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  • Programming doesn&rsquo;t have to be Magic

    - by Wes McClure
    In the show LOST, the Swan Station had a button that “had to be pushed” every 100 minutes to avoid disaster.  Several characters in the show took it upon themselves to have faith and religiously push the button, resetting the clock and averting the unknown “disaster”.  There are striking similarities in this story to the code we write every day.  Here are some common ones that I encounter: “I don’t know what it does but the application doesn’t work without it” “I added that code because I saw it in other similar places, I didn’t understand it, but thought it was necessary.” (for consistency, or to make things “work”) “An error message recommended it” “I copied that code” (and didn’t look at what it was doing) “It was suggested in a forum online and it fixed my problem so I left it” In all of these cases we haven’t done our due diligence to understand what the code we are writing is actually doing.  In the rush to get things done it seems like we’re willing to push any button (add any line of code) just to get our desired result and move on.  All of the above explanations are common things we encounter, and are valid ways to work through a problem we have, but when we find a solution to a task we are working on (whether a bug or a feature), we should take a moment to reflect on what we don’t understand.  Remove what isn’t necessary, comprehend and simplify what is.  Why is it detrimental to commit code we don’t understand? Perpetuates unnecessary code If you copy code that isn’t necessary, someone else is more likely to do so, especially peers Perpetuates tech debt Adding unnecessary code leads to extra code that must be understood, maintained and eventually cleaned up in longer lived projects Tech debt begets tech debt as other developers copy or use this code as guidelines in similar situations Increases maintenance How do we know the code is simplified if we don’t understand it? Perpetuates a lack of ownership Makes it seem ok to commit anything so long as it “gets the job done” Perpetuates the notion that programming is magic If we don’t take the time to understand every line of code we add, then we are contributing to the notion that it is simply enough to make the code work, regardless of how. TLDR Don’t commit code that you don’t understand, take the time to understand it, simplify it and then commit it!

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  • Microsoft Technical Computing

    - by Daniel Moth
    In the past I have described the team I belong to here at Microsoft (Parallel Computing Platform) in terms of contributing to Visual Studio and related products, e.g. .NET Framework. To be more precise, our team is part of the Technical Computing group, which is still part of the Developer Division. This was officially announced externally earlier this month in an exec email (from Bob Muglia, the president of STB, to which DevDiv belongs). Here is an extract: "… As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: 1. Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable ‘just-in-time’ processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed—reliably, consistently and quickly. 2. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today’s modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop… to the cluster… to the cloud. 3. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. …" Our Parallel Computing Platform team is directly responsible for item #2, and we work very closely with the teams delivering items #1 and #3. At the same time as the exec email, our marketing team unveiled a website with interviews that I invite you to check out: Modeling the World. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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

    - by G1i1ch
    Lately I've been getting professional work, hanging out with other programmers, and making friends in the industry. The only thing is I'm 100% self-taught. It's caused my style to extremely deviate from the style of those that are properly trained. It's the techniques and organization of my code that's different. It's a mixture of several things I do. I tend to blend several programming paradigms together. Like Functional and OO. I lean to the Functional side more than OO, but I see the use of OO when something would make more sense as an abstract entity. Like a game object. Next I also go the simple route when doing something. When in contrast, it seems like sometimes the code I see from professional programmers is complicated for the sake of it! I use lots of closures. And lastly, I'm not the best commenter. I find it easier just to read through my code than reading the comment. And most cases I just end up reading the code even if there are comments. Plus I've been told that, because of how simply I write my code, it's very easy to read it. I hear professionally trained programmers go on and on about things like unit tests. Something I've never used before so I haven't even the faintest idea of what they are or how they work. Lots and lots of underscores "_", which aren't really my taste. Most of the techniques I use are straight from me, or a few books I've read. Don't know anything about MVC, I've heard a lot about it though with things like backbone.js. I think it's a way to organize an application. It just confuses me though because by now I've made my own organizational structures. It's a bit of a pain. I can't use template applications at all when learning something new like with Ubuntu's Quickly. I have trouble understanding code that I can tell is from someone trained. Complete OO programming really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, yet that seems to be what EVERYONE else is strictly using. It's left me not that confident in the look of my code, or wondering whether I'll cause sparks when joining a company or maybe contributing to open source projects. In fact I'm rather scared of the fact that people will eventually be checking out my code. Is this just something normal any programmer goes through or should I really look to change up my techniques?

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  • Basic web architecture : Perl -> PHP

    - by Sunny Jim
    This is an architecture question. If there is a better forum, please redirect me. Apologies in advance. Essentially every website is built around a relational database, right? When a user uploads form data, that data is stored in a table. The problem is that the table structure(s) need to be modified whenever the website form is modified. Although I understand that modern web frameworks work around this problem by automatically building forms based on the table structure. For the last 20 years, I have been building websites using Perl. When I first encountered this problem, the easiest solution was to save serialized Perl objects as data BLOBS. After XML's introduction, this solution worked even better because XML is so effective for representing arbitrary data. This approach is consistent with the original Perl principles of Hubris, Laziness, and Impatience and I'm pretty committed to it. Obviously, the biggest drawback is that this solution locks me into the Perl interpreter. So instead, I've just completed a prototype of a universal RDB table. The prototype is written in Perl but porting it to PHP will be a good chance to develop those skills. The principal is based on the XML::Dumper module, which converts arbitrary Perl data structures into uniform XML. With my approach, each XML node is stored as a table record. I underestimated this undertaking and rolled something up myself. But the effort allows me to discuss the basic design instead of implementation details. As mentioned, I'm pretty committed to this approach of using flexible data structures. It's been successfully deployed on many websites, large, and complex. But are there any drawbacks I've overlooked? I rolled my own. Are other people taking a similar approach to their data? What kinds of solutions are available? I have not abandoned my dream of eventually contributing something useful to the worldwide community. In order to proceed, the next step would be peer review. How does one pursue that effort? Thanks! -Jim

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  • How much freedom should a programmer have in choosing a language and framework?

    - by Spencer
    I started working at a company that is primarily a C# oriented. We have a few people who like Java and JRuby, but a majority of programmers here like C#. I was hired because I have a lot of experience building web applications and because I lean towards newer technologies like JRuby on Rails or nodejs. I have recently started on a project building a web application with a focus on getting a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time. The software lead has dictated that I use mvc4 instead of rails. That might be OK, except I don't know mvc4, I don't know C# and I am the only one responsible for creating the web application server and front-end UI. Wouldn't it make sense to use a framework that I already know extremely well (Rails) instead of using mvc4? The two reasons behind the decision was that the tech lead doesn't know Jruby/rails and there would be no way to reuse the code. Counter arguments: He won't be contributing to the code and is frankly, not needed on this project. So, it doesn't really matter if he knows JRuby/rails or not. We actually can reuse the code since we have a lot of java apps that JRuby can pull code from and vice-versa. In fact, he has dedicated some resources to convert a Java library to C#, instead of just running the Java library on the JRuby on Rails app. All because he doesn't like Java or JRuby I have built many web applications, but using something unfamiliar is causing some spin-up and I am unable to build an awesome application in as short of a time that I'm used to. This would be fine, learning new technologies is important in this field. The problem is, for this project, we need to get a lot done in a short period of time. At what point should a developer be allowed to choose his tools? Is this dependent on the company? Does my company suck or is this considered normal? Do greener pastures exist? Am I looking at this the wrong way? Bonus: Should I just keep my head down and move along at a snails pace, or defy orders and go with what I know in order to make this project more successful? Edit: I had actually created a fully function rails application (on my own time) and showed it to the team and it did not seem to matter. I am currently porting it to mvc4 (slowly).

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  • Difference between the terms Material & Effect

    - by codey
    I'm making an effect system right now (I think, because it may be a material system... or both!). The effects system follows the common (e.g. COLLADA, DirectX) effect framework abstraction of Effects have Techniques, Techniques have Passes, Passes have States & Shader Programs. An effect, according to COLLADA, defines the equations necessary for the visual appearance of geometry and screen-space image processing. Keeping with the abstraction, effects contain techniques. Each effect can contain one or many techniques (i.e. ways to generate the effect), each of which describes a different method for rendering that effect. The technique could be relate to quality (e.g. high precision, high LOD, etc.), or in-game-situation (e.g. night/day, power-up-mode, etc.). Techniques hold a description of the textures, samplers, shaders, parameters, & passes necessary for rendering this effect using one method. Some algorithms require several passes to render the effect. Pipeline descriptions are broken into an ordered collection of Pass objects. A pass provides a static declaration of all the render states, shaders, & settings for "one rendering pipeline" (i.e. one pass). Meshes usually contain a series of materials that define the model. According to the COLLADA spec (again), a material instantiates an effect, fills its parameters with values, & selects a technique. But I see material defined differently in other places, such as just the Lambert, Blinn, Phong "material types/shaded surfaces", or as Metal, Plastic, Wood, etc. In game dev forums, people often talk about implementing a "material/effect system". Is the material not an instance of an effect? Ergo, if I had effect objects, stored in a collection, & each effect instance object with there own parameter setting, then there is no need for the concept of a material... Or am I interpreting it wrong? Please help by contributing your interpretations as I want to be clear on a distinction (if any), & don't want to miss out on the concept of a material if it should be implemented to follow the abstraction of the DirectX FX framework & COLLADA definitions closely.

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  • Need help fixing DPKG errors after update from 12.04 to 12.10

    - by James Wulfe
    So I was doing fine then i upgraded my system to 12.10 and now i cant get my system to update all of its packages properly. no matter what i do, what is happening here and how do i fix this. if i would have thought 12.10 would be this much of a hassle i would have never upgraded..... here is a sampling of the code that returns from "apt-get -f install" It should also be noted that it is just these 6 packages only. no other packages have given me this kind of trouble. well i should say as of now. It was just 5, but them i got an update for unity, and now unity-common is added to the trouble makers. which prevents me from further upgrading the actual unity package as this package is a dependancy. Preparing to replace usb-modeswitch-data 20120120-0ubuntu1 (using .../usb-modeswitch-data_20120815-1_all.deb) ... /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.prerm: 4: /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.prerm: dpkg-maintscript-helper: Input/output error dpkg: warning: subprocess old pre-removal script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: trying script from the new package instead ... /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/prerm: 4: /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/prerm: dpkg-maintscript-helper: Input/output error dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/usb-modeswitch-data_20120815-1_all.deb (--unpack): subprocess new pre-removal script returned error exit status 2 /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.postinst: 7: /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.postinst: dpkg-maintscript-helper: Input/output error dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/network-manager_0.9.6.0-0ubuntu7_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/pcmciautils_018-8_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/unity-common_6.10.0-0ubuntu2_all.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/whoopsie_0.2.7_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/usb-modeswitch_1.2.3+repack0-1ubuntu3_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/usb-modeswitch-data_20120815-1_all.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I would also like to note i have cleaned apt cashe both through the terminal and manualy, i have tried installing them manually through dpkg from both the /var/cache/apt/archives/ location and from my own manually downloaded .deb files. i have tried using dpkg-reconfigure and i have used bleachbit to clean my system. I have also tested both my HDD and memory and found no significant errors to lead to the input/output errors. Quite frankly i am just out of options and have grown tired of trying to google a solution to this mess but still do not wish to pursue backing up settings and reinstalling the system. Any help would be appreciated. I am only interested in answers, please leave your feeling towards grammar, punctuation, and bias towards how a "post should look" at the door. If you dont have something to contribute towards solving my problem then you are just doing nothing but contributing to it. Thank you.

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  • Java EE 8 update

    - by delabassee
    Planning for Java EE 8 is now well underway. As you know, a few weeks ago, we conducted a three part Java EE 8 Community Survey (you can find the final summary here). The data gathered have been very influential for the next steps. You can now expect over the coming weeks and months to see updates on the various specifications that compose the Java EE platform. Some Specification Leads are busy gathering additional feedback regarding what they should focus their efforts on (e.g. CDI 2 survey). Other Specification Leads have already publicly exposed what they think should be one of the focus for the evolution of the specification they lead.  For example, adding Server-Senet Events (SSE) support in JAX-RS is being discussed here and adding MVC support is being discussed here. Please remember that the fact we are now discussing any feature does not insure that it will be included in the proposal, nor in any particular update to Java EE. We can expect additional enhancements, changes and evolutions as we get closer to the finalisation of the different specifications... and there is still a long way to go with these specification proposals! Linda DeMichiel, Java EE Co-Specification Lead, has recently posted a draft proposal for the Java EE 8 Platform specification. Linda's goal is to recruit people and companies supporting this proposal before submitting it to the JCP.  This draft proposal is very interesting reading as it contains relevant information on the plans for Java EE 8 such as : The themes: Support for the latest web standards (eg. HTTP 2.0)  Continue to work on ease of development Improve the infrastructure for cloud support Alignment with Java SE 8 New JSRs to be added to the platform: J-Cache Java API for JSON Binding Java Configuration Plans for the Web Profile Plans on technologies to prune in Java EE 8, ... So if you haven't done it yet, I really encourage you to read the Java EE 8 draft proposal! Our goal for the Java EE 8 specification is for it to be finalized in the second half of 2016. It is important to note that we are in the early days of Java EE 8 and at this stage everything (themes, content, timing, etc.) is preliminary. Everything still needs to be discussed, challenged and agreed within the different Java Community Process (JCP) Experts Groups (EGs). Some EGs that still need to be formed! It could also means that the roadmap will have to be adjusted to follow the progress being made in the different EGs. This is also a good occasion to remind you that participation within those upcoming JCP Experts Groups is encouraged. Contributing in an EG is an effective lever to influence what Java EE 8 will become! Finally, as things get more concrete, we will share details on how to engage in the different Java EE 8 related Adopt-a-JSR initiatives, another way to contribute. You can also read other posts related to Java EE 8, here at The Aquarium blog. Just look for articles with the 'javaee8' tag.

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  • Should i continue my self-taught coding practice or learn how to do coding professionally?

    - by G1i1ch
    Lately I've been getting professional work, hanging out with other programmers, and making friends in the industry. The only thing is I'm 100% self-taught. It's caused my style to extremely deviate from the style of those that are properly trained. It's the techniques and organization of my code that's different. It's a mixture of several things I do. I tend to blend several programming paradigms together. Like Functional and OO. I lean to the Functional side more than OO, but I see the use of OO when something would make more sense as an abstract entity. Like a game object. Next I also go the simple route when doing something. When in contrast, it seems like sometimes the code I see from professional programmers is complicated for the sake of it! I use lots of closures. And lastly, I'm not the best commenter. I find it easier just to read through my code than reading the comment. And most cases I just end up reading the code even if there are comments. Plus I've been told that, because of how simply I write my code, it's very easy to read it. I hear professionally trained programmers go on and on about things like unit tests. Something I've never used before so I haven't even the faintest idea of what they are or how they work. Lots and lots of underscores "_", which aren't really my taste. Most of the techniques I use are straight from me, or a few books I've read. Don't know anything about MVC, I've heard a lot about it though with things like backbone.js. I think it's a way to organize an application. It just confuses me though because by now I've made my own organizational structures. It's a bit of a pain. I can't use template applications at all when learning something new like with Ubuntu's Quickly. I have trouble understanding code that I can tell is from someone trained. Complete OO programming really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, yet that seems to be what EVERYONE else is strictly using. It's left me not that confident in the look of my code, or wondering whether I'll cause sparks when joining a company or maybe contributing to open source projects. In fact I'm rather scared of the fact that people will eventually be checking out my code. Is this just something normal any programmer goes through or should I really look to change up my techniques?

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  • Summary of our Recent Pull Request Enhancements on CodePlex

    Over the past several weeks, we’ve been incrementally rolling out a bunch of enhancements around our pull request workflow for Git and Mercurial projects. Our goal is to make contributing to open source projects a simple and rewarding experience, and we’ll continue to invest in this area. Here’s a summary of the changes so far, in case you’ve missed them. As always, if you have any feedback, please let us know, whether on our ideas page or via Twitter. Support for branches You can now pick the source and destination branches for your pull request, whether you’re sending one from your fork, or using it within a project to collaborate with your other trusted contributors. A redesigned creation experience Our old pull request creation form was rather lacking. It asked for a title and comment in a small modal dialog, but that was about it. We knew we could do better, so we rethought the experience. Now, when you create a pull request, you’re taken to a new page that let’s you select the source and destination, and gives you information on the diffs and commits that you’re sending, so you can confirm that you’re sending the right set of changes. Inline code snippets in discussion If users comment on code in your pull request, we now display a preview of the snippet of relevant code inline with their comment on the discussion. Subsequent replies on that line are combined in a single thread to preserve your context. No more clicking and hunting to find where the comments are. And you can add another inline comment right from the discussion area. Comment notifications You can now elect receive an e-mail notification if a user comments on your pull request. If it’s on a line of code, we’ll display the relevant code snippet in the e-mail. Redesigned diff viewer Our old diff viewer hadn’t been touched in a while, and was in need of an update. We started with a visual facelift to use standard red/green colors for additions/deletions and remove the noisy “dots” that represented spaces and that littered the diff viewer. Based on feedback that the viewable region for diffs was too small, especially for smaller screen resolutions, we revamped the way the viewport for the code is sized, and now expand it to fill the majority of the browser height when scrolling down. The set of improvements we implemented here also apply anywhere diffs are viewed, not just for pull requests.

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  • SAN performance issues storing SQL Server tempdb on a SAN that's being backed up

    - by user42724
    I'm afraid I don't know much about SAN's so please forgive my lack of detail or technical terms. As a developer I've just completed and put on an existing production system a new application but it would appear to have tipped the scales regarding the performance of the backups being taken from the SAN. As I understand it there's a mirror of the SAN being taken usually constantly at the block-level. However, there seem to be so many new writes to the disk that the SAN mirroring/backup process can no longer keep up. I believe I've narrowed this down to SQL Servers tempdb which exists on a drive that contributes the largest portion of the problem! In fact I think tempdb has be contributing the largest portion of the issues all along regardless of my application! My question therefore is whether the tempdb should ever be mirrored or backed on the SAN and whether anyone else has gone through this sort of pain already? I'm wondering whether it's a best practise to make sure that tempdb is never mirrored on a SAN simply because any writes to it don't need to be saved. This also raises a slightly connected question - is it better to rely on SQL Servers built-in database backups tools (DB in full-recovery mode with full/differential and transaction log backups) or, as is the case with our application, SQL server is in simple recovery mode and never backed up since the SAN is mirrored and backed up? Many thanks

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  • Magento Apache Config & Memory Issues

    - by cheshirepine
    I have a Magento installation on a VPS that is giving me a headache. This particular VPS has a reasonable spec - 2gb Memory and 50gb storage. It runs a single domain, with a single Magento install - and nothing else. About 5 months ago we started having issues. Every so often (about once every 2 or 3 weeks) the VPS would crash - all processes stopped and the only way to restart the container is via Virtuozzo. Now, however its 2 or 3 times a week. My VPS hosts confirm I am breaching the 2gb memory limit, at which point all VPS processes are killed to stop it bringing the entire node down. I have not made any config changes to it at all - I was running New Relic on it for a short while, but have removed that in case it was contributing to the issues. I can see nothing in the logs which indicates an issue and we have no CRON jobs running at the time the crashes happen. The site generates steady, but not huge amounts of traffic (averaging usually less than 100 visits per day) Is there anything in particular I should have done to the Apache or PHP configs to help? Im not a massivley experienced Apache admin, but know more than enough to solve most problems... Failing that, any other ideas that might help? Can't afford for this site to be down this much.

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  • Locating memory leak in Apache httpd process, PHP/Doctrine-based application

    - by Sam
    I have a PHP application using these components: Apache 2.2.3-31 on Centos 5.4 PHP 5.2.10 Xdebug 2.0.5 with Remote Debugging enabled APC 3.0.19 Doctrine ORM for PHP 1.2.1 using Query Caching and Results Caching via APC MySQL 5.0.77 using Query Caching I've noticed that when I start up Apache, I eventually end up 10 child processes. As time goes on, each process will grow in memory until each one approaches 10% of available memory, which begins to slow the server to a crawl since together they grow to take up 100% of memory. Here is a snapshot of my top output: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1471 apache 16 0 626m 201m 18m S 0.0 10.2 1:11.02 httpd 1470 apache 16 0 622m 198m 18m S 0.0 10.1 1:14.49 httpd 1469 apache 16 0 619m 197m 18m S 0.0 10.0 1:11.98 httpd 1462 apache 18 0 622m 197m 18m S 0.0 10.0 1:11.27 httpd 1460 apache 15 0 622m 195m 18m S 0.0 10.0 1:12.73 httpd 1459 apache 16 0 618m 191m 18m S 0.0 9.7 1:13.00 httpd 1461 apache 18 0 616m 190m 18m S 0.0 9.7 1:14.09 httpd 1468 apache 18 0 613m 190m 18m S 0.0 9.7 1:12.67 httpd 7919 apache 18 0 116m 75m 15m S 0.0 3.8 0:19.86 httpd 9486 apache 16 0 97.7m 56m 14m S 0.0 2.9 0:13.51 httpd I have no long-running scripts (they all terminate eventually, the longest being maybe 2 minutes long), and I am working under the assumption that once each script terminates, the memory it uses gets deallocated. (Maybe someone can correct me on that). My hunch is that it could be APC, since it stores data between requests, but at the same time, it seems weird that it would store data inside the httpd process. How can I track down which part of my app is causing the memory leak? What tools can I use to see how the memory usage is growing inside the httpd process and what is contributing to it?

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  • Macs don't connect to wifi access point but PCs will

    - by Josh
    So, as a side project I'm going to try and figure out why the wifi APs in my building exhibit the following behavior: - They typically allow all types of computers to connect without issues - Sometimes Apples can't get an IP address but will still connect to the AP's signal - Less often, PCs can't connect to the wifi (same as above - yes signal, no IP addy) - Don't let Raiders fans on no matter the time of day! My first thought was that the DHCP leases were all taken up when the Apples would try to connect, and it was just their unlucky timing, but I would then try to log on with a PC that had a new, unleased MAC address and it would work... Could this be something to do with interoperability between an apple wifi card, and the APs? Different parts of the DHCP lease being taken up first? The fact that the Seattle Mariners might actually be good this year?? If this hasn't used up everyone's patience (with my crappy sports jokes), something else I could use some help with: - We don't have the model or type of AP - This is because there is no documentation available for them, and they literally look like small white boxes with no writing on them. Also, the company that installed them is out of business, so the situation might be that no docs will ever be on the way. -- Do you guys have any ideas on how to figure out what we have? Thanks as always for all the help, and I'm looking forward to the day when I know enough to start contributing back to the site, Josh

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  • All applications quit when printing on imac OS X 10.5.8

    - by Tamany
    I recently ran a software update. I'm not sure if my problems are associated with this but I'm pretty sure they are as I printed successfully before update. I checked the log at time of printing: 03/05/2010 22:03:15 Microsoft Word[697] *** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x17a82b50 03/05/2010 22:03:15 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:17 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Mon May 3 22:03:17 leopards-imac-2.local Word[697] <Error>: The function `CGPDFDocumentGetMediaBox' is obsolete and will be removed in an upcoming update. Unfortunately, this application, or a library it uses, is using this obsolete function, and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system performance. Please use `CGPDFPageGetBoxRect' instead. 03/05/2010 22:22:09 Microsoft Word[697] *** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x1b036500 Any thoughts on how to fix this?

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  • All applications quit when printing on imac OS 10.5.8

    - by Tamany
    Hello and hoping someone might be able to help. Recently ran software update (not sure if problems are associated with this but pretty sure they are as i printed successfully before update. checked log at time of printing: any thoughts on how to fix this? THANKYOU!! 03/05/2010 22:03:15 Microsoft Word[697] * -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x17a82b50 03/05/2010 22:03:15 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:17 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Mon May 3 22:03:17 leopards-imac-2.local Word[697] : The function CGPDFDocumentGetMediaBox' is obsolete and will be removed in an upcoming update. Unfortunately, this application, or a library it uses, is using this obsolete function, and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system performance. Please useCGPDFPageGetBoxRect' instead. 03/05/2010 22:22:09 Microsoft Word[697] * -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x1b036500

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  • How to move or delete files from a folder containing 2 million files on an NTFS drive?

    - by Beau
    The issue is that any modification to the directory locks up Explorer indefinitely, though Samba access to other directories still works. I've tried moving files locally and over Samba. Even enumerating the directory to get the list of files locks up the computer indefinitely. I tried using Python's win32file.FindFilesIterator to iterate the files but that also hangs. My idea was to move each file to a different directory (in a directory above the directory we're dealing with) based on its timestamp, so that we'd have at most a thousand or so files in each directory... But since I can't even enumerate the files, that's been a non-starter. If I have to give up and just nuke the directory I'm willing to do that, but a standard delete also hangs indefinitely. I have set these two parameters to increase speed and they also did not help the issue: R:\>fsutil behavior query disablelastaccess disablelastaccess = 1 R:\>fsutil behavior query disable8dot3 disable8dot3 = 1 These are all sequential images that would have run into the 'bug' with 8.3 filenames whereby many similarly named files in one directory can take a long time to compute 8.3 filenames. From what I understand this data is stored in the file system even after disable8dot3 is enabled, so it may still be contributing to the problem. Any ideas?

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  • All applications quit when printing on Mac OS X 10.5.8

    - by Tamany
    I recently ran a software update. I'm not sure if my problems are associated with this but I'm pretty sure they are as I printed successfully before update. I checked the log at time of printing: 03/05/2010 22:03:15 Microsoft Word[697] *** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x17a82b50 03/05/2010 22:03:15 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:16 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Ignoring Quickdraw drawing between QDBeginCGContext and QDEndCGContext 03/05/2010 22:03:17 [0x0-0x51051].com.microsoft.Word[697] Mon May 3 22:03:17 leopards-imac-2.local Word[697] <Error>: The function `CGPDFDocumentGetMediaBox' is obsolete and will be removed in an upcoming update. Unfortunately, this application, or a library it uses, is using this obsolete function, and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system performance. Please use `CGPDFPageGetBoxRect' instead. 03/05/2010 22:22:09 Microsoft Word[697] *** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x1b036500 Any thoughts on how to fix this?

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  • How to protect folder privacy against unethical network administrators? [closed]

    - by Trevor Trovalds
    I just need a technical solution for the sake of my group's shared passwords, projects, works, etc. safety. Our network has Active Directory with public/groups/users and NTFS permissions, under a Windows Server 2003 which will soon migrate to Windows Server 2008 R2. Our IT crowd is small, consisting of 2 DBAs, 4 designers, 6 developers (including me), 2 netadmins and (a lot of) tech supporters, everyone has local admin rights. Those 2 network admins weren't the ones who set the network up, they just took the lift recently when the previous ones quit. We usually find them laughing at private contents from users stored in the groups AD, sabotaging documents that don't match their personal tastes and, finally, this week we found out they stole a project we (developers and DBAs) were finishing and, long before, they presented it to the CEO as theirs without us knowing. I'm a systems analyst, and initially my group decided to store critical content, like shared passwords, inside encrypted .zip files. Unfortunately we couldn't do the same to the other hundreds of folders and files, which included the stolen project, because the zipping process would take too long for every update. We also tried an encrypted Subversion repository under SSL, but there are many dummies (~38 atm) involved in the projects that have trouble using TortoiseSVN when contributing, and very oftenly we had to fix messed up updates. Well, I think these two give the idea of what we've been trying to reach. So, is there a practical "individual" protection for our extensive data or my hope can already be euthanized? P.S.: Seriously, at the place where I live/work, political corruption gone the wildest, so denounce related options are likely impracticable. Yet both netadmins have strong "political bond" with the CEO and the President, hence their lousy behavior and our failed delation attempts.

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  • April 14th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API and Visual Studio

    - by ScottGu
    Here is the latest in my link-listing blog series: ASP.NET Easily overlooked features in VS 11 Express for Web: Good post by Scott Hanselman that highlights a bunch of easily overlooked improvements that are coming to VS 11 (and specifically the free express editions) for web development: unit testing, browser chooser/launcher, IIS Express, CSS Color Picker, Image Preview in Solution Explorer and more. Get Started with ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms: Good 5-part tutorial that walks-through building an application using ASP.NET Web Forms and highlights some of the nice improvements coming with ASP.NET 4.5. What is New in Razor V2 and What Else is New in Razor V2: Great posts by Andrew Nurse, a dev on the ASP.NET team, about some of the new improvements coming with ASP.NET Razor v2. ASP.NET MVC 4 AllowAnonymous Attribute: Nice post from David Hayden that talks about the new [AllowAnonymous] filter introduced with ASP.NET MVC 4. Introduction to the ASP.NET Web API: Great tutorial by Stephen Walher that covers how to use the new ASP.NET Web API support built-into ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4. Comprehensive List of ASP.NET Web API Tutorials and Articles: Tugberk Ugurlu links to a huge collection of articles, tutorials, and samples about the new ASP.NET Web API capability. Async Mashups using ASP.NET Web API: Nice post by Henrik on how you can use the new async language support coming with .NET 4.5 to easily and efficiently make asynchronous network requests that do not block threads within ASP.NET. ASP.NET and Front-End Web Development Visual Studio 11 and Front End Web Development - JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3: Nice post by Scott Hanselman that highlights some of the great improvements coming with VS 11 (including the free express edition) for front-end web development. HTML5 Drag/Drop and Async Multi-file Upload with ASP.NET Web API: Great post by Filip W. that demonstrates how to implement an async file drag/drop uploader using HTML5 and ASP.NET Web API. Device Emulator Guide for Mobile Development with ASP.NET: Good post from Rachel Appel that covers how to use various device emulators with ASP.NET and VS to develop cross platform mobile sites. Fixing these jQuery: A Guide to Debugging: Great presentation by Adam Sontag on debugging with JavaScript and jQuery.  Some really good tips, tricks and gotchas that can save a lot of time. ASP.NET and Open Source Getting Started with ASP.NET Web Stack Source on CodePlex: Fantastic post by Henrik (an architect on the ASP.NET team) that provides step by step instructions on how to work with the ASP.NET source code we recently open sourced. Contributing to ASP.NET Web Stack Source on CodePlex: Follow-on to the post above (also by Henrik) that walks-through how you can submit a code contribution to the ASP.NET MVC, Web API and Razor projects. Overview of the WebApiContrib project: Nice post by Pedro Reys on the new open source WebApiContrib project that has been started to deliver cool extensions and libraries for use with ASP.NET Web API. Entity Framework Entity Framework 5 Performance Improvements and Performance Considerations for EF5:  Good articles that describes some of the big performance wins coming with EF5 (which will ship with both .NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4). Automatic compilation of LINQ queries will yield some significant performance wins (up to 600% faster). ASP.NET MVC 4 and EF Database Migrations: Good post by David Hayden that covers the new database migrations support within EF 4.3 which allows you to easily update your database schema during development - without losing any of the data within it. Visual Studio What's New in Visual Studio 11 Unit Testing: Nice post by Peter Provost (from the VS team) that talks about some of the great improvements coming to VS11 for unit testing - including built-in VS tooling support for a broad set of unit test frameworks (including NUnit, XUnit, Jasmine, QUnit and more) Hope this helps, Scott

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  • Links to my “Best of 2010” Posts

    - by ScottGu
    I hope everyone is having a Happy New Years! 2010 has been a busy blogging year for me (this is the 100th blog post I’ve done in 2010).  Several people this week suggested I put together a summary post listing/organizing my favorite posts from the year.  Below is a quick listing of some of my favorite posts organized by topic area: VS 2010 and .NET 4 Below is a series of posts I wrote (some in late 2009) about the VS 2010 and .NET 4 (including ASP.NET 4 and WPF 4) release we shipped in April: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (DataTips, BreakPoints, Import/Export) Box Selection and Multi-line Editing Support with VS 2010 VS 2010 Extension Manager (and the cool new PowerCommands Extension) Pinning Projects and Solutions VS 2010 Web Deployment Debugging Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio Search and Navigation Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio Visual Studio Below are some additional Visual Studio posts I’ve done (not in the first series above) that I thought were nice: Download and Share Visual Studio Color Schemes Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Fun Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers Silverlight We shipped Silverlight 4 in April, and announced Silverlight 5 the beginning of December: Silverlight 4 Released Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released Silverlight 4 Training Kit Silverlight PivotViewer Now Available Silverlight Questions Announcing Silverlight 5 Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 We shipped Windows Phone 7 this fall and shipped free Visual Studio development tools with great Silverlight and XNA support in September: Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight ASP.NET MVC We shipped ASP.NET MVC 2 in March, and started previewing ASP.NET MVC 3 this summer.  ASP.NET MVC 3 will RTM in less than 2 weeks from today: ASP.NET MVC 2: Strongly Typed Html Helpers ASP.NET MVC 2: Model Validation Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Preview 1) Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta and NuGet (nee NuPack) Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 1  Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 2 Introducing Razor – A New View Engine for ASP.NET ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: New @model keyword in Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: Server-Side Comments with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: Razor’s @: and <text> syntax ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts and Sections with Razor IIS and Web Server Stack The IIS and Web Stack teams have made a bunch of great improvements to the core web server this year: Fix Common SEO Problems using the URL Rewrite Extension Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Introducing IIS Express SQL CE 4 (New Embedded Database Support with ASP.NET) Introducing Web Matrix EF Code First EF Code First is a really nice new data option that enables a very clean code-oriented data workflow: Announcing Entity Framework Code-First CTP5 Release Class-Level Model Validation with EF Code First and ASP.NET MVC 3 Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4 EF 4 Code First: Custom Database Schema Mapping Using EF Code First with an Existing Database jQuery and AJAX Contributions My team began making some significant source code contributions to the jQuery project this year: jQuery Templates, Data Link and Globalization Accepted as Official jQuery Plugins jQuery Templates and Data Linking (and Microsoft contributing to jQuery) jQuery Globalization Plugin from Microsoft Patches and Hot Fixes Some useful fixes you can download prior to VS 2010 SP1: Patch for Cut/Copy “Insufficient Memory” issue with VS 2010 Patch for VS 2010 Find and Replace Dialog Growing Patch for VS 2010 Scrolling Context Menu Videos of My Talks Some recordings of technical talks I’ve done this year: ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC, and Silverlight 4 Talks I did in Europe VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Talk in Arizona Other About Technical Debates (and ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC debates in particular) ASP.NET Security Fix Now on Windows Update Upcoming Web Camps I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who follows my blog – I really appreciate you reading it (the comments you post help encourage me to write it).  See you in the New Year! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Update Metadata and Cover Art in Windows Media Player 12

    - by DigitalGeekery
    If you use Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7, you may notice some of your media is missing information when displayed in the library. Today we look at how to edit and update metadata and cover art in WMP 12. By default, Windows Media Player will pull metadata, such as the title, artist, album, and cover art from the Internet. If you did not accept that default option during setup, we’ll need to turn the feature on first. Select Tools > Options from the top Menu bar. On the Library tab, ensure that Retrieve additional information form the Internet is checked. Click OK. Editing Metadata Now we’re ready to update some files. Find a media file with incorrect details or cover art. Right-click on the title and select Find album info. This will bring up the Find album information window. Here you’ll see the existing information that Windows Media Player interpreted as correct on the left side. The results of  WMP’s search for the media information are on the right. Click on Artists,  Albums , or Tracks to scroll through the search results and try to find a match. You can also type in new keywords in the Search box and hit enter (or click the Search button) to perform a new search.   If you find a correct match for your media file, click to select it and click Next. You’ll be prompted to confirm your selection, then click Finish. You should now see your media file displayed properly in Windows Media Player. Manually Entering Metadata If your search for the correct media information comes up empty, you can always manually enter the information yourself. On the Find album information window, click Edit under Existing Information. You can edit the existing information in the text boxes or the Genre dropdown box. There are a couple hidden text boxes below. Click next to Contributing Artist or Composer to enter that information.   Choosing Your Own Cover Art If your media file doesn’t pull the proper cover art, or if you simply wish to find a different image, you can add your own. Search online for a suitable image. An ideal size would be around 300 x 300 pixels, give or take. Right-click on the image copy the image. You’ll need to switch to Expanded title (if you haven’t already) to paste the image.   Paste your new image by right-clicking on the current image and select Paste album art. Note: If the image is not suitable size or type, the Paste album art option will not be available. Your new cover art will appear in Windows Media Player.   Even though it is pulled from the Internet, cover art is cached on your computer and will still be available when you are disconnected from the Internet. Are you new to Windows Media Player? If so, check out our article on how to Manage your music with Windows Media Player. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 11Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesMake VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 10Add Images and Metadata to Windows 7 Media Center Movie LibraryMake VLC Player Look like Winamp 5 (Kinda) TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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  • HTML Presence Controls for Communications Server 14 CodePlex Project

    Showing Presence on the Web If youre running Office Communicator Server 2007 R2, you know that your only out-of-the-box option for showing presence on the web is to use the NameControl ActiveX control that ships as part of Office.  Being an ActiveX control, this obviously means that youre limited to Internet Explorer.  Also, nobody likes ActiveX controls What if you want to show the presence of users in a pure ASP.NET or HTML application and cant assume that the user has Communicator installed you need anASP.NET or HTML presence control.  HTML Presence Controls for Microsoft Communications Server 14 We recently worked with the UC team at Microsoft on a keynote demo for TechEd 2010 in New Orleans.  The demo was for a fictitious airline Fabrikam Airlines that wanted to show the presence of customer service and reservations agents on its website.  Customers could also start an instant message conversation with the agents using a Silverlight web chat window that used WCF to communicate with the backend UCMA application. We built HTML Presence Controls that use AJAX to poll a REST-based WCF service running in IIS and hosting a UCMA 3.0 presence subscription application.   Microsoft has graciously allowed us to publish these on CodePlex so that the development community can benefit from them:  http://htmlpresencecontrols.codeplex.com/ We will be maintaining the CodePlex project as new builds of UCMA 3.0 become available.  Check out the project home page on CodePlex for some more in-depth details on how the controls are implemented. ASP.NET Server Control Implementation Were providing an ASP.NET Server Control implementation that you can use stand-alone or in a GridView or Repeater (or other layout control).  The control has properties that allow you to control its appearance, e.g. you can choose whether or not to show the contacts name or availability text. You can also use the server control in a layout control such as a GridView by putting it in a TemplateColumn and binding to the Sip Uri in the data source. Disclaimer Once we started working on these, we realized why Microsoft hasnt shipped such controls as part of the product.  There are some tradeoffs you have to be aware of when using these controls, heres the high level. Privacy The backend UCMA 3.0 application that subscribes to presence of contacts runs as a trusted application and can thus retrieve the presence of any user in the organization.  Theres currently no good way in UCMA to apply any privacy rules to ensure that the consumer of the presence controls has permission to see the presence of the contacts that the controls are bound to.  Just to be absolutely crystal clear These controls provide a way to query the presence of any user in the organization, regardless of the privacy relationship between the person consuming the controls and the contacts whose presence is being displayed. Were exploring options for a design pattern that would allow you to inject some privacy controls.  Keep in mind though that you would most likely be responsible for implementing this logic, as there is currently no functionality in UCMA that allows you to do that. Polling the WCF REST Service The controls poll the backend WCF service to retrieve the presence of contacts - you can control the refresh interval so that they poll less often. We implemented a caching layer so that the WCF service is always communicating with a presence cache it never communicates directly with Communications Server.  For example, if your web page is showing the presence of sip:[email protected] and 500 people have the page open, the presence cache only contains one instance of the subscription Communications Server is not being polled 500 times for the presence of that contact. Once the presence of a contact changes, it is updated in the cache.  There are some server-based push mechanisms that would work nicely here, such as the one that Outlook Web Access 2010 uses.  Unfortunately we didnt have time to explore these options. Community Contribution Take a look at the project Issue Tracker, there are a couple of things we can use some help with.  Shoot me a note if youre interested in contributing to the project. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • #MIX Day 2 Keynote: Put the Phone Down and Listen

    - by andrewbrust
    MIX day 1’s keynote was all about Windows Phone 7 (WP7).  MIX day 2’s was a reminder that Microsoft has much more going on than a new mobile platform.  Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, Doug Purdy and others showed us lots of other good things coming from Microsoft, mostly in the developer stack, that we certainly shouldn’t overlook.  These included the forthcoming IE9, its new JavaScript compiling engine and support for HTML 5 that takes full advantage of the local PC resources, including the Graphics Processing Unit.  The announcements also included important additions to ASP.NET (and one subtraction, in the form of lighter-weight ViewState technology) including almost-obsessive jQuery support.  That support is so good that John Resig, creator of the jQuery project, came on stage to tell us so.  Then Scott Guthrie told us that Microsoft would be contributing code to Open Source jQuery project. This is not your father’s Microsoft, it would seem. But to me, the crown jewel in today’s keynote were the numerous announcements around the Open Data Protocol (OData).  OData is nothing more than the protocol side of “Astoria” (now known as WCF Data Services, and until recently called ADO.NET Data Services) separated out and opened up as a platform-neutral standard.  The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was Microsoft’s vehicle for first announcing OData, as well as project “Dallas,” an Azure-based cloud platform for publishing commercial OData feeds.  And we had already known about “bridges” for Astoria (and thus OData) for PHP and Java.  We also knew that PowerPivot, Microsoft’s forthcoming self-service BI plug-in for Excel 2010, will consume OData feeds and then facilitate drill-down analysis of their data.  And we recently found out that SQL Reporting Services reports (in the forthcoming SQL Server 2008 R2) and SharePoint 2010 lists will be consumable in OData format as well. So what was left to announce?  How about OData clients for Palm webOS and Apple iPhone/Objective C?  How about the release to Open Source of .NET’s OData client?  Or the ability to publish any SQL Azure database as an OData service by simply checking a checkbox at deployment?  Maybe even a Silverlight tool (code-named “Houston”) to create SQL Azure databases (and then publish them as OData) right in the browser?  And what if you you could get at NetFlix’s entire catalog in OData format?  You can – just go to http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/ and see for yourself.  Douglas Purdy, who made these announcements said “we want OData to work on as many devices and platforms as possible.”  After all the cross-platform OData announcements made in about a half year’s time, it’s hard to dispute this. When Microsoft plays the data card, and plays it well, watch out, because data programmability is the company’s heritage.  I’ll be discussing OData at length in my April Redmond Review column.  I wrote that column two weeks ago, and was convinced then that OData was a big deal. Today upped the ante even more.  And following the Windows Phone 7 euphoria of yesterday was, I think, smart timing.  The phone, if it’s successful, will be because it’s a good developer platform play.  And developer platforms (as well as their creators) are most successful when they have a good data strategy.  OData is very Silverlight-friendly, and that means it’s WP7-friendly too.  Phone plus service-oriented data is a one-two punch.  A phone platform without data would have been a phone with no signal.

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  • RTL (Arabic and Hebrew) Support for Windows Phone 7

    - by Daniel Moth
    Problem and Background Currently there is no support for Right-To-Left rendering in Windows Phone 7, when developing with Silverlight (itself built on .NET Compact Framework). When I encountered that limitation, I had a flashback to 2005 when I complained about the luck of RTL on NETCF. Unfortunately, the partial solution I proposed back then requires PInvoke and there is no such support on Windows Phone today. Fortunately, my RTL requirements this time were more modest: all I wanted to do was display correctly a translation (of Hebrew or Arabic) in my FREE WP7 translator app. For v1.0 of the app, the code received a string from the service and just put it up on the screen as the translated text. In Arabic and Hebrew, that string (incorrectly) appeared reversed. I knew that, but decided that since it is a platform limitation, I could live with it and so could the users. Yuval P, a colleague at Microsoft, pushed me to offer support for Hebrew (something that I wasn't motivated to pursue if I am honest). After many back and forths, we landed on some code that works. It is certainly not the most efficient code (quite the opposite), but it works and met the bar of minimum effort for v1.1. Thanks Yuval for insisting and contributing most of the code! After Hebrew support was there, I thought the same solution would work for Arabic. Apparently, reversing the Arabic text is not enough: Arabic characters render themselves differently dependent on what preceded/succeeds them(!). So I needed some kind of utility that takes a reversed Arabic string and returns the same string but with the relevant characters "fixed". Luckily, another MS colleague has put out such a library (thanks Bashar): http://arabic4wp7.codeplex.com/. RTL Solution So you have a reversed RTL string and want to make it "right" before displaying on the screen. This is what worked for me (ymmv). Need to split the string into "lines". Not doing this and just reversing the string and sticking it a wrapping text control means that the user not only has to read right to left, they also have to read bottom up. The previous step must take into account a line length that works for both portrait and landscape modes, and of course, not break words in the middle, i.e. find natural breaks. For each line, break it up into words and reverse the order of the words and the order of the letters within each word On the previous step, do not reverse words that should be preserved, e.g. Windows and other such English words that are mixed in with the Arabic or Hebrew words. The same exclusion from reversal applies to numbers. Specifically, for Arabic, once there is a word that is reversed also change its characters. For some code paths, the above has to take into account whether the translation is "from" an RTL language or if it is "to" an RTL language. I packaged the solution in a single code file containing a static class (see the 'Background" section above for… background and credits). Download RTL.cs for your Windows Phone app (to see its usage in action download for FREE "The best translator app") Enjoy, and if you decide to improve on the code, feel free to share back with me… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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