code conversion - Page 674

Visual Studio & TFS – List of addins, extensions, patches and hotfixes – Latest and Greatest

- by terje

This post is a list of the addins and extensions we (I ) recommend for use in Inmeta. It’s coming up all the time – what to install, where are the download sites, etc etc, and thus I thought it better to post it here and keep it updated. The basics are Visual Studio 2010 connected to a Team Foundation Server 2010. The edition of Visual Studio I use is the Ultimate Edition, but as many stay with the Premium Edition I’ve marked the extensions which only works with the Ultimate with a . I’ve also split the group into Recommended (which means Required) and Optional (which means Recommended) and Nice to Have (which means Optional) . The focus is to get a setup which can be used for a complete coding experience for the whole ALM process. The Code Gallery is found either through the Tools/Extension Manager menu in Visual Studio or through this link. The ones to really download is the Recommended category. Then consider the Optional based on your needs. The list of course reflects what I use for my work , so it is by no means complete, and for some of the tools there are equally useful alternatives. The components directly associated with Visual Studio from Microsoft should be common, see the Microsoft column. Product Available on Code Gallery Latest Version License Rec/Opt/N2H Applicable to Microsoft TFS Power Tools Sept 2010 Complete setup msi on link, split into parts on CG Sept 2010 Free Recommended TFS integration Yes Productivity Power Tools Yes 10.0.11019.3 Free Recommended Coding Yes Code Contracts No 1.4.30903 Free Recommended Coding & Quality Yes Code Contracts Editor Extensions Yes 1.4.30903 Free Recommended Coding & Quality Yes VSCommands Yes 3.6.4.1 Lite version Free (Good enough) Nice to have Coding No Power Commands Yes 1.0.2.3 Free Recommended Coding Yes FeaturePack 2 No. MSDN Subscriber download under Visual Studio 2010 FP2 Part of MSDN Subscription Recommended Modeling & Testing Yes ReSharper No (Trial only) 5.1.1 Licensed Recommended Coding & Quality No dotTrace No 4.0.1 Licensed Optional Quality No NDepends No (Trial only) Licensed Optional Quality No tangible T4 editor Yes 1.950 Lite version Free (Good enough) Optional Coding (T4 templates) No Reflector No (Trial of Pro version only) 6.5 Lite version Free (Good enough) Recommended Coding/Investigation No LinqPad No 4.26.2 Licensed Nice to have Coding No Beyond Compare No 3.1.11 Licensed Recommended Coding/Investigation No Pex and Moles No (Moles available alone on CG) . Complete on MSDN Subscriber download under Visual Studio 2010 0.94.51023 Part of MSDN Subscription Optional Coding & Unit Testing Yes ApexSQL No Licensed Nice to have SQL No Some important Patches, upgrades and fixes Product Date Information Rec/Opt Applicable to Scrolling context menu KB2345133 and KB2413613 October 2010 Here Recommended Visual Studio MTM Patch October 2010 Here and here KB2387011 Recommended (if you use MTM) MTM Data warehouse fix June 2010 Iteration dates fails with SQL 2008 R2. KB2222312. Affects Burndown chart in Agile workbook Only for SQL 2008 R2 Server Upgrade 2008 to 2010 issue and hotfix August 2010 Fixes problems with labels and branches which are lost during upgrade. Apply before upgrade. Note: This has been fixed in the latest re-release of the TFS Server dated Aug 5th 2010. See here. Recommends downloading the latest bits. Only if upgrade from 2008 from earlier bits Server

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What I don’t like about WIF’s Claims-based Authorization

- by Your DisplayName here!

In my last post I wrote about what I like about WIF’s proposed approach to authorization – I also said that I definitely would build upon that infrastructure for my own systems. But implementing such a system is a little harder as it could be. Here’s why (and that’s purely my perspective): First of all WIF’s authorization comes in two “modes” Per-request authorization. When an ASP.NET/WCF request comes in, the registered authorization manager gets called. For SOAP the SOAP action gets passed in. For HTTP requests (ASP.NET, WCF REST) the URL and verb. Imperative authorization This happens when you explicitly call the claims authorization API from within your code. There you have full control over the values for action and resource. In ASP.NET per-request authorization is optional (depends on if you have added the ClaimsAuthorizationHttpModule). In WCF you always get the per-request checks as soon as you register the authorization manager in configuration. I personally prefer the imperative authorization because first of all I don’t believe in URL based authorization. Especially in the times of MVC and routing tables, URLs can be easily changed – but then you also have to adjust your authorization logic every time. Also – you typically need more knowledge than a simple “if user x is allowed to invoke operation x”. One problem I have is, both the per-request calls as well as the standard WIF imperative authorization APIs wrap actions and resources in the same claim type. This makes it hard to distinguish between the two authorization modes in your authorization manager. But you typically need that feature to structure your authorization policy evaluation in a clean way. The second problem (which is somehow related to the first one) is the standard API for interacting with the claims authorization manager. The API comes as an attribute (ClaimsPrincipalPermissionAttribute) as well as a class to use programmatically (ClaimsPrincipalPermission). Both only allow to pass in simple strings (which results in the wrapping with standard claim types mentioned earlier). Both throw a SecurityException when the check fails. The attribute is a code access permission attribute (like PrincipalPermission). That means it will always be invoked regardless how you call the code. This may be exactly what you want, or not. In a unit testing situation (like an MVC controller) you typically want to test the logic in the function – not the security check. The good news is, the WIF API is flexible enough that you can build your own infrastructure around their core. For my own projects I implemented the following extensions: A way to invoke the registered claims authorization manager with more overloads, e.g. with different claim types or a complete AuthorizationContext. A new CAS attribute (with the same calling semantics as the built-in one) with custom claim types. A MVC authorization attribute with custom claim types. A way to use branching – as opposed to catching a SecurityException. I will post the code for these various extensions here – so stay tuned.

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JustMock and Moles – A short overview for TDD alpha geeks

- by RoyOsherove

People have been lurking near my house, asking me to write something about Moles and JustMock, so I’ll try to be as objective as possible, taking in the fact that I work at Typemock. If I were NOT working at Typemock I’d write: JustMock JustMock tries to be Typemock at so many levels it’s not even funny. Technically they work the same and the API almost looks like it’s a search and replace work based on the Isolator API (awesome compliment!), but JustMock still has too many growing pains and bugs to be usable. Also, JustMock is missing alot of the legacy abilities such as Non public faking, faking all types and various other things that are really needed in real legacy code. Biggest thing (in terms of isolation integration) is that it does not integrate with other profilers such as coverage, NCover etc.) When JustMock comes out of beta, I feel that it should cost about half as Isolator costs, as it currently provides about half the abilities. Moles Moles is an addon of Pex and was originally only intended to work within the Pex environment. It started as a research project and now it’s a power-tool for VS (so it’s a separate install) Now it’s it’s own little stubbing framework. It’s not really an Isolation framework in the classic sense, because it does not provide any kind of API built in to verify object interactions. You have to use manual flags all on your own to do that. It generates two types of classes per assembly: Manual Stubs(just like you’d hand code them) and Mole classes. Each Mole class is a special API to change and break the behavior that the corresponding type. so MDateTime is how you change behavior for DateTime. In that sense the API is al over the place, and it can become highly unreadable and unmentionable over time in your test. Also, the Moles API isn’t really designed to deal with real Legacy code. It only deals with public types and methods. anything internal or private is ignored and you can’t change its behavior. You also can’t control static constructors. That takes about 95% of legacy scenarios out of the picture if that’s what you’re trying to use it for. Personally, I found it hard to get used to the idea of two parallel APIs for different abilities, and when to choose which. and I know this stuff. I would expect more usability from the API to make it more widely used. I don’t think that Moles in planning to go that route. Publishing it as an Isolation framework is really an afterthought of a tool that was design with a specific task in mind, and generic Isolation isn’t it. it’s only hope is DEQ – a simple code example that shows a simple Isolation API built on the Moles generic engine. Moles can and should be used for very simple cases of detouring functionality such a simple static methods or interfaces and virtual functions (like rhinomock and MOQ do). Oh, Wait. Ah, good thing I work at Typemock. I won’t write all that. I’ll just write: JustMock and Moles are great tools that enlarge the market space for isolation related technologies, and they prove that the idea of productivity and unit testing can go hand in hand and get people hooked. I look forward to compete with them at this growing market.

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PetaPoco with parameterised stored procedure and Asp.Net MVC

- by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

I have been playing with Micro ORMs as this is very interesting things that are happening in developer communities and I already liked the concept of it. It’s tiny easy to use and can do performance tweaks. PetaPoco is also one of them I have written few blog post about this. In this blog post I have explained How we can use the PetaPoco with stored procedure which are having parameters. I am going to use same Customer table which I have used in my previous posts. For those who have not read my previous post following is the link for that. Get started with ASP.NET MVC and PetaPoco PetaPoco with stored procedures Now our customer table is ready. So let’s Create a simple process which will fetch a single customer via CustomerId. Following is a code for that. CREATE PROCEDURE mysp_GetCustomer @CustomerId as INT AS SELECT * FROM [dbo].Customer where CustomerId=@CustomerId Now we are ready with our stored procedures. Now lets create code in CustomerDB class to retrieve single customer like following. using System.Collections.Generic; namespace CodeSimplified.Models { public class CustomerDB { public IEnumerable<Customer> GetCustomers() { var databaseContext = new PetaPoco.Database("MyConnectionString"); databaseContext.EnableAutoSelect = false; return databaseContext.Query<Customer>("exec mysp_GetCustomers"); } public Customer GetCustomer(int customerId) { var databaseContext = new PetaPoco.Database("MyConnectionString"); databaseContext.EnableAutoSelect = false; var customer= databaseContext.SingleOrDefault<Customer>("exec mysp_GetCustomer @customerId",new {customerId}); return customer; } } } Here in above code you can see that I have created a new method call GetCustomer which is having customerId as parameter and then I have written to code to use stored procedure which we have created to fetch customer Information. Here I have set EnableAutoSelect=false because I don’t want to create Select statement automatically I want to use my stored procedure for that. Now Our Customer DB class is ready and now lets create a ActionResult Detail in our controller like following using System.Web.Mvc; namespace CodeSimplified.Controllers { public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; return View(); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } public ActionResult Customer() { var customerDb = new Models.CustomerDB(); return View(customerDb.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult Details(int id) { var customerDb = new Models.CustomerDB(); return View(customerDb.GetCustomer(id)); } } } Now Let’s create view based on that ActionResult Details method like following. Now everything is ready let’s test it in browser. So lets first goto customer list like following. Now I am clicking on details for first customer and Let’s see how we can use the stored procedure with parameter to fetch the customer details and below is the output. So that’s it. It’s very easy. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more..Happy Programming

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Endless terrain in jMonkey using TerrainGrid fails to render

- by nightcrawler23

I have started to learn game development using jMonkey engine. I am able to create single tile of terrain using TerrainQuad but as the next step I'm stuck at making it infinite. I have gone through the wiki and want to use the TerrainGrid class but my code does not seem to work. I have looked around on the web and searched other forums but cannot find any other code example to help. I believe in the below code, ImageTileLoader returns an image which is the heightmap for that tile. I have modified it to return the same image every time. But all I see is a black window. The Namer method is not even called. terrain = new TerrainGrid("terrain", patchSize, 513, new ImageTileLoader(assetManager, new Namer() { public String getName(int x, int y) { //return "Scenes/TerrainMountains/terrain_" + x + "_" + y + ".png"; System.out.println("X = " + x + ", Y = " + y); return "Textures/heightmap.png"; } })); These are my sources: jMonkeyEngine 3 Tutorial (10) - Hello Terrain TerrainGridTest.java ImageTileLoader This is the result when i use TerrainQuad: , My full code: // Sample 10 - How to create fast-rendering terrains from heightmaps, and how to // use texture splatting to make the terrain look good. public class HelloTerrain extends SimpleApplication { private TerrainQuad terrain; Material mat_terrain; private float grassScale = 64; private float dirtScale = 32; private float rockScale = 64; public static void main(String[] args) { HelloTerrain app = new HelloTerrain(); app.start(); } private FractalSum base; private PerturbFilter perturb; private OptimizedErode therm; private SmoothFilter smooth; private IterativeFilter iterate; @Override public void simpleInitApp() { flyCam.setMoveSpeed(200); initMaterial(); AbstractHeightMap heightmap = null; Texture heightMapImage = assetManager.loadTexture("Textures/heightmap.png"); heightmap = new ImageBasedHeightMap(heightMapImage.getImage()); heightmap.load(); int patchSize = 65; //terrain = new TerrainQuad("my terrain", patchSize, 513, heightmap.getHeightMap()); // * This Works but below doesnt work* terrain = new TerrainGrid("terrain", patchSize, 513, new ImageTileLoader(assetManager, new Namer() { public String getName(int x, int y) { //return "Scenes/TerrainMountains/terrain_" + x + "_" + y + ".png"; System.out.println("X = " + x + ", Y = " + y); return "Textures/heightmap.png"; // set to return the sme hieghtmap image. } })); terrain.setMaterial(mat_terrain); terrain.setLocalTranslation(0,-100, 0); terrain.setLocalScale(2f, 1f, 2f); rootNode.attachChild(terrain); TerrainLodControl control = new TerrainLodControl(terrain, getCamera()); terrain.addControl(control); } public void initMaterial() { // TERRAIN TEXTURE material this.mat_terrain = new Material(this.assetManager, "Common/MatDefs/Terrain/HeightBasedTerrain.j3md"); // GRASS texture Texture grass = this.assetManager.loadTexture("Textures/white.png"); grass.setWrap(WrapMode.Repeat); this.mat_terrain.setTexture("region1ColorMap", grass); this.mat_terrain.setVector3("region1", new Vector3f(-10, 0, this.grassScale)); // DIRT texture Texture dirt = this.assetManager.loadTexture("Textures/white.png"); dirt.setWrap(WrapMode.Repeat); this.mat_terrain.setTexture("region2ColorMap", dirt); this.mat_terrain.setVector3("region2", new Vector3f(0, 900, this.dirtScale)); Texture building = this.assetManager.loadTexture("Textures/building.png"); building.setWrap(WrapMode.Repeat); this.mat_terrain.setTexture("slopeColorMap", building); this.mat_terrain.setFloat("slopeTileFactor", 32); this.mat_terrain.setFloat("terrainSize", 513); } }

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Things to install on a new machine – revisited

- by RoyOsherove

as I prepare to get a new dev machine at work, I write the things I am going to install on it, before writing the first line of code on that machine: Control Freak Tools: Everything Search Engine – a free and amazingly fast search engine for files all over your machine. (just file names, not inside files). This is so fast I use it almost as a replacement for my start menu, but it’s also great for finding those files that get hidden and tucked away in dark places on my system. Ever had a situation where you needed to see exactly how many copies of X.dll were hiding on your machine and where? this tool is perfect for that. Google Chrome. It’s just fast. very fast. and Firefox has become the IE of alternative browsers in terms of speed and memory. Don’t even get me started on IE. TweetDeck – get a complete view of what’s up on twitter Total Commander – my still favorite file manager, over five years now. KatMouse – will scroll any window your hovering on, even if it’s not an active window, when you use scroll the wheel on it. PowerIso or Daemon Tools – for loading up ISO images of discs LogMeIn Ignition – quick access to your LogMeIn computers for online Backup: JungleDisk or BackBlaze KeePass – save important passwords MS Security Essentials – free anti virus that’s quoest and doesn’t make a mess of your system. for home: uTorrent – a torrent client that can read rss feeds (like the ones from ezrss.it ) Camtasia Studio and SnagIt – for recording and capturing the screen, and then adding cool effects on top. Foxit PDF Reader – much faster that adove reader. Toddler Keys (for home) – for when your baby wants to play with your keyboard. Live Writer – for writing blog posts for Lenovo ThinkPads – Lenovo System Update – if you have a “custom” system instead of the one that came built in, this will keep all your lenovo drivers up to date. FileZilla – for FTP stuff All the utils from sysinternals, (or try the live-links) especially: AutoRuns for deciding what’s really going to load at startup, procmon to see what’s really going on with processes in your system Developer stuff: Reflector. Pure magic. Time saver. See source code of any compiled assembly. Resharper. Great for productivity and navigation across your source code FinalBuilder – a commercial build automation tool. Love it. much better than any xml based time hog out there. TeamCity – a great visual and friendly server to manage continuous integration. powerful features. Test Lint – a free addin for vs 2010 I helped create, that checks your unit tests for possible problems and hints you about it. TestDriven.NET – a great test runner for vs 2008 and 2010 with some powerful features. VisualSVN – a commercial tool if you use subversion. very reliable addin for vs 2008 and 2010 Beyond Compare – a powerful file and directory comparison tool. I love the fact that you can right click in windows exporer on any file and select “select left side to compare”, then right click on another file and select “compare with left side”. Great usability thought! PostSharp 2.0 – for addind system wide concepts into your code (tracing, exception management). Goes great hand in hand with.. SmartInspect – a powerful framework and viewer for tracing for your application. lots of hidden features. Crypto Obfuscator – a relatively new obfuscation tool for .NET that seems to do the job very well. Crypto Licensing – from the same company –finally a licensing solution that seems to really fit what I needed. And it works. Fiddler 2 – great for debugging and tracing http traffic to and from your app. Debugging Tools for Windows and DebugDiag - great for debugging scenarios. still wanting more? I think this should keep you busy for a while. Regulator and Regulazy – for testing and generating regular expressions Notepad 2 – for quick editing and viewing with syntax highlighting

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Silverlight Cream for March 28, 2010 -- #823

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Andy Beaulieu, Bill Reiss, jocelyn, Shawn Wildermuth, Cameron Albert, Shawn Oster, Alex Yakhnin, ondrejsv, Giorgetti Alessandro, Jeff Handley, SilverLaw, deepm, and Kyle McClellan. Shoutouts: If I've listed this before, it's worth another... Introduction to Prototyping with SketchFlow (twelve video series) and on the same page is Creating a Beehive Game with Behaviors in Blend 3 (ten video series) Shawn Oster announced his Slides + Code + Video from ‘An Introduction to Developing Applications for Microsoft Silverlight’ from MIX10 Tim Heuer announced earlier this week: Silverlight Client for Facebook updated for Silverlight 4 RC Nikhil Kothari announced the availability of his MIX10 Talk - Slides and Code András Velvárt backed up his great MIX09 effort with MIX10.Zoomery.com... everything in one DZ effort... thanks András! Andy Beaulieu posted his material for his Code Camp 13 in Waltham: Windows Phone: Silverlight for Casual Games From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MVVM - The Revolution Has Begun Michael Washington did an awesome tutorial on MVVM and Silverlight creating a simple Silverlight File Manager. The post has a link to the tutorial at CodeProject... great tutorial. Windows Phone 7 + Silverlight Performance Andy Beaulieu has a post up we should all bookmark... getting a handle on the graphics performance of our app on WP7. Great examples, and external links. Space Rocks game step 6: Keyboard handling Bill Reiss has a post up about keyboard input for the WP7 game he's building ... this is Episode 6 ... you're working along with him, right? Panoramic Navigation on Windows Phone 7 with No Code! jocelyn at InnovativeSingapore (I found this by way of Shawn's post), has a Panoramic Navigation template out there for WP7 for all of us to grab... great post about it too. My First WP7 Application Shawn Wildermuth has been playing with WP7 development and has his XBOX Game library app up on the emulator... all with source of course Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Game Cameron Albert built a web-based game called 'Shape Attack' and also did it for WP7 to compare the performance... check it out for yourself, but hey, it's game source for the phone... cool :) Changing the Onscreen Keyboard layout in Silverlight for Windows Phone using InputScope Shawn Oster has a cool post on changing the keyboard on WP7 to go along with what you're expecting the user to type... how cool is that?? Deep Zoom on WP7 Check out the quick work Alex Yakhnin made of putting DeepZoom on WP7... all source included. How to: Create a sketchy Siverlight GroupBox in Blend/SketchFlow ondrejsv has the xaml up to take Tim Greenfield's GroupBox control and insert it into SketchFlow. Silverlight / Castle Windsor – implementing a simple logging framework Giorgetti Alessandro posted about CastleWindsor for Silverlight, and a logging system inherited from LevelFilteredLogger in the absence of Log4Net. DomainDataSource in a ViewModel Jeff Handley responds to a common forum post about using DomainDataSource in a ViewModel. Read his comments on AutoLoad and ElementName Bindins. Digital Jugendstil TextEffect (Art Nouveau) - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a cool TagCloud demo and a UserControl he calls Art Nouveau up at the Expression Gallery... not for a business app, I don't think :) Configuring your DomainService for a Windows Phone 7 application deepm discusses RIA Services for WP7 and how to enable a WP7 app to communicate with a DomainService. Writing a Custom Filter or Parameter for DomainDataSource Kyle McClellan by way of Jeff Handley's blog, is discussing how to leverage the custom parameter types you defined in the previous version of RIA Services. 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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Databases in Source Control

- by Grant Fritchey

I’ve been working as a database professional for quite a long time. But originally, I was a developer. And I loved being a developer. There was this constant feedback loop of a job well done, your code compiled and it ran. Every time this happened successfully, you’d check it into source control. These days you have to add another step; the code passed all the tests, unit, line, regression, qa, whatever, then into source control it goes. As a matter of fact, when I first made the jump from developer to DBA/database developer/database professional, source control was the one thing I couldn’t believe was missing from the DBA toolbox. Come to find out, source control was only the beginning of what was missing from your standard DBAs set of skills. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disrespecting the DBA. They’re focused where they should be, on your production data. But there has to be a method for developing applications that include databases and the database side of that development and deployment process has long been lacking. This lack of development and deployment methodologies is a part of what has given rise to some of the wackier implementations of Object Relational Mapping tools, the NoSQL movement, and some of the other foul cursing that is directed towards databases, DBAs, and database development by application developers. Some of that is well earned. A lot isn’t. But it is a fact that database professionals, in general, do not have as sophisticated a model for managing development and deployment as application developers do. We could charge out and start trying to come up with our own standards and methods. I’m sure people have done exactly that. However, I’m lazy, and not terribly bright. Rather than try to invent a whole new process, I’m going to look to my developer roots and choose instead to emulate the developers. They’re sitting over there across the hall from me working with SCRUM/Agile/Waterfall/Object Driven/Feature Driven/Test Driven development processes that they’ve been polishing for years. What if I just started working on database development the same way they work on code development? Win! Ah, but now I have to have a mechanism for treating my database like application code. First, I need a method for getting it into source control. That’s where Red Gate’s SQL Source Control comes into the picture. SQL Source Control works within SQL Server Management Studio to connect your database objects up to the source control system of your choice. Right out of the box SQL Source Control can link to TFS, SVN or Vault. With a little work you can connect it to Git or just about any other source control system. With the ability to get my database into source control, a lot of possibilities for more direct integration with the application development teams open up.

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What's new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012 - part 2

- by nikolaosk

This is the second post in a series of posts titled "What's new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012".You can have a look at the first post in this series, here. Please find all my posts regarding VS 2012, here. In this post I will be looking into the various new features available in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012.I will be looking into the enhancements in the HTML Editor,CSS Editor and Javascript Editor.In order to follow along this post you must have Visual Studio 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 installed in your machine.Download and install VS 2012 using this link.My machine runs on Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 works just fine.I will work fine in Windows 7 as well so do not worry if you do not have the latest Microsoft operating system.1) Launch VS 2012 and create a new Web Forms application by going to File - >New Web Site - > ASP.Net Web Forms Site.2) Choose an appropriate name for your web site.3) I would like to point out the new enhancements in the CSS editor in VS 2012. In the Solution Explorer in the Content folder and open the Site.cssThen when I try to change the background-color property of the html element, I get a brand new handy color-picker. Have a look at the picture below Please note that the color-picker shows all the colors that have been used in this website. Then you can expand the color-picker by clicking on the arrows. Opacity is also supported. Have a look at the picture below4) There are also mobile styles in the Site.css .These are based on media queries.Please have a look at another post of mine on CSS3 media queries. Have a look at the picture below In this case when the maximum width of the screen is less than 850px there will be a new layout that will be dictated by these new rules. Also CSS snippets are supported. Have a look at the picture below I am writing a new CSS rule for an image element. I write the property transform and hit tab and then I have cross-browser CSS handling all of the major vendors.Then I simply add the value rotate and it is applied to all the cross browser options.Have a look at the picture below. I am sure you realise how productive you can become with all these CSS snippets. 5) Now let's have a look at the new HTML editor enhancements in VS 2012You can drag and drop a GridView web server control from the Toolbox in the Site.master file.You will see a smart tag (that was only available in the Design View) that you can expand and add fields, format the web server control.Have a look at the picture below 6) We also have available code snippets. I type <video and then press tab twice.By doing that I have the rest of the HTML 5 markup completed.Have a look at the picture below 7) I have new support for the input tag including all the HTML 5 types and all the new accessibility features.Have a look at the picture below 8) Another interesting feature is the new Intellisense capabilities. When I change the DocType to 4.01 and the type <audio>,<video> HTML 5 tags, Intellisense does not recognise them and add squiggly lines.Have a look at the picture below All these features support ASP.Net Web forms, ASP.Net MVC applications and Web Pages. 9) Finally I would like to show you the enhanced support that we have for Javascript in VS 2012. I have full Intellisense support and code snippets support.I create a sample javascript file. I type If and press tab. I type while and press tab.I type for and press tab.In all three cases code snippet support kicks in and completes the code stack. Have a look at the picture below We also have full Intellisense support.Have a look at the picture below I am creating a simple function and then type some sort of XML like comments for the input parameters. Have a look at the picture below. Then when I call this function, Intellisense has picked up the XML comments and shows the variables data types.Have a look at the picture below Hope it helps!!!

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Changing the action of a hyperlink in a Silverlight RichTextArea

- by Marc Schluper

The title of this post could also have been "Move over Hyperlink, here comes Actionlink" or "Creating interactive text in Silverlight." But alas, there can be only one. Hyperlinks are very useful. However, they are also limited because their action is fixed: browse to a URL. This may have been adequate at the start of the Internet, but nowadays, in web applications, the one thing we do not want to happen is a complete change of context. In applications we typically like a hyperlink selection to initiate an action that updates a part of the screen. For instance, if my application has a map displayed with some text next to it, the map would react to a selection of a hyperlink in the text, e.g. by zooming in on a location and displaying additional locational information in a popup. In this way, the text becomes interactive text. It is quite common that one company creates and maintains websites for many client companies. To keep maintenance cost low, it is important that the content of these websites can be updated by the client companies themselves, without the need to involve a software engineer. To accommodate this scenario, we want the author of the interactive text to configure all hyperlinks (without writing any code). In a Silverlight RichTextArea, the default action of a Hyperlink is the same as a traditional hyperlink, but it can be changed: if the Command property has a value then upon a click event this command is called with the value of the CommandParameter as parameter. How can we let the author of the text specify a command for each hyperlink in the text, and how can we let an application react properly to a hyperlink selection event? We are talking about any command here. Obviously, the application would recognize only a specific set of commands, with well defined parameters, but the approach we take here is generic in the sense that it pertains to the RichTextArea and any command. So what do we require? We wish that: As a text author, I can configure the action of a hyperlink in a (rich) text without writing code; As a text author, I can persist the action of a hyperlink with the text; As a reader of persisted text, I can click a hyperlink and the configured action will happen; As an application developer, I can configure a control to use my application specific commands. In an excellent introduction to the RichTextArea, John Papa shows (among other things) how to persist a text created using this control. To meet our requirements, we can create a subclass of RichTextArea that uses John's code and allows plugging in two command specific components: one to prompt for a command definition, and one to execute the command. Since both of these plugins are application specific, our RichTextArea subclass should not assume anything about them except their interface. public interface IDefineCommand { void Prompt(string content, // the link content Action<string, object> callback); // the method called to convey the link definition } public interface IPerformCommand : ICommand {} The IDefineCommand plugin receives the content of the link (the text visible to the reader) and displays some kind of control that allows the author to define the link. When that's done, this (possibly changed) content string is conveyed back to the RichTextArea, together with an object that defines the command to execute when the link is clicked by the reader of the published text. The IPerformCommand plugin simply implements System.Windows.Input.ICommand. Let's use MEF to load the proper plugins. In the example solution there is a project that contains rudimentary implementations of these. The IDefineCommand plugin simply prompts for a command string (cf. a command line or query string), and the IPerformCommand plugin displays a MessageBox showing this command string. An actual application using this extended RichTextArea would have its own set of commands, each having their own parameters, and hence would provide more user friendly application specific plugins. Nonetheless, in any case a command can be persisted as a string and hence the two interfaces defined above suffice. For a Visual Studio 2010 solution, see my article on The Code Project.

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WCF RIA Services DomainContext Abstraction Strategies–Say That 10 Times!

- by dwahlin

The DomainContext available with WCF RIA Services provides a lot of functionality that can help track object state and handle making calls from a Silverlight client to a DomainService. One of the questions I get quite often in our Silverlight training classes (and see often in various forums and other areas) is how the DomainContext can be abstracted out of ViewModel classes when using the MVVM pattern in Silverlight applications. It’s not something that’s super obvious at first especially if you don’t work with delegates a lot, but it can definitely be done. There are various techniques and strategies that can be used but I thought I’d share some of the core techniques I find useful. To start, let’s assume you have the following ViewModel class (this is from my Silverlight Firestarter talk available to watch online here if you’re interested in getting started with WCF RIA Services): public class AdminViewModel : ViewModelBase { BookClubContext _Context = new BookClubContext(); public AdminViewModel() { if (!DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool) { LoadBooks(); } } private void LoadBooks() { _Context.Load(_Context.GetBooksQuery(), LoadBooksCallback, null); } private void LoadBooksCallback(LoadOperation<Book> books) { Books = new ObservableCollection<Book>(books.Entities); } } Notice that BookClubContext is being used directly in the ViewModel class. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but if other ViewModel objects need to load books then code would be duplicated across classes. Plus, the ViewModel has direct knowledge of how to load data and I like to make it more loosely-coupled. To do this I create what I call a “Service Agent” class. This class is responsible for getting data from the DomainService and returning it to a ViewModel. It only knows how to get and return data but doesn’t know how data should be stored and isn’t used with data binding operations. An example of a simple ServiceAgent class is shown next. Notice that I’m using the Action<T> delegate to handle callbacks from the ServiceAgent to the ViewModel object. Because LoadBooks accepts an Action<ObservableCollection<Book>>, the callback method in the ViewModel must accept ObservableCollection<Book> as a parameter. The callback is initiated by calling the Invoke method exposed by Action<T>: public class ServiceAgent { BookClubContext _Context = new BookClubContext(); public void LoadBooks(Action<ObservableCollection<Book>> callback) { _Context.Load(_Context.GetBooksQuery(), LoadBooksCallback, callback); } public void LoadBooksCallback(LoadOperation<Book> lo) { //Check for errors of course...keeping this brief var books = new ObservableCollection<Book>(lo.Entities); var action = (Action<ObservableCollection<Book>>)lo.UserState; action.Invoke(books); } } This can be simplified by taking advantage of lambda expressions. Notice that in the following code I don’t have a separate callback method and don’t have to worry about passing any user state or casting any user state (the user state is the 3rd parameter in the _Context.Load method call shown above). public class ServiceAgent { BookClubContext _Context = new BookClubContext(); public void LoadBooks(Action<ObservableCollection<Book>> callback) { _Context.Load(_Context.GetBooksQuery(), (lo) => { var books = new ObservableCollection<Book>(lo.Entities); callback.Invoke(books); }, null); } } A ViewModel class can then call into the ServiceAgent to retrieve books yet never know anything about the DomainContext object or even know how data is loaded behind the scenes: public class AdminViewModel : ViewModelBase { ServiceAgent _ServiceAgent = new ServiceAgent(); public AdminViewModel() { if (!DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool) { LoadBooks(); } } private void LoadBooks() { _ServiceAgent.LoadBooks(LoadBooksCallback); } private void LoadBooksCallback(ObservableCollection<Book> books) { Books = books } } You could also handle the LoadBooksCallback method using a lambda if you wanted to minimize code just like I did earlier with the LoadBooks method in the ServiceAgent class. If you’re into Dependency Injection (DI), you could create an interface for the ServiceAgent type, reference it in the ViewModel and then inject in the object to use at runtime. There are certainly other techniques and strategies that can be used, but the code shown here provides an introductory look at the topic that should help get you started abstracting the DomainContext out of your ViewModel classes when using WCF RIA Services in Silverlight applications.

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SQL SERVER – MSQL_XP – Wait Type – Day 20 of 28

- by pinaldave

In this blog post, I am going to discuss something from my field experience. While consultation, I have seen various wait typed, but one of my customers who has been using SQL Server for all his operations had an interesting issue with a particular wait type. Our customer had more than 100+ SQL Server instances running and the whole server had MSSQL_XP wait type as the most number of wait types. While running sp_who2 and other diagnosis queries, I could not immediately figure out what the issue was because the query with that kind of wait type was nowhere to be found. After a day of research, I was relieved that the solution was very easy to figure out. Let us continue discussing this wait type. From Book On-Line: ?MSQL_XP occurs when a task is waiting for an extended stored procedure to end. SQL Server uses this wait state to detect potential MARS application deadlocks. The wait stops when the extended stored procedure call ends. MSQL_XP Explanation: This wait type is created because of the extended stored procedure. Extended Stored Procedures are executed within SQL Server; however, SQL Server has no control over them. Unless you know what the code for the extended stored procedure is and what it is doing, it is impossible to understand why this wait type is coming up. Reducing MSQL_XP wait: As discussed, it is hard to understand the Extended Stored Procedure if the code for it is not available. In the scenario described at the beginning of this post, our client was using third-party backup tool. The third-party backup tool was using Extended Stored Procedure. After we learned that this wait type was coming from the extended stored procedure of the backup tool they were using, we contacted the tech team of its vendor. The vendor admitted that the code was not optimal at some places, and within that day they had provided the patch. Once the updated version was installed, the issue on this wait type disappeared. As viewed in the wait statistics of all the 100+ SQL Server, there was no more MSSQL_XP wait type found. In simpler terms, you must first identify which Extended Stored Procedure is creating the wait type of MSSQL_XP and see if you can get in touch with the creator of the SP so you can help them optimize the code. If you have encountered this MSSQL_XP wait type, I encourage all of you to write how you managed it. Please do not mention the name of the vendor in your comment as I will not approve it. The focus of this blog post is to understand the wait types; not talk about others. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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Building a Mafia…TechFest Style

- by David Hoerster

It’s been a few months since I last blogged (not that I blog much to begin with), but things have been busy. We all have a lot going on in our lives, but I’ve had one item that has taken up a surprising amount of time – Pittsburgh TechFest 2012. After the event, I went through some minutes of the first meetings for TechFest, and I started to think about how it all came together. I think what inspired me the most about TechFest was how people from various technical communities were able to come together and build and promote a common event. As a result, I wanted to blog about this to show that people from different communities can work together to build something that benefits all communities. (Hopefully I've got all my facts straight.) TechFest started as an idea Eric Kepes and myself had when we were planning our next Pittsburgh Code Camp, probably in the summer of 2011. Our Spring 2011 Code Camp was a little different because we had a great infusion of some folks from the Pittsburgh Agile group (especially with a few speakers from LeanDog). The line-up was great, but we felt our audience wasn’t as broad as it should have been. We thought it would be great to somehow attract other user groups around town and have a big, polyglot conference. We started contacting leaders from Pittsburgh’s various user groups. Eric and I split up the ones that we knew about, and we just started making contacts. Most of the people we started contacting never heard of us, nor we them. But we all had one thing in common – we ran user groups who’s primary goal is educating our members to make them better at what they do. Amazingly, and I say this because I wasn’t sure what to expect, we started getting some interest from the various leaders. One leader, Greg Akins, is, in my opinion, Pittsburgh’s poster boy for the polyglot programmer. He’s helped us in the past with .NET Code Camps, is a Java developer (and leader in Pittsburgh’s Java User Group), works with Ruby and I’m sure a handful of other languages. He helped make some e-introductions to other user group leaders, and the whole thing just started to snowball. Once we realized we had enough interest with the user group leaders, we decided to not have a Fall Code Camp and instead focus on this new entity. Flash-forward to October of 2011. I set up a meeting, with the help of Jeremy Jarrell (Pittsburgh Agile leader) to hold a meeting with the leaders of many of Pittsburgh technical user groups. We had representatives from 12 technical user groups (Python, JavaScript, Clojure, Ruby, PittAgile, jQuery, PHP, Perl, SQL, .NET, Java and PowerShell) – 14 people. We likened it to a scene from a Godfather movie where the heads of all the families come together to make some deal. As a result, the name “TechFest Mafia” was born and kind of stuck. Over the next 7 months or so, we had our starts and stops. There were moments where I thought this event would not happen either because we wouldn’t have the right mix of topics (was I off there!), or enough people register (OK, I was wrong there, too!) or find an appropriate venue (hmm…wrong there, too) or find enough sponsors to help support the event (wow…not doing so well). Overall, everything fell into place with a lot of hard work from Eric, Jen, Greg, Jeremy, Sean, Nicholas, Gina and probably a few others that I’m forgetting. We also had a bit of luck, too. But in the end, the passion that we had to put together an event that was really about making ourselves better at what we do really paid off. I’ve never been more excited about a project coming together than I have been with Pittsburgh TechFest 2012. From the moment the first person arrived at the event to the final minutes of my closing remarks (where I almost lost my voice – I ended up being diagnosed with bronchitis the next day!), it was an awesome event. I’m glad to have been part of bringing something like this to Pittsburgh…and I’m looking forward to Pittsburgh TechFest 2013. See you there!

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Tuple in C# 4.0

- by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

C# 4.0 language includes a new feature called Tuple. Tuple provides us a way of grouping elements of different data type. That enables us to use it a lots places at practical world like we can store a coordinates of graphs etc. In C# 4.0 we can create Tuple with Create method. This Create method offer 8 overload like following. So you can group maximum 8 data types with a Tuple. Followings are overloads of a data type. Create(T1)- Which represents a tuple of size 1 Create(T1,T2)- Which represents a tuple of size 2 Create(T1,T2,T3) – Which represents a tuple of size 3 Create(T1,T2,T3,T4) – Which represents a tuple of size 4 Create(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5) – Which represents a tuple of size 5 Create(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6) – Which represents a tuple of size 6 Create(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7) – Which represents a tuple of size 7 Create(T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7,T8) – Which represents a tuple of size 8 Following are some example code for tuple. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace TupleExample { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var tuple = System.Tuple.Create<string, string, string>("Jalpesh", "P", "Vadgama"); Console.WriteLine(tuple); var t = System.Tuple.Create<int, string>(1, "Jalpesh"); Console.WriteLine(t); } } } Following is a output of above as expected. You can also access values insides Tuple with ItemN property. Where N represents particular number of item in tuple. Following is an example of it. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace TupleExample { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var tuple = System.Tuple.Create<string, string, string>("Jalpesh", "P", "Vadgama"); Console.WriteLine(tuple.Item1); Console.WriteLine(tuple.Item2); Console.WriteLine(tuple.Item3); } } } Here you can see I have printed items with Item1,Item2 and Item3 . Following is the output of above code. Even we can create a nested tuple also following is code for nested tuple. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace TupleExample { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var tuple = System.Tuple.Create(1,"Jalpesh",new Tuple<string,string>("P","Vadgama")); Console.WriteLine(tuple.Item1); Console.WriteLine(tuple.Item2); Console.WriteLine(tuple.Item3); } } } Following is a output above code as expected. As you can see there are unlimited possibilities we can do lots of things with Tuple. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more. Till then Happy Programming!!

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Creating dynamic breadcrumb in asp.net mvc with mvcsitemap provider

- by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

I have done lots breadcrumb kind of things in normal asp.net web forms I was looking for same for asp.net mvc. After searching on internet I have found one great nuget package for mvpsite map provider which can be easily implemented via site map provider. So let’s check how its works. I have create a new MVC 3 web application called breadcrumb and now I am adding a reference of site map provider via nuget package like following. You can find more information about MVC sitemap provider on following URL. https://github.com/maartenba/MvcSiteMapProvid So once you add site map provider. You will find a Mvc.SiteMap file like following. And following is content of that file. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <mvcSiteMap xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://mvcsitemap.codeplex.com/schemas/MvcSiteMap-File-3.0" xsi:schemaLocation="http://mvcsitemap.codeplex.com/schemas/MvcSiteMap-File-3.0 MvcSiteMapSchema.xsd" enableLocalization="true"> <mvcSiteMapNode title="Home" controller="Home" action="Index"> <mvcSiteMapNode title="About" controller="Home" action="About"/> </mvcSiteMapNode> </mvcSiteMap> So now we have added site map so now its time to make breadcrumb dynamic. So as we all know that with in the standard asp.net mvc template we have action link by default for Home and About like following. <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li> <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li> </ul> </div> Now I want to replace that with our sitemap provider and make it dynamic so I have added the following code. <div id="menucontainer"> @Html.MvcSiteMap().Menu(true) </div> That’s it. This is the magic code @Html.MvcSiteMap will dynamically create breadcrumb for you. Now let’s run this in browser. You can see that it has created breadcrumb dynamically without writing any action link code. So here you can see with MvcSiteMap provider we don’t have to write any code we just need to add menu syntax and rest it will do automatically. That’s it. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more till then happy programming.

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Deploying a SharePoint 2007 theme using Features

- by Kelly Jones

I recently had a requirement to update the branding on an existing Windows SharePoint Services (WSS version 3.0) site. I needed to update the theme, along with the master page. An additional requirement is that my client likes to have all changes bundled up in SharePoint solutions. This makes it much easier to move code from dev to test to prod and more importantly, makes it easier to undo code migrations if any issues would arise (I agree with this approach). Updating the theme was easy enough. I created a new theme, along with a two new features. The first feature, scoped at the farm level, deploys the theme, adding it to the spthemes.xml file (in the 12 hive –> \Template\layouts\1033 folder). Here’s the method that I call from the feature activated event: private static void AddThemeToSpThemes(string id, string name, string description, string thumbnail, string preview, SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { XmlDocument spThemes = new XmlDocument(); //use GetGenericSetupPath to find the 12 hive folder string spThemesPath = SPUtility.GetGenericSetupPath(@"TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\spThemes.xml"); //load the spthemes file into our xmldocument, since it is just xml spThemes.Load(spThemesPath); XmlNode root = spThemes.DocumentElement; //search the themes file to see if our theme is already added bool found = false; foreach (XmlNode node in root.ChildNodes) { foreach (XmlNode prop in node.ChildNodes) { if (prop.Name.Equals("TemplateID")) { if (prop.InnerText.Equals(id)) { found = true; break; } } } if (found) { break; } } if (!found) //theme not found, so add it { //This is what we need to add: // <Templates> // <TemplateID>ThemeName</TemplateID> // <DisplayName>Theme Display Name</DisplayName> // <Description>My theme description</Description> // <Thumbnail>images/mythemethumb.gif</Thumbnail> // <Preview>images/mythemepreview.gif</Preview> // </Templates> StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.Append("<Templates><TemplateID>"); sb.Append(id); sb.Append("</TemplateID><DisplayName>"); sb.Append(name); sb.Append("</DisplayName><Description>"); sb.Append(description); sb.Append("</Description><Thumbnail>"); sb.Append(thumbnail); sb.Append("</Thumbnail><Preview>"); sb.Append(preview); sb.Append("</Preview></Templates>"); root.CreateNavigator().AppendChild(sb.ToString()); spThemes.Save(spThemesPath); } } Just as important, is the code that removes the theme when the feature is deactivated: private static void RemoveThemeFromSpThemes(string id) { XmlDocument spThemes = new XmlDocument(); string spThemesPath = HostingEnvironment.MapPath("/_layouts/") + @"1033\spThemes.xml"; spThemes.Load(spThemesPath); XmlNode root = spThemes.DocumentElement; foreach (XmlNode node in root.ChildNodes) { foreach (XmlNode prop in node.ChildNodes) { if (prop.Name.Equals("TemplateID")) { if (prop.InnerText.Equals(id)) { root.RemoveChild(node); spThemes.Save(spThemesPath); break; } } } } } So, that takes care of deploying the theme. In order to apply the theme to the web, my activate feature method looks like this: public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb curweb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent) { curweb.ApplyTheme("myThemeName"); curweb.Update(); } } Deactivating is just as simple: public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb curweb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent) { curweb.ApplyTheme("none"); curweb.Update(); } } Ok, that’s the code necessary to deploy, apply, un-apply, and retract the theme. Also, the solution (WSP file) contains the actual theme files. SO, next is the master page, which I’ll cover in my next blog post.

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glsl shader to allow color change of skydome ogre3d

- by Tim

I'm still very new to all this but learning a lot. I'm putting together an application using Ogre3d as the rendering engine. So far I've got it running, with a simple scene, a day/night cycle system which is working okay. I'm now moving on to looking at changing the color of the skydome material based on the time of day. What I've done so far is to create a struct to hold the ColourValues for the different aspects of the scene. struct todColors { Ogre::ColourValue sky; Ogre::ColourValue ambient; Ogre::ColourValue sun; }; I created an array to store all the colours todColors sceneColours [4]; I populated the array with the colours I want to use for the various times of the day. For instance DayTime (when the sun is high in the sky) sceneColours[2].sky = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].ambient = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].sun = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); I've got code to work out the time of the day using a float currentHours to store the current hour of the day 10.5 = 10:30 am. This updates constantly and updates the sun as required. I am then calculating the appropriate colours for the time of day when relevant using else if( currentHour >= 4 && currentHour < 7) { // Lerp from night to morning Ogre::ColourValue lerp = Ogre::Math::lerp<Ogre::ColourValue, float>(sceneColours[GT_TOD_NIGHT].sky , sceneColours[GT_TOD_MORNING].sky, (currentHour - 4) / (7 - 4)); } My original attempt to get this to work was to dynamically generate a material with the new colour and apply that material to the skydome. This, as you can probably guess... didn't go well. I know it's possible to use shaders where you can pass information such as colour to the shader from the code but I am unsure if there is an existing simple shader to change a colour like this or if I need to create one. What is involved in creating a shader and material definition that would allow me to change the colour of a material without the overheads of dynamically generating materials all the time? EDIT : I've created a glsl vertex and fragment shaders as follows. Vertex uniform vec4 newColor; void main() { gl_FrontColor = newColor; gl_Position = ftransform(); } Fragment void main() { gl_FragColor = gl_Color; } I can pass a colour to it using ShaderDesigner and it seems to work. I now need to investigate how to use it within Ogre as a material. EDIT : I created a material file like this : vertex_program colour_vs_test glsl { source test.vert default_params { param_named newColor float4 0.0 0.0 0.0 1 } } fragment_program colour_fs_glsl glsl { source test.frag } material Test/SkyColor { technique { pass { lighting off fragment_program_ref colour_fs_glsl { } vertex_program_ref colour_vs_test { } } } } In the code I have tried : Ogre::MaterialPtr material = Ogre::MaterialManager::getSingleton().getByName("Test/SkyColor"); Ogre::GpuProgramParametersSharedPtr params = material->getTechnique(0)->getPass(0)->getVertexProgramParameters(); params->setNamedConstant("newcolor", Ogre::Vector4(0.7, 0.5, 0.3, 1)); I've set that as the Skydome material which seems to work initially. I am doing the same with the code that is attempting to lerp between colours, but when I include it there, it all goes black. Seems like there is now a problem with my colour lerping.

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Write TSQL, win a Kindle.

- by Fatherjack

So recently Red Gate launched sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com and showed the world how to embed your own scripts harmoniously in a third party tool to get the details that you want about your SQL Server performance. The site has a way to submit your own metrics and take a copy of the ones that other people have submitted to build a library of code to keep track of key metrics of your servers performance. There have been several submissions already but they have now launched a competition to provide an incentive for you to get creative and show us what you can do with a bit of TSQL and the SQL Monitor framework*. What’s it worth? Well, if you are one of the 3 winners then you get to choose either a Kindle Fire or $199. How do you win? Simply write the T-SQL for a SQL Monitor custom metric and the relevant description and introduction for it and submit it via sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com before 14th Sept 2012 and then sit back and wait while the judges review your code and your aims in writing the metric. Who are the judges and how will they judge the metrics? There are two judges for this competition, Steve Jones (Microsoft SQL Server MVP, co-founder of SQLServerCentral.com, author, blogger etc) and Jonathan Allen (um, yeah, Steve has done all the good stuff, I’m here by good fortune). We will be looking to rate the metrics on each of 3 criteria: how the metric can help with performance tuning SQL Server. how having the metric running enables DBA’s to meet best practice. how interesting /original the idea for the metric is. Our combined decision will be final etc etc ** What happens to my metric? Any metrics submitted to the competition will be automatically entered into the site library and become available for sharing once the competition is over. You’ll get full credit for metrics you submit regardless of the competition results. You can enter as many metrics as you like. How long does it take? Honestly? Once you have the T-SQL sorted then so long as you can type your name and your email address you are done : http://sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com/share-a-metric/ What can I monitor? If you really really want a Kindle or $199 (and let’s face it, who doesn’t? ) and are momentarily stuck for inspiration, take a look at these example custom metrics that have been written by Stuart Ainsworth, Fabiano Amorim, TJay Belt, Louis Davidson, Grant Fritchey, Brad McGehee and me to start the library off. There are some great pieces of TSQL in those metrics gathering important stats about how SQL Server is performing. * – framework may not be the best word here but I was under pressure and couldnt think of a better one. If you prefer try ‘engine’, or ‘application’? I don’t know, pick something that makes sense to you. ** – for the full (legal) version of the rules check the details on sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com or send us an email if you want any point clarified. Disclaimer – Jonathan is a Friend of Red Gate and as such, whenever they are discussed, will have a generally positive disposition towards Red Gate tools. Other tools are often available and you should always try others before you come back and buy the Red Gate ones. All code in this blog is provided “as is” and no guarantee, warranty or accuracy is applicable or inferred, run the code on a test server and be sure to understand it before you run it on a server that means a lot to you or your manager.

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Thinktecture.IdentityModel: Comparing Strings without leaking Timinig Information

- by Your DisplayName here!

Paul Hill commented on a recent post where I was comparing HMACSHA256 signatures. In a nutshell his complaint was that I am leaking timing information while doing so – or in other words, my code returned faster with wrong (or partially wrong) signatures than with the correct signature. This can be potentially used for timing attacks like this one. I think he got a point here, especially in the era of cloud computing where you can potentially run attack code on the same physical machine as your target to do high resolution timing analysis (see here for an example). It turns out that it is not that easy to write a time-constant string comparer due to all sort of (unexpected) clever optimization mechanisms in the CLR. With the help and feedback of Paul and Shawn I came up with this: Structure the code in a way that the CLR will not try to optimize it In addition turn off optimization (just in case a future version will come up with new optimization methods) Add a random sleep when the comparison fails (using Shawn’s and Stephen’s nice Random wrapper for RNGCryptoServiceProvider). You can find the full code in the Thinktecture.IdentityModel download. [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoOptimization)] public static bool IsEqual(string s1, string s2) { if (s1 == null && s2 == null) { return true; } if (s1 == null || s2 == null) { return false; } if (s1.Length != s2.Length) { return false; } var s1chars = s1.ToCharArray(); var s2chars = s2.ToCharArray(); int hits = 0; for (int i = 0; i < s1.Length; i++) { if (s1chars[i].Equals(s2chars[i])) { hits += 2; } else { hits += 1; } } bool same = (hits == s1.Length * 2); if (!same) { var rnd = new CryptoRandom(); Thread.Sleep(rnd.Next(0, 10)); } return same; }

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Algorithm to Find the Aggregate Mass of "Granola Bar"-Like Structures?

- by Stuart Robbins

I'm a planetary science researcher and one project I'm working on is N-body simulations of Saturn's rings. The goal of this particular study is to watch as particles clump together under their own self-gravity and measure the aggregate mass of the clumps versus the mean velocity of all particles in the cell. We're trying to figure out if this can explain some observations made by the Cassini spacecraft during the Saturnian summer solstice when large structures were seen casting shadows on the nearly edge-on rings. Below is a screenshot of what any given timestep looks like. (Each particle is 2 m in diameter and the simulation cell itself is around 700 m across.) The code I'm using already spits out the mean velocity at every timestep. What I need to do is figure out a way to determine the mass of particles in the clumps and NOT the stray particles between them. I know every particle's position, mass, size, etc., but I don't know easily that, say, particles 30,000-40,000 along with 102,000-105,000 make up one strand that to the human eye is obvious. So, the algorithm I need to write would need to be a code with as few user-entered parameters as possible (for replicability and objectivity) that would go through all the particle positions, figure out what particles belong to clumps, and then calculate the mass. It would be great if it could do it for "each" clump/strand as opposed to everything over the cell, but I don't think I actually need it to separate them out. The only thing I was thinking of was doing some sort of N2 distance calculation where I'd calculate the distance between every particle and if, say, the closest 100 particles were within a certain distance, then that particle would be considered part of a cluster. But that seems pretty sloppy and I was hoping that you CS folks and programmers might know of a more elegant solution? Edited with My Solution: What I did was to take a sort of nearest-neighbor / cluster approach and do the quick-n-dirty N2 implementation first. So, take every particle, calculate distance to all other particles, and the threshold for in a cluster or not was whether there were N particles within d distance (two parameters that have to be set a priori, unfortunately, but as was said by some responses/comments, I wasn't going to get away with not having some of those). I then sped it up by not sorting distances but simply doing an order N search and increment a counter for the particles within d, and that sped stuff up by a factor of 6. Then I added a "stupid programmer's tree" (because I know next to nothing about tree codes). I divide up the simulation cell into a set number of grids (best results when grid size ˜7 d) where the main grid lines up with the cell, one grid is offset by half in x and y, and the other two are offset by 1/4 in ±x and ±y. The code then divides particles into the grids, then each particle N only has to have distances calculated to the other particles in that cell. Theoretically, if this were a real tree, I should get order N*log(N) as opposed to N2 speeds. I got somewhere between the two, where for a 50,000-particle sub-set I got a 17x increase in speed, and for a 150,000-particle cell, I got a 38x increase in speed. 12 seconds for the first, 53 seconds for the second, 460 seconds for a 500,000-particle cell. Those are comparable speeds to how long the code takes to run the simulation 1 timestep forward, so that's reasonable at this point. Oh -- and it's fully threaded, so it'll take as many processors as I can throw at it.

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Triangle Line-Segment Intersection - detecting near misses

- by Will

A ray is a very poor approximation of a player! I think approximating a player with a sphere traveling a straight line each game tick will solve my problems of the player intersecting edges of scenery because their line segment missed it yet their own model is not infinitely thin... I have a 3D triangle and a line segment. I have the normal triangle-line-segment intersection code which I admit I have only a woolly grasp of. To model movement and compute collisions of the player I have to determine if a line passes within sphere-radius of a triangle. But I can find no convenient line near-miss intersection code! Here's the classic triangle intersection ### commented ### code with my starting assumptions: function triangle_ray_intersection(a,b,c,ray_origin,ray_dir,ray_radius) { // http://softsurfer.com/Archive/algorithm_0105/algorithm_0105.htm#intersect_RayTriangle%28%29 // get triangle edge vectors and plane normal var u = vec3_sub(b,a); var v = vec3_sub(c,a); var n = vec3_cross(u,v); if(n[0]==0 && n[1]==0 && n[2]==0) return null; // triangle is degenerate var w0 = vec3_sub(ray_origin,a); var j = vec3_dot(n,ray_dir); if(Math.abs(j) < 0.00000001) { //### if parallel, might still pass within ray_radius of it return null; // parallel, disjoint or on plane } var i = -vec3_dot(n,w0); // get intersect point of ray with triangle plane var k = i / j; if(k < 0.0) return null; // ray goes away from triangle //### as its a line segment, k > 1+ray_radius means no intersect var hit = vec3_add(ray_origin,vec3_scale(ray_dir,k)); // intersect point of ray and plane // is I inside T? //### here I'm a bit lost; this is presumably computing barycentric coordinates? var uu = vec3_dot(u,u); var uv = vec3_dot(u,v); var vv = vec3_dot(v,v); var w = vec3_sub(hit,a); var wu = vec3_dot(w,u); var wv = vec3_dot(w,v); var D = uv * uv - uu * vv; var s = (uv * wv - vv * wu) / D; //### therefore, compute if its within ray_radius scaled to the 0..1 of barycentric coordinates? if(s<0.0 || s>1.0) return null; // I is outside T var t = (uv * wu - uu * wv) / D; if(t<0.0 || (s+t)>1.0) return null; // I is outside T //### finally, if it passses a barycentric test it might still be too far //### to a point; must check that its distance from a corner is within ray_radius too if more than one barycentric coord is >1 //### so we have rounded corners... return [hit,n]; // I is in T } Given the distance between the point of plane intersection and each corner, I ought to be able to determine distance at world scale of how far beyond the edge - beyond 1.0 in barycentric coordinates for each axis - that point is... At this point my head explodes! Is this the right track? What's the actual code? UPDATE: you can earn 100 pts on SO if you answer this question there...! How can you determine if a line segment passes within some distance of a triangle?

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F# in ASP.NET, mathematics and testing

- by DigiMortal

Starting from Visual Studio 2010 F# is full member of .NET Framework languages family. It is functional language with syntax specific to functional languages but I think it is time for us also notice and study functional languages. In this posting I will show you some examples about cool things other people have done using F#. F# and ASP.NET As I am ASP/ASP.NET MVP I am – of course – interested in how people use different languages and technologies with ASP.NET. C# MVP Tomáš Petrícek writes about developing ASP.NET MVC applications using F#. He also shows how to use LINQ To SQL in F# (using F# PowerPack) and provides sample solution and Visual Studio 2010 template for F# MVC web applications. You may also find interesting how you can create controllers in F#. Excellent work, Tomáš! Vladimir Matveev has interesting example about how to use F# and ApplicationHost class to process ASP.NET requests ouside of IIS. This is simple and very straight-forward example and I strongly suggest you to take a look at it. Very cool example is project Strom in Codeplex. Storm is web services testing tool that is fully written on F#. Take a look at this site because Codeplex offers also source code besides binaries. Math Functional languages are strong in fields like mathematics and physics. When I wrote my C# example about BigInteger class I found out that recursive version of Fibonacci algorithm in C# is not performing well. In same time I made same experiment on F# and in F# there were no performance problems with recursive version. You can find F# version of Fibonacci algorithm from Bob Palmer’s blog posting Fibonacci numbers in F#. Although golden spiral is useful for solving many problems I looked for some practical code example and found one. Kean Walmsley published in his Through the Interface blog very interesting posting Creating Fibonacci spirals in AutoCAD using F#. There are also other cool examples you may be interested in. Using numerical components by Extreme Optimization it is possible to make some numerical integration (quadrature method) using F# (also C# example is available). fsharp.it introduces factorials calculation on F#. Robert Pickering has made very good work on programming The Game of Life in Silverlight and F# – I definitely suggest you to try out this example as it is very illustrative too. Who wants something more complex may take a look at Newton basin fractal example in F# by Jonathan Birge. Testing After some searching and surfing I found out that there is almost everything available for F# to write tests and test your F# code. FsCheck - FsCheck is a port of Haskell's QuickCheck. Important parts of the manual for using FsCheck is almost literally "adapted" from the QuickCheck manual and paper. Any errors and omissions are entirely my responsibility. FsTest - This project is designed to Language Oriented Programming constructs around unit testing and behavior testing in F#. The goal of this project is to create a Domain Specific Language for testing F# code in a way that makes sense for functional programming. FsUnit - FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework. xUnit.NET - xUnit.net is a developer testing framework, built to support Test Driven Development, with a design goal of extreme simplicity and alignment with framework features. It is compatible with .NET Framework 2.0 and later, and offers several runners: console, GUI, MSBuild, and Visual Studio integration via TestDriven.net, CodeRush Test Runner and Resharper. It also offers test project integration for ASP.NET MVC. Getting started Well, as a first thing you need Visual Studio 2010. Then take a look at these resources: F# samples @ MSDN Microsoft F# Developer Center @ MSDN F# Language Reference @ MSDN F# blog F# forums Real World Functional Programming: With Examples in F# and C# (Amazon) Happy F#-ing! :)

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Autoscaling in a modern world…. last chapter

- by Steve Loethen

As we all know as coders, things like logging are never important. Our code will work right the first time. So, you can understand my surprise when the first time I deployed the autoscaling worker role to the actual Azure fabric, it did not scale. I mean, it worked on my machine. How dare the datacenter argue with that. So, how did I track down the problem? (turns out, it was not so much code as lack of the right certificate) When I ran it local in the developer fabric, I was able to see a wealth of information. Lots of periodic status info every time the autoscalar came around to check on my rules and decide to act or not. But that information was not making it to Azure storage. The diagnostics were not being transferred to where I could easily see and use them to track down why things were not being cooperative. After a bit of digging, I discover the problem. You need to add a bit of extra configuration code to get the correct information stored for you. I added the following to my app.config: Code Snippet <system.diagnostics> <sources> <source name="Autoscaling General"switchName="SourceSwitch" switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" > <listeners> <add name="AzureDiag" /> <remove name="Default"/> </listeners> </source> <source name="Autoscaling Updates"switchName="SourceSwitch" switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" > <listeners> <add name="AzureDiag" /> <remove name="Default"/> </listeners> </source> </sources> <switches> <add name="SourceSwitch" value="Verbose, Information, Warning, Error, Critical" /> </switches> <sharedListeners> <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiag"/> </sharedListeners> <trace> <listeners> <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener,Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiagnostics"> <filter type="" /> </add> </listeners> </trace> </system.diagnostics> Suddenly all the rich tracing info I needed was filling up my storage account. After a few cycles of trying to attempting to scale, I identified the cert problem, uploaded a correct certificate, and away it went. I hope this was helpful.

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In GLSL is it possible to offset vertices based on height map colour?

- by Rob

I am attempting to generate some terrain based upon a heightmap. I have generated a 32 x 32 grid and a corresponding height map - In my vertex shader I am trying to offset the position of the Y axis based upon the colour of the heightmap, white vertices being higher than black ones. //Vertex Shader Code #version 330 uniform mat4 modelMatrix; uniform mat4 viewMatrix; uniform mat4 projectionMatrix; uniform sampler2D heightmap; layout (location=0) in vec4 vertexPos; layout (location=1) in vec4 vertexColour; layout (location=3) in vec2 vertexTextureCoord; layout (location=4) in float offset; out vec4 fragCol; out vec4 fragPos; out vec2 fragTex; void main() { // Retreive the current pixel's colour vec4 hmColour = texture(heightmap,vertexTextureCoord); // Offset the y position by the value of current texel's colour value ? vec4 offset = vec4(vertexPos.x , vertexPos.y + hmColour.r, vertexPos.z , 1.0); // Final Position gl_Position = projectionMatrix * viewMatrix * modelMatrix * offset; // Data sent to Fragment Shader. fragCol = vertexColour; fragPos = vertexPos; fragTex = vertexTextureCoord; } However the code I have produced only creates a grid with none of the y vertices higher than any others. This is the C++ code that generates the grid and texture co-orientates which I believe to be correct as the texture is mapped to the grid, hence the white blob in the middle. The grid-lines are generated in the fragment shader, sorry for any confusion. I have tried multiplying the r value of hmColour by 1000 unfortunately that had no effect. The only other problem it could be is that the texture coordinate data is incorrect ? for (int z = 0; z < MAP_Z ; z++) { for(int x = 0; x < MAP_X ; x++) { //Generate Vertex Buffer vertexData[iVertex++] = float (x) * MAP_X; vertexData[iVertex++] = 0; vertexData[iVertex++] = -(float) (z) * MAP_Z; //Colour Buffer NOT NEEDED colourData[iColour++] = 255.0f; // R colourData[iColour++] = 1.0f; // G colourData[iColour++] = 0.0f; // B //Texture Buffer textureData[iTexture++] = (float ) x * (1.0f / MAP_X); textureData[iTexture++] = (float ) z * (1.0f / MAP_Z); } } The heightmap texture I am trying to use appears like so (without grid-lines). This is the corresponding fragment shader // Fragment Shader Code #version 330 uniform sampler2D hmTexture; layout (location=0) out vec4 fragColour; in vec2 fragTex; in vec4 pos; void main(void) { vec2 line = fragTex * 32; // Without Gridlines fragColour = texture(hmTexture,fragTex); // With grid lines // + mix(vec4(0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0), vec4(1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0), // smoothstep(0.05,fract(line.y), 0.99) * smoothstep(0.05,fract(line.x),0.99)); }

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Silverlight Cream for March 08, 2011 -- #1056

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Joost van Schaik, Manas Patnaik, Kevin Hoffman, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata, Dhananjay Kumar, Dennis Delimarsky, Samuel Jack, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jfo. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How I let the trees grow" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior" Joost van Schaik Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 from last week posted, plus the ECOContest is ready to be voted on: SilverlightShow for Feb 28 - March 06, 2011 Drew DeVault is a young man involved with the Microsoft Student Insiders. He gave a WP7 presentation at RMTT and has posted his material: Post-Session: Windows Phone 7 @ RMTT Rui Marinho has an app in the ECO Contest called Forest Findr. is based on the BIng Map Control for silverlight and Sql Spatial data, and helps you find Forests and get geolocated pictures and wikipedia information, and has a post up with a bunch of info on it here: Forest Findr. my entry on the SilverlightShow EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior Joost van Schaik has a behavior that makes *anything* draggable and 'flickable' in WP7 ... read the intro, scroll to the bottom to watch the demo, and then grab up the code... cool stuff, Joost! Data Aggregation Using Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4 Manas Patnaik sent me a link to his blog, and it appears he's got lots of Silverlight goodness out there so you'll be hearing more about him. This first post is on the Presentation Model in RIA and Silverlight 4... good discussion, diagrams and code... good job, Manas! WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Advanced UI Kevin Hoffman has part 3 of an ambitious 12-part tutorial series up on WP7 development ... this go-around is concentrating on Advanced UI - Panorama/Pivot controls, DataBinding, ObservableCollections, and Converters... whew! Sterling DB on top of Isolated Storage – 2 Jesse Liberty has part 2 of his Sterling series up... this time setting up the database in App.xaml so it can be used for dealing with tombstoning. Silverlight Charting: Formatting the Tick Marks Deborah Kurata's next chart tutorial is all about showing you how to continue to dress up your charts.. this time by formatting the tick marks... if you don't know what that is... check out the first image in the post. Stored Procedure in WCF Data Service Dhananjay Kumar has a very nice tutorial up on using a stored proc with WCF Data Services... I happen to know someone working on just that at this time. If you have this in mind, here's a step-by-step guide to getting it done. Windows Phone 7 – Episode 5 – Pages Dennis Delimarsky has part 5 of his WP7 tutorial series up and is discussing Pages in this 17 minute video. Unpacking Simon Squared: My mini framework-independent animation library Samuel Jack has not only Open-Sourced the WP7 game he built and blogged about, but he's now explaining some of the structure of the game in posts such as this one about the animation library he wrote that his game is built on. How I let the trees grow Peter Kuhn shares with us the code he used for the tree animation in his ECO Contest entry. There's a lot to learn in this post about performance ... the fully-animated tree has about 20K elements... 5K branches and 20K leaves... check it out. WP7 ToastPrompt in depth WindowsPhoneGeek takes a deep dive into the ToastPrompt control in the Coding4fun Toolkit... everything you need to completely use the control including sample code. Beware the loaded event Jfo talks about another frustration point she had with WP7 development, and that is around the use of the loaded event... read these tips from someone that's been there. 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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