug. The bug has little practical importance, but it has an extremely large importance to me as a developer: I can't rest easy knowing that my code has the potential to blow up. Squashing the bug is the purpose of this question. I apologize for the long intro, so let's get dirty. I wanted to build a class that allows me to receive input from a Stream in an event-based manner. The stream, in my scenario, is guaranteed to be a FileStream and there is also an associated StreamReader already present to leverage. The public interface of the class is this: public class MyStreamManager { public event EventHandler<ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs> StandardOutputRead; public void StartSendingEvents(); public void StopSendingEvents(); } Obviously this specific scenario has to do with a console's standard output, but that is a detail and does not play an important role. StartSendingEvents and StopSendingEvents do what they advertise; for the purposes of this discussion, we can assume that events are always being sent without loss of generality. The class uses these two fields internally: protected readonly StringBuilder inputAccumulator = new StringBuilder(); protected readonly byte[] buffer = new byte[256]; The functionality of the class is implemented in the methods below. To get the ball rolling: public void StartSendingEvents(); { this.stopAutomation = false; this.BeginReadAsync(); } To read data out of the Stream without blocking, and also without requiring a carriage return char, BeginRead is called: protected void BeginReadAsync() { if (!this.stopAutomation) { this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.BeginRead( this.buffer, 0, this.buffer.Length, this.ReadHappened, null); } } The challenging part: BeginRead requires using a buffer. This means that when reading from the stream, it is possible that the bytes available to read ("incoming chunk") are larger than the buffer. Since we are only handing off data from the stream to a consumer, and that consumer may well have inside knowledge about the size and/or format of these chunks, I want to call event subscribers exactly once for each chunk. Otherwise the abstraction breaks down and the subscribers have to buffer the incoming data and reconstruct the chunks themselves using said knowledge. This is much less convenient to the calling code, and detracts from the usefulness of my class. To this end, if the buffer is full after EndRead, we don't send its contents to subscribers immediately but instead append them to a StringBuilder. The contents of the StringBuilder are only sent back whenever there is no more to read from the stream (thus preserving the chunks). private void ReadHappened(IAsyncResult asyncResult) { var bytesRead = this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.EndRead(asyncResult); if (bytesRead == 0) { this.OnAutomationStopped(); return; } var input = this.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding.GetString( this.buffer, 0, bytesRead); this.inputAccumulator.Append(input); if (bytesRead < this.buffer.Length) { this.OnInputRead(); // only send back if we 're sure we got it all } this.BeginReadAsync(); // continue "looping" with BeginRead } After any read which is not enough to fill the buffer, all accumulated data is sent to the subscribers: private void OnInputRead() { var handler = this.StandardOutputRead; if (handler == null) { return; } handler(this, new ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs(this.inputAccumulator.ToString())); this.inputAccumulator.Clear(); } (I know that as long as there are no subscribers the data gets accumulated forever. This is a deliberate decision). The good This scheme works almost perfectly: Async functionality without spawning any threads Very convenient to the calling code (just subscribe to an event) Maintains the "chunkiness" of the data; this allows the calling code to use inside knowledge of the data without doing any extra work Is almost agnostic to the buffer size (it will work correctly with any size buffer irrespective of the data being read) The bad That last almost is a very big one. Consider what happens when there is an incoming chunk with length exactly equal to the size of the buffer. The chunk will be read and buffered, but the event will not be triggered. This will be followed up by a BeginRead that expects to find more data belonging to the current chunk in order to send it back all in one piece, but... there will be no more data in the stream. In fact, as long as data is put into the stream in chunks with length exactly equal to the buffer size, the data will be buffered and the event will never be triggered. This scenario may be highly unlikely to occur in practice, especially since we can pick any number for the buffer size, but the problem is there. Solution? Unfortunately, after checking the available methods on FileStream and StreamReader, I can't find anything which lets me peek into the stream while also allowing async methods to be used on it. One "solution" would be to have a thread wait on a ManualResetEvent after the "buffer filled" condition is detected. If the event is not signaled (by the async callback) in a small amount of time, then more data from the stream will not be forthcoming and the data accumulated so far should be sent to subscribers. However, this introduces the need for another thread, requires thread synchronization, and is plain inelegant. Specifying a timeout for BeginRead would also suffice (call back into my code every now and then so I can check if there's data to be sent back; most of the time there will not be anything to do, so I expect the performance hit to be negligible). But it looks like timeouts are not supported in FileStream. Since I imagine that async calls with timeouts are an option in bare Win32, another approach might be to PInvoke the hell out of the problem. But this is also undesirable as it will introduce complexity and simply be a pain to code. Is there an elegant way to get around the problem? Thanks for being patient enough to read all of this.

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• How to retrive message list from p2p

  - by cre-johnny07

  Hello friends I have a messaging system that uses p2p. Each peer has a incoming message list and a outgoing message list. What I need to do is whenever a new peer will join the mesh he will get the all the incoming messages from other peers and add those into it's own incoming message list. Now I know when I get the other peer info from I can ask them to give their own list to me. But I'm not finding the way how..? Any suggestion on this or help would be highly appreciated. I'm giving my code below. Thanking in Advance Johnny #region Instance Fields private string strOrigin = ""; //the chat member name private string m_Member; //the channel instance where we execute our service methods against private IServerChannel m_participant; //the instance context which in this case is our window since it is the service host private InstanceContext m_site; //our binding transport for the p2p mesh private NetPeerTcpBinding m_binding; //the factory to create our chat channel private ChannelFactory<IServerChannel> m_channelFactory; //an interface provided by the channel exposing events to indicate //when we have connected or disconnected from the mesh private IOnlineStatus o_statusHandler; //a generic delegate to execute a thread against that accepts no args private delegate void NoArgDelegate(); //an object to hold user details private IUserService userService; //an Observable Collection of object to get all the Application Instance Details in databas ObservableCollection<AppLoginInstance> appLoginInstances; // an Observable Collection of object to get all Incoming Messages types ObservableCollection<MessageType> inComingMessageTypes; // an Observable Collection of object to get all Outgoing Messages ObservableCollection<PDCL.ERP.DataModels.Message> outGoingMessages; // an Observable Collection of object to get all Incoming Messages ObservableCollection<PDCL.ERP.DataModels.Message> inComingMessages; //an Event Aggregator to publish event for other modules to subscribe private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator; /// <summary> /// an IUnityCOntainer to get the container /// </summary> private IUnityContainer container; private RefreshConnectionStatus refreshConnectionStatus; private RefreshConnectionStatusEventArgs args; private ReplyRequestMessage replyMessageRequest; private ReplyRequestMessageEventArgs eventsArgs; #endregion public P2pMessageService(IUserService UserService, IEventAggregator EventAggregator, IUnityContainer container) { userService = UserService; this.container = container; appLoginInstances = new ObservableCollection<AppLoginInstance>(); inComingMessageTypes = new ObservableCollection<MessageType>(); inComingMessages = new ObservableCollection<PDCL.ERP.DataModels.Message>(); outGoingMessages = new ObservableCollection<PDCL.ERP.DataModels.Message>(); this.args = new RefreshConnectionStatusEventArgs(); this.eventsArgs = new ReplyRequestMessageEventArgs(); this.eventAggregator = EventAggregator; this.refreshConnectionStatus = this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<RefreshConnectionStatus>(); this.replyMessageRequest = this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<ReplyRequestMessage>(); } #region IOnlineStatus Event Handlers void ostat_Offline(object sender, EventArgs e) { // we could update a status bar or animate an icon to //indicate to the user they have disconnected from the mesh //currently i don't have a "disconnect" button but adding it //should be trivial if you understand the rest of this code } void ostat_Online(object sender, EventArgs e) { try { m_participant.Join(userService.AppInstance); } catch (Exception Ex) { Logger.Exception(Ex, Ex.TargetSite.Name + ": " + Ex.TargetSite + ": " + Ex.Message); } } #endregion #region IServer Members //this method gets called from a background thread to //connect the service client to the p2p mesh specified //by the binding info in the app.config public void ConnectToMesh() { try { m_site = new InstanceContext(this); //use the binding from the app.config with default settings m_binding = new NetPeerTcpBinding("P2PMessageBinding"); m_channelFactory = new DuplexChannelFactory<IServerChannel>(m_site, "P2PMessageEndPoint"); m_participant = m_channelFactory.CreateChannel(); o_statusHandler = m_participant.GetProperty<IOnlineStatus>(); o_statusHandler.Online += new EventHandler(ostat_Online); o_statusHandler.Offline += new EventHandler(ostat_Offline); //m_participant.InitializeMesh(); //this.appLoginInstances.Add(this.userService.AppInstance); BackgroundWorkerHelper.DoWork<object>(() => { //this is an empty unhandled method on the service interface. //why? because for some reason p2p clients don't try to connect to the mesh //until the first service method call. so to facilitate connecting i call this method //to get the ball rolling. m_participant.InitializeMesh(); //SynchronizeMessage(this.inComingMessages); return new object(); }, arg => { }); this.appLoginInstances.Add(this.userService.AppInstance); } catch (Exception Ex) { Logger.Exception(Ex, Ex.TargetSite.Name + ": " + Ex.TargetSite + ": " + Ex.Message); } } public void Join(AppLoginInstance obj) { try { // Adding Instance to the PeerList if (appLoginInstances.SingleOrDefault(a => a.InstanceId == obj.InstanceId)==null) { appLoginInstances.Add(obj); this.refreshConnectionStatus.Publish(new RefreshConnectionStatusEventArgs() { Status = m_channelFactory.State }); } //this will retrieve any new members that have joined before the current user m_participant.SynchronizeMemberList(userService.AppInstance); } catch(Exception Ex) { Logger.Exception(Ex,Ex.TargetSite.Name + ": " + Ex.TargetSite + ": " + Ex.Message); } } /// <summary> /// Synchronizes member list /// </summary> /// <param name="obj">The AppLoginInstance Param</param> public void SynchronizeMemberList(AppLoginInstance obj) { //as member names come in we simply disregard duplicates and //add them to the member list, this way we can retrieve a list //of members already in the chatroom when we enter at any time. //again, since this is just an example this is the simplified //way to do things. the correct way would be to retrieve a list //of peernames and retrieve the metadata from each one which would //tell us what the member name is and add it. we would want to check //this list when we join the mesh to make sure our member name doesn't //conflict with someone else try { if (appLoginInstances.SingleOrDefault(a => a.InstanceId == obj.InstanceId) == null) { appLoginInstances.Add(obj); } } catch (Exception Ex) { Logger.Exception(Ex, Ex.TargetSite.Name + ": " + Ex.TargetSite + ": " + Ex.Message); } } /// <summary> /// This methos broadcasts the mesasge to all peers. /// </summary> /// <param name="msg">The whole message which is to be broadcasted</param> /// <param name="securityLevels"> Level of security</param> public void BroadCastMsg(PDCL.ERP.DataModels.Message msg, List<string> securityLevels) { try { foreach (string s in securityLevels) { if (this.userService.IsInRole(s)) { if (this.inComingMessages.Count == 0 && msg.CreatedByApp != this.userService.AppInstanceId) { this.inComingMessages.Add(msg); } else if (this.inComingMessages.SingleOrDefault(a => a.MessageId == msg.MessageId) == null && msg.CreatedByApp != this.userService.AppInstanceId) { this.inComingMessages.Add(msg); } } } } catch (Exception Ex) { Logger.Exception(Ex, Ex.TargetSite.Name + ": " + Ex.TargetSite + ": " + Ex.Message); } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="msg">The Message to denyed</param> public void BroadCastReplyMsg(PDCL.ERP.DataModels.Message msg) { try { //if (this.inComingMessages.SingleOrDefault(a => a.MessageId == msg.MessageId) != null) //{ this.replyMessageRequest.Publish(new ReplyRequestMessageEventArgs() { Message = msg }); this.inComingMessages.Remove(this.inComingMessages.SingleOrDefault(o => o.MessageId == msg.MessageId)); //} } catch (Exception ex) { Logger.Exception(ex, ex.TargetSite.Name + ": " + ex.TargetSite + ": " + ex.Message); } } //again we need to sync the worker thread with the UI thread via Dispatcher public void Whisper(string Member, string MemberTo, string Message) { } public void InitializeMesh() { //do nothing } public void Leave(AppLoginInstance obj) { if (this.appLoginInstances.SingleOrDefault(a => a.InstanceId == obj.InstanceId) != null) { this.appLoginInstances.Remove(this.appLoginInstances.Single(a => a.InstanceId == obj.InstanceId)); } } //public void SynchronizeRemoveMemberList(AppLoginInstance obj) //{ // if (appLoginInstances.SingleOrDefault(a => a.InstanceId == obj.InstanceId) != null) // { // appLoginInstances.Remove(obj); // } //} #endregion

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