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  • GPG Invalid Signature

    - by user46421
    I am having problems with the following (in an attempt to remove hyperlinks, I have removed one of the "/" from the addresses): W: GPG error: http://archive.ubuntu.com oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key <[email protected]> W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG B725097B3ACC3965 Launchpad lffl W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 4874D3686E80C6B7 Launchpad PPA for Banshee Team W: GPG error: http://archive.getdeb.net jaunty-getdeb Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG A8A515F046D7E7CF GetDeb Archive Automatic Signing Key <[email protected]> W: GPG error: http://badgerports.org lucid Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG C90F9CB90E1FAD0C Jo Shields <[email protected]> W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 976B5901365C5CA1 Launchpad PPA for transmissionbt W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/dlecan/openjdk/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/dlecan/openjdk/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/flash/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/sun-java-community-team/sun-java6/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/sun-java-community-team/sun-java6/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found I have tried the following solutions which were in a closed case titled "The following signatures were invalid": First of all try sudo apt-get clean sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade Some ISPs cache the packages and errors like these are reported then. If the above commands don't work, try sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::http::No-Cache=True and again sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade If it still doesn't work, sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::BrokenProxy=true sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

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  • Distributed Development Tools -- (Version control and Project Management)

    - by Macy Abbey
    I've recently become responsible for choosing which source control and project management software to use for a company that employs me. Currently it uses Jira (project management) and Subversion (version control). I know there are many other options out there -- the ones I know about are all in this article http://mashable.com/2010/07/14/distributed-developer-teams/ . I'm leaning towards recommending they just stay with what they have as it seems workable and any change would have to be worth the cost of switching to say github/basecamp or some other solution. Some details on the team: It's a distributed development shop. Meetings of the whole team in one room are rare. It's currently a very small development team (three developers). The project management software is used by developers and a product manager or two. What are you experiences with version control and project management web applications? Are there any you would recommend and you think are worth the switching cost of time to learn new services / implementing the change? Edit: After educating myself further on the options it appears DVCS offer powerful benefits that may be worth investing in now as opposed to later in the company's lifetime when the switching cost is higher: I'm a Subversion geek, why I should consider or not consider Mercurial or Git or any other DVCS?

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  • Most effective way to do daily standup meeting when a few people are remote

    - by Burhan Ali
    I am a software developer in a small team of seven. We are not an Agile (with a big 'A') team but are experimenting with some aspects of agile. One of these is the daily "standup" meeting. The difficulty here is that for two days of the week we have at least one person working from home so the full team isn't available in the same room. What is the best way to carry out a daily standup in this situation? Some facts that may be relevant: We all work in a single open plan room. We use Skype in our company. We don't have any video conferencing capability. We all work the same hours so there are no timezone complexities involved. The development manager is one of the people who works from home one day a week. Things we have tried: Conference call using Skype: This is tricky for those in the office because you can hear people speak in the room and then a split second later through the headset. This can e very distracting. Conference phone: Awful experience. Hard to get them to work and poor quality audio. Text-based updates using Skype. This is not as engaging and is no different than just firing off a status email in the morning. I have seen other questions about remote collaboration but they are mainly about completely remote teams and/or teams that span multiple time zones. We are not affected by either of these problems. What can we do to make our standup meetings better in these circumstances?

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  • Is it wise for a programmer to move into management?

    - by Desolate Planet
    Many times, a developer has suggested that I become a team leader because I'm motivated, but during my career in the IT industry, I've seen so many people who are great at programming, move into management and they are miserable. I've also seen many managers return to programming stating "I'm a technical person, I like technical problems". If this is such a common thing, why do developers feel compelled to leave the technical domain and move into management? Sure you'll have more money and more control, but if you don't enjoy your work and take your problems out on your tream. Secondly, I've been asked in developer interviews, "Would you consider leading a team?" and I'm always tempted to cite the Peter Principle based on what I've seen. I am interested in furthering myself, but not in the way the company may want i.e "Vice President of department blah". To be honest, I've seen this more often in the corporate world than in small development houses and it's always put me off ever going back to a corporate environment. I just feel that this is becoming more and more the norm and it's impacting team morale and degrading the quality of the work. Question: Based on what I've said, Is it a smart move for a technical person to move into management?

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  • Need help with ColdFusion and ASP.NET site [closed]

    - by Michael Stone
    To begin, I wasn't too sure how to title this.. I've got a few questions. First off, I've got a very big site that's in ColdFusion and we've been migrating to ASP.NET C# 4.0 the last 8 months. I've got a team of 7 programmers and no one can seem to figure out these answers, not even our senior C# programmer. We're using Team Foundation Server and we can't figure out how to only push up one small change at time. Right now we're stuck to publishing the entire site and it's causing serious issues. We've currently got the site as a Project and not a Website. We're wondering if that's one issue. I actually think it might be a problem. We're also dealing with an issue where we can't access our regular folders with relative paths. So we're first developing our admin side in .NET and We've got our regular site and then we've got another site within that for our .NET admin tools. By site, I'm referring to them actually being Sites in IIS. This also creates a problem for us when we're creating tools that upload images and want to store them and access them from our parent Site. I'd very much appreciate any advice on how to go about this in the most standardized way. So what I'm hoping for is advise on: -Publishing and managing a site/project in Team Foundation Server. Being able to push up one fix at a time if needed would be GREAT! -Any help figuring out the issuing referencing folders from my .NET child site to my parent ColdFusion site using regular relative paths. "/a/images/b/" would be nice nice instead of only being able to do "/b/images/" We're using ColdFusion 8, C# Asp.NET 4.0/Entity Framework/POCO Templates, and a Windows 2008 R2 Server. Thank you in advance for any help.

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  • A Fresh Start

    - by Laila
    As you may already be aware, I'm no longer responsible for the .NET Reflector newsletter. That publication is now in the very capable hands of the Reflector team. But fear not; starting in early April, I'll be launching a brand new .NET Newsletter, and I invite you to enjoy the very first edition by subscribing to our new mailing list, or by updating your Simple-Talk subscriptions, and joining the .NET Newsletter mailing list. With a fresh and snappy design (it might even be described as idiosyncratic. but I can say no more at this stage), we'll be making a brand new start. Each month, a member of my team (that's the Red Gate .NET team) will host the .NET Newsletter, bringing you the choicest cuts of breaking news, the very best .NET content from Simple-Talk, alongside details of hot upcoming events. To top it off, not only will you be among the first to get access to free resources (including free wall-charts, training videos and eBooks), but you'll also get exclusive access to betas, early access programs, and special offers. We can't wait to share the new design and exciting new content with you! If you have any questions about the changes to the newsletter, please feel free to send an email to [email protected] or post a comment on my blog. If I don't hear from you before next month, then I'll simply say that I hope you enjoy the new look. Cheers, Laila

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  • The Home Stretch: NetBeans IDE 7.1 Release Candidate

    - by TinuA
    The first release candidate build of NetBeans IDE 7.1 is live and available for download, which means the big release (GA) is expected any day soon.NetBeans IDE 7.1 delivers support for JavaFX 2.0, enabling the full compile, debug and profile development cycle for JavaFX 2.0 applications and keeping developers in sync with the latest from the Java platform. Beyond JavaFX support, 7.1 also provides significant Swing GUI Builder enhancements, CSS3 support, and visual debugging tools for JavaFX and Swing user interfaces. And Git--a much anticipated featured--has been integrated into the IDE."The entire NetBeans team is tremendously excited about this release, which provides developers with more state-of-the-art tools for building front-end clients," says NetBeans Engineering Director John Jullion-Ceccarelli. "Whether you are doing JavaFX, HTML5, Swing, or JSF, NetBeans 7.1 will let you quickly and easily develop great-looking and full-featured clients for your Java or PHP-based applications."But there's one more task to check off before the general availability: The NetBeans team has launched a Community Acceptance Survey to get user feedback about the release candidate. Download the RC build, test it and take the survey to let the team know if NetBeans IDE 7.1 is ready for its debut!

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  • Naming conventions: camelCase versus underscore_case ? what are your thoughts about it?

    - by poelinca
    I've been using underscore_case for about 2 years and I recently switched to camelCase because of the new job (been using the later one for about 2 months and I still think underscore_case is better suited for large projects where there are alot of programmers involved, mainly because the code is easyer to read). Now everybody at work uses camelCase because (so they say) the code looks more elegant . What are you're thoughts about camelCase or underscore_case p.s. please excuse my bad english Edit Some update first: platform used is PHP (but I'm not expecting strict PHP platform related answers , anybody can share their thoughts on which would be the best to use , that's why I came here in the first place) I use camelCase just as everibody else in the team (just as most of you recomend) we use Zend Framework which also recommends camelCase Some examples (related to PHP) : Codeigniter framework recommends underscore_case , and honestly the code is easier to read . ZF recomends camelCase and I'm not the only one who thinks ZF code is a tad harder to follow through. So my question would be rephrased: Let's take a case where you have the platform Foo which doesn't recommend any naming conventions and it's the team leader's choice to pick one. You are that team leader, why would you pick camelCase or why underscore_case? p.s. thanks everybody for the prompt answers so far

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  • Java Magazine: Developer Tools and More

    - by Tori Wieldt
    The May/June issue of Java Magazine explores the tools and techniques that can help you bring your ideas to fruition and make you more productive. In “Seven Open Source Tools for Java Deployment,” Bruno Souza and Edson Yanaga present a set of tools that you can use now to drastically improve the deployment process on projects big or small—enabling you and your team to focus on building better and more-innovative software in a less stressful environment. We explore the future of application development tools at Oracle in our interview with Oracle’s Chris Tonas, who discusses plans for NetBeans IDE 9, Oracle’s support for Eclipse, and key trends in the software development space. For more on NetBeans IDE, don’t miss “Quick and Easy Conversion to Java SE 8 with NetBeans IDE 8” and “Build with NetBeans IDE, Deploy to Oracle Java Cloud Service.” We also give you insight into Scrum, an iterative and incremental agile process, with a tour of a development team’s Scrum sprint. Find out if Scrum will work for your team. Other article topics include mastering binaries in Maven-based projects, creating sophisticated applications with HTML5 and JSF, and learning to program with BlueJ. At the end of the day, tools don’t make great code—you do. What tools are vital to your development process? How are you innovating today? Let us know. Send a tweet to @oraclejavamag. The next big thing is always just around the corner—maybe it’s even an idea that’s percolating in *your* brain. Get started today with this issue of Java Magazine. Java Magazine is a FREE, bi-monthly, online publication. It includes technical articles on the Java language and platform; Java innovations and innovators; JUG and JCP news; Java events; links to online Java communities; and videos and multimedia demos. Subscriptions are free, registration required.

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  • How should I structure moving from overworld to menu system / combat?

    - by persepolis
    I'm making a text-based "Arena" game where the player is the owner of 5 creatures that battle other teams for loot, experience and glory. The game is very simple, using Python and a curses emulator. I have a static ASCII map of an "overworld" of sorts. My character, represented by a glyph, can move about this static map. There are locations all over the map that the character can visit, that break down into two types: 1) Towns, which are a series of menus that will allow the player to buy equipment for his team, hire new recruits or do other things. 2) Arenas, where the player's team will have a "battle" interface with actions he can perform, messages about the fight, etc. Maybe later, an ASCII representation of the fight but for now, just screens of information with action prompts. My main problem is what kind of design or structure I should use to implement this? Right now, the game goes through a master loop which waits for keyboard input and then moves the player about the screen. My current thinking is this: 1) Upon keyboard input, the Player coordinates are checked against a list of Location objects and if the Player coords match the Location coords then... 2) ??? I'm not sure if I should then call a seperate function to initiate a "menu" or "combat" mode. Or should I create some kind of new GameMode object that contains a method itself for drawing the screen, printing the necessary info? How do I pass my player's team data into this object? My main concern is passing around the program flow into all these objects. Should I be calling straight functions for different parts of my game, and objects to represent "things" within my game? I was reading about the MVC pattern and how this kind of problem might benefit - decouple the GUI from the game logic and user input but I have no idea how this applies to my game.

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  • The Talent Behind Customer Experience

    - by Christina McKeon
    Earlier, I wrote about Powerful Data Lessons from the Presidential Election. A key component of the Obama team’s data analysis deserves its own discussion—the people. Recruiters are probably scrambling to find out who those Obama data crunchers are and lure them into corporations. For the Obama team, these data scientists became a secret ingredient that the competition didn’t have. This team of analysts knew how to hear the signal and ignore the noise, how to segment and target its base, and how to model scenarios and revise plans based on what the data told them. The talent was the difference. As you work to transform your organization to be more customer-centric, don’t forget that talent is a critical element. Journey mapping is a good start to understanding how your talent impacts your customer experiences. Part of journey mapping includes documenting the “on-stage” and “back-stage” systems and touchpoints. When mapping this part of your customers’ journey, include the roles and talent behind the employee actions—both customer facing and further upstream from that customer touchpoint. Know what each of these roles does, how well you are retaining people in these areas, and your plans to fill these open positions in the future. To use data scientists as an example, this job will be in high demand over the next 10 years. The workforce is shrinking, and higher education institutions may not be able to turn out trained data scientists as fast as you need them. You don’t want to be caught with a skills deficit, so consider how you can best plan for the future talent you will need. Have your existing employees make their career aspirations known to you now. You may find you already have employees willing to take on roles that drive better customer experiences. Then develop customer experience talent from within your organization through targeted learning programs. If you know that you will need to go outside the organization, build those candidate relationships now. Nurture the candidates you want to hire and partner with universities, colleges, and trade associations so you can increase the number of qualified candidates in your talent pool.

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  • What Pattern will solve this - fetching dependent record from database

    - by tunmise fasipe
    I have these classes class Match { int MatchID, int TeamID, //used to reference Team ... other fields } Note: Match actually have 2 teams which means 2 TeamID class Team { int TeamID, string TeamName } In my view I need to display List<Match> showing the TeamName. So I added another field class Match { int MatchID, int TeamID, //used to reference Team ... other fields string TeamName; } I can now do Match m = getMatch(id); m.TeamName = getTeamName(m.TeamId); //get name from database But for a List<Match>, getTeamName(TeamId) will go to the database to fetch TeamName for each TeamID. For a page of 10 Matches per page, that could be (10x2Teams)=20 trip to database. To avoid this, I had the idea of loading everything once, store it in memory and only lookup the TeamName in memory. This made me have a rethink that what if the records are 5000 or more. What pattern is used to solve this and how?

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  • Cry Engine 3 vs UDK

    - by Daniele Riccardelli
    I'm new here and I hope that other people may find this question interesting. Me and a bunch of guys from my University are thinking about getting started in game development, but, even though the game design is kind of ready, we are stucked at the point "which Engine should we choose". At first, we were thinking about Unity3D Free, in particular because we are pretty familiar with C# and, even better, it's completely free, but on the other hand there are some cons like no dynamic shadowing that make the realization of our game kinda hard. So, we are thinking about moving either to UDK or Cry Engine, since they are not as expensive as Unity3D Pro (at least before the game deployment) . The thing we are worried the most, though, is that we are kind of scared about the support for team work(i mean, that we might find it hard to coordinate our efforts without software support), since in Unity3D the team features are part of purchasable content, and we are not interested in paying that much for a project we are not even sure we can complete. So, finally, I hope one of you knows the mentioned engines enough to give us a tip telling which one offers better team features and is advisable for guys that have barely worked before on videogames but have good object oriented programming skills. Probably might be helpful for your suggestion, if i say that our game is an exploration game. Thanks to anybody who's going to answer.

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  • During interviews, how do I gauge a company's respect for my position?

    - by Bluu
    I'm a web developer who previously joined a software company not knowing their value and respect went to big data analysis, not their website. Sure, they needed a public-facing website, but I eventually found that the most exciting, valued projects there went to data teams. Realizing this, members of the web team were picked off and switched teams, making it hard for those left behind to keep up the work load, and making us look bad. At times it seemed the company culture sneered at us, wondering, "What does that team even do here?" A friend of mine had the opposite problem at another software company. All he wanted to do was crunch big numbers. However he complained that the rest of the company wouldn't shut up about developing the usability of their website. Meanwhile his analytics team languished. I've also heard of salespeople getting love at a company, while engineering as a whole is undervalued, or vice versa. As for my story, if I could have known the company was like that, I might have avoided the job in the first place. So, before I join a new company, how do I gauge its actual respect for my programming role? For its other roles? I want to avoid companies that aren't serious about my particular focus in programming, or, perhaps bigger picture, companies that don't value everybody who works there. (Note I think gauging the company's attitude toward the basic needs of its programmers is covered by these related questions.)

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  • Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Maria Colgan
    I can't believe it's time for OpenWorld again! Oracle OpenWorld is the largest gathering of Oracle customers, partners, developers, and technology enthusiasts. This year it will take place between September 30th and October 4th in San Francisco. Of course, the Optimizer development group will be there and you will have multiple opportunities to meet the team, in one of our technical sessions, or at the Oracle Database demogrounds. This year the Optimizer team has 2 technical sessions, as well as a booth in the Oracle Database demogrounds. Tuesday, October 2nd at 1:15pm Oracle Optimizer: Harnessing the Power of Optimizer Hints Session CON8455 at Moscone South - room 103 In this session we will discuss in detail how optimizer hints are interpreted, when they should be used, and why they sometimes appear to be ignored. Thursday, October 4th at 12:45pm Oracle Optimizer: An Insider’s View of How the Optimizer Works Session CON8457 at Moscone South - room 104This session explains how the latest version of the optimizer works and the best ways you can influence its decisions to ensure you get optimal execution every time. It will also include a full history of the Cost Based Optimizer, so make sure you stick around for this one! If you have burning Optimizer or statistics related questions, or if you just want to pick up an Optimizer bumper sticker, you can stop by the Optimizer demo booth. This year we are located in booth 3157, in the Database area of the demogrounds, in Moscone South. Members of the Optimizer development team will be there Monday through Wednesday from 9:45 am until 6pm. The full Oracle OpenWorld catalog is on-line, or you can browse by speakers by name. So start planning your trip today! +Maria Colgan

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  • A key principle of Scrum...

    - by AndyScott
    "A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements." I have been working in a SCRUM environment, with 4-6 week cycles, for about 6 months now and have been very pleased with the impact that it has had on my life (regular work hours, seeing my family, etc).  But was looking up the criteria for a 'Certified Scrum Master' and came across the SCRUM definition on Wikipedia, and started reading the actual definition.  My first thought was "hey, this development methodology actually allows you to deal with what happens in the real world (i.e. customers changing requirements); but is this "selling out" on solid requirements? I understand that this works in the environment that I am currently working in, where there are deep pockets paying the bills, and also making the descisions on what requirements to change / impliment; but is this a recepie for success in smaller or simply more budget concious environments?  Having the ability to be completely flexible when the client wants the product changed.   The more I think about it, the more I feel that SCRUM development may be better suited for an environment where a team is taking over a project from another team (bringing some outside development in-house or something of that ilk), as opposed to ground up development. What do you think?

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  • Why is a software development life-cycle so inefficient?

    - by user87166
    Currently the software development lifecycle followed in the IT company I work at is: The "Business" works with a solution manager to build a Business Requirement document The solution manager works with the Program manager to build a Functional Spec The PM works with the engineering lead to develop a release plan and with the engineering team to develop technical specifications If there are any clarifications required, developers contact the PM who contacts the solution manager who contacts the business and all the way back introducing a latency of nearly 24 hours and massive email chains for any clarifications By the time the tech spec is made, nearly 1 month has passed in back and forth Now, 2 weeks go to development while the test writes test cases Code is dropped formally to test, test starts raising bugs. Even if there is 1 root cause for 10 different issues, and its an easily fixed one, developers are not allowed to give fresh code to test for the next 1 week. After 2-3 such drops to test the code is given to the ops team as a "golden drop" ( 2 months passed from the beginning) Ops team will now deploy the code in a staging environment. If it runs stable for a week, it will be promoted to UAT and after 2 weeks of that it will be promoted to prod. If there are any bugs found here, well, applying for a visa requires less paperwork This entire process is followed even if a single SSRS report is to be released. How do other companies process such requirements? I'm wondering why, the business cannot just drop the requirements to developers, developers build and deploy to UAT themselves, expose it to the business who raise functional bugs and after fixing those promote to prod. (even for more complex stuff)

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  • Poll on Entity Framework 4 &ndash; one year on

    - by Eric Nelson
    12 months back (today is March 15th 2010) on the 16th of  March 2009 I created a poll on Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…. Entity Framework v1 was getting a mixed reception at the time – I met developers who genuinely hated it and I met developers who were loving the productivity improvements they were seeing. There were definitely issues with v1, too many IMHO. Which is why the product team placed a huge effort on listening to the community to drive the feature set for v2 (which ultimately was named Entity Framework 4 as it ships with .NET 4). I think overall the team have done a great job. It isn’t perfect in .NET 4 (which is why the team are busy on post .NET 4 improvements) but I would happily use it and recommend it for a wide variety of projects – much wider than I would have with v1. I am speaking on EF 4 at www.devweek.com this Wednesday and I thought it would be fun to put a new version of the poll out and see how v4 is being received. Obviously the big difference is we have not yet shipped EF4 vs when I did the original poll on EF1. March 2010 poll – please vote Summary of March 2009 poll – it was a tie between positive and negative Total votes 150 Positive about EF v1 42 (15 + 19 + 8) Negative about EF v1  43 (34 + 9)

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  • Oracle Transportation Management (Lead) Functional Consultant in Germany

    - by user769227
    My name is Giovanni and I lead the practice of OTM (Oracle Transportation Management) consultants in Western Europe. I currently have a role open for an OTM Lead Consultant to join my international team in Germany. Oracle Transportation Management is the leading TMS application software in the market, as confirmed by Gartner’s classification as LEADER of its TMS Magic Quadrant with the highest rating among vendors. The OTM Consulting practice is a team of OTM functional and technical specialists located across Europe whose broad objective is to assist companies in the implementation of their TMS solution based on OTM. These companies are leading Shippers of various industries and Logistic Service Providers. Key requirements for this role are: relevant experience with Supply Chain or Transportation Management in other consulting organizations or large enterprises, the drive to learn the leading TMS application software in today’s market and the interest to join a truly international team. We offer the opportunity to work for a leader of the IT Industry and assist international clients to realize their business transformation initiatives through innovation. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, and are you looking for a work culture where innovation is the goal, hard work is expected, and creativity is rewarded then please visit this link for more information.

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  • Gesture Based NetBeans Tip Infrastructure

    - by Geertjan
    All/most/many gestures you make in NetBeans IDE are recorded in an XML file in your user directory, "var/log/uigestures", which is what makes the Key Promoter I outlined yesterday possible. The idea behind it is for analysis to be made possible, when you periodically pass the gestures data back to the NetBeans team. See http://statistics.netbeans.org for details. Since the gestures in the 'uigestures' file are identifiable by distinct loggers and other parameters, there's no end to the interesting things that one is able to do with it. While the NetBeans team can see which gestures are done most frequently, e.g., which kinds of projects are created most often, thus helping in prioritizing new features and bugs, etc, you as the user can, depending on who and how the initiative is taken, directly benefit from your collected data, too. Tim Boudreau, in a recent article, mentioned the usefulness of hippie completion. So, imagine that whenever you use code completion, a tip were to appear reminding you about hippie completion. And then you'd be able to choose whether you'd like to see the tip again or not, etc, i.e., customize the frequency of tips and the types of tips you'd like to be shown. And then, it could be taken a step further. The tip plugin could be set up in such a way that anyone would be able to register new tips per gesture. For example, maybe you have something very interesting to share about code completion in NetBeans. So, you'd create your own plugin in which there'd be an HTML file containing the text you'd like to have displayed whenever you (or your team members, or your students, maybe?) use code completion. Then you'd register that HTML file in plugin's layer file, in a subfolder dedicated to the specific gesture that you're interested in commenting on. The same is true, not just for NetBeans IDE, but for anyone creating their applications on top of the NetBeans Platform, of course.

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  • How to undelete files in TFS

    - by Tarun Arora
    Have you accidently deleted files from TFS and are looking at a way to undelete the file? You don’t have to undo your previous check in to get the files back, there is a simpler way. 01 – View Deleted items in Team Explorer Have you been wondering how you can view deleted items in Team Explorer? Well, go to tools, options, Source Control. From Visual Studio Team Foundation check ‘show deleted items in the Source Control Explorer’.  02 – Undelete files from TFS Simply right click the deleted file or folder and from the context menu select ‘Undelete’. This will roll back the files to the version before the delete operation was committed on them.  The undeleted changes now show up as pending changes in your workspace. You need to right click the folder and select Check In Pending changes from the context menu to restore the files. Add a comment and check in the files back to TFS to undelete them Right click the folder and view history. You’ll see both the check in that deleted the file/folder and the check in that restored it. So, that’s how you can restoring deleted files in TFS… Nice and simple… Right?

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

    - by Michael Williamson
    Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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

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

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  • Using QT to build a WYSIWYG Editor for a Custom Markup Language

    - by Aaron
    I'm new to QT, and am trying to figure out the best means of creating a WYSIWYG editor widget for a custom markup language that displays simple text, images, and links. I need to be able to propagate changes from the WYSIWYG editor to the custom markup representation. As a concrete example of the problem domain, imagine that the custom markup might have a "player" tag which contains a player name and a team name. The markup could look like this: Last week, <player id="1234"><name>Aaron Rodgers</name><team>Packers</team></player> threw a pass. This text would display in the editor as: Last week, Aaron Rodgers of the Packers threw a pass. The player name and the team name would be editable directly within the editor in standard WYSIWYG fashion, so that my users do not have to learn any markup. Also, when the player name is moused-over, a details pop-up will appear about that player, and similarly for the team. With that long introduction, I'm trying to figure out where to start with QT. It seems that the most logical option would be the Rich Text API using a QTextDocument. This approach seems less than ideal given the limitations of a QTextDocument: I can't figure out how to capture navigation events from clicking on links. Following links on click seems to only be enabled when the QTextEdit is readonly. Custom objects that implement QTextObjectInterface are ignored in copy-and-paste operations Any HTML-based markup that is passed to it as Rich Text is retranslated into a series of span tags and lots of other junk, making it extremely difficult to propagate changes from the editor back to the original custom markup. A second option appears to be QWebKit, which allows for live editing of HTML5 markup, so I could specify a two-way translation between the custom markup and HTML5. I'm not clear on how one would propagate changes from the editor back to the original markup in real-time without re-translating the entire document on every text change. The QWebKit solutions looks like awfully bulky to me (Learning WebKit along with QT) to what should be a relatively simple problem. I have also considered implementing the WYSIWYG with a custom class using native QT containers, labels, images, and other widgets manually. This seems like the most flexible approach, and the one most likely not to run into unresolvable problems. However, I'm pretty sure that implementing all the details of a normal text editor (selecting text, font changes, cut-and-paste support, undo/redo, dragging of objects, cursor placement, etc.) will be incredibly time consuming. So, finally, my question: are there any QT gurus out there with some advice on where to start with this sort of project? BTW, I am using QT because the application is a desktop application that needs platform independence.

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  • How do you remind your Scrum Product Owner about his promises/actions?

    - by Felix Ogg
    ** EDIT: Rephrased the question to re-focus ** Our Scrum team meets as seldomly as possible, but we meet with the product owner every chance we get. We track everyone's agreed action points (particularly theirs). We are 100% agile, but our product owner lives in traditional world, we remain off-site. We facilitate him in crossing over to our fast-paced world. There's not much wrong. The team and the PO are in good spirits. PO is present at every meeting and positively energized. Just imagine this person as a 70 year old, slow grandpa, who is forgetful, yet kind. In reality he isn't, but he is used to a working environment (public servants) that is much slooooower. Manyana-manyana etc. It is frustrating for my team to cooperate: PO lives in a non-prioritized environment, and everyone in it has learned the productivity-technique of NGTD (Not Getting Things Done). He WANTS to, it's just that he forgets or 'sinks' somewhere along the away. We have experimented with a text file, maintained by the Scrum master (low-tech), which he broadcasts by e-mail every day JIRA, our issue tracker. Turns out this is nice for programmers, but too steep for 'regular people' I Googled for Issue tracking webtools but came up empty handed: All tools are aimed at IT issue tracking, instead of meeting action point tracking/planning for mere mortals. I did find TODO-lists like RememberTheMilk, but they don't track comments, and - to be honest - I doubt we could get our product owner to use it (too complicated). We have three requirements: Register action points, assign to a team member and a deadline Offer anyone to 'comment' on progress of any action point Do not build our own tool from scratch We do not need: - impressive authorization models, - multi-project, - workflow, - crosslinking. Is there any trick/tool you use to assist your product owner 'fly' like the rest of the rest of the team? Communication before tools I agree with the general consensus that one should not try to apply technology to a communication problem, however in this case I am merely looking for a tool to save me time in setting up prioritized lists. I found www.thymer.com today, may be what I am looking for. The guys are cool. It is getting rather feature-bloated though.

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