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• Frustrated where I am, but not sure where to go with my career [closed]

  - by Tom Pickles

  I work (3 years now) as a lead developer for a team developing internal tools and websites for a customer account within large outsourcing company. I'm a self taught programmer and my previous incarnation was a 3rd line support guy, so I have a solid infrastructure knowledge. We use VB.Net/MSSQL/SSIS/SSRS ASP.NET (nTier) in house and I have about 8 years coding experience. Without going into too much detail, my boss is very ambitious and uses our team as his footing to get up the ladder. I've been in the team from the start and the only new dev's we have brought in have been people with a bit of VBA/VBScript experience, much to my chagrin, to bolster his empire. It's been a lot of hard work to bring them up to a standard, but there's still a lot for them to learn. This makes my life stressful as I always get the high profile/complex project work to do as other's simply cannot do it, or it'd take them twice/three times longer to do it. My boss is always seeking stuff for us to build for people who haven't asked for it, which usually get's thrown to me as I have the most experience and can pick new API's (etc) up quicker. He doesn't give us proper requirements, we don't get time to design properly before we code, he wants us to throw something (quick and dirty as he calls it) together so we can get it out ASAP. I take pride in my work so I like to do it properly, make my code clean, maintainable etc, and I train the other guys in the team to do the same. But, we always fall on our faces. The customer we drop the apps on say it doesn't do what they need (due to few requirements), or my boss doesn't like it/changes the spec, so we have to rework it, it get's drawn out, and it makes us and me look and feel like fools. We then get accused by boss of not being reactive enough to change. I've had enough. In order to get my skills and knowledge gap's filled, I've been reading Code Complete 2nd Ed (McConnell) and the Head First Design Patterns books. I'm forcing myself to move into C# from VB at home to broaden my horizons. I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't want to code all my life as I'd like to move into a higher level design/architects role at some point in time (I'm 35). Where do I/can I go from here?

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• Best development architecture for a small team of programmers ( WAMP Stack )

  - by Tio

  Hi all.. I'm in the first month of work in a new company.. and after I met the two programmer's and asked how things are organized in terms of projects inside the company, they simply shrug their shoulders, and said that nothing is organized.. I think my jaw hit the ground that same time.. ( I know some, of you think I should quit, but I'm on a privileged position, I'm the most experienced there, so there's room for me to grow inside the company, and I'm taking the high road ).. So I talked to the IT guy, and one of the programmers, and maybe this week I'm going to get a server all to myself to start organizing things. I've used various architectures in my previous work experiences, on one I was developing in a server on the network ( no source control of course ).. another experience I had was developing in my local computer, with no server on the network, just source control. And at home, I have a mix of the two, everything I code is on a server on the network, and I have those folders under source control, and I also have a no-ip account configured on that server so I can access it everywhere and I can show the clients anything. For me I think this last solution ( the one I have at home ) is the best: Network server with WAMP stack. The server as a public IP so we can access it by domain name. And use subdomains for each project. Everybody works directly on the network server. I think the problem arises, when two or more people want to work on the same project, in this case the only way to do this is by using source control and local repositories, this is great, but I think this turns development a lot more complicated. In the example I gave, to make a change to the code, I would simply need to open the file in my favorite editor, make the change, alter the database, check in the changes into source control and presto all done. Using local repositories, I would have to get the latest version, run the scripts on the local database to update it, alter the file, alter the database, check in the changes to the network server, update the database on the network server, see if everything is running well on the network server, and presto all done, to me this seems overcomplicated for a change on a simple php page. I could share the database for the local development and for the network server, that sure would help. Maybe the best way to do this is just simply: Network server with WAMP stack ( test server so to speak ), public server accessible trough the web. LAMP stack on every developer computer ( minus the database ) We develop locally, test, then check in the changes into the server test and presto. What do you think? Maybe I should start doing this at home.. Thanks and best regards... Edit: I'm sorry I made a mistake and switched WAMP with LAMP, sorry about that..

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• Detecting if someone is in a room in your house and sending you an email.

  - by mbcrump

  Let me setup this scenario: You are selling your house. You have small children. (Possibly 2 rug rats or more) The real estate company calls and says they have a showing for your house between the hours of 3pm-6pm. You have to keep the children occupied. You realize this is the 5th time you have shown your house this week. What is a programmer to do?……Setup a webcam, find a motion detection software that has support to launch a program and of course, Visual Studio 2010. First, comes the tools Some sort of webcam, I chose the WinBook because a friend of mine loaned it to me. It is a basic USB2.0 camera that supports 640x480 without software.  Next up was find webcam software that supports launching a program. WebcamXP support this. VS 2010 Console Application. A cell phone that you can check your email. You may be asking, why write code to send the email when a lot of commercial software motion detection packages include that as base functionality. Well, first it cost money and second I don’t want the picture of the person as that probably invades privacy and as a future buyer, I don’t want someone recording me in their house. Now onto the show... First, the code part. We are going to create a VS2010 or whatever version you have installed and use the following code snippet. Code Snippet using System; using System.Net.Mail; using System.Net;     namespace MotionDetectionEmailer {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             try             {                 MailMessage m = new MailMessage                    ("[email protected]",                     "[email protected]",                     "Motion Detected at " + DateTime.Now,                     "Someone is in the downstairs basement.");                 SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("smtp.charter.net");                 client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("mbcrump", "NOTTELLINGYOU");                 client.Send(m);             }               catch (SmtpException ex)             {                 Console.WriteLine("Who cares?? " + ex.ToString());             }         }       } } Second, Download and install wecamxp and select the option to launch an external program and you are finished. Now, when you are at MCDonalds and can check your email on your phone, you will see when they entered the house and you can go back home without waiting the full 3 hours. --- NICE!

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• Is the science of Computer Science dead?

  - by Veaviticus

  Question : Is the science and art of CS dead? By that I mean, the real requirements to think, plan and efficiently solve problems seems to be falling away from CS these days. The field seems to be lowering the entry-barrier so more people can 'program' without having to learn how to truly program. Background : I'm a recent graduate with a BS in Computer Science. I'm working a starting position at a decent sized company in the IT department. I mostly do .NET and other Microsoft technologies at my job, but before this I've done Java stuff through internships and the like. I personally am a C++ programmer for my own for-fun projects. In Depth : Through the work I've been doing, it seems to me that the intense disciplines of a real science don't exist in CS anymore. In the past, programmers had to solve problems efficiently in order for systems to be robust and quick. But now, with the prevailing technologies like .NET, Java and scripting languages, it seems like efficiency and robustness have been traded for ease of development. Most of the colleagues that I work with don't even have degrees in Computer Science. Most graduated with Electrical Engineering degrees, a few with Software Engineering, even some who came from tech schools without a 4 year program. Yet they get by just fine without having the technical background of CS, without having studied theories and algorithms, without having any regard for making an elegant solution (they just go for the easiest, cheapest solution). The company pushes us to use Microsoft technologies, which take all the real thought out of the matter and replace it with libraries and tools that can auto-build your project for you half the time. I'm not trying to hate on the languages, I understand that they serve a purpose and do it well, but when your employees don't know how a hash-table works, and use the wrong sorting methods, or run SQL commands that are horribly inefficient (but get the job done in an acceptable time), it feels like more effort is being put into developing technologies that coddle new 'programmers' rather than actually teaching people how to do things right. I am interested in making efficient and, in my opinion, beautiful programs. If there is a better way to do it, I'd rather go back and refactor it than let it slide. But in the corporate world, they push me to complete tasks quickly rather than elegantly. And that really bugs me. Is this what I'm going to be looking forward to the rest of my life? Are there still positions out there for people who love the science and art of CS rather than just the paycheck? And on the same note, here's a good read if you haven't seen it before The Perils Of Java Schools

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 16, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 16, 2011Popular ReleasesuComponents: uComponents v2.1 RTM: What's new in v2.1? 5 new DataTypes JSON Datasource DropDown Multiple Textstring Similarity Text Image XPath DropDownList Please note that the release of DataType Grid has been postponed until v2.2. 3 new XSLT extensions Media Nodes Search Multi-node tree picker updates XPath start node selectors From Global or Relative start node selectors Max & Min node selection limits Bug fixes If you find a bug or have an issue, please raise a ticket here on CodePlex for us and we'l...Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.6 (BETA): This is seventh BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. New in this release: Version 5.0.6 is almost completely backward compatible with 4.2.1 and 5.0.3 (BETA) Bug fixes and helpers to simplify many common scenarios For more information about this release see the following blog posts: F...SQLCE Code Generator: Build 1.0.3: New beta of the SQLCE Code Generator. New features: - Generates an IDataRepository interface that contains the generated repository interfaces that represents each table - Visual Studio 2010 Custom Tool Support Custom Tool: The custom tool is called SQLCECodeGenerator. Write this in the Custom Tool field in the Properties Window of an SDF file included in your project, this should create a code-behind file for the generated data access codeKooboo CMS: Kooboo 3.0 RC: Bug fixes Inline editing toolbar positioning for websites with complicate CSS. Inline editing is turned on by default now for the samplesite template. MongoDB version content query for multiple filters. . Add a new 404 page to guide users to login and create first website. Naming validation for page name and datarule name. Files in this download kooboo_CMS.zip: The Kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB ...SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.2: 1. introduce sql color syntax highlighting with http://www.codeproject.com/KB/edit/FastColoredTextBox_.aspxUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.7.0: Service release fixing 50+ issues! Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to check the free foundation videos on how to get started building Umbraco sites. They're available from: Introduction for webmasters: http://umbraco.tv/help-and-support/video-tutorials/getting-started Understand the Umbraco concepts: http://umbraco.tv/help-and-support...ProDinner - ASP.NET MVC EF4 Code First DDD jQuery Sample App: first release: ProDinner is an ASP.NET MVC sample application, it uses DDD, EF4 Code First for Data Access, jQuery and MvcProjectAwesome for Web UI, it has Multi-language User Interface Features: CRUD and search operations for entities Multi-Language User Interface upload and crop Images (make thumbnail) for meals pagination using "more results" button very rich and responsive UI (using Mvc Project Awesome) Multiple UI themes (using jQuery UI themes)BEPUphysics: BEPUphysics v0.15.0: BEPUphysics v0.15.0!LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.1: This release contains couple of new features and bug fixes including: Features: Send chat transcript via email Operator can now invite visitor to chat (pro-active chat request) Bug Fixes: Operator management (Save and Delete) bug fixes Operator Console chat small fixesIronRuby: 1.1.3: IronRuby 1.1.3 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. The main purpose of this release is to sync with IronPython 2.7 release, i.e. to keep the Dynamic Language Runtime that both these languages build on top shareable. This release also fixes a few bugs: 5763 Use...SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.3.2.1 Production: Release 2.3.2.1 implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 13 modules with 163 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scripts for working with ADO.NET, SMO, Agent, RMO, SSIS, SQL script files, PBM, Performance Counters, SQLProfiler, Oracle and MySQL and using Powershell ISE as a SQL and Oracle query tool. In addition optional backend databases and SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 reports are provided with SQLServer and PBM modules. See readme file for details.IronPython: 2.7: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm very pleased to announce the release of IronPython 2.7. This release contains all of the language features of Python 2.7, as well as several previously missing modules and numerous bug fixes. IronPython 2.7 also includes built-in Visual Studio support through IronPython Tools for Visual Studio. IronPython 2.7 requires .NET 4.0 or Silverlight 4. To download IronPython 2.7, visit http://ironpython.codeplex.com/releases/view/54498. Any bugs should be report...XML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.2: Changes in 4.0: This release is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Changed XSD validation to use the schema specified by the XML documents. Added a VS style Error List, double-clicking an error takes you to the offending node. XPathNavigator schema validation finally gives SourceObject (was fixed in .NET 4). Added Namespaces window and better support for XPath expressions in documents with a default namespace. Added ExpandAll and CollapseAll toolbar buttons (in a...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.0.0: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation has been in beta for some time now and has been used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re now highly confident in the product and have designated this release as stable. We recommend all users update to this version. New Capabilities MappingsTo improve compatibility with other libraries some new .NET capabilities are now populated with wurfl data: “maximumRenderedPageSize” populated with “max_deck_size” “rendersBreaksAfterWmlAnchor” populated ...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.3: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager added interactive search for the lookupWPF Inspector: WPF Inspector 0.9.7: New Features in Version 0.9.7 - Support for .NET 3.5 and 4.0 - Multi-inspection of the same process - Property-Filtering for multiple keywords e.g. "Height Width" - Smart Element Selection - Select Controls by clicking CTRL, - Select Template-Parts by clicking CTRL+SHIFT - Possibility to hide the element adorner (over the context menu on the visual tree) - Many bugfixes??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-03-10: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ??，????。??????????All-In-One Code Framework ???，??20?Sample！！????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ASP.NET ??： CSASPNETBingMaps VBASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload CS/VBASPNETSerializeJsonString CSASPNETIPtoLocation CSASPNETExcelLikeGridView ....... Winform??： FTPDownload FTPUpload MultiThreadedWebDownloader...Rawr: Rawr 4.1.0: Note: This release may say 4.0.21 in the version bar. This is a typo and the version is actually 4.1.0, not to be confused with 4.0.10 which was released a while back. Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a Relea...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1.2 for IIS 7: This is a localization release of PHP Manager for IIS 7. It contains all the functionality available in 56962 plus a few bug fixes (see change list for more details). Most importantly this release is translated into five languages: German - the translation is provided by Christian Graefe Dutch - the translation is provided by Harrie Verveer Turkish - the translation is provided by Yusuf Oztürk Japanese - the translation is provided by Kenichi Wakasa Russian - the translation is provid...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Beta ChangesAdded user streams support Serialization is not attempted for Twitter 5xx errors Fixes based on feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.2.0: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comNew ProjectsABSC - Automatic Battle System Configurator: ABSC - Automatic Battle System Configurator Este é um aplicativo que auxilia os usuários na configuração de diversos script's de batalha disponíveis atualmente para o Rpg Maker. O aplicativo irá gerar um script com toda a configuração especificada pelo usuário.Active Directory Monkey: Designed for IS support teams to easily reset active directoy passwords.Ag-Light: Artesis projectAnito.ORM: Anito ORMblogengine customizations: Customizations for dotnetblogengineCool Tool: Cool Tool is a Visual studio add-in for generating business entities. Generator provides functionality to be able easily and comfortable generate class elements and implement chosen interfaces. Project is developed in VS 2010 (C# 4.0). Enjoy!csmpfit - A Least Squares Optimization Library in C# (C Sharp): A C# port of the C-based mpfit Levenberg Marquardt solver at Argonne National Labs (http://cow.physics.wisc.edu/~craigm/idl/cmpfit.html), including both desktop .NET and Silverlight project libraries.DirectX 11 Framework for Experimentation: Basic Framework for DirectX 11 (without DXUT) containing basic stuffs like Text Rendering, Quad Render, Model Loading, basic Skinning animation, Shader framework (substitute for the effect API) and lots of random stuffs !!!Doanvien code project: DoanVien code projectdtweet - a dashing way of tweeting: dtweet is developed in ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM (Razor) C# JQuery 1.5.1FormMail.NET: This is a project to support emailing form data from a .NET page, and storing that form data in an XML file.LRU Cache: This project implements the LRU Cache using C#. It uses a Dictionary and a LinkedList. Dictionary ensures fast access to the data, and the linkedlist controls which objects are to be removed first.Magelia WebStore Open-source e-commerce software: Magelia WebStore is a customizable, multilingual and multi-currency open-source e-commerce software for the .net environment. WebStore was developped C# and Aspx and only requires an SQL Server Express. MDA.Net: MDA.Net is the .Net/Silverlight port of mda-vst instruments and effects. Currently it includes just the MDA piano and an overdrive with basic interfaces to build on. Just PM me if you have some time to help - we are in no rush, aim to migrate everything one-by-one. MVC NGShop: NGShop ????????????，????Asp.net MVC 2.0 + Jquery + SQL Server 2008， ???Castle Windsor IOC、entity framework，??????visual studio 2010??，??????vs2010，?????js???。Orchard - Photo Albums module: This module allows you to create photo albums with various effects: lightbox, slideshow, etc. PowerShell Workflow: PowerShell Workflow helps organizations to define their operational processes through the power of Workflow and Powershell. Project Dark: Early version of our project. Made in Torque 3dReFSharp: ReFSharp is pretty printer, analyzing tool and translator source code texts between F#, C# and Java. Current version has full functional pretty printer for F# and pre-alpha translator of C# to F#.Relate Intranet Templates: <project name> is an open source package for EPiServer Relate which creates a foundation for an intranet.Service monitor: Service monitor is a simple utility that lets you monitor and manage the states of services of multiple machines. It allows starting/stopping and restarting. It is Windows 7 UAC aware.Sharp Console: Sharp Console is a Windows Command Line (WCL)alternative written in C#. It targets those who lack access to the WCL or simply wish to use the NET framework instead. It aims to provide the same (and more!) functionality as the WCL. Contribute anything you feel will make it better!Stone2: New version of Stone, but using TFS for versioningStudent Database Management System: Student Database Management System is a sample Online Web based and also desktop application which helps school to maintain their records free online. this project is open source project and Free available for all schools to check and send their response..

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• Should I be looking for an alternative to Zen Cart as my business grows?

  - by MarkS

  I created a business website for a family business which is growing. It's my family, and I'm a software developer, but I don't want to rebuild the wheels or be a shopping cart programmer. For this business, I need the web store to "just work", but... it gets complicated... There are two parts of this business website. One of them is driven by Wordpress and I use the awesome Thesis theme. This is modern, flexible, and saves me a lot of time from doing custom coding and styling. I couldn't be more pleased with this arrangement. The other part of the site is a Zen Cart store. It's administration and it's flexibility is frustrating and archaic Web 1.0. For the past few years, I keep hearing that the developers are working on a 2.0 version of Zen Cart, but they haven't communicated anything significant in the past few years other than to say, "When it's ready, we'll let you know." What I'm looking for in a cart, I would need to install 6-10 additional mods, and would need to do a lot of custom coding. I'm now willing to pay for a top-notch e-commerce solution for a small business that we can grow up into a larger business over time. Requirements: Extremely flexible shipping that let's us set up rules per product/category, tables of rates, calculated rates, max package weighs, etc. (flexibility like that available with CEON Advance Shipping Module for Zen Cart Coupons and gift certificates Manual order entry for phone orders Multi-channel support (We also sell on Amazon, eBay, use Google Base and we want to maintain one set of inventory and have it kept current) Decent SEO features Reviews and star-ratings on products Easy social networking features for sharing, following, liking, etc) Easy integration with AdWords and analytics tracking Modern and very usable product and store administration (Like I was saying, I'm spoiled by Wordpress and Thesis) At the end of the day, I don't care if it's a hosted solution or if I have to host it myself. I just want something that is going to stay up-to-date, regularly be maintained and improved, and if I have to update it, things like the one-click update present in Wordpress is something it has to have. Professional Webmasters, if you had to run a store / website, but you had to spend your time focusing on your sales and marketing efforts rather than diffing php files and copying and tweaking them to change even the slightest details of your site, what would you choose?

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• Will my self-taught code be fine, or should I take it to the professional level?

  - by G1i1ch

  Lately I've been getting professional work, hanging out with other programmers, and making friends in the industry. The only thing is I'm 100% self-taught. It's caused my style to extremely deviate from the style of those that are properly trained. It's the techniques and organization of my code that's different. It's a mixture of several things I do. I tend to blend several programming paradigms together. Like Functional and OO. I lean to the Functional side more than OO, but I see the use of OO when something would make more sense as an abstract entity. Like a game object. Next I also go the simple route when doing something. When in contrast, it seems like sometimes the code I see from professional programmers is complicated for the sake of it! I use lots of closures. And lastly, I'm not the best commenter. I find it easier just to read through my code than reading the comment. And most cases I just end up reading the code even if there are comments. Plus I've been told that, because of how simply I write my code, it's very easy to read it. I hear professionally trained programmers go on and on about things like unit tests. Something I've never used before so I haven't even the faintest idea of what they are or how they work. Lots and lots of underscores "_", which aren't really my taste. Most of the techniques I use are straight from me, or a few books I've read. Don't know anything about MVC, I've heard a lot about it though with things like backbone.js. I think it's a way to organize an application. It just confuses me though because by now I've made my own organizational structures. It's a bit of a pain. I can't use template applications at all when learning something new like with Ubuntu's Quickly. I have trouble understanding code that I can tell is from someone trained. Complete OO programming really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, yet that seems to be what EVERYONE else is strictly using. It's left me not that confident in the look of my code, or wondering whether I'll cause sparks when joining a company or maybe contributing to open source projects. In fact I'm rather scared of the fact that people will eventually be checking out my code. Is this just something normal any programmer goes through or should I really look to change up my techniques?

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• DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

  - by Rick Strahl

  Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Interviews: Going Beyond the Technical Quiz

  - by Tony Davis

  All developers will be familiar with the basic format of a technical interview. After a bout of CV-trawling to gauge basic experience, strengths and weaknesses, the interview turns technical. The whiteboard takes center stage and the challenge is set to design a function or query, or solve what on the face of it might seem a disarmingly simple programming puzzle. Most developers will have experienced those few panic-stricken moments, when one’s mind goes as blank as the whiteboard, before un-popping the marker pen, and hopefully one’s mental functions, to work through the problem. It is a way to probe the candidate’s knowledge of basic programming structures and techniques and to challenge their critical thinking. However, these challenges or puzzles, often devised by some of the smartest brains in the development team, have a tendency to become unnecessarily ‘tricksy’. They often seem somewhat academic in nature. While the candidate straight out of IT school might breeze through the construction of a Markov chain, a candidate with bags of practical experience but less in the way of formal training could become nonplussed. Also, a whiteboard and a marker pen make up only a very small part of the toolkit that a programmer will use in everyday work. I remember vividly my first job interview, for a position as technical editor. It went well, but after the usual CV grilling and technical questions, I was only halfway there. Later, they sat me alongside a team of editors, in front of a computer loaded with MS Word and copy of SQL Server Query Analyzer, and my task was to edit a real chapter for a real SQL Server book that they planned to publish, including validating and testing all the code. It was a tough challenge but I came away with a sound knowledge of the sort of work I’d do, and its context. It makes perfect sense, yet my impression is that many organizations don’t do this. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that Red Gate started to move over to this model for developer interviews. Now, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the whiteboard challenges, the candidate can expect to sit with their prospective team, in front of Visual Studio, loaded with all the useful tools in the developer’s kit (ReSharper and so on) and asked to, for example, analyze and improve a real piece of software. The same principles should apply when interviewing for a database positon. In addition to the usual questions challenging the candidate’s knowledge of such things as b-trees, object permissions, database recovery models, and so on, sit the candidate down with the other database developers or DBAs. Arm them with a copy of Management Studio, and a few other tools, then challenge them to discover the flaws in a stored procedure, and improve its performance. Or present them with a corrupt database and ask them to get the database back online, and discover the cause of the corruption.

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• Au revoir, Python?

  - by GuySmiley

  I'm an ex-C++ programmer who's recently discovered (and fallen head-over-heels with) Python. I've taken some time to become reasonably fluent in Python, but I've encountered some troubling realities that may lead me to drop it as my language of choice, at least for the time being. I'm writing this in the hopes that someone out there can talk me out of it by convincing me that my concerns are easily circumvented within the bounds of the python universe. I picked up python while looking for a single flexible language that will allow me to build end-to-end working systems quickly on a variety of platforms. These include: - web services - mobile apps - cross-platform client apps for PC Development speed is more of a priority at the time-being than execution speed. However, in order to improve performance over time without requiring major re-writes or architectural changes I think it's imperative to be able to interface easily with Java. That way, I can use Java to optimize specific components as the application scales, without throwing away any code. As far as I can tell, my requirement for an enterprise-capable, platform-independent, fast language with a large developer base means it would have to be Java. .NET or C++ would not cut it due to their respective limitations. Also Java is clearly de rigeur for most mobile platforms. Unfortunately, tragically, there doesn't seem to be a good way to meet all these demands. Jython seems to be what I'm looking for in principle, except that it appears to be practically dead, with no one developing, supporting, or using it to any great degree. And also Jython seems too married to the Java libraries, as you can't use many of the CPython standard libraries with it, which has a major impact on the code you end up writing. The only other option that I can see is to use JPype wrapped in marshalling classes, which may work although it seems like a pain and I wonder if it would be worth it in the long run. On the other hand, everything I'm looking for seems to be readily available by using JRuby, which seems to be much better supported. As things stand, I think this is my best option. I'm sad about this because I absolutely love everything about Python, including the syntax. The perl-like constructs in Ruby just feel like such a step backwards to me in terms of readability, but at the end of the day most of the benefits of python are available in Ruby as well. So I ask you - am I missing something here? Much of what I've said is based on what I've read, so is this summary of the current landscape accurate, or is there some magical solution to the Python-Java divide that will snuff these concerns and allow me to comfortably stay in my happy Python place?

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• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

  In a recent ASP.NET MVC application I’m involved with, we had a late in the process request to handle Content Negotiation: Returning output based on the HTTP Accept header of the incoming HTTP request. This is standard behavior in ASP.NET Web API but ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this functionality directly out of the box. Another reason this came up in discussion is last week’s announcements of ASP.NET vNext, which seems to indicate that ASP.NET Web API is not going to be ported to the cloud version of vNext, but rather be replaced by a combined version of MVC and Web API. While it’s not clear what new API features will show up in this new framework, it’s pretty clear that the ASP.NET MVC style syntax will be the new standard for all the new combined HTTP processing framework. Why negotiated Content? Content negotiation is one of the key features of Web API even though it’s such a relatively simple thing. But it’s also something that’s missing in MVC and once you get used to automatically having your content returned based on Accept headers it’s hard to go back to manually having to create separate methods for different output types as you’ve had to with Microsoft server technologies all along (yes, yes I know other frameworks – including my own – have done this for years but for in the box features this is relatively new from Web API). As a quick review,  Accept Header content negotiation works off the request’s HTTP Accept header:POST http://localhost/mydailydosha/Editable/NegotiateContent HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json Host: localhost Content-Length: 76 Pragma: no-cache { ElementId: "header", PageName: "TestPage", Text: "This is a nice header" } If I make this request I would expect to get back a JSON result based on my application/json Accept header. To request XML  I‘d just change the accept header:Accept: text/xml and now I’d expect the response to come back as XML. Now this only works with media types that the server can process. In my case here I need to handle JSON, XML, HTML (using Views) and Plain Text. HTML results might need more than just a data return – you also probably need to specify a View to render the data into either by specifying the view explicitly or by using some sort of convention that can automatically locate a view to match. Today ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this sort of automatic content switching out of the box. Unfortunately, in my application scenario we have an application that started out primarily with an AJAX backend that was implemented with JSON only. So there are lots of JSON results like this:[Route("Customers")] public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return Json(repo.GetCustomers(),JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } These work fine, but they are of course JSON specific. Then a couple of weeks ago, a requirement came in that an old desktop application needs to also consume this API and it has to use XML to do it because there’s no JSON parser available for it. Ooops – stuck with JSON in this case. While it would have been easy to add XML specific methods I figured it’s easier to add basic content negotiation. And that’s what I show in this post. Missteps – IResultFilter, IActionFilter My first attempt at this was to use IResultFilter or IActionFilter which look like they would be ideal to modify result content after it’s been generated using OnResultExecuted() or OnActionExecuted(). Filters are great because they can look globally at all controller methods or individual methods that are marked up with the Filter’s attribute. But it turns out these filters don’t work for raw POCO result values from Action methods. What we wanted to do for API calls is get back to using plain .NET types as results rather than result actions. That is  you write a method that doesn’t return an ActionResult, but a standard .NET type like this:public Customer UpdateCustomer(Customer cust) { … do stuff to customer :-) return cust; } Unfortunately both OnResultExecuted and OnActionExecuted receive an MVC ContentResult instance from the POCO object. MVC basically takes any non-ActionResult return value and turns it into a ContentResult by converting the value using .ToString(). Ugh. The ContentResult itself doesn’t contain the original value, which is lost AFAIK with no way to retrieve it. So there’s no way to access the raw customer object in the example above. Bummer. Creating a NegotiatedResult This leaves mucking around with custom ActionResults. ActionResults are MVC’s standard way to return action method results – you basically specify that you would like to render your result in a specific format. Common ActionResults are ViewResults (ie. View(vn,model)), JsonResult, RedirectResult etc. They work and are fairly effective and work fairly well for testing as well as it’s the ‘standard’ interface to return results from actions. The problem with the this is mainly that you’re explicitly saying that you want a specific result output type. This works well for many things, but sometimes you do want your result to be negotiated. My first crack at this solution here is to create a simple ActionResult subclass that looks at the Accept header and based on that writes the output. I need to support JSON and XML content and HTML as well as text – so effectively 4 media types: application/json, text/xml, text/html and text/plain. Everything else is passed through as ContentResult – which effecively returns whatever .ToString() returns. Here’s what the NegotiatedResult usage looks like:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return new NegotiatedResult(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return new NegotiatedResult("Show", repo.GetCustomer(id)); } There are two overloads of this method – one that returns just the raw result value and a second version that accepts an optional view name. The second version returns the Razor view specified only if text/html is requested – otherwise the raw data is returned. This is useful in applications where you have an HTML front end that can also double as an API interface endpoint that’s using the same model data you send to the View. For the application I mentioned above this was another actual use-case we needed to address so this was a welcome side effect of creating a custom ActionResult. There’s also an extension method that directly attaches a Negotiated() method to the controller using the same syntax:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return this.Negotiated(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return this.Negotiated("Show",repo.GetCustomer(id)); } Using either of these mechanisms now allows you to return JSON, XML, HTML or plain text results depending on the Accept header sent. Send application/json you get just the Customer JSON data. Ditto for text/xml and XML data. Pass text/html for the Accept header and the "Show.cshtml" Razor view is rendered passing the result model data producing final HTML output. While this isn’t as clean as passing just POCO objects back as I had intended originally, this approach fits better with how MVC action methods are intended to be used and we get the bonus of being able to specify a View to render (optionally) for HTML. How does it work An ActionResult implementation is pretty straightforward. You inherit from ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method to send your output to the ASP.NET output stream. ActionFilters are an easy way to effectively do post processing on ASP.NET MVC controller actions just before the content is sent to the output stream, assuming your specific action result was used. Here’s the full code to the NegotiatedResult class (you can also check it out on GitHub):/// <summary> /// Returns a content negotiated result based on the Accept header. /// Minimal implementation that works with JSON and XML content, /// can also optionally return a view with HTML. /// </summary> /// <example> /// // model data only /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult(repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// // optional view for HTML /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public class NegotiatedResult : ActionResult { /// <summary> /// Data stored to be 'serialized'. Public /// so it's potentially accessible in filters. /// </summary> public object Data { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Optional name of the HTML view to be rendered /// for HTML responses /// </summary> public string ViewName { get; set; } public static bool FormatOutput { get; set; } static NegotiatedResult() { FormatOutput = HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data to serialize /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Data to serialize</param> public NegotiatedResult(object data) { Data = data; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data and an optional view for HTML views /// </summary> /// <param name="data"></param> /// <param name="viewName"></param> public NegotiatedResult(string viewName, object data) { Data = data; ViewName = viewName; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("context"); HttpResponseBase response = context.HttpContext.Response; HttpRequestBase request = context.HttpContext.Request; // Look for specific content types if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) { response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/plain")) { response.ContentType = "text/plain"; response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json")) { using (JsonTextWriter writer = new JsonTextWriter(response.Output)) { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings(); if (FormatOutput) settings.Formatting = Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml")) { response.ContentType = "text/xml"; if (Data != null) { using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(response.OutputStream, new UTF8Encoding())) { if (FormatOutput) writer.Formatting = System.Xml.Formatting.Indented; XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(Data.GetType()); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } } else { // just write data as a plain string response.Write(Data); } } } /// <summary> /// Extends Controller with Negotiated() ActionResult that does /// basic content negotiation based on the Accept header. /// </summary> public static class NegotiatedResultExtensions { /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated( repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(data); } /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="viewName">Name of the View to when Accept is text/html</param> /// /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, string viewName, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(viewName, data); } } Output Generation – JSON and XML Generating output for XML and JSON is simple – you use the desired serializer and off you go. Using XmlSerializer and JSON.NET it’s just a handful of lines each to generate serialized output directly into the HTTP output stream. Please note this implementation uses JSON.NET for its JSON generation rather than the default JavaScriptSerializer that MVC uses which I feel is an additional bonus to implementing this custom action. I’d already been using a custom JsonNetResult class previously, but now this is just rolled into this custom ActionResult. Just keep in mind that JSON.NET outputs slightly different JSON for certain things like collections for example, so behavior may change. One addition to this implementation might be a flag to allow switching the JSON serializer. Html View Generation Html View generation actually turned out to be easier than anticipated. Initially I used my generic ASP.NET ViewRenderer Class that can render MVC views from any ASP.NET application. However it turns out since we are executing inside of an active MVC request there’s an easier way: We can simply create a custom ViewResult and populate its members and then execute it. The code in text/html handling code that renders the view is simply this:response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); which is a neat and easy way to render a Razor view assuming you have an active controller that’s ready for rendering. Sweet – dependency removed which makes this class self-contained without any external dependencies other than JSON.NET. Summary While this isn’t exactly a new topic, it’s the first time I’ve actually delved into this with MVC. I’ve been doing content negotiation with Web API and prior to that with my REST library. This is the first time it’s come up as an issue in MVC. But as I have worked through this I find that having a way to specify both HTML Views *and* JSON and XML results from a single controller certainly is appealing to me in many situations as we are in this particular application returning identical data models for each of these operations. Rendering content negotiated views is something that I hope ASP.NET vNext will provide natively in the combined MVC and WebAPI model, but we’ll see how this actually will be implemented. In the meantime having a custom ActionResult that provides this functionality is a workable and easily adaptable way of handling this going forward. Whatever ends up happening in ASP.NET vNext the abstraction can probably be changed to support the native features of the future. Anyway I hope some of you found this useful if not for direct integration then as insight into some of the rendering logic that MVC uses to get output into the HTTP stream… Related Resources Latest Version of NegotiatedResult.cs on GitHub Understanding Action Controllers Rendering ASP.NET Views To String© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Oracle releases new Java Embedded products

  - by Henrik Stahl

  With less than one week to go to JavaOne 2012, we've spiced things up a little by releasing not one but two net new embedded Java products. This is an important step towards realizing the vision of Java as the standard platform for the Internet of Things that I outlined in a recent blog post. The two new products are: Java ME Embedded 3.2. Based on same code as the widely deployed Oracle Java Wireless Client for feature phones, this new product provides a Java ME implementation optimized for very small microcontroller-based devices and adds - among other things - a new Device Access API that enables interaction with peripherals common in edge devices such as various types of sensors. In addition to the new Java ME Embedded platform, we have also released an update of the Java ME SDK which adds support for the development of small embedded devices. Java Embedded Suite 7.0. This is an integrated middleware stack for embedded devices, incorporating Java SE Embedded and versions of JavaDB, GlassFish and a Web Services stack optimized for remote operation and small footprint. A typical Internet of Things (or M2M) infrastructure contains three types of compute nodes: The edge device which is typically a sensor or control point of some kind. These devices can be connected directly to a backend through a mobile network if they are installed in - for example - a remote vending machine; or, they can be part of a local short-range network and be connected to the backend through a more powerful gateway device. A gateway is the second type of compute node and acts as an aggregator and control point for a local network. A good example of this could be a generalized home Internet access point, or home gateway. Gateways are mostly using normal wall power and are used for multiple applications, deployed by multiple service providers. Finally, the last type of compute node is the normal enterprise or cloud backend. Java ME Embedded and Java Embedded Suite are perfect base software stacks for the edge devices and the gateway respectively, providing the Java promise of a platform independent runtime and a complete set of libraries as well as allowing a programmer to focus on the business logic rather than plumbing. We are very thrilled with these new releases that open up exciting opportunities for Java developers to extend services and enterprise applications in ways that will make organizations more efficient and touch our daily lives. To find out more, come to the JavaOne conference (for technical content) and to the Java Embedded @ JavaOne subconference (for business content). There will be plenty of cool demos showing complete end-to-end applications, provided by Oracle and our partners, as well as keynotes and numerous sessions where you can learn more about the technology and business opportunities.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 12, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 12, 2011Popular ReleasesXML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.2: Changes in 4.0: This release is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Changed XSD validation to use the schema specified by the XML documents. Added a VS style Error List, double-clicking an error takes you to the offending node. XPathNavigator schema validation finally gives SourceObject (was fixed in .NET 4). Added Namespaces window and better support for XPath expressions in documents with a default namespace. Added ExpandAll and CollapseAll toolbar buttons (in a...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.0.0: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation has been in beta for some time now and has been used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re now highly confident in the product and have designated this release as stable. We recommend all users update to this version. New Capabilities MappingsTo improve compatibility with other libraries some new .NET capabilities are now populated with wurfl data: “maximumRenderedPageSize” populated with “max_deck_size” “rendersBreaksAfterWmlAnchor” populated ...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.3: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager added interactive search for the lookupWPF Inspector: WPF Inspector 0.9.7: New Features in Version 0.9.7 - Support for .NET 3.5 and 4.0 - Multi-inspection of the same process - Property-Filtering for multiple keywords e.g. "Height Width" - Smart Element Selection - Select Controls by clicking CTRL, - Select Template-Parts by clicking CTRL+SHIFT - Possibility to hide the element adorner (over the context menu on the visual tree) - Many bugfixes??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-03-10: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ??，????。??????????All-In-One Code Framework ???，??20?Sample！！????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ASP.NET ??： CSASPNETBingMaps VBASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload CS/VBASPNETSerializeJsonString CSASPNETIPtoLocation CSASPNETExcelLikeGridView ....... Winform??： FTPDownload FTPUpload MultiThreadedWebDownloader...Rawr: Rawr 4.1.0: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a Release of the WPF version, most of the general issues have been resolved. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Tracker. Whe...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1.2 for IIS 7: This is a localization release of PHP Manager for IIS 7. It contains all the functionality available in 56962 plus a few bug fixes (see change list for more details). Most importantly this release is translated into five languages: German - the translation is provided by Christian Graefe Dutch - the translation is provided by Harrie Verveer Turkish - the translation is provided by Yusuf Oztürk Japanese - the translation is provided by Kenichi Wakasa Russian - the translation is provid...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Beta ChangesAdded user streams support Serialization is not attempted for Twitter 5xx errors Fixes based on feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.2.0: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comMicrosoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-03-09: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008Office Web.UI: Version 2.4: After having lost all modifications done for 2.3. I finally did it again... Have a look at http://www.officewebui.com/change-log Also, the documentation continues to grow... http://www.officewebui.com/category/kb ThanksmyCollections: Version 1.3: New in version 1.3 : Added Editor management for Books Added Amazon API for Books Us, Fr, De Added Amazon Us, Fr, De for Movies Added The MovieDB for Fr and De Added Author for Books Added Editor and Platform for Games Added Amazon Us, De for Games Added Studio for XXX Added Background for XXX Bug fixing with Softonic API Bug fixing with IMDB UI improvement Removed GraceNote Added Amazon Us,Fr, De for Series Added TVDB Fr and De for Series Added Tracks for Musi...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.1: Version 1.1 (8 Mar 2011)new Dialog class for redirecting users to Facebook dialogs new Async publishing methods new Check for Extended Permissions option fixed bug: inappropiate condition of redirecting to login in Api class fixed bug: IframeRedirect method not workingpatterns & practices : Composite Services: Composite Services Guidance - CTP2: Overview The Composite Services guidance (codename Reykjavik) provides best practices and capabilities for applying industry-known SOA design patterns when building robust, connected, service-oriented composite enterprise applications. These capabilities are implemented as a set of reusable components for analytic tracing, service virtualization, metadata centralization and versioning, and policy centralization as well as exception management, included in this release. Changes in this CTP ...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.0 Beta 1: Beta 1You can't install IronPython Tools for Visual Studio side-by-side with Python Tools for Visual Studio. A race condition sometimes causes local MPI debugging to miss breakpoints. When MPI jobs on a cluster fail they don’t get cleaned up correctly, which can cause debugging to stall because the associated MPI job is stuck in the queue. The "Threads" view has a race condition which can cause it not to display properly at times. VS2010 shortcuts that are pinned to the taskbar are so...DotNetAge -a lightweight Mvc jQuery CMS: DotNetAge 2: What is new in DotNetAge 2.0 ? Completely update DJME to DJME2, enhance user experience ,more beautiful and more interactively visit DJME project home to lean more about DJME http://www.dotnetage.com/sites/home/djme.html A new widget engine has came! Faster and easiler. Runtime performance enhanced. SEO enhanced. UI Designer enhanced. A new web resources explorer. Page manager enhanced. BlogML supports added that allows you import/export your blog data to/from dotnetage publishi...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 Beta: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB and MongoDB. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder t...IronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 2: On behalf of the IronPython team, I am pleased to announce IronPython 2.7 Release Candidate 2. The releases contains a few minor bug fixes, including a working webbrowser module. Please see the release notes for 61395 for what was fixed in previous releases.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.20: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.6: Once again supports biomes, thanks to an updated Minecraft Biome Extractor, which added support for the new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format. Updated mcmap to support new biome format.Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.3.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. This release uses the Sandcastle Guided Installation package used by Sandcastle Styles. Download and extract to a folder and then run SandcastleI...New Projects8428-3127-6884-4328: No summary providedAngua R.P.G. Engine: The Angua R.P.G. Engine is a C# open-source system for playing turn-based Role-Playing Games over the Internet or TCP/IP based networks. AppServices - SOA for greenhorns: AppServices is a simple service container. It can inject services to any public or private property or field with declared ServiceAttribute. It supports Windows Forms, WPF and ASP.NET. Silverlight is not tested yet, but it should do also. AppServices simplifies service referenceAxHibernate: AxHibernate aims to produce a POCO-mapped style domain-library for Dynamics AX. I.e., an AX business-connector-ignorant ORM domain library for Dynamics Ax.Business localizer, translation: Translation and localization software used in your business. Help to localize resource file on top of .NET Microsoft stack.cloudsync: cloudsyncDaily Deals .Net - Groupon Clone: Daily Deals .Net is a "daily deals" application based on the .net technology. Utilizing MVC 3 to provide a Groupon-like experience. This project needs your support. Please sign up today to help bring a viable daily deals project to the .Net open source world. ENGUILABE.INFO - Descubre un nuevo mundo: codigo reutilizable y aprendibleeuler 40: euler 40euler 42: euler 42gibon: gibbon blog+portfolio+communitiHoley Ship: Battleship project.Improved CAPTCHA Control ASP.NET 2.0 C#: Improved C# port of Jeff Atwood's custom CAPTCHA control (image verification against robots).IslandUnit: IslandUnit helps you isolate the dependencies of your system with an fluent interface that makes easier to produce mocks and stubs with existing frameworks (Moq, NMock, NBuilder, AutoPoco) and put the isolated dependencies in IoC containers, leaving your system highly testable.KidsChores: Helps keep tracks of to do list for kids, allowing them to earn points, allowances, etc.Local Copy SharePoint Items: The "Local Copy SharePoint Items" is a PowerShell (v1) written script to grab all documents out of libraries/lists from a given SharePoint 2007 site. Get yourself exited to run this script as folliowing: .\LCSPI.ps1 -url http://moss2007 -bkploc c:\destination mkfashio: mkfashion MyTest: MyTestNaja, a Cobra IDE: Naja (a.k.a. Cobra IDE) is an Integrated Development Environment for the Cobra programming language (www.cobra-language.com). NDasm: Visual Studio add-in that displays IL code for any managed method in your .Net solution. Helpful for studying .Net platform. For example now you can easily see what happens when you are declaring delegate type or how your cool lambda expression actually looks like. olympicgameslondon: The aim of the Olympicgameslondon project is to provide a platform where sports professionals and athletes can broadcast themselves, individuals/supporters, Londoners, visitors etc can post views, share information and find interesting news about the London 2012 Olympic games.Populate SharePoint Form Fields from QueryString via Javascript: This project makes it possible to pre-fill SharePoint Edit form fields using JavaScript and field values passed via querystring - without server-side deployment.Project Server: Xin chào t?t c? các thành viên c?a team th?c t?p t?t nghi?p c?a công ty Toàn C?u Th?nh. Ðây là server du?c dùng d? giúp d? m?i ngu?i ch?nh s?a project c?a m?t m?t cách d? dàng nh?t trong quá trình làm vi?c nhóm. Support: ngtrongtri@yahoo.com.vnPure Midi: Pure Midi - Handling midi communication in .NET with full sequencing support and arranger like musical styles playing.Relative Time: Render a TimeSpan object as something that's consumable by humans like "about 9 minutes ago" or "yesterday".RPG Character Creation: RPG Character Creation makes it easier to create and maintain characters using the Avalon 2.0 ruleset. It is developed in C#.SearchBox for WPF: Customizable search box for WPF with auto-complete capabilities.Sebro: Sebro is a freelance-like platform for the SEO related market. The main feature of the platform is an automated tracking and statistics gathering of work and strongly formalized criteria of its completion or failure.ShoppingApp2: Project will cover basics of creating ASP.NET application. Aim of project is creating application which will help users, via web, to manage their home budget. Socket Redirection for Terminal Services: Socket Redirection for Terminal Services allows to connect to the Internet on a machine, which does not has access to I-net, using another machine in the network, which has that access. Sort Calculator: it is a c# sort calculator that generates randomly array numbers and implements several sorting algorithms.SpSource 2010: Port of SPSource to work with VS 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010SQL Script Executer: SQL Executer makes it easy to deploy, execute multiple scripts on SQL Server as you could do in VS 2008. In Visual Studio 2008's Database Project, one had an option to select multiple sql files and Run them on choosen DB. Visual Studio 2010, doesn't come with this functionality. Test By Wire: Test by wire is a unit test framework, which handles automatic setup and orchestration of test-target and dependencies. In addition Test By Wire features an automatic mocking feature, that is interfaces with pure BDD style syntax. Time Manager System: The TMS (Time Manager System) allows you to plan, organize and schedule your daily activities. The TMS is based on the Pomodoro Technique that improves your productivity.Windows Azure Service Instances Auto Scaling: Windows Azure Service Instances Auto Scaling is a way for dynamically scaling-up and scaling-down the instances number of a running hosted service. In this version this management is done based on a time schedule by an Azure Worker Role.

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• What is a better abstraction layer for D3D9 and OpenGL vertex data management?

  - by Sam Hocevar

  My rendering code has always been OpenGL. I now need to support a platform that does not have OpenGL, so I have to add an abstraction layer that wraps OpenGL and Direct3D 9. I will support Direct3D 11 later. TL;DR: the differences between OpenGL and Direct3D cause redundancy for the programmer, and the data layout feels flaky. For now, my API works a bit like this. This is how a shader is created: Shader *shader = Shader::Create( " ... GLSL vertex shader ... ", " ... GLSL pixel shader ... ", " ... HLSL vertex shader ... ", " ... HLSL pixel shader ... "); ShaderAttrib a1 = shader->GetAttribLocation("Point", VertexUsage::Position, 0); ShaderAttrib a2 = shader->GetAttribLocation("TexCoord", VertexUsage::TexCoord, 0); ShaderAttrib a3 = shader->GetAttribLocation("Data", VertexUsage::TexCoord, 1); ShaderUniform u1 = shader->GetUniformLocation("WorldMatrix"); ShaderUniform u2 = shader->GetUniformLocation("Zoom"); There is already a problem here: once a Direct3D shader is compiled, there is no way to query an input attribute by its name; apparently only the semantics stay meaningful. This is why GetAttribLocation has these extra arguments, which get hidden in ShaderAttrib. Now this is how I create a vertex declaration and two vertex buffers: VertexDeclaration *decl = VertexDeclaration::Create( VertexStream<vec3,vec2>(VertexUsage::Position, 0, VertexUsage::TexCoord, 0), VertexStream<vec4>(VertexUsage::TexCoord, 1)); VertexBuffer *vb1 = new VertexBuffer(NUM * (sizeof(vec3) + sizeof(vec2)); VertexBuffer *vb2 = new VertexBuffer(NUM * sizeof(vec4)); Another problem: the information VertexUsage::Position, 0 is totally useless to the OpenGL/GLSL backend because it does not care about semantics. Once the vertex buffers have been filled with or pointed at data, this is the rendering code: shader->Bind(); shader->SetUniform(u1, GetWorldMatrix()); shader->SetUniform(u2, blah); decl->Bind(); decl->SetStream(vb1, a1, a2); decl->SetStream(vb2, a3); decl->DrawPrimitives(VertexPrimitive::Triangle, NUM / 3); decl->Unbind(); shader->Unbind(); You see that decl is a bit more than just a D3D-like vertex declaration, it kinda takes care of rendering as well. Does this make sense at all? What would be a cleaner design? Or a good source of inspiration?

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• Advice on designing a robust program to handle a large library of meta-information & programs

  - by Sam Bryant

  So this might be overly vague, but here it is anyway I'm not really looking for a specific answer, but rather general design principles or direction towards resources that deal with problems like this. It's one of my first large-scale applications, and I would like to do it right. Brief Explanation My basic problem is that I have to write an application that handles a large library of meta-data, can easily modify the meta-data on-the-fly, is robust with respect to crashing, and is very efficient. (Sorta like the design parameters of iTunes, although sometimes iTunes performs more poorly than I would like). If you don't want to read the details, you can skip the rest Long Explanation Specifically I am writing a program that creates a library of image files and meta-data about these files. There is a list of tags that may or may not apply to each image. The program needs to be able to add new images, new tags, assign tags to images, and detect duplicate images, all while operating. The program contains an image Viewer which has tagging operations. The idea is that if a given image A is viewed while the library has tags T1, T2, and T3, then that image will have boolean flags for each of those tags (depending on whether the user tagged that image while it was open in the Viewer). However, prior to being viewed in the Viewer, image A would have no value for tags T1, T2, and T3. Instead it would have a "dirty" flag indicating that it is unknown whether or not A has these tags or not. The program can introduce new tags at any time (which would automatically set all images to "dirty" with respect to this new tag) This program must be fast. It must be easily able to pull up a list of images with or without a certain tag as well as images which are "dirty" with respect to a tag. It has to be crash-safe, in that if it suddenly crashes, all of the tagging information done in that session is not lost (though perhaps it's okay to loose some of it) Finally, it has to work with a lot of images (10,000) I am a fairly experienced programmer, but I have never tried to write a program with such demanding needs and I have never worked with databases. With respect to the meta-data storage, there seem to be a few design choices: Choice 1: Invidual meta-data vs centralized meta-data Individual Meta-Data: have a separate meta-data file for each image. This way, as soon as you change the meta-data for an image, it can be written to the hard disk, without having to rewrite the information for all of the other images. Centralized Meta-Data: Have a single file to hold the meta-data for every file. This would probably require meta-data writes in intervals as opposed to after every change. The benefit here is that you could keep a centralized list of all images with a given tag, ect, making the task of pulling up all images with a given tag very efficient

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• Blender DirectX exporter to Panda3D

  - by jakebird451

  I have been experimenting with Panda3D lately. I have a character made in Blender with various bones and currently with one animation that I wish to export to a *.x format for Panda3D. My current attempt was to export the model was to first export with bones [Armatures] by checking the "Export Armatures" button in the export menu (file name: char.x). Thanks to the *.x file format, I read the file and it seems to have the same bone structure format as the model (with parenting and matrix positional data). The second export was selecting Animations - Full Animation to provide just the animation (file name: char_idle.x). The models exported just fine. I am not sure about the animation yet, but the file seems to be just fine. This is my code for loading the model into python & Panda3D: self.model = Actor("char.x",{"char_idle.x"}) When I run the program the command line provides a couple of errors, the main errors of interest are: :Actor(warning): char.x is not a character! and ... File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\actor\Actor.py", line 284, in __init__ if (type(anims[anims.keys()[0]])==type({})): AttributeError: 'set' object has no attribute 'keys' The first error is the most interesting to me. The model works if I leave the animation dictionary blank. With no animations loaded the character appears in its un-animated T position, however the actor warning still shows up. The character should include the various bones when I exported the model right? I am not that experienced with blender, I'm just a programmer. So if the problem lies in blender please try to keep that in mind when posting a reply. I'll try my best to keep up. I also tried to print out the bone structure without any animations loaded and it provides a similar error with the line print self.model.listJoints(): File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\actor\Actor.py", line 410, in listJoints Actor.notify.error("no part named: %s" % (partName)) File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\directnotify\Notifier.py", line 132, in error raise exception(errorString) StandardError: no part named: modelRoot I really hope it is a simple exporting fix.

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• Curl_errno=55, "Failed sending network data."

  - by 4dplane

  Hi all: I have a php script that updates a database via an api. This script works on one server but not on another. Both servers have curl enabled and they have php 5.2.6 or above. The error happens in the do_put() method. The rest of the script seems to be fine. I have found that: curl_errno= 55 = "Failed sending network data". curl_error= select/poll returned error <?php //phpinfo(); require_once "class.DelveAuthUtil.php"; $access_key = ""; $secret = "W"; $org_id = ""; $media_id = ""; $new_tag_name = "uvideo"; $assign_tag_to_media_url = "http://api..com/rest/organizations/$org_id/media/$media_id/properties/tags/$new_tag_name"; $signed_create_new_tag_url = DAU::authenticate_request("PUT", $assign_tag_to_media_url, $access_key, $secret); # perform the creation of the new custom property $put_response = do_put($signed_create_new_tag_url); # Execute the POST function do_post($url, $params=array()) { # Combine parameters $param_string = ""; foreach ($params as $key => $value) { $value = urlencode($value); $param_string = $param_string . "&$key=$value"; } // Get the curl session object $session = curl_init($url); // Set the POST options. curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POST, true); curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $param_string); curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); // Do the POST and then close the session $response = curl_exec($session); curl_close($session); return $response; } # Execute the PUT function do_put($url) { // Get the curl session object $session = curl_init($url); print(" <br> session= " . $session . "<br>"); // Set the PUT options. print ("opt0= " . curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, TRUE) . "<br>"); print ("opt1= " . curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_PUT, true) . "<br>"); print ("opt2= " . curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false) . "<br>"); print ("opt3= " . curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true) . "<br>"); // Do the PUT and then close the session $response = curl_exec($session); if (curl_errno($session)) { print ( "curl_errno= " . curl_errno($session). "<br>"); print( "curl_error= " . curl_error($session) . "<br>"); } else { curl_close($session); } } I have small lead in the Apache log - there is an SSL issue that I do not know how to resolve. [Thu Mar 25 15:57:58 2010] [warn] Init: You should not use name-based virtual hosts in conjunction with SSL!! [Thu Mar 25 15:57:58 2010] [notice] Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) configured -- resuming normal operations [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec) [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate is a CA certificate (BasicConstraints: CA == TRUE !?) [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `yourvps.a2hosting.com' does NOT match server name!? [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate is a CA certificate (BasicConstraints: CA == TRUE !?) [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `yourvps.a2hosting.com' does NOT match server name!? [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [warn] Init: SSL server IP/port conflict: my1.com:443 (/home/httpd/my.com/conf/kloxo.my1.com:69) vs. elggtest.my1.com:443 (/home/httpd/elggtest.my1.com/conf/kloxo.elggtest.my1.com:71) [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [warn] Init: You should not use name-based virtual hosts in conjunction with SSL!! [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ... [Thu Mar 25 15:58:59 2010] [notice] Digest: done [Thu Mar 25 15:59:00 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate is a CA certificate (BasicConstraints: CA == TRUE !?) [Thu Mar 25 15:59:00 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `yourvps.a2hosting.com' does NOT match server name!? [Thu Mar 25 15:59:00 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate is a CA certificate (BasicConstraints: CA == TRUE !?) [Thu Mar 25 15:59:00 2010] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `yourvps.a2hosting.com' does NOT match server name!? [Thu Mar 25 15:59:00 2010] [warn] Init: SSL server IP/port conflict: my1.com:443 (/home/httpd/my1.com/conf/kloxo.my1.com:69) vs. elggtest.my1.com:443 (/home/httpd/elggtest.my1.com/conf/kloxo.elggtest.my1.com:71) [Thu Mar 25 15:59:00 2010] [warn] Init: You should not use name-based virtual hosts in conjunction with SSL!! [Thu Mar 25 15:59:00 2010] [notice] Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) configured -- resuming normal operations[/PHP] Any help would be great! Thanks, 4dplane

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• Array Multiplication and Division

  - by Narfanator

  I came across a question that (eventually) landed me wondering about array arithmetic. I'm thinking specifically in Ruby, but I think the concepts are language independent. So, addition and subtraction are defined, in Ruby, as such: [1,6,8,3,6] + [5,6,7] == [1,6,8,3,6,5,6,7] # All the elements of the first, then all the elements of the second [1,6,8,3,6] - [5,6,7] == [1,8,3] # From the first, remove anything found in the second and array * scalar is defined: [1,2,3] * 2 == [1,2,3,1,2,3] But What, conceptually, should the following be? None of these are (as far as I can find) defined: Array x Array: [1,2,3] * [1,2,3] #=> ? Array / Scalar: [1,2,3,4,5] / 2 #=> ? Array / Scalar: [1,2,3,4,5] % 2 #=> ? Array / Array: [1,2,3,4,5] / [1,2] #=> ? Array / Array: [1,2,3,4,5] % [1,2] #=> ? I've found some mathematical descriptions of these operations for set theory, but I couldn't really follow them, and sets don't have duplicates (arrays do). Edit: Note, I do not mean vector (matrix) arithmetic, which is completely defined. Edit2: If this is the wrong stack exchange, tell me which is the right one and I'll move it. Edit 3: Add mod operators to the list. Edit 4: I figure array / scalar is derivable from array * scalar: a * b = c => a = b / c [1,2,3] * 3 = [1,2,3]+[1,2,3]+[1,2,3] = [1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3] => [1,2,3] = [1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3] / 3 Which, given that programmer's division ignore the remained and has modulus: [1,2,3,4,5] / 2 = [[1,2], [3,4]] [1,2,3,4,5] % 2 = [5] Except that these are pretty clearly non-reversible operations (not that modulus ever is), which is non-ideal. Edit: I asked a question over on Math that led me to Multisets. I think maybe extensible arrays are "multisets", but I'm not sure yet.

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• Why learn Flash Builder 4 (Flex) when I can just use Flash Professional?

  - by Jason McKenna

  I want to learn Flash Builder 4 (Flex) because I see sooo many jobs requesting experience with it. i also just like knowing stuff. I am also very interested in focusing on RIA development now. BUT... can anyone tell me CLEARLY why the heck I would ever use FLEX over Flash Pro?? it is a time investment, so is it worth it? All I read are misguided posts about how Flash Pro is for games and banner ads, and Flex is for programmers and RIAs blah blah... this simply isn't so from my 9 years of contracting experience. I'm 99.9% certain that I can build anything a flex developer can build, but using Flash Pro. I can build powerful AS3-driven apps for the desktop, mobile device, or browser, and I can link to databases with XML and I can import text files and communicate with ColdFusion and everything. The advantage with Flash Pro is that I can also easily and clearly animate transitions and build custom elements that look the way I want/need them to look for my specific client. Why would I want to use a bunch of pre-built components that drive my file sizes to the moon?? Who is happy with a drag-n-drop button?? Is Flex just a thing made for programmer people with no artistic inclination? What is the advantage of using it?? It takes me back to Visual Basic class. Seems like a pain to have to use multiple tools to import crap from Flash Pro into Flex and yada yada... why when I can do it all nicely in Flash Pro to begin with. Am I clueless, or missing some major piece of the puzzle? Thanks for any clarity. PS, I couldn't care less about the code editors. It aint that bad people. They make it out like the thing doesn't even respond to keyboard input or something. Does everthing I need it do anyways. Please help out here. If I just dont need to learn it, I dont want to waste the time. Jase

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• Problem with Variable Scoping in Rebol's Object

  - by Rebol Tutorial

  I have modified the rebodex app so that it can be called from rebol's console any time by typing rebodex. To show the title of the app, I need to store it in app-title: system/script/header/title so tha it could be used later in view/new/title dex reform [self/app-title version] That works but as you can see I have named the var name "app-title", but if I use "title" instead, the window caption would show weird stuff (vid code). Why ? REBOL [ Title: "Rebodex" Date: 23-May-2010 Version: 2.1.1 File: %rebodex.r Author: "Carl Sassenrath" Modification: "Rebtut" Purpose: "A simple but useful address book contact database." Email: %carl--rebol--com library: [ level: 'intermediate platform: none type: 'tool domain: [file-handling DB GUI] tested-under: none support: none license: none see-also: none ] ] rebodex.context: context [ app-title: system/script/header/title version: system/script/header/version set 'rebodex func[][ names-path: %names.r ;data file name-list: none fields: [name company title work cell home car fax web email smail notes updat] names: either exists? names-path [load names-path][ [[name "Carl Sassenrath" title "Founder" company "REBOL Technologies" email "%carl--rebol--com" web "http://www.rebol.com"]] ] brws: [ if not empty? web/text [ if not find web/text "http://" [insert web/text "http://"] error? try [browse web/text] ] ] dial: [request [rejoin ["Dial number for " name/text "? (Not implemented.)"] "Dial" "Cancel"]] dex-styles: stylize [ lab: label 60x20 right bold middle font-size 11 btn: button 64x20 font-size 11 edge [size: 1x1] fld: field 200x20 font-size 11 middle edge [size: 1x1] inf: info font-size 11 middle edge [size: 1x1] ari: field wrap font-size 11 edge [size: 1x1] with [flags: [field tabbed]] ] dex-pane1: layout/offset [ origin 0 space 2x0 across styles dex-styles lab "Name" name: fld bold return lab "Title" title: fld return lab "Company" company: fld return lab "Email" email: fld return lab "Web" brws web: fld return lab "Address" smail: ari 200x72 return lab "Updated" updat: inf 200x20 return ] 0x0 updat/flags: none dex-pane2: layout/offset [ origin 0 space 2x0 across styles dex-styles lab "Work #" dial work: fld 140 return lab "Home #" dial home: fld 140 return lab "Cell #" dial cell: fld 140 return lab "Alt #" dial car: fld 140 return lab "Fax #" fax: fld 140 return lab "Notes" notes: ari 140x72 return pad 136x1 btn "Close" #"^q" [store-entry save-file unview] ] 0x0 dex: layout [ origin 8x8 space 0x1 styles dex-styles srch: fld 196x20 bold across rslt: list 180x150 [ nt: txt 178x15 middle font-size 11 [ store-entry curr: cnt find-name nt/text update-entry unfocus show dex ] ] supply [ cnt: count + scroll-off face/text: "" face/color: snow if not n: pick name-list cnt [exit] face/text: select n 'name face/font/color: black if curr = cnt [face/color: system/view/vid/vid-colors/field-select] ] sl: slider 16x150 [scroll-list] return return btn "New" #"^n" [new-name] btn "Del" #"^d" [delete-name unfocus update-entry search-all show dex] btn "Sort" [sort names sort name-list show rslt] return at srch/offset + (srch/size * 1x0) bx1: box dex-pane1/size bx2: box dex-pane2/size return ] bx1/pane: dex-pane1/pane bx2/pane: dex-pane2/pane rslt/data: [] this-name: first names name-list: copy names curr: none search-text: "" scroll-off: 0 srch/feel: make srch/feel [ redraw: func [face act pos][ face/color: pick face/colors face system/view/focal-face if all [face = system/view/focal-face face/text search-text] [ search-text: copy face/text search-all if 1 = length? name-list [this-name: first name-list update-entry show dex] ] ] ] update-file: func [data] [ set [path file] split-path names-path if not exists? path [make-dir/deep path] write names-path data ] save-file: has [buf] [ buf: reform [{REBOL [Title: "Name Database" Date:} now "]^/[^/"] foreach n names [repend buf [mold n newline]] update-file append buf "]" ] delete-name: does [ remove find/only names this-name if empty? names [append-empty] save-file new-name ] clean-names: function [][n][ forall names [ if any [empty? first names none? n: select first names 'name empty? n][ remove names ] ] names: head names ] search-all: function [] [ent flds] [ clean-names clear name-list flds: [name] either empty? search-text [insert name-list names][ foreach nam names [ foreach word flds [ if all [ent: select nam word find ent search-text][ append/only name-list nam break ] ] ] ] scroll-off: 0 sl/data: 0 resize-drag scroll-list curr: none show [rslt sl] ] new-name: does [ store-entry clear-entry search-all append-empty focus name ; update-entry ] append-empty: does [append/only names this-name: copy []] find-name: function [str][] [ foreach nam names [ if str = select nam 'name [ this-name: nam break ] ] ] store-entry: has [val ent flag] [ flag: 0 if not empty? trim name/text [ foreach word fields [ val: trim get in get word 'text either ent: select this-name word [ if ent val [insert clear ent val flag: flag + 1] ][ if not empty? val [repend this-name [word copy val] flag: flag + 1] ] if flag = 1 [flag: 2 updat/text: form now] ] if not zero? flag [save-file] ] ] update-entry: does [ foreach word fields [ insert clear get in get word 'text any [select this-name word ""] ] show rslt ] clear-entry: does [ clear-fields bx1 clear-fields bx2 updat/text: form now unfocus show dex ] show-names: does [ clear rslt/data foreach n name-list [ if n/name [append rslt/data n/name] ] show rslt ] scroll-list: does [ scroll-off: max 0 to-integer 1 + (length? name-list) - (100 / 16) * sl/data show rslt ] do resize-drag: does [sl/redrag 100 / max 1 (16 * length? name-list)] center-face dex new-name focus srch show-names view/new/title dex reform [app-title version] insert-event-func [ either all [event/type = 'close event/face = dex][ store-entry unview ][event] ] do-events ] ]

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• How should I pitch moving to an agile/iterative development cycle with mandated 3-week deployments?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm part of a small team of four, and I'm the unofficial team lead (I'm lead in all but title, basically). We've largely been a "cowboy" environment, with no architecture or structure and everyone doing their own thing. Previously, our production deployments would be every few months without being on a set schedule, as things were added/removed to the task list of each developer. Recently, our CIO (semi-technical but not really a programmer) decided we will do deployments every three weeks; because of this I instantly thought that adopting an iterative development process (not necessarily full-blown Agile/XP, which would be a huge thing to convince everyone else to do) would go a long way towards helping manage expectations properly so there isn't this far-fetched idea that any new feature will be done in three weeks. IMO the biggest hurdle is that we don't have ANY kind of development approach in place right now (among other things like no CI or automated tests whatsoever). We don't even use Waterfall, we use "Tell Developer X to do a task, expect him to do everything and get it done". Are there any pointers that would help me start to ease us towards an iterative approach and A) Get the other developers on board with it and B) Get management to understand how iterative works? So far my idea involves trying to set up a CI server and get our build process automated (it takes about 10-20 minutes right now to simply build the application to put it on our development server), since pushing tests and/or TDD will be met with a LOT of resistance at this point, and constantly force us to break larger projects into smaller chunks that could be done iteratively in a three-week cycle; my only concern is that, unless I'm misunderstanding, an agile/iterative process may or may not release the software (depending on the project scope you might have "working" software after three weeks, but there isn't enough of it that works to let users make use of it), while I think the expectation here from management is that there will always be something "ready to go" in three weeks, and that disconnect could cause problems. On that note, is there any literature or references that explains the agile/iterative approach from a business standpoint? Everything I've seen only focuses on the developers, how to do it, but nothing seems to describe it from the perspective of actually getting the buy-in from the businesspeople.

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• Node.js vs PHP processing speed

  - by Cody Craven

  I've been looking into node.js recently and wanted to see a true comparison of processing speed for PHP vs Node.js. In most of the comparisons I had seen, Node trounced Apache/PHP set ups handily. However all of the tests were small 'hello worlds' that would not accurately reflect any webpage's markup. So I decided to create a basic HTML page with 10,000 hello world paragraph elements. In these tests Node with Cluster was beaten to a pulp by PHP on Nginx utilizing PHP-FPM. So I'm curious if I am misusing Node somehow or if Node is really just this bad at processing power. Note that my results were equivalent outputting "Hello world\n" with text/plain as the HTML, but I only included the HTML as it's closer to the use case I was investigating. My testing box: Core i7-2600 Intel CPU (has 8 threads with 4 cores) 8GB DDR3 RAM Fedora 16 64bit Node.js v0.6.13 Nginx v1.0.13 PHP v5.3.10 (with PHP-FPM) My test scripts: Node.js script var cluster = require('cluster'); var http = require('http'); var numCPUs = require('os').cpus().length; if (cluster.isMaster) { // Fork workers. for (var i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) { cluster.fork(); } cluster.on('death', function (worker) { console.log('worker ' + worker.pid + ' died'); }); } else { // Worker processes have an HTTP server. http.Server(function (req, res) { res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'}); res.write('<html>\n<head>\n<title>Speed test</title>\n</head>\n<body>\n'); for (var i = 0; i < 10000; i++) { res.write('<p>Hello world</p>\n'); } res.end('</body>\n</html>'); }).listen(80); } This script is adapted from Node.js' documentation at http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cluster.html PHP script <?php echo "<html>\n<head>\n<title>Speed test</title>\n</head>\n<body>\n"; for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++) { echo "<p>Hello world</p>\n"; } echo "</body>\n</html>"; My results Node.js $ ab -n 500 -c 20 http://speedtest.dev/ This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $> Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/ Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/ Benchmarking speedtest.dev (be patient) Completed 100 requests Completed 200 requests Completed 300 requests Completed 400 requests Completed 500 requests Finished 500 requests Server Software: Server Hostname: speedtest.dev Server Port: 80 Document Path: / Document Length: 190070 bytes Concurrency Level: 20 Time taken for tests: 14.603 seconds Complete requests: 500 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 95066500 bytes HTML transferred: 95035000 bytes Requests per second: 34.24 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 584.123 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 29.206 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 6357.45 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 0 0.2 0 2 Processing: 94 547 405.4 424 2516 Waiting: 0 331 399.3 216 2284 Total: 95 547 405.4 424 2516 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 424 66% 607 75% 733 80% 813 90% 1084 95% 1325 98% 1843 99% 2062 100% 2516 (longest request) PHP/Nginx $ ab -n 500 -c 20 http://speedtest.dev/test.php This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $> Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/ Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/ Benchmarking speedtest.dev (be patient) Completed 100 requests Completed 200 requests Completed 300 requests Completed 400 requests Completed 500 requests Finished 500 requests Server Software: nginx/1.0.13 Server Hostname: speedtest.dev Server Port: 80 Document Path: /test.php Document Length: 190070 bytes Concurrency Level: 20 Time taken for tests: 0.130 seconds Complete requests: 500 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 95109000 bytes HTML transferred: 95035000 bytes Requests per second: 3849.11 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 5.196 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.260 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 715010.65 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 0 0.2 0 1 Processing: 3 5 0.7 5 7 Waiting: 1 4 0.7 4 7 Total: 3 5 0.7 5 7 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 5 66% 5 75% 5 80% 6 90% 6 95% 6 98% 6 99% 6 100% 7 (longest request) Additional details Again what I'm looking for is to find out if I'm doing something wrong with Node.js or if it is really just that slow compared to PHP on Nginx with FPM. I certainly think Node has a real niche that it could fit well, however with these test results (which I really hope I made a mistake with - as I like the idea of Node) lead me to believe that it is a horrible choice for even a modest processing load when compared to PHP (let alone JVM or various other fast solutions). As a final note, I also tried running an Apache Bench test against node with $ ab -n 20 -c 20 http://speedtest.dev/ and consistently received a total test time of greater than 0.900 seconds.

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• Uninstalling with Ubuntu Software Center doesn't work on Ubuntu 12.04.1 64bit

  - by likethesky

  Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if the .deb package I'm installing is broken in some way (I've built it, using NetBeans 7.2), or if indeed this is a bug in Software Center. When I install this particular 32-bit .deb on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS--all updates applied--(where it was built), GDebi shows it and has an 'Uninstall' button next to it. So it works fine to uninstall it there, via the GDebi GUI. However, when I install it on 12.04.1 LTS--all updates applied--it installs fine, but then does not show up in Ubuntu Software Center as available to be uninstalled. No combination of searching finds it. However, I can from the command line, do sudo apt-get purge javafxapplication1 and it finds it and deletes it. The same thing happens when I build a 64-bit .deb and attempt to install it to the same (64-bit AMD) or a different 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04.1 system. So it seems to be isolated to this NetBeans-generated .deb and the 64-bit AMD build (though I haven't tried it on a 32-bit 12.04.1 install yet). These are all on VirtualBox VMs, btw, if that matters. Any way to clean up my Software Center and see if it's something I've done to get it in this state? Could this behavior be due to how this particular .deb has been built? (It doesn't have an 'Installed-Size' control field, so I do get the "Package is of bad quality" warning when I install it--which I do by clicking 'Ignore and install' button.) If you want all the gory details about why this happening--a bug has been reported against NetBeans for this behavior here: http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-25486 (EDIT: Just to be clear, the app installs fine, runs fine, all works as intended--I just can't get that 'bad package' message to go away, and now... I also can't uninstall it via Software Center, but rather, need to use sudo apt-get purge to uninstall it, after it installs.) Thanks for any pointers. I'm happy to report this as a bug against Ubuntu Software Center/Centre too, if that's what it seems to be, just tell me where to do so (a link). I'm a relative Ubuntu, NetBeans, and JavaFX newbie, though a long-time programmer. If I report it as a bug, I'll try it on the 32-bit build of 12.04.1 as well. Also, if I should add any more detail to the bug reported against NetBeans above, let me know--or feel free to add it yourself to the bug report above, if you would like. Thanks again!

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• Removing hard-coded values and defensive design vs YAGNI

  - by Ben Scott

  First a bit of background. I'm coding a lookup from Age - Rate. There are 7 age brackets so the lookup table is 3 columns (From|To|Rate) with 7 rows. The values rarely change - they are legislated rates (first and third columns) that have stayed the same for 3 years. I figured that the easiest way to store this table without hard-coding it is in the database in a global configuration table, as a single text value containing a CSV (so "65,69,0.05,70,74,0.06" is how the 65-69 and 70-74 tiers would be stored). Relatively easy to parse then use. Then I realised that to implement this I would have to create a new table, a repository to wrap around it, data layer tests for the repo, unit tests around the code that unflattens the CSV into the table, and tests around the lookup itself. The only benefit of all this work is avoiding hard-coding the lookup table. When talking to the users (who currently use the lookup table directly - by looking at a hard copy) the opinion is pretty much that "the rates never change." Obviously that isn't actually correct - the rates were only created three years ago and in the past things that "never change" have had a habit of changing - so for me to defensively program this I definitely shouldn't store the lookup table in the application. Except when I think YAGNI. The feature I am implementing doesn't specify that the rates will change. If the rates do change, they will still change so rarely that maintenance isn't even a consideration, and the feature isn't actually critical enough that anything would be affected if there was a delay between the rate change and the updated application. I've pretty much decided that nothing of value will be lost if I hard-code the lookup, and I'm not too concerned about my approach to this particular feature. My question is, as a professional have I properly justified that decision? Hard-coding values is bad design, but going to the trouble of removing the values from the application seems to violate the YAGNI principle. EDIT To clarify the question, I'm not concerned about the actual implementation. I'm concerned that I can either do a quick, bad thing, and justify it by saying YAGNI, or I can take a more defensive, high-effort approach, that even in the best case ultimately has low benefits. As a professional programmer does my decision to implement a design that I know is flawed simply come down to a cost/benefit analysis?

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• Why learn Flash Builder 4 (Flex) when I can just use Flash Professional?

  - by Jason McKenna

  I want to learn Flash Builder 4 (Flex) because I see so many jobs requesting experience with it. I also just like knowing stuff. I am also very interested in focusing on RIA development now. BUT... can anyone tell me CLEARLY why the heck I would ever use FLEX over Flash Pro? It is a time investment, so is it worth it? All I read are misguided posts about how Flash Pro is for games and banner ads, and Flex is for programmers and RIAs blah blah... this simply isn't so from my 9 years of contracting experience. I'm 99.9% certain that I can build anything a flex developer can build, but using Flash Pro. I can build powerful AS3-driven apps for the desktop, mobile device, or browser, and I can link to databases with XML and I can import text files and communicate with ColdFusion and everything. The advantage with Flash Pro is that I can also easily and clearly animate transitions and build custom elements that look the way I want/need them to look for my specific client. Why would I want to use a bunch of pre-built components that drive my file sizes to the moon? Who is happy with a drag-n-drop button? Is Flex just a thing made for programmer people with no artistic inclination? What is the advantage of using it? It takes me back to Visual Basic class. Seems like a pain to have to use multiple tools to import crap from Flash Pro into Flex and yada yada... why when I can do it all nicely in Flash Pro to begin with. Am I clueless, or missing some major piece of the puzzle? Thanks for any clarity. PS, I couldn't care less about the code editors. It ain't that bad people. They make it out like the thing doesn't even respond to keyboard input or something. Does everything I need it do anyways. Please help out here. If I just don't need to learn it, I don't want to waste the time.

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