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• Microsoft Channel 9 Interviews Mei Liang to Introduce Sample Browser Extension for Visual Studio 2012 and 2010

  - by Jialiang

  This morning, Microsoft Channel 9 interviewed Mei Liang - Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - to introduce the newest Sample Browser extension for Visual Studio 2012 &2010.   This extension provides a way for developers to search and download more than 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio, including over 700 Windows 8 samples and more than 1000 All-In-One Code Framework customer-driven code samples. Mei shows us not only the extension, but also the standalone version of the Sample Browser.   http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Sample-Browser-Visual-Studio-Extension   Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, working in close partnership with the Visual Studio product team and MSDN Samples Gallery, developed the Sample Browser extension for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010.  As an effort to evolve the code sample use experience and improve developers' productivity, the Sample Browser allows programmers to search, download and open over 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio with just a few simple clicks.  If no existing code sample can meet the needs, developers can even request a code sample easily from Microsoft thanks to the free “Sample Request Service” offered by Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.  Through innovations, the teams hope to put the power of tens of thousands of code samples at developers’ fingertips. In short 3 months, the Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension has been installed by 100K global users.  It is also selected as one of the six most highly regarded and commonly used tools for Visual Studio that will make your programming experience feel like never before.   Got to love the All-In-One Code Framework team! You guys know this is THE go to source for code samples. Get this extension and you'll never need to leave VS2012 (well except for bathroom trips, but that's TMI anyway... ;) Read More... From: Greg Duncan (Author of CoolThingOfTheDay) 9/6/2011 12:00 AM The one software design pattern that I have used in just about every application I’ve written is “cut-and-paste,” so the new “Sample Browser” – read sample as a noun not an adjective – is a great boon to my productivity. Read More... From: Jim O'Neil (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) 9/28/2011 12:00 AM Install: http://aka.ms/samplebrowservsx Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework also offers the standalone version of Sample Browser.   The standalone version is particularly useful to Visual Studio Express edition or Visual Studio 2008 users, who cannot install the Sample Browser Visual Studio extension.   From Grassroots’ Passion for Developers to the Innovation of Sample Browser This Sample Browser has come a very long way improving the code sample use experience.  The history can be traced back to a grass-root innovation three years ago.   In early 2009, a few MSDN forum support engineers observed that lots of developers were struggling to work in Visual Studio without adequate code samples. Programming tasks seem harder than they should be when you only read through the documentation.  Just a couple of lines of sample code could answer a lot of questions.   They had a brilliant idea: What if we produce code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks in forums, social networks and support incidents, and then aggregate all our sample code in a one-stop library to benefit developers?  And what if developers can request code samples directly from Microsoft, free of charge?  This small group of grassroots at Microsoft devoted their nights and weekends to prototyping such a customer-driven code sample library.  This simple idea eventually turned into “Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework”, aka. OneCode.  With the support from more and more passionate developers at Microsoft and the leaders in the Community and Online Support team and Microsoft Commercial Technical Services (CTS), the idea has become a continually growing library with over 1000 customer-driven code samples covering almost all Microsoft development technologies.  These code samples originated from developers’ common pains and needs should be able to help many developers.  However, if developers cannot easily discover the code samples, the effort would still be in vain.  So in early 2010, the team started the idea of Sample Browser to ease the discovery and access of these samples.  In just two months, the first version of Sample Browser was finished and released by a passionate developer.  It was a very simple application, only supporting the basic sample offline search.  Users had to download the whole 100MB sample package containing all samples first, and run the Sample Browser to search locally.   Though developers could not search and download samples on-demand, this simple application laid a solid foundation for the team’s continuous innovations of Sample Browsing experience. In 2011, MSDN Samples Gallery had a big refresh.  The online sample experience was brought to a new level thanks to its PM Steven Wilssens and the gallery team’s effort.  Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Team saw the opportunity to realize the “on-demand” sample search and download feature with the new gallery.  The two teams formed a strong partnership to upload all the customer-driven code samples to MSDN Samples Gallery, and released the new version of Sample Browser to support “on-demand” sample downloading in April, 2011.  Mei Liang, the Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, was interviewed by Channel 9 to demo the Sample Browser.  Customers love the effort and the innovation!!  This can be clearly seen from the user comments in the publishing page.   It was very encouraging to the team of All-In-One Code Framework. The team continues innovating and evolving the Sample Browser.  They found the Visual Studio product team this time, and integrated the Sample Browsing experience into the latest Visual Studio 2012.  The newly released Sample Browser Visual Studio extension makes good use of Visual Studio 2012 IDE such as the new Quick Launch bar, the code editor, the toolbar and menus to offer easy access to thousands of code samples from within the development environment.   The Visual Studio Senior Program Manager Lead - Anthony Cangialosi, the Program Manager - Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha, the MSDN Samples Gallery PM – Steven Wilssens, and the Visual Studio Senior Escalation Engineer - Ed Dore shared lots of insightful suggestions with the team.  Thanks to the brilliant cross-group collaboration inside Microsoft, tens of new features including “Local Language Support” and “Favorite Samples”, as well as a face-lifted user interface, were added to further enhance the user experience. Since the new Sample Browser Visual Studio extension was released, it has received over 100 thousand downloads and five-star ratings.  A customer told the team that he officially falls in LOVE with Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.   The Sample Browser Innovation for Developers Never Stops! The teams would never stop improving the Sample Browser for developers’ easier lives.   The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, Visual Studio and MSDN Samples Gallery teams are working closely to develop the next version of Sample Browser.  Here are the key functions in development or in discussion.  We hope to learn your feedback of the effort.  You can submit your suggestions to the official Visual Studio UserVoice site.  We look forward to hearing from you! 1) Offline Sample Search This is one of the top feature requests that we have received for Sample Browser.   The Sample Browser will support the offline search mode so that developers can search downloaded code samples when they do not have internet access.  This is particularly useful to developers in Enterprises with strict proxy settings. 2) Code Snippet Support and Visual Studio Editor Integration Today, the Sample Browser supports downloading and opening sample project.   However, when developers are searching for code samples, a better user experience would be to see the code snippets in the search result first.  Developers can quickly decide if the code snippet is relevant.   They can also drag and drop the code snippet into the Visual Studio Editor to solve some simple programming tasks.  If developers want to learn more about the sample, they can then choose to download the sample project and open it in Visual Studio. 3) Enterprise Sample Sharing and Searching Large enterprises have many code samples for their own internal tools and APIs that are not appropriate to be shared publicly in MSDN Samples Gallery.   In that case, today’s Sample Browser and MSDN Samples Gallery cannot help these Enterprise developers.  The idea is to create a Code Sample Repository in TFS, and provide an additional Visual Studio extension for Enterprise developers to quickly share code samples to TFS.  The Sample Browser can be configured to connect to the TFS Code Sample Repository to search for and download code samples.  This would potentially enable the Enterprise developers to be more productive. 4) Windows Store Sample Browser With the upcoming release of Windows RT and Microsoft Surface, developers are facing a completely new world of application platform.   Not like laptop, people would often use Microsoft Surface in commute and in travel.  Internet may not be available.  Today’s Visual Studio cannot be installed and run on Windows RT, however, our enthusiastic developers would hope to spend every minute on code.  They love code!   The idea is to create a Windows Store version of Sample Browser. Search and download samples from the online Samples Gallery when the user has internet access. Browse the sample code files and learn the sample documentation of downloaded samples with or without internet access.   In addition to the "browse” function, the Sample Browser could further support “bookmark”, “learning notes”, “code review”, and “quick social sharing". Make full use of the new touch and Windows Store App UI to give developers a new “relaxing” code browsing and learning experience, anytime, anywhere. With Windows Store Sample Browser, developers can enjoy A new relaxing and enjoyable experience for developers to learn code samples You do not have to sit in front of desk and formally open Visual Studio to read code samples.  Many developers get sub-health due to staying in front of desk for a very long time.  With Windows RT, Microsoft Surface and this Windows Store Sample Browser combining with the online MSDN Samples Gallery, developers can sit in a sofa, relaxingly hold the tablet and enjoy to learn their beloved sample code with detailed documentation. Anytime, anywhere Whether you have internet access or not, whether you are at home, in office, or in commute/airplane, developers can always easily access and browse the sample code. Lightweight and fast Particularly for learning a small sample project, the Windows Store Sample Browser would be more lightweight and faster to open and browse the sample code. Please submit your feedback and suggestion to Visual Studio UserVoice.  We look forward to hearing from you and deliver a better and better sample use experience.  Happy Coding!   Special Thanks to People working behind the latest release of Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension and the great partnerships!

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• Cocos3d lighting problem

  - by Parasithe

  I'm currently working on a cocos3d project, but I'm having some trouble with lighting and I have no idea how to solve it. I've tried everything and the lighting is always as bad in the game. The first picture is from 3ds max (the software we used for 3d) and the second is from my iphone app. http://prntscr.com/ly378 http://prntscr.com/ly2io As you can see, the lighting is really bad in the app. I manually add my spots and the ambiant light. Here is all my lighting code : _spot = [CC3Light lightWithName: @"Spot" withLightIndex: 0]; // Set the ambient scene lighting. ccColor4F ambientColor = { 0.9, 0.9, 0.9, 1 }; self.ambientLight = ambientColor; //Positioning _spot.target = [self getNodeNamed:kCharacterName]; _spot.location = cc3v( 400, 400, -600 ); // Adjust the relative ambient and diffuse lighting of the main light to // improve realisim, particularly on shadow effects. _spot.diffuseColor = CCC4FMake(0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0); _spot.specularColor = CCC4FMake(0, 0, 0, 1); [_spot setAttenuationCoefficients:CC3AttenuationCoefficientsMake(0, 0, 1)]; // Another mechansim for adjusting shadow intensities is shadowIntensityFactor. // For better effect, set here to a value less than one to lighten the shadows // cast by the main light. _spot.shadowIntensityFactor = 0.75; [self addChild:_spot]; _spot2 = [CC3Light lightWithName: @"Spot2" withLightIndex: 1]; //Positioning _spot2.target = [self getNodeNamed:kCharacterName]; _spot2.location = cc3v( -550, 400, -800 ); _spot2.diffuseColor = CCC4FMake(0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0); _spot2.specularColor = CCC4FMake(0, 0, 0, 1); [_spot2 setAttenuationCoefficients:CC3AttenuationCoefficientsMake(0, 0, 1)]; _spot2.shadowIntensityFactor = 0.75; [self addChild:_spot2]; I'd really appreciate if anyone would have some tip on how to fix the lighting. Maybe my spots are bad? maybe it's the material? I really have no idea. Any help would be welcomed. I already ask some help on cocos2d forums. I had some answers but I need more help.

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• Making a Case For The Command Line

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/06/30/making-a-case-for-the-command-line.aspxI have had an idea percolating in the back of my mind for over a year now that I’ve just recently started to implement. This idea relates to building out “internal tools” to ease the maintenance and on-going support of a software system. The system that I currently work on is (mostly) web-based, so we traditionally we have built these internal tools in the form of pages within the app that are only accessible by our developers and support personnel. These pages allow us to perform tasks within the system that, for one reason or another, we don’t want to let our end users perform (e.g. mass create/update/delete operations on data, flipping switches that turn paid modules of the system on or off, etc). When we try to build new tools like this we often struggle with the level of effort required to build them. Effort Required Creating a whole new page in an existing web application can be a fairly large undertaking. You need to create the page and ensure it will have a layout that is consistent with the other pages in the app. You need to decide what types of input controls need to go onto the page. You need to ensure that everything uses the same style as the rest of the site. You need to figure out what the text on the page should say. Then, when you figure out that you forgot about an input that should really be present you might have to go back and re-work the entire thing. Oh, and in addition to all of that, you still have to, you know, write the code that actually performs the task. Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application! Plumbing Problems A former co-worker of mine, John Sonmez, always advocated the Unix philosophy for building internal tools: start with something that runs at the command line, and then build a UI on top of that if you need to. John’s idea has a lot of merit, and we tried building out some internal tools as simple Console applications. Unfortunately, this was often easier said that done. Doing a “File –> New Project” to build out a tool for a mature system can be pretty daunting because that new project is totally empty.  In our case, the web application code had a lot of of “plumbing” built in: it managed authentication and authorization, it handled database connection management for our multi-tenanted architecture, it managed all of the context that needs to follow a user around the application such as their timezone and regional/language settings. In addition, the configuration file for the web application  (a web.config in our case because this is an ASP .NET application) is large and would need to be reproduced into a similar configuration file for a Console application. While most of these problems are could be solved pretty easily with some refactoring of the codebase, building Console applications for internal tools still potentially suffers from one pretty big drawback: you’d have to execute them on a machine with network access to all of the needed resources. Obviously, our web servers can easily communicate the the database servers and can publish messages to our service bus, but the same is not true for all of our developer and support personnel workstations. We could have everyone run these tools remotely via RDP or SSH, but that’s a bit cumbersome and certainly a lot less convenient than having the tools built into the web application that is so easily accessible. Mix and Match So we need a way to build tools that are easily accessible via the web application but also don’t require the overhead of creating a user interface. This is where my idea comes into play: why not just build a command line interface into the web application? If it’s part of the web application we get all of the plumbing that comes along with that code, and we’re executing everything on the web servers which means we’ll have access to any external resources that we might need. Rather than having to incur the overhead of creating a brand new page for each tool that we want to build, we can create one new page that simply accepts a command in text form and executes it as a request on the web server. In this way, we can focus on writing the code to accomplish the task. If the tool ends up being heavily used, then (and only then) should we consider spending the time to build a better user experience around it. To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of building great user experiences into your system; we should all strive to provide the best UX possible to our end users. I’m only advocating this sort of bare-bones interface for internal consumption by the technical staff that builds and supports the software. This command line interface should be the “back end” to a highly polished and eye-pleasing public face. Implementation As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is an idea that I’ve had for awhile but have only recently started building out. I’ve outlined some general guidelines and design goals for this effort as follows: Text in, text out: In the interest of keeping things as simple as possible, I want this interface to be purely text-based. Users will submit commands as plain text, and the application will provide responses in plain text. Obviously this text will be “wrapped” within the context of HTTP requests and responses, but I don’t want to have to think about HTML or CSS when taking input from the user or displaying responses back to the user. Task-oriented code only: After building the initial “harness” for this interface, the only code that should need to be written to create a new internal tool should be code that is expressly needed to accomplish the task that the tool is intended to support. If we want to encourage and enable ourselves to build good tooling, we need to lower the barriers to entry as much as possible. Built-in documentation: One of the great things about most command line utilities is the ‘help’ switch that provides usage guidelines and details about the arguments that the utility accepts. Our web-based command line utility should allow us to build the documentation for these tools directly into the code of the tools themselves. I finally started trying to implement this idea when I heard about a fantastic open-source library called CLAP (Command Line Auto Parser) that lets me meet the guidelines outlined above. CLAP lets you define classes with public methods that can be easily invoked from the command line. Here’s a quick example of the code that would be needed to create a new tool to do something within your system: 1: public class CustomerTools 2: { 3: [Verb] 4: public void UpdateName(int customerId, string firstName, string lastName) 5: { 6: //invoke internal services/domain objects/hwatever to perform update 7: } 8: } This is just a regular class with a single public method (though you could have as many methods as you want). The method is decorated with the ‘Verb’ attribute that tells the CLAP library that it is a method that can be invoked from the command line. Here is how you would invoke that code: Parser.Run(args, new CustomerTools()); Note that ‘args’ is just a string[] that would normally be passed passed in from the static Main method of a Console application. Also, CLAP allows you to pass in multiple classes that define [Verb] methods so you can opt to organize the code that CLAP will invoke in any way that you like. You can invoke this code from a command line application like this: SomeExe UpdateName -customerId:123 -firstName:Jesse -lastName:Taber ‘SomeExe’ in this example just represents the name of .exe that is would be created from our Console application. CLAP then interprets the arguments passed in order to find the method that should be invoked and automatically parses out the parameters that need to be passed in. After a quick spike, I’ve found that invoking the ‘Parser’ class can be done from within the context of a web application just as easily as it can from within the ‘Main’ method entry point of a Console application. There are, however, a few sticking points that I’m working around: Splitting arguments into the ‘args’ array like the command line: When you invoke a standard .NET console application you get the arguments that were passed in by the user split into a handy array (this is the ‘args’ parameter referenced above). Generally speaking they get split by whitespace, but it’s also clever enough to handle things like ignoring whitespace in a phrase that is surrounded by quotes. We’ll need to re-create this logic within our web application so that we can give the ‘args’ value to CLAP just like a console application would. Providing a response to the user: If you were writing a console application, you might just use Console.WriteLine to provide responses to the user as to the progress and eventual outcome of the command. We can’t use Console.WriteLine within a web application, so I’ll need to find another way to provide feedback to the user. Preferably this approach would allow me to use the same handler classes from both a Console application and a web application, so some kind of strategy pattern will likely emerge from this effort. Submitting files: Often an internal tool needs to support doing some kind of operation in bulk, and the easiest way to submit the data needed to support the bulk operation is in a file. Getting the file uploaded and available to the CLAP handler classes will take a little bit of effort. Mimicking the console experience: This isn’t really a requirement so much as a “nice to have”. To start out, the command-line interface in the web application will probably be a single ‘textarea’ control with a button to submit the contents to a handler that will pass it along to CLAP to be parsed and run. I think it would be interesting to use some javascript and CSS trickery to change that page into something with more of a “shell” interface look and feel. I’ll be blogging more about this effort in the future and will include some code snippets (or maybe even a full blown example app) as I progress. I also think that I’ll probably end up either submitting some pull requests to the CLAP project or possibly forking/wrapping it into a more web-friendly package and open sourcing that.

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• Do most companies not know how to write software?

  - by SnOrfus

  If you're an active reader here, try to think about how many times you've heard (and even agreed) when someone here has told someone else to start looking for a new job. Personally, I've seen it a lot more than I expected: it's almost starting to sound cliche. I get that there are bound to be a number of companies that are bad at developing software or managing a software project, but it almost seems like it's getting worse and more frequent, maybe we're just hearing from them and not all of the places that have decent work atmospheres/conditions. So I ask: In your experience, and through your developer friends do you find that it is common that companies have bad development environments and if so: Why do you think it's common? What do you think could be done to fix it as a developer, as a manager, as an industry? Do you think it's improving?

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• Logical and Physical Modeling for Analytical Applications

  - by Dejan Sarka

  I am proud to announce that my first course for Pluralsight is released. The course title is Logical and Physical Modeling for Analytical Applications. Here is the description of the course. A bad data model leads to an application that does not perform well. Therefore, when developing an application, you should create a good data model from the start. However, even the best logical model can’t help when the physical implementation is bad. It is also important to know how SQL Server stores and accesses data, and how to optimize the data access. Database optimization starts by splitting transactional and analytical applications. In this course, you learn how to support analytical applications with logical design, get understanding of the problems with data access for queries that deal with large amounts of data, and learn about SQL Server optimizations that help solving these problems. Enjoy the course!

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• How one decision can turn web services to hell

  - by DigiMortal

  In this posting I will show you how one stupid decision may turn developers life to hell. There is a project where bunch of complex applications exchange data frequently and it is very hard to change something without additional expenses. Well, one analyst thought that string is silver bullet of web services. Read what happened. Bad bad mistake In the early stages of integration project there was analyst who also established architecture and technical design for web services. There was one very bad mistake this analyst made: All data must be converted to strings before exchange! Yes, that’s correct, this was the requirement. All integers, decimals and dates are coming in and going out as strings. There was also explanation for this requirement: This way we can avoid data type conversion errors! Well, this guy works somewhere else already and I hope he works in some burger restaurant – far away from computers. Consequences If you first look at this requirement it may seem like little annoying piece of crap you can easily survive. But let’s see the real consequences one stupid decision can cause: hell load of data conversions are done by receiving applications and SSIS packages, SSIS packages are not error prone and they depend heavily on strings they get from different services, there are more than one format per type that is used in different services, for larger amounts of data all these conversion tasks slow down the work of integration packages, practically all developers have been in hurry with some SSIS import tasks and some fields that are not used in different calculations in SSAS cube are imported without data conversions (by example, some prices are strings in format “1.021 $”). The most painful problem for developers is the part of data conversions because they don’t expect that there is such a stupid requirement stated and therefore they are not able to estimate the time their tasks take on these web services. Also developers must be prepared for cases when suddenly some service sends data that is not in acceptable format and they must solve the problems ASAP. This puts unexpected load on developers and they are not very happy with it because they can’t understand why they have to live with this horror if it is possible to fix. What to do if you see something like this? Well, explain the problem to customer and demand special tasks to project schedule to get this mess solved before going on with new developments. It is cheaper to solve the problems now that later.

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• Recover partition after GParted resizing interrupted by unexpected shutdown

  - by user84207

  As I was resizing my partitions using GParted, my laptop battery ran out, and the process was interrupted. Now, I am unable to mount the partition which I was trying to resize. I get the following error when I click to mount the partition on nautilus: Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda3, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so How can I go about recovering my data? Is there a safe way to attempt to force-mount the partition in question? Any help towards recovering my data is sincerely appreciated.

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• Project Corndog: Viva el caliente perro!

  - by Matt Christian

  During one of my last semesters in college we were required to take a class call Computer Graphics which tried (quite unsuccessfully) to teach us a combination of mathematics, OpenGL, and 3D rendering techniques.  The class itself was horrible, but one little gem of an idea came out of it.  See, the final project in the class was to team up and create some kind of demo or game using techniques we learned in class.  My friend Paul and I teamed up and developed a top down shooter that, given the stringent timeline, was much less of a game and much more of 3D objects floating around a screen. The idea itself however I found clever and unique and decided it was time to spend some time developing a proper version of our idea.  Project Corndog as it is tentatively named, pits you as a freshly fried corndog who broke free from the shackles of fair food slavery in a quest to escape the state fair you were born in.  Obviously it's quite a serious game with undertones of racial prejudice, immoral practices, and cheap food sold at high prices. The game itself is a top down shooter in the style of 1942 (NES).  As a delicious corndog you will have to fight through numerous enemies including hungry babies, carnies, and the corndog serial-killer himself the corndog eating champion!  Other more engaging and frighteningly realistic enemies await as the only thing between you and freedom. Project Corndog is being developed in Visual Studio 2008 with XNA Game Studio 3.1.  It is currently being hosted on Google code and will be made available as an open source engine in the coming months.

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• Why lock statements don't scale

  - by Alex.Davies

  We are going to have to stop using lock statements one day. Just like we had to stop using goto statements. The problem is similar, they're pretty easy to follow in small programs, but code with locks isn't composable. That means that small pieces of program that work in isolation can't necessarily be put together and work together. Of course actors scale fine :) Why lock statements don't scale as software gets bigger Deadlocks. You have a program with lots of threads picking up lots of locks. You already know that if two of your threads both try to pick up a lock that the other already has, they will deadlock. Your program will come to a grinding halt, and there will be fire and brimstone. "Easy!" you say, "Just make sure all the threads pick up the locks in the same order." Yes, that works. But you've broken composability. Now, to add a new lock to your code, you have to consider all the other locks already in your code and check that they are taken in the right order. Algorithm buffs will have noticed this approach means it takes quadratic time to write a program. That's bad. Why lock statements don't scale as hardware gets bigger Memory bus contention There's another headache, one that most programmers don't usually need to think about, but is going to bite us in a big way in a few years. Locking needs exclusive use of the entire system's memory bus while taking out the lock. That's not too bad for a single or dual-core system, but already for quad-core systems it's a pretty large overhead. Have a look at this blog about the .NET 4 ThreadPool for some numbers and a weird analogy (see the author's comment). Not too bad yet, but I'm scared my 1000 core machine of the future is going to go slower than my machine today! I don't know the answer to this problem yet. Maybe some kind of per-core work queue system with hierarchical work stealing. Definitely hardware support. But what I do know is that using locks specifically prevents any solution to this. We should be abstracting our code away from the details of locks as soon as possible, so we can swap in whatever solution arrives when it does. NAct uses locks at the moment. But my advice is that you code using actors (which do scale well as software gets bigger). And when there's a better way of implementing actors that'll scale well as hardware gets bigger, only NAct needs to work out how to use it, and your program will go fast on it's own.

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• How do you safely work around broken code? [closed]

  - by burnt1ce

  Once in a while, a co-worker will check-in bad code which blocks my application from initializing properly. To get around this problem quickly, I comment out the offending code. I then forget to uncomment the offending code at the time of my check-in, so I want to prevent this from happening again. Do you have any suggestions on how to: Disable bad code that stop you from working Prevent yourself from checking in unwanted changes? I'm currently using Visual Studio as my IDE and TFS as my source code repo.

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• How can I convince cowboy programmers to use source control?

  - by P.Brian.Mackey

  UPDATE I work on a small team of devs, 4 guys. They have all used source control. Most of them can't stand source control and instead choose not to use it. I strongly believe source control is a necessary part of professional development. Several issues make it very difficult to convince them to use source control: The team is not used to using TFS. I've had 2 training sessions, but was only allotted 1 hour which is insufficient. Team members directly modify code on the server. This keeps code out of sync. Requiring comparison just to be sure you are working with the latest code. And complex merge problems arise Time estimates offered by developers exclude time required to fix any of these problems. So, if I say nono it will take 10x longer...I have to constantly explain these issues and risk myself because now management may perceive me as "slow". The physical files on the server differ in unknown ways over ~100 files. Merging requires knowledge of the project at hand and, therefore, developer cooperation which I am not able to obtain. Other projects are falling out of sync. Developers continue to have a distrust of source control and therefore compound the issue by not using source control. Developers argue that using source control is wasteful because merging is error prone and difficult. This is a difficult point to argue, because when source control is being so badly mis-used and source control continually bypassed, it is error prone indeed. Therefore, the evidence "speaks for itself" in their view. Developers argue that directly modifying server code, bypassing TFS saves time. This is also difficult to argue. Because the merge required to synchronize the code to start with is time consuming. Multiply this by the 10+ projects we manage. Permanent files are often stored in the same directory as the web project. So publishing (full publish) erases these files that are not in source control. This also drives distrust for source control. Because "publishing breaks the project". Fixing this (moving stored files out of the solution subfolders) takes a great deal of time and debugging as these locations are not set in web.config and often exist across multiple code points. So, the culture persists itself. Bad practice begets more bad practice. Bad solutions drive new hacks to "fix" much deeper, much more time consuming problems. Servers, hard drive space are extremely difficult to come by. Yet, user expectations are rising. What can be done in this situation?

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• web server response code 500

  - by Bryan Kemp

  I realize that this may spur a religious discussion, but I discussed this with friends and get great, but conflicting answers and the actual documentation is of little help. What does the 500 series response codes mean from the webserver? Internal Server Error, but that is vague. My assumption is that it means that something bad happened to the server (file system corruption, no connection to the database, network issue, etc.) but not specifically a data driven error (divide by zero, record missing, bad parameter, etc). Something to note, there are some web client implementations (the default Android and Blackberry httpclients) that do not allow access to the html boddy if the server response is 500 so there is no way to determine what caused the issue from the client. What I have been been implementing recently is a web service that returns a json payload wrapped in a response object that contains more specific error information if it is data related, but the server response will be 200 since it finished the actual processing. Thoughts?

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• How do you safely comment out code in Visual Studio and TFS?

  - by burnt1ce

  Once in a while, a co-worker check-ins bad code and this blocks you from your application from initializing properly so you can continue doing your work. To get around this problem quickly, I've commented out the offending code. I accidentally to uncomment out the offending code at the time of check-in and I want to prevent this from happening again. Do you have a trick to 1) disable bad code that stop you from working 2) prevent yourself from checking in unwanted changes? I'm currently using Visual Studio as my IDE and TFS as my source code repo.

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• Shrink Partition on Production Server

  - by Campo

  SO our production server was only setup with one large partition. I have setup a standby server and properly partitioned it. Now the boss wants the production environment's partition shrunk. It is an HP DL380 G5 We have 4 hot swap drives in a raid 5. How best should I go about doing this. Seems like a bad idea to me. Should I use windows or HP to do the partitioning? What should I be aware of in a production environment? The idea is to put the site (Inetpub) on a separate partition instead of the C: drive. How much downtime should I expect? Is this a terrible idea? Anything else I have missed?

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• how to resize an encrypted logical volume?

  - by Nirmik

  I installed Ubuntu with encryption and LVM on my entire haddisk... Now I want to resize it. How do I do This... Following this link gave me errors on step 2 - How to resize a LVM partition? error ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sda5 e2fsck 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012) ext2fs_open2: Bad magic number in super-block e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks... e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda5 The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 what do I do?

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• What are tangible advantages to proper Unit Tests over Functional Test called unit tests

  - by Jackie

  A project I am working on has a bunch of legacy tests that were not properly mocked out. Because of this the only dependency it has is EasyMock, which doesn't support statics, constructors with arguments, etc. The tests instead rely on database connections and such to "run" the tests. Adding powermock to handle these cases is being shot down as cost prohibitive due to the need to upgrade the existing project to support it (Another discussion). My questions are, what are the REAL world tangible benifits of proper unit testing I can use to push back? Are there any? Am I just being a stickler by saying that bad unit tests (even if they work) are bad? Is code coverage just as effective?

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• Entity component system -> handling components that depend on one another

  - by jtedit

  I really like the idea of an entity component system and feel it has great flexibility, but have a question. How should dependent components be handled? I'm not talking about how components should communicate with other components they depend on, I have that sorted, but rather how to ensure components are present. For example, an entity cannot have a "velocity" component if it doesn't have a "position" component, in the same way it cant have an "acceleration" component if it doesn't have a "velocity" component. My first idea was every component class overrides an "onAddedToEntity(Entity ent)" function. Then in that function it checks that prerequisite components are also added to the entity, eg: struct EntCompVelocity() : public EntityComponent{ //member variables here void onAddedToEntity(Entity ent){ if(!ent.hasComponent(EntCompPosition::Id)){ ent.addComponent(new EntCompPosition()); } } } This has the nice property that if the acceleration component adds the velocity component, the velocity component will itself add the position component to the entity so dependency "trees" will sort themselves out. However my concern is if I do this components will silently be added with default values and, in the example of adding position, many entities will appear at the origin. Another idea was to simple have the "Entity.addComponent();" function return false if the component's prerequisite components aren't already on the entity, this would force you to manually add the position component and set its value before adding the velocity component. Finally I could simply not ensure a components prerequisite components are added, the "UpdatePosition" system only deals with entities with both a position and velocity component, so therefore adding a velocity component without having a position component wont be a problem (it wont cause crashes due to null pointer/etc), but it does mean entities will carry useless unused data if you add components but not their prerequisite components. Does anyone have experience with this problem and/or any of these methods to solve it? How did you solve the problem?

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• Configure IPv6 on your Linux system (Ubuntu)

  After the presentation on IPv6 at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series and some recent discussion on social media networks with other geeks and Linux interested IT people here in Mauritius, I thought that I should give it a try (finally) and tweak my local network infrastructure. Honestly, I have been to busy with contractual project work and it never really occurred to me to set up IPv6 in my LAN. Well, the following paragraphs are going to shed some light on those aspects of modern computer and network technology. This is the first article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. Let's embrace IPv6 The basic configuration on Linux is actually very simple as the kernel, operating system, and user-space programs support that protocol natively. If your system is ready to go for IP (aka: IPv4), then you are good to go for anything else. At least, I didn't have to install any additional packages on my system(s). We are going to assign a static IPv6 address to the system. Hence, we have to modify the definition of interfaces and check whether we have an inet6 entry specified. Open your favourite text editor and check the following entries (it should be at least similar to this): $ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces auto eth0# IPv4 configurationiface eth0 inet static  address 192.168.1.2  network 192.168.1.0  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.1.255# IPv6 configurationiface eth0 inet6 static  pre-up modprobe ipv6  address 2001:db8:bad:a55::2  netmask 64 Of course, you might have to adjust your interface device (eth0) or you might be interested to have multiple directives for additional devices (eth1, eth2, etc.). The auto instruction takes care that your device is enabled and configured during the booting phase. The use of the pre-up directive depends on your kernel configuration but in most scenarios this might be an optional line. Anyways, it doesn't hurt to have it enabled after all - just to be on the safe side. Next, either restart your network subsystem like so: $ sudo service networking restart Or you might prefer to do it manually with identical parameters, like so: $ sudo ifconfig eth0 inet6 add 2001:db8:bad:a55::2/64 In case that you're logged in remotely into your PC (ie. via ssh), it is highly advised to opt for the second choice and add the device manually. You can check your configuration afterwards with one of the following commands (depends on whether it is installed): $ sudo ifconfig eth0eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:21:5a:50:d7:94            inet addr:192.168.160.2  Bcast:192.168.160.255  Mask:255.255.255.0          inet6 addr: fe80::221:5aff:fe50:d794/64 Scope:Link          inet6 addr: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2/64 Scope:Global          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1 $ sudo ip -6 address show eth03: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qlen 1000    inet6 2001:db8:bad:a55::2/64 scope global        valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever    inet6 fe80::221:5aff:fe50:d794/64 scope link        valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever In both cases, it confirms that our network device has been assigned a valid IPv6 address. That's it in general for your setup on one system. But of course, you might be interested to enable more services for IPv6, especially if you're already running a couple of them in your IP network. More details are available on the official Ubuntu Wiki. Continue to configure your network to provide IPv6 address information automatically in your local infrastructure.

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• Performance Tuning and Query Optimisation–SQLBits Training Day

  - by simonsabin

  I will be doing a training day at SQLbits in April on Performance Tuning and Query Optimisation. This is the outline for the day. Its going to be an intense day, I look forward to seeing you there. To register go to http://www. sqlbits .com/information/registration.aspx . Places are limited so make sure you register soon. Outline of the day. Most database performance issues are due to a combination of bad queries, bad database design or poor indexing. All of them are related to each other. In this...(read more)

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• What naming anti-patterns exist?

  - by Billy ONeal

  There are some names, where if you find yourself reaching for those names, you know you've already messed something up. For example: XxxManager This is bad because a class should describe what the class does. If the most specific word you can come up with for what the class does is "manage," then the class is too big. What other naming anti-patterns exist? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not asking "what names are bad" -- that question is entirely subjective and there's no way to answer it. I'm asking, "what names indicate overall design problems with the system." That is, if you find yourself wanting to call a component Xyz, that probably indicates the component is ill concieved. Also note here that there are exceptions to every rule -- I'm just looking for warning flags for when I really need to stop and rethink a design.

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• Why are a seemingly disproportionate amount of programmers just, well, not nice?

  - by Macy Abbey

  Maybe it's just my personal experience, but I associate with varying different groups and types of people and it seems to me that an oddly large percentage of programmers I have encountered are "not nice" or for an attempt at a better definition: Condescending Snarky Negative in the way they talk about people If you have noticed the same thing, any theories as to why? Any suggestions on how to politely or not so politely let one of these programmers know how they are acting and suggest they correct it if they want to be perceived as professional one would want to work with? Or perhaps I've just come across a bad sample and there are bad seeds in every group of people one can name.

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• Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS USB not being detected after formatting with Startup Disk Creator

  - by Zach

  sudo fdisk -l lists the drive, however, I cannot find it in the file explorer. Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000d871e Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 486322175 243160064 83 Linux /dev/sda2 486324222 488396799 1036289 5 Extended /dev/sda5 486324224 488396799 1036288 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdb: 8195 MB, 8195480064 bytes 253 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1020 cylinders, total 16006797 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00027ae4 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 62 15999719 M 7999829 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) Manually mounting it produces this error message :~$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/external -ouiduid=1000,gid=1000,utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137 mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so Is the usb toast?

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• Unable to mount external hard drive

  - by arranjamesroche

  Basically I my 12.10 update crashed halfway through, so I've had to start again and put all my data onto an external HDD. It was all going fine until this came up : Error mounting /dev/sdb1 at /media/amy/CA47-8339: Command-line `mount -t "vfat" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush" "/dev/sdb1" "/media/amy/CA47-8339"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so When I tried to restore my info off the HDD. Now I'm stuck completely clueless as to how I'll get anything off the hard drive.

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• Transition from maintenance programming to design

  - by andrew wang

  What to do people do develop a design for a s/w for a given set of requirements? I like many people joined a Semiconductor MNC and got stuck in maintenance for quite a couple of years. My work was usually changing a lines of code for windows drivers supplied by my company or a couple of small script (style like) C programs for validating h/w. As a result I developed the bad habit of 'programming by coincidence'. I have not developed the ability for designing tools/programs from scratch. I was the only s/w member of the local team and thus some grunt work from the well established other site of the company came to be done by me. Now I have moved to a different company and thus finding developing from scratch very difficult. How do I unlearn my bad habit and develop this ability of designing s/w and then coding it ?

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• Transiltion from maintenance programing to design

  - by andrew wang

  What to do guys do develop a design for a s/w for a given set of requirements? I like many people joined a Semiconductor MNC and got stuck in maintenance for quite a couple of years. My work was usually changing a lines of code for windows drivers supplied by my company or a couple of small script (style like) C programs for validating h/w. As a result I developed the bad habit of 'programming by coincidence'. I have not developed the ability for designing tools/programs from scratch. I was the only s/w member of the local team and thus some grunt work from the well established other site of the company came to be done by me. Now I have moved to a different company and thus finding developing from scratch very difficult. How do I unlearn my bad habit and develop this ability of designing s/w and then coding it ?

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