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• Putting Together a Game Design Team?

  - by Kaia

  I'm attempting to put together a game design team that is willing to help me design/program, test, and somewhat produce the game we make to the public. I need anyone who knows anything about programming/coding, designing, etc. Once we get it up and running and out into the world (over dramatic maybe? haha) I have ideas of generating a profit from it so there is a possibility of payment. My thinking on it (so far) is this: 2D (possibly. I haven't decided if I want it 2D or 3D. It really depends on what is easier) 3rd person. Adventure (I want there to be a point to it, but like a point with no real end) I want there to be a story to it. If you've ever played Dofus, think like that. There is a story to the game, but no real end. I want (if possible) to include mini-games. These could end up becoming a possible way for a player to aquire in-game money, quest items, etc. If anyone is interested in helping me create the story line/script (which we will finsih first, before creating the game) please contact me. I want to get this completed as soon as possible.

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• Where is he now?

  - by Chris G. Williams

  A couple months ago, I announced I was leaving Magenic in order to take a break from consulting. I figured I'd post an update as to what I'm doing now, since I haven't exactly been slacking off.1) I accepted a position as a Lead Developer with RealPage. I work on a number of internal use applications for a subsidiary known as LevelOne. The majority of my work is in ASP.NET, a surprising amount of VB.NET, some C# and I'm picking up a few new tools for my belt... specifically Python, MongoDB and Perl.2) I am still the owner of Big Robot Games, a retail game store / coffee shop in the South Carolina upstate region. I'm not as involved in the day to day activity as I was, but I'm there most nights and weekends, when I'm not off doing other things, like #3.3) I am on the staff of Rock Revolt Magazine as a journalist, covering live performances as well as interviewing bands, providing album & video game reviews, fixing the website and the occasional prison ink. (Just kidding on that last one.)4) In whatever time is leftover, I still manage to bang out a little code on Heroic Adventure! (aka HA!) and talk about Windows Phone, XNA and whatever else suits me, wherever they'll let me.I guess that's about it.

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• Emulate Historical Figures i.e. Einstein - Is this possible using linguistic logic for my http://www.ustimeline.com Education System

  - by Johnnylight

  After hearing about the success of IBM's Watson I started thinking perhaps emulating human language is now possible? My goal is to create Virtual Historical characters to represent the main characters in my Adventur-Cation The Great American Adventure program such as Einstein or Crazy Horse. The goal is to build an intelligent system capable of indexing the internet and storing the data using a schema using modern knowledge on linguistic theory (phonemes, morphemes, syntax) to build a system capable to returning a semantically sound response very similar to the response made by the same person if still alive today. The goal would be to use the same engine/system for all characters. Each characters would have their own digital representation and voice, and would organize data differently based on tags/keywords stored about the individual. Imagine a Max Headroom Einstein. Based on the success of Watson, I believe something like this may now be possible. Would be an interesting way to study history and would be a vehicle of entertainment as well. Can anyone confirm if this has already been attempted? Is anyone interested in exploring this using Cognitive Science, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Historical data captured on the internet, and Linguistic theory?

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• Book Giveaway: We Have 10 Free Copies of the 4-Hour Chef (The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life)

  - by The Geek

  The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the world of rapid learning from the best-selling author of the 4-Hour Workweek, and we’ve got 10 free copies for How-To Geek readers. Want more information? Here’s the description of the book, from the Amazon page. The 4-Hour Chef is a five-stop journey through the art and science of learning: 1. META-LEARNING. Before you learn to cook, you must learn to learn. META charts the path to doubling your learning potential. 2. THE DOMESTIC. DOM is where you learn the building blocks of cooking. These are the ABCs (techniques) that can take you from Dr, Seuss to Shakespeare. 3. THE WILD. Becoming a master student requires self-sufficiency in all things. WILD teaches you to hunt, forage, and survive. 4. THE SCIENTIST. SCI is the mad scientist and modernist painter wrapped into one. This is where you rediscover whimsy and wonder. 5. THE PROFESSIONAL. Swaraj, a term usually associated with Mahatma Gandhi, can be translated as “self-rule.” In PRO, we’ll look at how the best in the world become the best in the world, and how you can chart your own path far beyond this book. Still not sold? There’s more information and pictures over on the Amazon page for the book. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows HTG Explains: Why Screen Savers Are No Longer Necessary

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• How does Game Salad compare with Cocos2D in terms of 2D game development?

  - by jih

  I want to make some 2d games for iOS. I first come across cocos2d and kobold but then wanted something more graphical for rapid prototyping. I then found Game Maker which doesn't support iOS but is fairly easy to learn and then found Game Salad which supports iOS as well as other platforms. I know this question has been ask before but I want to know in terms of the types of games I want to develop what an learning investment path would be best. The types of games genre I am interest are: Side scrollers Simple games like diamond dash or ninja fruits, shanghai, etc Old fashioned zelda or dragonquest type (nintendo fan here:-) 2d adventure RPG games (real time or turn based) Mystery turn based games like carmen sandiego, wizardry, myst etc. So now the question becomes for me becomes which game development environment should I invest my time in learning. Game Salad or cocos2d? To make that decision I was wondering if experienced game programmers and help with some pointers: It would seem game salad would be great for quickies being graphical but in terms of 2d platform games etc would there be speed/performance/feature penalties? Are there certain 2d games genre of the 4 above that Game salad is better at while certain type cocos2d would be better at?

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• Has anyone used game salad before and how does it compare with cocos2d in terms of 2d game development

  - by jih

  First a short intro. I am new to the game development space and want to make some 2d games for iOS. I first come across cocos2d and kobold but then wanted something more graphical for rapid prototyping. I then found Game Maker which doesn't support iOS but is fairly easy to learn and then found Game Salad which supports iOS as well as other platforms. I know this question has been ask before but I want to know in terms of the types of games I want to develop what an learning investment path would be best. The types of games genre I am interest are: Side scrollers Simple games like diamond dash or ninja fruits, shanghai, etc Old fashioned zelda or dragonquest type (nintendo fan here:-) 2d adventure RPG games (real time or turn based) Mystery turn based games like carmen sandiego, wizardry, myst etc. So now the question becomes Which game development environment should I invest my time in learning. Game Salad or cocos2d? It would seem game salad would be great for quickies being graphical but in terms of 2d platform games etc would there be speed/performance/feature penalties? Are there certain 2d games genre of the 4 above that Game salad is better at while certain type cocos2d would be better at? Anyone with experience of both can share some pointers? Thanks. inexperienced jih

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• Bad previous code. To fix or not to fix?

  - by Viniyo Shouta

  As a freelancer programmer I am often asked to edit part of an application source code in order to add functionalities, fix bugs etc. While I'm on my adventure journey to study the source to do what I'm asked correctly I run into code like: World::User* GetWorld() { map<DWORD,World*>::iterator it = mapWld.find( m_userWorldId ) if( it != mapWld.end() ) return &it->second; return NULL; } if( pUser->GetWorld()->GetId() == 250 ) If I investigate further I end up finding that the DWORD class member of User, userWorldId can be a value non-found in the map mapWld, which will lead to a casuality as also known as crash! The obviously valid way to do it is: World* pWorld = pUser->GetWorld(); if( pWorld && pWorld->GetId() == 250 )//... Sometimes when it's something just 'small' I end up sort of 'fixing' it. But sometimes when I'm on a 500 thousand line source code and this kind of code is everywhere there is no much can do. The question is if it's politically correct to fix some of these things. Think of it; You are not paid to fix it. Perhaps you think it's right, but it was necessarily done that way for some reason and you should not be messing with it. You do not have authorization, you do not own the source and none of the copyrights belong to you. You have authorization to edit issues accordingly to the owners but you're in a hurry, you have many other projects to do, it's the end of the month, you must pay the bills. Sincerely, I think of it as seeing an animal die from a disease in front of you, you have the cure in your hands but you do nothing. What is the best to do in this scenario?

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• Enjoy Cloud Odyssey The Oracle Movie

  - by Naresh Persaud

  If you attended Open World you may have seen the promotions for a new movie produced by Oracle. The movie is called Cloud Odyssey and it chronicles the journey of a hero to the cloud. The movie is an animated sci-fi adventure. This movie will be played at Oracle events around the world so you may soon get an invite to attend. Interesting approach to telling the cloud story. For many IT organizations, the journey to the cloud is a major initiative for end users. I am sure Homer would be proud. In fact perhaps if it is successful, I am hopeful we may see a cloud Iliad.  Below, I have embedded a trailer to the movie for your viewing pleasure. While it clearly is not the next Iron Man, it is intriguing. Hope you enjoy.  &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

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• UITextView refuses to change its color

  - by Friendlydeveloper

  Hello, in some cases things you'd expect to solve within a sec turn out to become a lifetime adventure. This is one of these cases :) All I wanted to do, is simply change the text color of one of my UITextViews. So far I tried: UIColor *myColor = [UIColor colorWithHue:38 saturation:98 brightness:100 alpha:1.0]; [myTextView setTextColor:myColor]; OR UIColor *myColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"colorImage.png"]]; [myTextView setTextColor:myColor]; Both seem to work fine for UILabels, but fail for UITextView elements. When I try [UIColor colorWithHue... I only get a reddish kinda color, no matter what values I choose (except values for black and white. They work). The colorWithPatternImage does not change textColor at all. Strange isn't it? I obviously must be missing something. Help is very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• How does one find a '.' in a string object in Object-C

  - by NaZer

  I am working on getting a simple calculator working as part of my adventure to learning Object-C and iOS development. In Object-C using NSString, how does one look for a period in a string? Based on the comments this is what I got so far. NSString * tmp = [display text]; NSLog(@"%@", tmp); // Shows the number on the display correctly int x = [tmp rangeOfString:@"."].location; NSLog(@"%i", x); // Shows some random signed number if (x < 0) { [display setText:[[display text] stringByAppendingFormat:@"."]]; } It is still not working :(

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• Localization in ASP.NET MVC 2 using ModelMetadata

  - by rajbk

  This post uses an MVC 2 RTM application inside VS 2010 that is targeting the .NET Framework 4. .NET 4 DataAnnotations comes with a new Display attribute that has several properties including specifying the value that is used for display in the UI and a ResourceType. Unfortunately, this attribute is new and is not supported in MVC 2 RTM. The good news is it will be supported and is currently available in the MVC Futures release. The steps to get this working are shown below: Download the MVC futures library   Add a reference to the Microsoft.Web.MVC.AspNet4 dll.   Add a folder in your MVC project where you will store the resx files   Open the resx file and change “Access Modifier” to “Public”. This allows the resources to accessible from other assemblies. Internaly, it changes the “Custom Tool” used to generate the code behind from  ResXFileCodeGenerator to “PublicResXFileCodeGenerator”    Add your localized strings in the resx.   Register the new ModelMetadataProvider protected void Application_Start() { AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();   RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);   //Add this ModelMetadataProviders.Current = new DataAnnotations4ModelMetadataProvider(); DataAnnotations4ModelValidatorProvider.RegisterProvider(); }   Use the Display attribute in your Model public class Employee { [Display(Name="ID")] public int ID { get; set; }   [Display(ResourceType = typeof(Common), Name="Name")] public string Name { get; set; } } Use the new HTML UI Helpers in your strongly typed view: <%: Html.EditorForModel() %> <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m) %> <%: Html.LabelFor(m => m.Name) %> ..and you are good to go. Adventure is out there!

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• The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip

  - by Laila

  Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, the two .NET Rocks radio show hosts, have decided to set off to 15 cities in the US, between April 19th and May 7th, in their DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV). What for you'll ask me? Well, to drive around the US, meet up with .NET developers, and show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Each evening, they stop in a city and host a three hour event in front of a 100 to 300 crowd of developers, where Carl is showing off media features in Silverlight 4 and their road trip tracking application, whilst Richard is demo-ing the web performance testing features of VS2010 using his portable server rig. But before they take to the stage, they have a special guest brought in - a rock star from the Visual Studio world - whom they interview for an hour as a .NET Rock episode. So far, they've had - amongst others - Phil Haack, a Program Manager with the ASP.NET team working on ASP.NET MVC, Dan Fernandez, an Evangelism Manager in the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft, and Beth Massi, Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft. I love the fact that the audience gets a chance to participate, ask questions and have a great laugh, as you can hear in the first episode! Along the way, the .NET Rocks guys are giving away great prizes (including .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler licenses, and "40" LCD TVs!). Even more out of the ordinary, at each stop on the road trip, one lucky attendee (who entered in the Ride Along competition) gets to jump in the RV with Carl and Richard and ride along with them to the next stop on the roadtrip. How cool is that! Richard told us: "Our first winner in Mountain View was Eric Ziko. I was looking for him to announce that he had won, when he found us and gave us a bottle of scotch he had brought just to say 'thanks for the great show'. We all had a toast from the bottle the next night when he headed back home." Cheeky! There's still space to a few of these events, so if you want to attend, register now, because it's first come first serve. We're grateful to Richard and Carl for giving us the opportunity to sponsor this major .NET event! A unique .NET adventure worth following for sure. Cheers, Laila

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• Silverlight Cream for December 09, 2010 -- #1006

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Adam Kinney, Jonathan van de Veen, René Schulte(-2-), Vikas, Chad Campbell, Chris Koenig, John Papa, and Martin Krüger. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight TV #54: Introducing 11 Brand New Labs" John Papa WP7: "Gestures in Windows Phone 7" Chris Koenig Training: "New Windows Phone 7 tutorials for Designers on toolbox!" Adam Kinney Shoutouts: Jesse Liberty posted ways to get help when you get stuck: Top 10 Tips To Getting Help With Silverlight From SilverlightCream.com: New Windows Phone 7 tutorials for Designers on toolbox! Adam Kinney posted about some WP7 design goodness he's had the opportunity to take part in putting together that is now available for all of us on the Microsoft design Toolbox site.... detailed info about what's there. Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application part #39 Jonathan van de Veen has his latest Silverlight coding adventure detailed on his blog... in the final throes of releasing, he came across some issues surrounding CRUD operations... Windows Phone Unplugged - How to Detect the Zune Software René Schulte has a post up about my two favorite devices: Zune and WP7 ... and how to detect if the Zune software is running when the device is connected to the PC. Issue with the WP7 PictureDecoder and Workaround René Schulte has a second post up today about strange behavior with the PictureDecoder DecodeJpeg method... he describes the problem and a workaround for it. Performance Wizard for Silverlight Vikas reports some Silverlight goodness in the VS2010 SP1 beta that's out ... a Performance Wizard... and he's ratted out it's use and sharing that info... Submitting an App to the Windows Phone Marketplace Chad Campbell details the user experience of getting an app through the marketplace to users... from the standpoint of someone that's been there. Gestures in Windows Phone 7 Chris Koenig is talking about Gestures in WP7, documenting how he used some XNA to get some side-to-side image scrolling going on... and gave us the source! Silverlight TV #54: Introducing 11 Brand New Labs John Papa has his latest Silverlight TV up and he's talking to two great guys: Dan Wahlin and Corey Schuman who have produced the labs you've seen referenced... awesome stuff guys... WP7: precisely position the text cursor when writing text Martin Krüger has a quick WP7 usage tip up for precisely positioning the text cursor in a textbox ... I could have used that today when "Nick's Frame Shop" came up as "Nix Frame Shop" in a search. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SharePoint, HTTP Modules, and Page Validation

  - by Damon Armstrong

  Sometimes I really believe that SharePoint actively thwarts my attempts to get it to do what I want.  First you look at something and say, wow, that should work.  Then you realize it doesn’t.  Then you have an epiphany and see a workaround.  And when you almost have that work around working… well then SharePoint says no again.  Then it’s off on another whirl-wind adventure to find a work around for the workaround.  I had one of those issues today, but I think I finally got past the last roadblock. So, I was writing an HTTP module as a workaround for another problem.  Everything looked like it was working great because I had been slowly adding code into the HTTP module bit by bit in a prototyping effort.  Finally I put in the last bit of code in place… and I started to get an error: “The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.” This is not an uncommon error – it normally occurs when you are updating an item on a GET request and you have not marked the web containing the item with AllowUnsafeUpdates.  One issue, however, is that I wasn’t updating anything in my code.  I was, however, getting an SPWeb object so I decided to set the AllowUnsafeUpdates property on it to true for good measure. Once that was in place, I ran it again… “The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.” WTF?!?!  I really expected that setting the AllowUnsafeUpdates property on the SPWeb would fix the issue, but clearly that was not the case.  I have had occasion to disassemble some SharePoint code with .NET Reflector in the past, and one of the things SharePoint abuses a bit more than it should is the HttpContext.  One way to avoid this abuse is to clear out the HttpContext while your code runs and then set it back once you are done.  I tried this next, and everything worked out just like I had expected.  So, if you are building an HTTP Module for SharePoint and some code that you are running ends up giving you a security validation error, remember to try running that code with AllowUnsafeUpdates turned on and try running the code with the HttpContext nulled out (just remember to set it back after your code runs or else you’ll really jack things up).

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• “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on GDSE and also on the regular Stackoverflow site, and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? (* With the exception of Flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with Flash, but I'm worried that Flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.) For simple & short games the Newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "OK, I'm going to download and play that"?

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• Game development: “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  Heyo, I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on gamedev and also on the regular stackoverflow and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). For simple & short games the newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "ok, I'm going to download and play that"? Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? Thanks! (* With the exception of flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have these downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with flash, but I'm worried that flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.)

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• Web Experience Management: Segmentation & Targeting - Chalk Talk with John

  - by Michael Snow

  Today's post comes from our WebCenter friend, John Brunswick.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Having trouble getting your arms around the differences between Web Content Management (WCM) and Web Experience Management (WEM)?  Told through story, the video below outlines the differences in an easy to understand manner. By following the journey of Mr. and Mrs. Smith on their adventure to find the best amusement park in two neighboring towns, we can clearly see what an impact context and relevancy play in our decision making within online channels.  Just as when we search to connect with the best products and services for our needs, the Smiths have their grandchildren coming to visit next week and finding the best park is essential to guarantee a great family vacation.  One town effectively Segments and Targets visitors to enhance their experience, reducing the effort needed to learn about their park. Have a look below to join the Smiths in their search.    Learn MORE about how you might measure up: Deliver Engaging Digital Experiences Drive Digital Marketing SuccessAccess Free Assessment Tool

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• What if you could work on anything you wanted?

  - by Nick Harrison

  What if you could work on anything you wanted? Redgate is doing an experiment of sorts this week.  Called Down Tools Week.    The idea is that they stopped working on their regular projects for a week and strike out on something that catches their attention and drives their passion. Evidently in many cases, these projects have turned out to be new features in their existing products that individual were interested in, some were internal iniatives and some where evidently off the wall new ideas.   Today is show and tell where they will share with each other what they have been working on. There may well be some interesting announcements coming out of this.    The prospects are exciting. I understand that Google does something similar allowing their employees a specified amount of time to work on projects of their own choosing.    This has been the breeding ground for some of my favorite services. It is a shame that more companies do not follow such practices.   Now I know that most companies cannot afford to shut down everything for a week and sometimes you can't really explore an interesting idea in 8 hours a week or however much time Google allocates, but still it may be worth while. What would happen if your company gave you as an individual 1 week each quarter to work on a project of your own design and see what happens?   I would be happen if you still had to get approval for before your week long adventure. Personally, I think that this could be a very effective use of training budgets.   Give me a week to research something on my own and you would be amazed at what I can find out.    Maybe this should be the prerequisite before starting a new project.   Stagger the team onboarding but have everyone spend a week long sabbatical studying BizTalk before starting a project that will hinge on BizTalk. The show and tell afterwards is a great way to keep everyone honest or at least reassure management that everyone is honest.    If your goal was to spend a week researching and exploring a new technology and you had to do a show and tell afterwards to show off what you had learned, then everyone can learn a bit of what you just learned.     Sounds like a promising win win for me. Maybe it is a pipe dream, but what if .... What would you work on if given the opportunity to work on anything you wanted?

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• How to keep a data structure synchronized over a network?

  - by David Gouveia

  Context In the game I'm working on (a sort of a point and click graphic adventure), pretty much everything that happens in the game world is controlled by an action manager that is structured a bit like: So for instance if the result of examining an object should make the character say hello, walk a bit and then sit down, I simply spawn the following code: var actionGroup = actionManager.CreateGroup(); actionGroup.Add(new TalkAction("Guybrush", "Hello there!"); actionGroup.Add(new WalkAction("Guybrush", new Vector2(300, 300)); actionGroup.Add(new SetAnimationAction("Guybrush", "Sit")); This creates a new action group (an entire line in the image above) and adds it to the manager. All of the groups are executed in parallel, but actions within each group are chained together so that the second one only starts after the first one finishes. When the last action in a group finishes, the group is destroyed. Problem Now I need to replicate this information across a network, so that in a multiplayer session, all players see the same thing. Serializing the individual actions is not the problem. But I'm an absolute beginner when it comes to networking and I have a few questions. I think for the sake of simplicity in this discussion we can abstract the action manager component to being simply: var actionManager = new List<List<string>>(); How should I proceed to keep the contents of the above data structure syncronized between all players? Besides the core question, I'm also having a few other concerns related to it (i.e. all possible implications of the same problem above): If I use a server/client architecture (with one of the players acting as both a server and a client), and one of the clients has spawned a group of actions, should he add them directly to the manager, or only send a request to the server, which in turn will order every client to add that group? What about packet losses and the like? The game is deterministic, but I'm thinking that any discrepancy in the sequence of actions executed in a client could lead to inconsistent states of the world. How do I safeguard against that sort of problem? What if I add too many actions at once, won't that cause problems for the connection? Any way to alleviate that?

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• Combobox binding with different types

  - by George Evjen

  Binding to comboboxes in Silverlight has been an adventure the past couple of days. In our framework at ArchitectNow we use LookupGroups and LookupValues. In our database we would have a LookupGroup of NBA Teams for example. The group would be called NBATeams, we get the LookupGroupID and then get the values from the LookupValues table. So we would end up with a list of all 30+ teams. Our lookup values entity has a display text(string), value(string), IsActive and some other fields. With our applications we load all this information into the system when the user is logging in or right after they login. So in cache we have a list of groups and values that we can get at whenever we want to. We get this information in our framework simply by creating an observable collection of type LookupValue. To get a list of these values into our property all we have to do is. var NBATeams = AppContext.Current.LookupSerivce.GetLookupValues(“NBATeams”); Our combobox then is bound like this. (We use telerik components in most if not all our projects) <telerik:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding NBATeams}”></telerik:RadComboBox> This should give you a list in your combobox. We also set up another property in our ViewModel that is a just single object of NBATeams  - “SelectedNBATeam” Our selectedItem in our combobox would look like, we would set this to a two way binding since we are sending data back. SelectedItem={Binding SelectedNBATeam, mode=TwoWay}” This is all pretty straight forward and we use this pattern throughout all our applications. What do you do though when you have a combobox in a ItemsControl or ListBox? Here we have a list of NBA Teams that are a string that are being brought back from the database. We cant have the selected item be our LookupValue because the data is a string and its being bound in an ItemsControl. In the example above we would just have the combobox in a form. Here though we have it in a ItemsControl, where there is no selected item from the initial ItemsSource. In order to get the selected item to be displayed in the combobox you have to convert the LookupValue to a string. Then instead of using SelectedItem in the combobox use SelectedValue. To convert the LookupValue we do this. Create an observable collection of strings public ObservableCollection<string> NBATeams { get; set;} Then convert your lookups to strings var NBATeams = new ObservableCollection<string>(AppContext.Current.LookupService.GetLookupValues(“NBATeams”).Select(x => x.DisplayText)); This will give us a list of strings and our selected value should be bound to the NBATeams property in our ItemsSource in our ItemsControl. SelectedValue={Binding NBATeam, mode=TwoWay}”

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• Does water damage a fiber optic / cat5 cable

  - by chris

  One of the buildings I support recently had an adventure with a broken fire sprinkler. Lots of water everywhere. One of the "drains" the water used was the vertical risers between network closets. The cable plant in this building has bundles of cat5e as well as conduit with bundles of multimode fiber optic cables. The fiber is standard multi strand plenum rated stuff that terminates in boxes that have the patches to the switches. As far as I can tell, no water got near the ends of the cables (fiber or copper) but the conduit was saturated, and is likely still saturated because there isn't any air flow to dry the cables out. My gut reaction is that while it didn't do the cables any favors, it likely also isn't going to cause any problems. A little more reading / googling around leads me to believe that the water may cause problems down the road. Some pretty pictures so everyone knows what I'm talking about: Fiber conduit: Vertical riser, going down: Vertical riser, going up: Does anyone have any experience with this sort of damage and how to deal with it? Should we just ask the insurance adjuster to add "pull new structured cable" to the list of things to be replaced? And, if the opinion is "replace it because it'll start failing randomly over time" please include links that describe the specific failure modes, so I've got some ammo to use with the adjuster.

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• Can gnome windows (in Ubuntu) be individually themed?

  - by Peter.O

  (Yes, "individually themed" is an oxymoron, but I still want it.) I've just moved from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, and although I am enjoying this new adventure playground, I've encountered something quite unexpected... and its bugging me. It is probably because there are so many gnome apps in Ubuntu (... how strange :) This is great. and the range of available apps is excellent! ...but because of this one-stop-shop scenario, most of the windows look remarkably similar. I'm certainly not after bling-maximus, but I would like a few differentiating colours for my not-so-young eyes to help identify an app at a glance (especially in the compiz lists) ... I love compiz :) I thought it was just a bit of razzle-dazzle, and that alone would be enough, but it is actually very practical to boot. So, basically, I'm wondering if there is a way to theme individual window components on a per app basis... especially the window decoration; menu bar, etc. Thanks.

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• Creating an ec2 image on amazon fails at mkfs.ext3

  - by Dave Orr

  I'm trying to create an image of my ec2 instance in Amazon's cloud. It's been a bit of an adventure so far. I did manage to install Amazon's ec2-api-tools, which was harder than it seemed like it should have been. Then I ran: ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k pk-{key}.pem -c cert-{cert}.pem -u {uid} -s 1536 Which returned: Copying / into the image file /mnt/image... Excluding: /sys/kernel/debug /sys/kernel/security /sys /proc /dev/pts /dev /dev /media /mnt /proc /sys /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules /mnt/image /mnt/img-mnt 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1048576 bytes (1.0 MB) copied, 0.00677357 s, 155 MB/s mkfs.ext3: option requires an argument -- 'L' Usage: mkfs.ext3 [-c|-l filename] [-b block-size] [-f fragment-size] [-i bytes-per-inode] [-I inode-size] [-J journal-options] [-G meta group size] [-N number-of-inodes] [-m reserved-blocks-percentage] [-o creator-os] [-g blocks-per-group] [-L volume-label] [-M last-mounted-directory] [-O feature[,...]] [-r fs-revision] [-E extended-option[,...]] [-T fs-type] [-U UUID] [-jnqvFKSV] device [blocks-count] ERROR: execution failed: "mkfs.ext3 -F /mnt/image -U 1c001580-9118-4a50-9a25-dcf02be6d25f -L " So mkfs.ext3 wants -L, which is a volume name. But ec2-bundle-vol doesn't seem to take in a volume name as an argument, and the docs (http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/gsg/2006-06-26/creating-an-image.html) don't seem to think one should be needed. Certainly their sample command: # ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k ~root/pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem -u 495219933132 -s 1536 doesn't specify anything. So... any help? What am I missing?

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• CC.NET + SVN : Server certificate issue

  - by MSI

  I am trying to setup Continuous Integration in our office. Being a puny little developer I am facing this supposedly infamous problem: " Source control operation failed: svn: OPTIONS of 'https://trunkURL': Server certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted" So I tried the following solution - Run CC.NET service (server running as win service) using a domain account (rather than default LOCAL SYSTEMS) and accept cert permanently using command prompt under that user by using svn log/list on the repo. Doesn't help :(. I am getting the following from my artifact/log files(or dashboard) ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.CruiseControlException: Source control operation failed: svn: OPTIONS of 'https://TrunkURL': Server certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted (https://ServerAdd) . Process command: E:\(svn.exe Path) log https://TrunkURL -r "{2010-11-08T02:12:20Z}:{2010-11-08T02:13:21Z}" --verbose --xml --no-auth-cache --non-interactive at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.ProcessSourceControl.Execute(ProcessInfo processInfo) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.Svn.GetModifications(IIntegrationResult from, IIntegrationResult to) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.QuietPeriod.GetModificationsWithLogging(ISourceControl sc, IIntegrationResult from, IIntegrationResult to) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.QuietPeriod.GetModifications(ISourceControl sourceControl, IIntegrationResult lastBuild, IIntegrationResult thisBuild) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.IntegrationRunner.GetModifications(IIntegrationResult from, IIntegrationResult to) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.IntegrationRunner.Integrate(IntegrationRequest request) We are using VisualSVN Server and CC.NET for this adventure. Tips, suggestions will be highly appreciated. Thanks

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• Power Outage Interrupted Upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate to 7 Ultimate, Reverted to Vista, Now Vista is failing... What Next?

  - by tednewk

  I was in the midst of what seemed to be a successful upgrade from Vista Ultimate to 7 Ultimate when there was a brief blackout. The upgrade failed and Windows reverted back to Vista. Now Vista is very slow to boot, has problems waking back-up from inactivity and quickly loses it's wireless connection. The wake-up problem manifests itself as the mouse is clearly shown on a black screen but I have no access to the Desktop or Taskbar or Explorer. Even Alt-Ctrl-Delete doesn't seem to work. No task menu, no reboot. Hitting the reset button reboots the machine with the usual Black Screen warnings offering Safe Mode. I tried to do a system restore to a point before the upgrade. That didn't seem to work. My guess is that my system is a mutant with parts of Vista and parts of 7 crashing each other. I would like avoid a clean install if at all possible to avoid reinstalling other software. What should I try now? My thoughts are: My a system back-up to lock the computer in place Trying a second 7 upgrade If that appears to be working make another back-up If not reload back-up and try a repairing Vista from DVD. If that appears to work make another back-up, let system stablize about a week then try 7 install again If that doesn't work are there any other options to try before settling for a clean install? Another complication, I am doing this by "remote control". I'm traveling with my job and I'll be talking my son through it over the phone. (Kind of like the landing the 747 cliche from all the 70's adventure shows!) So is there a way of simplifying the steps? Thanks Ted

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