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• Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

  - by Etienne Tremblay

  I’d like to thank Packt for providing me with a review version of Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices eBook. In fairness I also know the author Peter having seen him speak at DevTeach on many occasions.  I started by looking at the table of content to see what this book was about, knowing that “best practices” is a real misnomer I wanted to see what they were.  I really like the fact that he starts the book by really saying they are not really best practices but actually recommend practices.  As a Team Foundation Server user I found that chapter 2 was more for the open source crowd and I really skimmed it.  The portion on Branching was well documented, although I’m not a fan of the testing branch myself, but the rest was right on. The section on merge remote changes (bring the outside to you) paradigm is really important and was touched on. Chapter 3 has good solid practices on low level constructs like generics and exceptions. Chapter 4 dives into architectural practices like decoupling, distributed architecture and data based architecture.  DTOs and ORMs are touched on briefly as is NoSQL. Chapter 5 is about deployment and is really a great primer on all the “packaging” technologies like Visual Studio Setup and Deployment (depreciated in 2012), Click Once and WIX the major player outside of commercial solutions.  This is a nice section on how to move from VSSD to WIX this is going to be important in the coming years due to the fact that VS 2012 doesn’t support VSSD. In chapter 6 we dive into automated testing practices, including test coverage, mocking, TDD, SpecDD and Continuous Testing.  Peter covers all those concepts really nicely albeit succinctly. Being a book on recommended practices I find this is really good. I really enjoyed chapter 7 that gave me a lot of great tips to enhance my Visual Studio “experience”.  Tips on organizing projects where good.  Also even though I knew about configurations I like that he put that in there so you can move all your settings to another machine, a lot of people don’t know about that. Quick find and Resharper are also briefly covered.  He touches on macros (depreciated in 2012).  Finally he touches on Continuous Integration a very important concept in today’s ALM landscape. Chapter 8 is all about Parallelization, threads, Async, division of labor, reactive extensions.  All those concepts are touched on and again generalized approaches to those modern problems are giving.       Chapter 9 goes into distributed apps, the most used and accepted practice in the industry for .NET projects the chapter tackles concepts like Scalability, Messaging and Cloud (the flavor of the month of distributed apps, although I think this will stick ;-)).  He also looks a protocols TCP/UDP and how to debug distributed apps.  He touches on logging and health monitoring. Chapter 10 tackles recommended practices for web services starting with implementing WCF services, which goes into all sort of goodness like how to host in IIS or self-host.  How to manual test WCF services, also a section on authentication and authorization.  ASP.NET Web services are also touched on in that chapter All in all a good read, nice tips and accepted practices.  I like the conciseness of the subjects and Peter touches on a lot of things in this book and uses a lot of the current technologies flavors to explain the concepts.   Cheers, ET

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• Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Everyone runs into performance issues at some point. Same thing goes for Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. It just so happens that we have this nice little SQL Server monitoring tool. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use the monitoring tool to identify the bottlenecks, figure out the causes and then apply a fix (where possible) and then start the whole thing all over again? Just a crazy thought. OK, I was asked to. This is my first time looking through these servers, so here's how I'd go about using SQL Monitor to get a quick health check, sort of like checking the vitals on a patient. First time opening up our internal SQL Monitor instance and I was greeted with this: Oh my. Maybe I need to get our internal guys to read my blog. Anyway, I know that there are two servers where most of the load is. I'll drill down on the first. I'm selecting the server, not the instance, by clicking on the server name. That opens up the Global Overview page for the server. The information here much more applicable to the "oh my gosh, I have a problem now" type of monitoring. But, looking at this, I am seeing something immediately. There are four(4) drives on the system. The C:\ has an average read time of 16.9ms, more than double the others. Is that a problem? Not sure, but it's something I'll look at. It's write time is higher too. I'll keep drilling down, first, to the unclosed alerts on the server. Now things get interesting. SQL Monitor has a number of different types of alerts, some related to error states, others to service status, and then some related to performance. Guess what I'm seeing a bunch of right here: Long running queries and long job durations. If you check the dates, they're all recent, within the last 24 hours. If they had just been old, uncleared alerts, I wouldn't be that concerned. But with all these, all performance related, and all in the last 24 hours, yeah, I'm concerned. At this point, I could just start responding to the Alerts. If I click on one of the the Long-running query alerts, I'll get all kinds of cool data that can help me determine why the query ran long. But, I'm not in a reactive mode here yet. I'm still gathering data, trying to understand how the server works. I have the information that we're generating a lot of performance alerts, let's sock that away for the moment. Instead, I'm going to back up and look at the Global Overview for the SQL Instance. It shows all the databases on the server and their status. Then it shows a number of basic metrics about the SQL Server instance, again for that "what's happening now" view or things. Then, down at the bottom, there is the Top 10 expensive queries list: This is great stuff. And no, not because I can see the top queries for the last 5 minutes, but because I can adjust that out 3 days. Now I can see where some serious pain is occurring over the last few days. Databases have been blocked out to protect the guilty. That's it for the moment. I have enough knowledge of what's going on in the system that I can start to try to figure out why the system is running slowly. But, I want to look a little more at some historical data, to understand better how this server is behaving. More next time.

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part II

  - by Tara Kizer

  I arrived in Seattle last Monday afternoon to attend PASS Summit 2011.  I had really wanted to attend Gail Shaw’s (blog|twitter) and Grant Fritchey’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar “All About Execution Plans” on Monday, but that would have meant flying out on Sunday which I couldn’t do.  On Tuesday, I attended Allan Hirt’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar entitled “A Deep Dive into AlwaysOn: Failover Clustering and Availability Groups”.  Allan is a great speaker, and his seminar was packed with demos and information about AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2012.  Unfortunately, I have lost my notes from this seminar and the presentation materials are only available on the pre-con DVD.  Hmpf! On Wednesday, I attended Gail Shaw’s “Bad Plan! Sit!”, Andrew Kelly’s (blog|twitter) “SQL 2008 Query Statistics”, Dan Jones’ (blog|twitter) “Improving your PowerShell Productivity”, and Brent Ozar’s (blog|twitter) “BLITZ! The SQL – More One Hour SQL Server Takeovers”.  In Gail’s session, she went over how to fix bad plans and bad query patterns.  Update your stale statistics! How to fix bad plans Use local variables – optimizer can’t sniff it, so it’ll optimize for “average” value Use RECOMPILE (at the query or stored procedure level) – CPU hit OPTIMIZE FOR hint – most common value you’ll pass How to fix bad query patterns Don’t use them – ha! Catch-all queries Use dynamic SQL OPTION (RECOMPILE) Multiple execution paths Split into multiple stored procedures OPTION (RECOMPILE) Modifying parameter values Use local variables Split into outer and inner procedure OPTION (RECOMPILE) She also went into “last resort” and “very last resort” options, but those are risky unless you know what you are doing.  For the average Joe, she wouldn’t recommend these.  Examples are query hints and plan guides. While I enjoyed Andrew’s session, I didn’t take any notes as it was familiar material.  Andrew is a great speaker though, and I’d highly recommend attending his sessions in the future. Next up was Dan’s PowerShell session.  I need to look into profiles, manifests, function modules, and function import scripts more as I just didn’t quite grasp these concepts.  I am attending a PowerShell training class at the end of November, so maybe that’ll help clear it up.  I really enjoyed the Excel integration demo.  It was very cool watching PowerShell build the spreadsheet in real-time.  I must look into this more!  On a side note, I am jealous of Dan’s hair.  Fabulous hair! Brent’s session showed us how to quickly gather information about a server that you will be taking over database administration duties for.  He wrote a script to do a fast health check and then later wrapped it into a stored procedure, sp_Blitz.  I can’t wait to use this at my work even on systems where I’ve been the primary DBA for years, maybe there’s something I’ve overlooked.  We are using EPM to help standardize our environment and uncover problems, but sp_Blitz will definitely still help us out.  He even provides a cloud-based update feature, sp_BlitzUpdate, for sp_Blitz so you don’t have to constantly update it when he makes a change.  I think I’ll utilize his update code for some other challenges that we face at my work.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (8 of 25): Rocky Anderson&ndash;Justice Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Ross Carl “Rocky” Anderson served two terms as the 33rd mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, between 2000 and 2008.  He is the Executive Director of High Road for Human Rights.  Prior to serving as Mayor, he practiced law for 21 years in Salt Lake City, during which time he was listed in Best Lawyers in America, was rated A-V (highest rating) by Martindale-Hubbell, served as Chair of the Utah State Bar Litigation Section[4] and was Editor-in-Chief of, and a contributor to, Voir Dire legal journal. As mayor, Anderson rose to nationwide prominence as a champion of several national and international causes, including climate protection, immigration reform, restorative criminal justice, LGBT rights, and an end to the "war on drugs". Before and after the invasion by the U.S. of Iraq in 2003, Anderson was a leading opponent of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and related human rights abuses. Anderson was the only mayor of a major U.S. city who advocated for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, which he did in many venues throughout the United States. Anderson's work and advocacy led to local, national, and international recognition in numerous spheres, including being named by Business Week as one of the top twenty activists in the world on climate change,serving on the Newsweek Global Environmental Leadership Advisory Board, and being recognized by the Human Rights Campaign as one of the top ten straight advocates in the United States for LGBT equality. He has also received numerous awards for his work, including the EPA Climate Protection Award, the Sierra Club Distinguished Service Award, the Respect the Earth Planet Defender Award, the National Association of Hispanic Publications Presidential Award, The Drug Policy Alliance Richard J. Dennis Drugpeace Award, the Progressive Democrats of America Spine Award, the League of United Latin American Citizens Profile in Courage Award, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee Patriot Award, the Code Pink (Salt Lake City) Pink Star honor, the Morehouse University Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award, and the World Leadership Award for environmental programs. Formerly a member of the Democratic Party, Anderson expressed his disappointment with that Party in 2011, stating, “The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party." Anderson announced his intention to run for President in 2012 as a candidate for the newly-formed Justice Party. Although founded by Rocky Anderson of Utah, the Justice Party was first recognized by Mississippi and describes itself as advocating economic justice through measures such as green jobs and a right to organize, environment justice through enforcing employee safeguards in trade agreements, and social and civic justice through universal health care. In its first press release, the Utah Justice Party set forth its goals for justice in the economic, environmental, social and civic realms, along with a call to rid the corrupting influence of big money from government, to reverse the erosion of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and to stop draining American resources to support illegal wars of aggression. Its press release says its grassroots supporters believe that now is the time for all to "shed their skeptical view that their voices don't matter", that "our 2-party system is a 'duopoly' controlled by the same corporate and military interests", and that the people must act to ensure "that our nation will achieve a brighter, sustainable future.” Anderson has ballot access in CO, CT, FL, ID, LA, MI, MN, MS, NJ, NM, OR, RI, TN, UT, VT, WA (152 electoral votes) and has write-in access in AL, AK, DE, GA, IL, IO, KS, MD, MO, NE, NH, NY, PA, TX Learn more about Rocky Anderson and Justice Party on Wikipedia.

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• What information must never appear in logs?

  - by MainMa

  I'm about to write the company guidelines about what must never appear in logs (trace of an application). In fact, some developers try to include as many information as possible in trace, making it risky to store those logs, and extremely dangerous to submit them, especially when the customer doesn't know this information is stored, because she never cared about this and never read documentation and/or warning messages. For example, when dealing with files, some developers are tempted to trace the names of the files. For example before appending file name to a directory, if we trace everything on error, it will be easy to notice for example that the appended name is too long, and that the bug in the code was to forget to check for the length of the concatenated string. It is helpful, but this is sensitive data, and must never appear in logs. In the same way: Passwords, IP addresses and network information (MAC address, host name, etc.)¹, Database accesses, Direct input from user and stored business data must never appear in trace. So what other types of information must be banished from the logs? Are there any guidelines already written which I can use? ¹ Obviously, I'm not talking about things as IIS or Apache logs. What I'm talking about is the sort of information which is collected with the only intent to debug the application itself, not to trace the activity of untrusted entities. Edit: Thank you for your answers and your comments. Since my question is not too precise, I'll try to answer the questions asked in the comments: What I'm doing with the logs? The logs of the application may be stored in memory, which means either in plain on hard disk on localhost, in a database, again in plain, or in Windows Events. In every case, the concern is that those sources may not be safe enough. For example, when a customer runs an application and this application stores logs in plain text file in temp directory, anybody who has a physical access to the PC can read those logs. The logs of the application may also be sent through internet. For example, if a customer has an issue with an application, we can ask her to run this application in full-trace mode and to send us the log file. Also, some application may sent automatically the crash report to us (and even if there are warnings about sensitive data, in most cases customers don't read them). Am I talking about specific fields? No. I'm working on general business applications only, so the only sensitive data is business data. There is nothing related to health or other fields covered by specific regulations. But thank you to talk about that, I probably should take a look about those fields for some clues about what I can include in guidelines. Isn't it easier to encrypt the data? No. It would make every application much more difficult, especially if we want to use C# diagnostics and TraceSource. It would also require to manage authorizations, which is not the easiest think to do. Finally, if we are talking about the logs submitted to us from a customer, we must be able to read the logs, but without having access to sensitive data. So technically, it's easier to never include sensitive information in logs at all and to never care about how and where those logs are stored.

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• XNA Multiplayer Games and Networking

  - by JoshReuben

  ·        XNA communication must by default be lightweight – if you are syncing game state between players from the Game.Update method, you must minimize traffic. That game loop may be firing 60 times a second and player 5 needs to know if his tank has collided with any player 3 and the angle of that gun turret. There are no WCF ServiceContract / DataContract niceties here, but at the same time the XNA networking stack simplifies the details. The payload must be simplistic - just an ordered set of numbers that you would map to meaningful enum values upon deserialization.   Overview ·        XNA allows you to create and join multiplayer game sessions, to manage game state across clients, and to interact with the friends list ·        Dependency on Gamer Services - to receive notifications such as sign-in status changes and game invitations ·        two types of online multiplayer games: system link game sessions (LAN) and LIVE sessions (WAN). ·        Minimum dev requirements: 1 Xbox 360 console + Creators Club membership to test network code - run 1 instance of game on Xbox 360, and 1 on a Windows-based computer   Network Sessions ·        A network session is made up of players in a game + up to 8 arbitrary integer properties describing the session ·        create custom enums – (e.g. GameMode, SkillLevel) as keys in NetworkSessionProperties collection ·        Player state: lobby, in-play   Session Types ·        local session - for split-screen gaming - requires no network traffic. ·        system link session - connects multiple gaming machines over a local subnet. ·        Xbox LIVE multiplayer session - occurs on the Internet. Ranked or unranked   Session Updates ·        NetworkSession class Update method - must be called once per frame. ·        performs the following actions: o   Sends the network packets. o   Changes the session state. o   Raises the managed events for any significant state changes. o   Returns the incoming packet data. ·        synchronize the session à packet-received and state-change events à no threading issues   Session Config ·        Session host - gaming machine that creates the session. XNA handles host migration ·        NetworkSession properties: AllowJoinInProgress , AllowHostMigration ·        NetworkSession groups: AllGamers, LocalGamers, RemoteGamers   Subscribe to NetworkSession events ·        GamerJoined ·        GamerLeft ·        GameStarted ·        GameEnded – use to return to lobby ·        SessionEnded – use to return to title screen   Create a Session session = NetworkSession.Create(         NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,         maximumLocalPlayers,         maximumGamers,         privateGamerSlots,         sessionProperties );   Start a Session if (session.IsHost) {     if (session.IsEveryoneReady)     {        session.StartGame();        foreach (var gamer in SignedInGamer.SignedInGamers)        {             gamer.Presence.PresenceMode =                 GamerPresenceMode.InCombat;   Find a Network Session AvailableNetworkSessionCollection availableSessions = NetworkSession.Find(     NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,       maximumLocalPlayers,     networkSessionProperties); availableSessions.AllowJoinInProgress = true;   Join a Network Session NetworkSession session = NetworkSession.Join(     availableSessions[selectedSessionIndex]);   Sending Network Data var packetWriter = new PacketWriter(); foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Get the tank associated with this player.     Tank myTank = gamer.Tag as Tank;     // Write the data.     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Position);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TankRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TurretRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.IsFiring);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Health);       // Send it to everyone.     gamer.SendData(packetWriter, SendDataOptions.None);     }   Receiving Network Data foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Keep reading while packets are available.     while (gamer.IsDataAvailable)     {         NetworkGamer sender;          // Read a single packet.         gamer.ReceiveData(packetReader, out sender);          if (!sender.IsLocal)         {             // Get the tank associated with this packet.             Tank remoteTank = sender.Tag as Tank;              // Read the data and apply it to the tank.             remoteTank.Position = packetReader.ReadVector2();             …   End a Session if (session.AllGamers.Count == 1)         {             session.EndGame();             session.Update();         }   Performance •        Aim to minimize payload, reliable in order messages •        Send Data Options: o   Unreliable, out of order -(SendDataOptions.None) o   Unreliable, in order (SendDataOptions.InOrder) o   Reliable, out of order (SendDataOptions.Reliable) o   Reliable, in order (SendDataOptions.ReliableInOrder) o   Chat data (SendDataOptions.Chat) •        Simulate: NetworkSession.SimulatedLatency , NetworkSession.SimulatedPacketLoss •        Voice support – NetworkGamer properties: HasVoice ,IsTalking , IsMutedByLocalUser

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• Make your TSQL easier to read during a presentation

  - by Jonathan Allen

  SQL Server Management Studio 2012 has some neat settings that you can use to help your presentations at a SQL event better for the attendees if you are willing to spend a few minutes making some settings changes. Historically, I have been reluctant to make changes to my SSMS settings as it is such a tedious process and it’s not 100% clear that what you think you are changing is actually what gets changed. With SSMS 2012 this has become a lot easier and a lot less risky. In any session that involves TSQL there is a trade off between the speaker having all the code on screen and the attendees being able to read any of what is on screen. You (the speaker) might be able to read this when you are working on the code but plenty of your audience wont be able to make head or tail of it. SSMS 2012 has a zoom facility that can help: but don’t go nuts … Having the font too big means you will be scrolling a lot and the code will again be rendered unreadable. There is more though but you need to take a deep breath and open the Tools menu and delve into the SSMS options. In previous versions of SSMS this is a deep, dark and scary place where changing values can be obscure and sometimes catastrophic to the UI when you get back to the code editor. First things first, we set out as a good DBA and save our current (and presumably acceptable) SSMS configuration. From the import and Export Settings you can set up a file to hold all of the settings that you currently have. The wizard will open and ask you to pick an option. This time around choose to export settings. hit next and next again and then name your settings profile in the final step of the wizard and then click Finish. Once this is done then you can change whatever you like and always get back to this configuration in a couple of clicks. So what can you change to make for a good experience? Well there are plenty of things that can be altered but don’t go too mad and change too many things without taking a look at the results for every item on the list above you can change font, size, weight, colour, background colour etc. etc. but consider what you are trying to achieve and take it slowly. I have seen presenters with their settings set to have a yellow highlight and black font rather than the default pale blue background and slightly darker font so to achieve that select Text Editor and then select “Selected Text” in the Display Items listbox. As you change things the Sample area give you an idea of what effect you are going to have. Black and yellow is the colour combination with the highest contrast – that’s why bees and wasps# are that colour. What next? how about increasing the default font for your demo scripts? This means that any script you open and any new ones that you start will take on this font. No more zooming (or forgetting to) in the middle of sessions. now don’t forget to save this profile – follow the same steps as above but give the profile a different name, something like PresentationBigFontHighContrast might be appropriate. Once you are done making changes, export the settings once more and then go into the Import Export wizard and import settings from the first profile you created. Everything will be back to normal. Now making changes to suit your environment can be done very easily and with confidence. * – and warning tape and safety signs and so forth – Health and Safety officers simply copy nature!

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• Collaborative Organizations build Organizational Culture

  “A Collaborative organization builds its culture based on the idea of the family or an athletic team.”(Hoefling, 2001) As I grew up, I participated in many different types of clubs, civic organizations, and sports teams.  Now looking back at the more successful undertakings, I can see three commonalities amongst them. They all shared a defined purpose or goal, defined functional roles, and a shared sense of responsibility to the group. Defined Purpose or Goal In order to unit people to work together, they must share a common goal or have a common purpose. An example of this would be the Lions Club International Foundation. There purpose is to help everyone to lead healthier and more productive lives, nurtures the potential of youth, promotes health, serves the elderly, empowers the disabled and helps victims of disasters. This organization holds localized meetings across the world and works in conjunction with other localized clubs within there organization along with other organizations to promote common goals. If there are no common goals for the group, then there is nothing that binds people to the group, and nothing will be done. Defined Functional Roles In order for an organization to work and function as a team, they must have defined roles and everyone must know how their roles are interdependent on each other. Lets shed light on this subject by looking at a football team’s offense.  Each player has an assigned role to play each time the ball is snapped. The offensive line blocks for the running back or quarterback, the quarterback passes the ball to the wide receiver or hands it off to the running back and the running back and wide receivers run with the ball towards the goal line. Each member of this team shares a common goal of scoring a touchdown, but if each team member does not fulfill their assigned roles the offences will collapse and the team will lose yards. This will provide a set back to the teams goal of scoring a touchdown because they potential are then farther away from the goal line.  In addition, if all the players do not know their roles and how they are part of a larger team then even larger yard losses can occur. Shared Sense of Personal Responsibility to the Group Shared responsibility comes with the shared common goals. Each person in the organization must do their part to promote the common shared goal or purpose based on their abilities. A prime example of this is a wrestling team competing in a match. Points are awarded to the team based on how many wins the team achieves in the meet and of that how many wins where won by decision or by pin. If a wrestler pins his opponent the teams will receive 2 points for the win, but if the wrestler wins by decision, then the team only gets one point for the win. So it is the responsibility of each person on the team to not get pinned if they are unable to win the match. If the team member gets pinned then the other team receives an additional point for the win. References: Hoefling, T. (2001). Working Virtually: Managing People for Successful Virtual Teams and Organizations. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

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• Moving StarterSTS to the (Azure) Cloud

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Quite some people asked me about an Azure version of StarterSTS. While I kinda knew what I had to do to make the move, I couldn’t find the time. Until recently. This blog post briefly documents the necessary changes and design decisions for the next version of StarterSTS which will work both on-premise and on Azure. Provider Fortunately StarterSTS is already based on the idea of “providers”. Authentication, roles and claims generation is based on the standard ASP.NET provider infrastructure. This makes the migration to different data stores less painful. In my case I simply moved the ASP.NET provider database to SQL Azure and still use the standard SQL Server based membership, roles and profile provider. In addition StarterSTS has its own providers to abstract resource access for certificates, relying party registration, client certificate registration and delegation. So I only had to provide new implementations. Signing and SSL keys now go in the Azure certificate store and user mappings (client certificates and delegation settings) have been moved to Azure table storage. The one thing I didn’t anticipate when I originally wrote StarterSTS was the need to also encapsulate configuration. Currently configuration is “locked” to the standard .NET configuration system. The new version will have a pluggable SettingsProvider with versions for .NET configuration as well as Azure service configuration. If you want to externalize these settings into e.g. a database, it is now just a matter of supplying a corresponding provider. Moving between the on-premise and Azure version will be just a matter of using different providers. URL Handling Another thing that’s substantially different on Azure (and load balanced scenarios in general) is the handling of URLs. In farm scenarios, the standard APIs like ASP.NET’s Request.Url return the current (internal) machine name, but you typically need the address of the external facing load balancer. There’s a hotfix for WCF 3.5 (included in v4) that fixes this for WCF metadata. This was accomplished by using the HTTP Host header to generate URLs instead of the local machine name. I now use the same approach for generating WS-Federation metadata as well as information card files. New Features I introduced a cache provider. Since we now have slightly more expensive lookups (e.g. relying party data from table storage), it makes sense to cache certain data in the front end. The default implementation uses the ASP.NET web cache and can be easily extended to use products like memcached or AppFabric Caching. Starting with the relying party provider, I now also provide a read/write interface. This allows building management interfaces on top of this provider. I also include a (very) simple web page that allows working with the relying party provider data. I guess I will use the same approach for other providers in the future as well. I am also doing some work on the tracing and health monitoring area. Especially important for the Azure version. Stay tuned.

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• The best computer ever

  - by Jeff

  (This is a repost from my personal blog… wow… I need to write more technical stuff!) About three years and three months ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro, and it turned out to be the best computer I've ever owned. You might think that every computer with better specs is automatically better than the last, but that hasn't been my experience. My first one was a Sony, back in the Pentium III days, and it cost an astonishing $2,500. That was even more ridiculous in 1999 dollars. It had a dial-up modem, and a CD-ROM, built-in! It may have even played DVD's. A few years later I bought an HP, and it ended up being a pile of shit. The power connector inside came loose from the board, and on occasion would even short. In 2005, I bought a Dell, and it wasn't bad. It had a really high resolution screen (complete with dead pixels, a problem in those days), and it was the first laptop I felt I could do real work on. When 2006 rolled around, Apple started making computers with Intel CPU's, and I bought the very first one the week it came out. I used Boot Camp to run Windows. I still have it in its box somewhere, and I used it for three years. The current 17" was new in 2009. The goodness was largely rooted in having a big screen with lots of dots. This computer has been the source of hundreds of blog posts, tens of thousands of lines of code, video and photo editing, and of course, a whole lot of Web surfing. It connected to corpnet at Microsoft, WiFi in Hawaii and has presented many a deck. It has traveled with me tens of thousands of miles. Last year, I put a solid state drive in it, and it was like getting a new computer. I can boot up a Windows 7 VM in about 19 seconds. Having 8 gigs of RAM has always been fantastic. Everything about it has been fast and fun. When new, the battery (when not using VM's) could get as much as 10 hours. I can still do 7 without much trouble. After 460 charge cycles, the battery health is still between 85 and 90%. The only real negative has been the size and weight. It's only an inch thick, but naturally it's pretty big with a 17" screen. You don't get battery life like that without a huge battery, either, so it's heavy. It was never a deal breaker, but sometimes a long haul across a large airport, you know you're carrying it. Today, Apple announced a new, thinner and lighter 15" laptop, with twice the RAM and CPU cores, and four times the screen resolution. It basically handles my size and weight issues while retaining the resolution, and it still costs less than my 17" did. So I ordered one. Three years is an excellent run, but I kind of budgeted for a new workhorse this year anyway. So if you're interested in a 17" MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz CPU, 8 gigs of RAM and a 320 gig hard drive (sorry, I'm keeping the SSD), I have one to sell. They've apparently discontinued the 17", which is going to piss off the video community. It's in excellent condition, with a few minor scratches, but I take care of my stuff.

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• Application Logging needs work

  Application Logging Application logging is the act of logging events that occur within an application much like how a court report documents what happens in court case. Application logs can be useful for several reasons, but the most common use for logs is to recreate steps to find the root cause of applications errors. Other uses can include the detection of Fraud, verification of user activity, or provide audits on user/data interactions. “Logs can contain different kinds of data. The selection of the data used is normally affected by the motivation leading to the logging. “ (OWASP, 2009) OWASP also stats that logging include applicable debugging information like the event date time, responsible process, and a description of the event. “There are many reasons why a logging system is a necessary part of delivering a distributed application. One of the most important is the ability to track exactly how many users are using the application during different time periods.” (Hatton, 2000) Hatton also states that application logging helps system designers determine whether parts of an application aren't being used as designed. He implies that low usage can be used to identify if users like or do not like aspects of a system based on user usage of the application. This enables application designers to extract why users don't like aspects of an application so that changes can be made to increase its usefulness and effectiveness. “Logging memory usage can also assist you in tuning up the internals of your application. If you're experiencing a randomly occurring problem, being able to match activities performed with the memory status at the time may enable you to discover the cause of the problem. It also gives you a good indication of the health of the distributed server machine at the time any activity is performed. “ (Hatton, 2000) Commonly Logged Application Events (Defined by OWASP) Access of Data Creation of Data Modification of Data in any form Administrative Functions  Configuration Changes Debugging Information(Application Events)  Authorization Attempts  Data Deletion Network Communication  Authentication Events  Errors/Exceptions Application Error Logging The functionality associated with application error logging is actually the combination of proper error handling and applications logging.  If we look back at Figure 4 and Figure 5, these code examples allow developers to handle various types of errors that occur within the life cycle of an application’s execution. Application logging can be applied within the Catch section of the TryCatch statement allowing for the errors to be logged when they occur. By placing the logging within the Catch section specific error details can be accessed that help identify the source of the error, the path to the error, what caused the error and definition of the error that occurred. This can then be logged and reviewed at a later date in order recreate the error that was received based data found in the application log. By allowing applications to log errors developers IT staff can use them to recreate errors that are encountered by end-users or other dependent systems.

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• Come up with a real-world problem in which only the best solution will do (a problem from Introduction to algorithms) [closed]

  - by Mike

  EDITED (I realized that the question certainly needs a context) The problem 1.1-5 in the book of Thomas Cormen et al Introduction to algorithms is: "Come up with a real-world problem in which only the best solution will do. Then come up with one in which a solution that is “approximately” the best is good enough." I'm interested in its first statement. And (from my understanding) it is asked to name a real-world problem where only the exact solution will work as opposed to a real-world problem where good-enough solution will be ok. So what is the difference between the exact and good enough solution. Consider some physics problem for example the simulation of the fulid flow in the permeable medium. To make this simulation happen some simplyfing assumptions have to be made when deriving a mathematical model. Otherwise the model becomes at least complex and unsolvable. Virtually any particle in the universe has its influence on the fluid flow. But not all particles are equal. Those that form the permeable medium are much more influental than the ones located light years away. Then when the mathematical model needs to be solved an exact solution can rarely be found unless the mathematical model is simple enough (wich probably means the model isn't close to reality). We take an approximate numerical method and after hours of coding and days of verification come up with the program or algorithm which is a solution. And if the model and an algorithm give results close to a real problem by some degree that is good enough soultion. Its worth noting the difference between exact solution algorithm and exact computation result. When considering real-world problems and real-world computation machines I believe all physical problems solutions where any calculations are taken can not be exact because universal physical constants are represented approximately in the computer. Any numbers are represented with the limited precision, at least limited by amount of memory available to computing machine. I can imagine plenty of problems where good-enough, good to some degree solution will work, like train scheduling, automated trading, satellite orbit calculation, health care expert systems. In that cases exact solutions can't be derived due to constraints on computation time, limitations in computer memory or due to the nature of problems. I googled this question and like what this guy suggests: there're kinds of mathematical problems that need exact solutions (little note here: because the question is taken from the book "Introduction to algorithms" the term "solution" means an algorithm or a program, which in this case gives exact answer on each input). But that's probably more of theoretical interest. So I would like to narrow down the question to: What are the real-world practical problems where only the best (exact) solution algorithm or program will do (but not the good-enough solution)? There are problems like breaking of cryptographic ciphers where only exact solution matters in practice and again in practice the process of deciphering without knowing a secret should take reasonable amount of time. Returning to the original question this is the problem where good-enough (fast-enough) solution will do there's no practical need in instant crack though it's desired. So the quality of "best" can be understood in any sense: exact, fastest, requiring least memory, having minimal possible network traffic etc. And still I want this question to be theoretical if possible. In a sense that there may be example of computer X that has limited resource R of amount Y where the best solution to problem P is the one that takes not more than available Y for inputs of size N*Y. But that's the problem of finding solution for P on computer X which is... well, good enough. My final thought that we live in a world where it is required from programming solutions to practical purposes to be good enough. In rare cases really very very good but still not the best ones. Isn't it? :) If it's not can you provide an example? Or can you name any such unsolved problem of practical interest?

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• High Profile ASP.NET websites

  - by nandos

  About twice a month I get asked to justify the reason "Why are we using ASP.NET and not PHP or Java, or buzz-word-of-the-month-here, etc". 100% of the time the questions come from people that do not understand anything about technology. People that would not know the difference between FTP and HTTP. The best approach I found (so far) to justify it to people without getting into technical details is to just say "XXX website uses it". Which I get back "Oh...I did not know that, so ASP.NET must be good". I know, I know, it hurts. But it works. So, without getting into the merit of why I'm using ASP.NET (which could trigger an endless argument for other platforms), I'm trying to compile a list of high profile websites that are implemented in ASP.NET. (No, they would have no idea what StackOverflow is). Can you name a high-profile website implemented in ASP.NET? EDIT: Current list (thanks for all the responses): (trying to avoid tech sites and prioritizing retail sites) Costco - http://www.costco.com/ Crate & Barrel - http://www.crateandbarrel.com/ Home Shopping Network - http://www.hsn.com/ Buy.com - http://www.buy.com/ Dell - http://www.dell.com Nasdaq - http://www.nasdaq.com/ Virgin - http://www.virgin.com/ 7-Eleven - http://www.7-eleven.com/ Carnival Cruise Lines - http://www.carnival.com/ L'Oreal - http://www.loreal.com/ The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov/ Remax - http://www.remax.com/ Monster Jobs - http://www.monster.com/ USA Today - http://www.usatoday.com/ ComputerJobs.com - http://computerjobs.com/ Match.com - http://www.match.com National Health Services (UK) - http://www.nhs.uk/ CarrerBuilder.com - http://www.careerbuilder.com/

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• Accommodating hierarchical data in SQL Server 2005 database design

  - by Remnant

  Context I am fairly new to database design (=know the basics) and am grappling with how best to design my database for a project I am currently working on. In short, my database will keep a log of which employees have attended certain health and safety courses throughout the year. There are multiple types of course e.g. moving objects, fire safety, hygiene etc. In terms of my database design I need to accommodate the following: Each location can have multiple divisions Each division can have multiple departments Each department can have multiple functions Each function can have multiple job roles Each job role can have different course requirements Also note that the structure at each location may not be the same e.g. the departments within divisions are not the same across locations and the functions within departments may also differ. Edit - updated to better articulate problem Let's assume I am just looking at Location, Division and Department and I have my database as follows: LocationTable DivisionTable DepartmentTable LocationID(PK) DivisionID(PK) DepartmentID(PK) LocationName DivisionName DepartmentName There is a many-to-many relationship between Locations and Divisions and also between Departments and Divisions. Suppose I set up a 'Junction Table' as follows: Location_Division LocationID(FK) DivisionID(FK) Using Location_Division I could easily pull back the Divisions for any Location. However, suppose I want to pull back all departments for a given Division in a given Location. If I set up another 'Junction Table' for Division and Department then I can't see how I would differentiate Division by Location? Division_Department DivisionID(FK) DepartmentID(FK) Location_Division Division_Department LocationID DivisionID DivisionID DepartmentID 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 Do I need to expand the number of columns in my 'Junction Table' e.g. Location_Division_Department LocationID(FK) DivisionID(FK) DepartmentID(FK) Location_Division_Department LocationID DivisionID DepartmentID 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 3 2 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 3

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• When writing a game, should you make objects/enemies/etc. have unique ID numbers?

  - by SLC

  I have recently encountered some issues with merely passing references to objects/enemies in a game I am making, and am wondering if I am using the wrong approach. The main issue I have is disposing of enemies and objects, when other enemies or players may still have links to them. For example, if you have a Rabbit, and a Wolf, the Wolf may have selected the Rabbit to be its target. What I am doing, is the wolf has a GameObject Target = null; and when it decides it is hungry, the Target becomes the Rabbit. If the Rabbit then dies, such as another wolf killing it, it cannot be removed from the game properly because this wolf still has a reference to it. In addition, if you are using a decoupled approach, the rabbit could hit by lightning, reducing its health to below zero. When it next updates itself, it realises it has died, and is removed from the game... but there is no way to update everything that is interested in it. If you gave every enemy a unique ID, you could simply use references to that instead, and use a central lookup class that handled it. If the monster died, the lookup class could remove it from its own index, and subsequently anything trying to access it would be informed that it's dead, and then they could act accordingly. Any thoughts on this?

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• TLS with SNI in Java clients

  - by ftrotter

  There is an ongoing discussion on the security and trust working group for NHIN Direct regarding the IP-to-domain mapping problem that is created with traditional SSL. If an HISP (as defined by NHIN Direct) wants to host thousands of NHIN Direct "Health Domains" for providers, then it will an "artificially inflated cost" to have to purchase an IP for each of those domains. Because Apache and OpenSSL have recently released TLS with support for the SNI extension, it is possible to use SNI as a solution to this problem on the server side. However, if we decide that we will allow server implementations of the NHINDirect transport layer to support TLS+SNI, then we must require that all clients support SNI too. OpenSSL based clients should do this by default and one could always us stunnel to implement an TLS+SNI aware client to proxy if your given programming language SSL implementation does not support SNI. It appears that native Java applications using OpenJDK do not yet support SNI, but I cannot get a straight answer out of that project. I know that there are OpenSSL Java libraries available but I have no idea if that would be considered viable. Can you give me a "state of the art" summary of where TLS+SNI support is for Java clients? I need a Java implementers perspective on this.

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• Finding latency issues (stalls) in embedded Linux systems

  - by camh

  I have an embedded Linux system running on an Atmel AT91SAM9260EK board on which I have two processes running at real-time priority. A manager process periodically "pings" a worker process using POSIX message queues to check the health of the worker process. Usually the round-trip ping takes about 1ms, but very occasionally it takes much longer - about 800ms. There are no other processes that run at a higher priority. It appears the stall may be related to logging (syslog). If I stop logging the problem seems to go away. However it makes no difference if the log file is on JFFS2 or NFS. No other processes are writing to the "disk" - just syslog. What tools are available to me to help me track down why these stalls are occurring? I am aware of latencytop and will be using that. Are there some other tools that may be more useful? Some details: Kernel version: 2.6.32.8 libc (syslog functions): uClibc 0.9.30.1 syslog: busybox 1.15.2

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• How to do OrderBY on XML column in SQL SERVER 2008

  - by Rohit

  I am creating a comma seperated values of columns specified in dbName attribute of below xml. Now i want to concatenate those columns on the basic of Position attribute. DECLARE @varXML AS XML = '<gridFormat> <column property="FacilityInternalID" dbName="Pname" HeaderText="TAT Health" IsVisible="1" Position="1" /> <column property="FacilityInternalID" dbName="Priority" HeaderText="Priority" IsVisible="1" Position="2" /> <column property="FacilityInternalID" dbName="JobID" HeaderText="Job Number" IsVisible="1" Position="3" /> <column property="FacilityInternalID" dbName="Status" HeaderText="Status" IsVisible="1" Position="6" /> <column property="FacilityInternalID" dbName="name" HeaderText="Customer" IsVisible="1" Position="4" /> <column property="FacilityInternalID" dbName="sname" HeaderText="Facility " IsVisible="1" Position="5" /> </gridFormat>' PRINT @varXML This is the query by which I am generating CSV of columns. I have to use it is select list. SELECT @ColumnsToDisplay = LEFT(MyCsvList, LEN(MyCsvList) - 1) FROM ( SELECT ( SELECT row.value('@property', 'varchar(200)') + ', ' AS [text()] FROM @varXML.nodes('gridFormat/column') AS d ( row ) FOR XML PATH('') ) AS MyCsvList ) AS MyCsvListFinal SET @SQL = 'SELECT ' + @ColumnsToDisplay + ' FROM JobListingDetails' Result should be select Pname,Priority,JobID,name,sname,status FROM JobListingDetails. Please help.

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• How to find Part Time development/IT work?

  - by Jonathan

  I've been working in the IT field now for 10 years. Originally trained as an Engineer, started out with C++ and have been a .Net specialist since beta. Currently seconded to a major city and working in the finance industry as freelance, I really feel like i've hit the glass ceiling. Have been contracting now for 5 years as the company politics and frustration of not being promoted and poor pay rises for excellent work but during the last decade of corporate cost cutting took its toll on my morale. Freelance made all the difference and i've had a very decorated career for good clients. What any Engineering student could ever dream of when starting out. The problem is, it doesn't particularly make me happy. It's good work, and i enjoy the problem solving aspects of it and having something to do each day. However there is always a large overhead of non-technical work and dealing with poor managers etc. I guess the Engineering was always a bit of a mistake i made the best out of, and now having 10 years behind a computer hasn't done wonders for my health or eye sight. In a nutshell i am in the process of retraining as a therapist and would like to open my own clinic. However, never having done this before, the fast pace IT skills outdate and the fact that all my experience and skills are non transferrable, i am a little worried. Any ideas how i can find part time IT work as i build up my business? (it's incredibly hard to find freelancing work that doesn't require long hours and overtime). Or other ideas to make the transition easier, and perhaps backout if it financially doesn't work/or i have enough marketing skills? I'd be interested to hear from people who have made a similar transition, successfully or unsuccessfully. Many thanks

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• Obj-C: ++variable is increasing by two instead of one

  - by Eli Garfinkel

  I am writing a program that asks users yes/no questions to help them decide how to vote in an election. I have a variable representing the question number called questionnumber. Each time I go through the switch-break loop, I add 1 to the questionnumber variable so that the next question will be displayed. This works fine for the first two questions. But then it skips the third question and moves on to the fourth. When I have more questions in the list, it skips every other question. Somewhere, for some reasons, the questionnumber variable is increasing when I don't want it to. Please look at the code below and tell me what I'm doing wrong. Thank you! Eli import "MainView.h" import @implementation MainView @synthesize Question; @synthesize mispar; int conservative = 0; int liberal = 0; int questionnumber = 1; (IBAction)agreebutton:(id)sender { ++liberal; } (IBAction)disagreebutton:(id)sender { ++conservative; } (IBAction)nextbutton:(id)sender { ++questionnumber; switch (questionnumber) { case 2: Question.text = @"Congress should pass a law that would ban Americans from earning more than one hundred million dollars in any given year."; break; case 3: Question.text = @"It is not fair to admit people to a university or employ them on the basis of merit alone. Factors such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation must also be considered."; break; case 4: Question.text = @"There are two Americas - one for the rich and one for the poor."; break; case 5: Question.text = @"Top quality health care should be free for all."; break; default: break; } } @end

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• How do I label a group of radio boxes for WCAG / 508 Compliance? Is ASP.NET doing it wrong?

  - by Mark Brittingham

  I am trying to bring an existing web site into greater conformance with WCAG 2.0 Guidelines and am a bit confused over the output emitted by Microsoft (ASP.NET 4.0 although it was the same in 3.5). Suppose you have a question like: "How would you rate your health?" and a set of 5 answers created using an ASP.NET RadioButtonList. I place the question in an asp:Label with an "AssociatedControlID" that matches the ID of the RadioButtonList (e.g. "SelfRatingBox"). Seems pretty easy... Only the output that is generated has an html "label" with a "For" that is equal to the ID of a table that wraps up the RadioButtons. I assumed that this would work with page readers but our 508 compliance guy is saying that the reader isn't associating the label with the radio controls. The WCAG guidelines indicate that you have to use a fieldset around the entire group and a legend to capture the associated text (the question). So what gives? It would be ideal if MS could take my label and the radiobuttonlist and generate the appropriate fieldset and legend tags but it seems pretty clear that to achieve WCAG compliance, I'll have to roll my own. Is this correct or am I missing something?

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• SSL certificate pre-fetch .NET

  - by Wil P

  I am writing a utility that would allow me to monitor the health of our websites. This consists of a series of validation tasks that I can run against a web application. One of the tests is to anticipate the expiration of a particular SSL certificate. I am looking for a way to pre-fetch the SSL certificate installed on a web site using .NET or a WINAPI so that I can validate the expiration date of the certificate associated with a particular website. One way I could do this is to cache the certificates when they are validated in the ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback handler and then match them up with configured web sites, but this seems a bit hackish. Another would be to configure the application with the certificate for the website, but I'd rather avoid this if I can in order to minimize configuration. What would be the easiest way for me to download an SSL certificate associated with a website using .NET so that I can inspect the information the certificate contains to validate it? EDIT: To extend on the answer below there is no need to manually create the ServicePoint prior to creating the request. It is generated on the request object as part of executing the request. private static string GetSSLExpiration(string url) { HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse()) { } if (request.ServicePoint.Certificate != null) { return request.ServicePoint.Certificate.GetExpirationDateString(); } else { return string.Empty; } }

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• archiving strategies and limitations of data in a table

  - by Samuel

  Environment: Jboss, Mysql, JPA, Hibernate Our web application will be catering to a large amount of users (~ 1,000,000) and there are a lots of child table where user specific data are stored (e.g. personal, health, forum contributions ...). What would be the best practice to archive user & user specific information. [a] Would it be wise to move the archived user & user specific information to their respective tables within the same database (e.g. user_archive, user_forum_comments_archive ...) OR [b] Would you just mark the database entries with a flag in the original table(s) and just query only non archived entries. We have a unique constraint on User.loginid, how do you handle this requirement if the users are archived via 1-[a] (i.e if a user with loginid 'samuel' gets moved into the archive table and if a new user gets added with the same name in the original table, how would you prevent this. What would be the best strategy to address the unique key constraints. We have a requirement to selectively archive records and bring it back if necessary, will you rely on database tools are would you handle this via your persistence APIs exposed by the JPA entity model.

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• Looking for detailed explanation of Hibernate UserType methods for mutable objects

  - by Tom

  I am creating a custom UserType class in Hibernate. The specific case is for an HL7v3 clinical document (I work in health IT). It is a mutable object and most of the documentation around the Hibernate UserType interface seems to center around immutable types. I want a better understanding of how and when the interface methods are used, specifically: assemble - why two parameters (one Serializable, one Object)? What is the use case for this method? disassemble - should I just implement this method to return a serializable form (e.g. String representation)? When and how is this method invoked? equals - is this for update? read? contention? dirty reads? What are the consequences of simply returning false in most cases? replace - I really don't understand where the three Object parameters come from, when this method is invoked, and what Hibernate expects to return, or how that return value is used. Any pointers would be appreciated. I've searched and read all I can find on the subject, but have not found much documentation at all explaining how these methods are used for mutable objects.

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• Making GUI applications on Linux/Windows. What languages/tools to use?

  - by Javed Ahamed

  My student group and I are trying to continue working on a project we worked on this semester over the summer to become a professional, deployable app. We originally did it in Adobe AIR but it seems now that the computers this program will be running on will be very slow, maybe 600mhz and 128-256mb ram so flash just isn't going to cut it. It is basically a health diagnosis application that we will be shipping out to impoverished countries. Now comes the real question. We are wondering what language to rebuild our application in. It has to have a good gui builder associated with it, like adobe flex/air gui builder or visual studio's gui builder but the application should run on linux primarily, and if it can run on windows thats just a plus. We are all students too without really any outside help so whatever we decide to do this in there must be ample documentation available when we hit problems. Some things we have considered so far are using python and glade or c# and monodevelop, but again we really are not experts on any of this which is why I am asking for help as I would rather spend the time now choosing the right tools instead of wasting time down the line when we hit a roadblock. Thanks in advance!

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