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• Include weather information in ASP.Net site from weather.com services

  - by sreejukg

  In this article, I am going to demonstrate how you can use the XMLOAP services (referred as XOAP from here onwards) provided by weather.com to display the weather information in your website. The XOAP services are available to be used for free of charge, provided you are comply with requirements from weather.com. I am writing this article from a technical point of view. If you are planning to use weather.com XOAP services in your application, please refer to the terms and conditions from weather.com website. In order to start using the XOAP services, you need to sign up the XOAP datafeed. The signing process is simple, you simply browse the url http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html. The URL looks similar to the following. Click on the sign up button, you will reach the registration page. Here you need to specify the site name you need to use this feed for. The form looks similar to the following. Once you fill all the mandatory information, click on save and continue button. That’s it. The registration is over. You will receive an email that contains your partner id, license key and SDK. The SDK available in a zipped format, contains the terms of use and documentation about the services available. Other than this the SDK includes the logos and icons required to display the weather information. As per the SDK, currently there are 2 types of information available through XOAP. These services are Current Conditions for over 30,000 U.S. and over 7,900 international Location IDs Updated at least Hourly Five-Day Forecast (today + 4 additional forecast days in consecutive order beginning with tomorrow) for over 30,000 U.S. and over 7,900 international Location IDs Updated at least Three Times Daily The SDK provides detailed information about the fields included in response of each service. Additionally there is a refresh rate that you need to comply with. As per the SDK, the refresh rate means the following “Refresh Rate” shall mean the maximum frequency with which you may call the XML Feed for a given LocID requesting a data set for that LocID. During the time period in between refresh periods the data must be cached by you either in the memory on your servers or in Your Desktop Application. About the Services Weather.com will provide you with access to the XML Feed over the Internet through the hostname xoap.weather.com. The weather data from the XML feed must be requested for a specific location. So you need a location ID (LOC ID). The XML feed work with 2 types of location IDs. First one is with City Identifiers and second one is using 5 Digit US postal codes. If you do not know your location ID, don’t worry, there is a location id search service available for you to retrieve the location id from city name. Since I am a resident in the Kingdom of Bahrain, I am going to retrieve the weather information for Manama(the capital of Bahrain) . In order to get the location ID for Manama, type the following URL in your address bar. http://xoap.weather.com/search/search?where=manama I got the following XML output. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- This document is intended only for use by authorized licensees of The –> <!-- Weather Channel. Unauthorized use is prohibited. Copyright 1995-2011, –> <!-- The Weather Channel Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved. –> <search ver="3.0">       <loc id="BAXX0001" type="1">Al Manama, Bahrain</loc> </search> You can try this with any city name, if the city is available, it will return the location id, and otherwise, it will return nothing. In order to get the weather information, from XOAP,  you need to pass certain parameters to the XOAP service. A brief about the parameters are as follows. Please refer SDK for more details. Parameter name Possible Value cc Optional, if you include this, the current condition will be returned. Value can be anything, as it will be ignored e.g. cc=* dayf If you want the forecast for 5 days, specify dayf=5 This is optional iink Value should be XOAP par Your partner id. You can find this in your registration email from weather.com prod Value should be XOAP key The license key assigned to you. This will be available in the registration email unit s or m (standard or matric or you can think of Celsius/Fahrenheit) this is optional field, if not specified the unit will be standard(s) The URL host for the XOAP service is http://xoap.weather.com. So for my purpose, I need the following request to be made to access the XOAP services. http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/BAXX0001?cc=*&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=*********&key=************** (The ***** to be replaced with the corresponding alternatives) The response XML have a root element “weather”. Under the root element, it has the following sections <head> - the meta data information about the weather results returned. <loc> - the location data block that provides, the information about the location for which the wheather data is retrieved. <lnks> - the 4 promotional links you need to place along with the weather display. Additional to these 4 links, there should be another link with weather channel logo to the home page of weather.com. <cc> - the current condition data. This element will be there only if you specify the cc element in the request. <dayf> - the forcast data as you specified. This element will be there only if you specify the dayf in the request. In this walkthrough, I am going to capture the weather information for Manama (Location ID: BAXX0001). You need 2 applications to display weather information in your website. A Console application that retrieves data from the XMLOAP and store in the SQL Server database (or any data store as you prefer).This application will be scheduled to execute in every 25 minutes using windows task scheduler, so that we can comply with the refresh rate. A web application that display data from the SQL Server database Retrieve the Weather from XOAP I have created a console application named, Weather Service. I created a SQL server database, with the following columns. I named the table as tblweather. You are free to choose any name. Column name Description lastUpdated Datetime, this is the last time when the weather data is updated. This is the time of the service running TemparatureDateTime The date and time returned by XML feed Temparature The temperature returned by the XML feed. TemparatureUnit The unit of the temperature returned by the XML feed iconId The id of the icon to be used. Currently 48 icons from 0 to 47 are available. WeatherDescription The Weather Description Phrase returned by the feed. Link1url The url to the first promo link Link1Text The text for the first promo link Link2url The url to the second promo link Link2Text The text for the second promo link Link3url The url to the third promo link Link3Text The text for the third promo link Link4url The url to the fourth promo link Link4Text The text for the fourth promo link Every time when the service runs, the application will update the database columns from the XOAP data feed. When the application starts, It is going to get the data as XML from the url. This demonstration uses LINQ to extract the necessary data from the fetched XML. The following are the code segment for extracting data from the weather XML using LINQ. // first, create an instance of the XDocument class with the XOAP URL. replace **** with the corresponding values. XDocument weather = XDocument.Load("http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/BAXX0001?cc=*&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=***********&key=c*********"); // construct a query using LINQ var feedResult = from item in weather.Descendants() select new { unit = item.Element("head").Element("ut").Value, temp = item.Element("cc").Element("tmp").Value, tempDate = item.Element("cc").Element("lsup").Value, iconId = item.Element("cc").Element("icon").Value, description = item.Element("cc").Element("t").Value, links = from link in item.Elements("lnks").Elements("link") select new { url = link.Element("l").Value, text = link.Element("t").Value } }; // Load the root node to a variable, you may use foreach construct instead. var item1 = feedResult.First(); *If you want to learn more about LINQ and XML, read this nice blog from Scott GU. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/08/07/using-linq-to-xml-and-how-to-build-a-custom-rss-feed-reader-with-it.aspx Now you have all the required values in item1. For e.g. if you want to get the temperature, use item1.temp; Now I just need to execute an SQL query against the database. See the connection part. using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=sreeju\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog=Sample;Integrated Security=True")) { string strSql = @"update tblweather set lastupdated=getdate(), temparatureDateTime = @temparatureDateTime, temparature=@temparature, temparatureUnit=@temparatureUnit, iconId = @iconId, description=@description, link1url=@link1url, link1text=@link1text, link2url=@link2url, link2text=@link2text,link3url=@link3url, link3text=@link3text,link4url=@link4url, link4text=@link4text"; SqlCommand comm = new SqlCommand(strSql, conn); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparatureDateTime", item1.tempDate); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparature", item1.temp); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparatureUnit", item1.unit); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("description", item1.description); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("iconId", item1.iconId); var lstLinks = item1.links; comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link1url", lstLinks.ElementAt(0).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link1text", lstLinks.ElementAt(0).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link2url", lstLinks.ElementAt(1).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link2text", lstLinks.ElementAt(1).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link3url", lstLinks.ElementAt(2).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link3text", lstLinks.ElementAt(2).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link4url", lstLinks.ElementAt(3).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link4text", lstLinks.ElementAt(3).text); conn.Open(); comm.ExecuteNonQuery(); conn.Close(); Console.WriteLine("database updated"); } Now click ctrl + f5 to run the service. I got the following output Check your database and make sure, the data is updated with the latest information from the service. (Make sure you inserted one row in the database by entering some values before executing the service. Otherwise you need to modify your application code to count the rows and conditionally perform insert/update query) Display the Weather information in ASP.Net page Now you got all the data in the database. You just need to create a web application and display the data from the database. I created a new ASP.Net web application with a default.aspx page. In order to comply with the terms of weather.com, You need to use Weather.com logo along with the weather display. You can find the necessary logos to use under the folder “logos” in the SDK. Additionally copy any of the icon set from the folder “icons” to your web application. I used the 93x93 icon set. You are free to use any other sizes available. The design view of the page in VS2010 looks similar to the following. The page contains a heading, an image control (for displaying the weather icon), 2 label controls (for displaying temperature and weather description), 4 hyperlinks (for displaying the 4 promo links returned by the XOAP service) and weather.com logo with hyperlink to the weather.com home page. I am going to write code that will update the values of these controls from the values stored in the database by the service application as mentioned in the previous step. Go to the code behind file for the webpage, enter the following code under Page_Load event handler. using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=sreeju\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog=Sample;Integrated Security=True")) { SqlCommand comm = new SqlCommand("select top 1 * from tblweather", conn); conn.Open(); SqlDataReader reader = comm.ExecuteReader(); if (reader.Read()) { lblTemparature.Text = reader["temparature"].ToString() + "&deg;" + reader["temparatureUnit"].ToString(); lblWeatherDescription.Text = reader["description"].ToString(); imgWeather.ImageUrl = "icons/" + reader["iconId"].ToString() + ".png"; lnk1.Text = reader["link1text"].ToString(); lnk1.NavigateUrl = reader["link1url"].ToString(); lnk2.Text = reader["link2text"].ToString(); lnk2.NavigateUrl = reader["link2url"].ToString(); lnk3.Text = reader["link3text"].ToString(); lnk3.NavigateUrl = reader["link3url"].ToString(); lnk4.Text = reader["link4text"].ToString(); lnk4.NavigateUrl = reader["link4url"].ToString(); } conn.Close(); } Press ctrl + f5 to run the page. You will see the following output. That’s it. You need to configure the console application to run every 25 minutes so that the database is updated. Also you can fetch the forecast information and store those in the database, and then retrieve it later in your web page. Since the data resides in your database, you have the full control over your display. You need to make sure your website comply with weather.com license requirements. If you want to get the source code of this walkthrough through the application, post your email address below. Hope you enjoy the reading.

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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• Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

  - by sbwalker

  Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference. First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails. Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it.  This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer. In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline. So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms. The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ). At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC. While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC. In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios. So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick. Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The  “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again. And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense. So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

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• New Release Overview Part 2

  - by brian.harrison

  To continue our discussion of the next release of WCI, lets take a look at a few other new features that have been developed and tested. Password Management With customer implementations starting to go more external, we were finding that these customers wanted to use the native users within the portal because the customer did not want to provide an LDAP server that is externally facing. However, the portal does not provide anything close to the same level of password policy that a standard LDAP environment would provide. With that being the case, we made the decision to provide the same kind of password policies directly within WCI that a standard LDAP environment would have. Password Expiration - In how many days will a password expire which will force the user to change their password? Also, in how many days prior to expiration with the user be notified that their password is about the expire? Password Rotation - How many of your previous passwords will you not be able to use when changing your password? Password Policies - What are the requirements for the password that is being created by the user? Number of Characters Numbers Required Symbols Required Capitalization Required Easily Configurable - Configuration is handled through the Portal Settings utility within Administration. All options are available on the main page of the utility. In addition to the configuration options that were mention above, there has also been a complete rewrite of the Change Password screen to provide better information to the user when they are changing their password. The Change Password will now provide a red light/green light listing of all the policies the user must meet for the changed password to be successful. As the user is typing the password, the red lights will change to green lights as the policies as met. In addition, text will show next to the password text box stating what policy has not been met yet. NOTE: The password policy functionality is not held within the User Editor page within Administration. We did not want to remove the option for Administrators to change a user's password on the fly in the case of a password reset situation. Miscellaneous Features In addition to the Password Management feature, there are a few other features that are related to WCI that should be mentioned. Consolidated Installer - Instead of having up to 12 or 13 different installers, one for each of the main products and separate services, we are going to only provide two installers. One that will be used for Collaboration and its respective images. The second will contain WCI and all of the relevant services required for a WCI architecture as well as the IDK, .NET App Accelerator, SharePoint Console as well as all Content Web Services and Identity Services. Updated Documentation - Most of us are aware that the documentation hasn't been properly kept up to date with the last couple of releases. We are doing everything that we can to remedy this with the next release by consolidating and reviewing everything that is available. We are making sure to fill in the gaps that are already there, add in all documentation for the functionality as well as clearing anything that is no longer valid based on the newly released version. I hope that you enjoyed reading through this new release information. Next time we will start to talk about the new functionality that will be available within the next release of Collaboration. If there is anything in particular that you would like to get more detail about, then please don't hesitate to send me a comment.

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• Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

  - by Roger Hart

  Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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• Building applications with WCF - Intro

  - by skjagini

  I am going to write series of articles using Windows Communication Framework (WCF) to develop client and server applications and this is the first part of that series. What is WCF As Juwal puts in his Programming WCF book, WCF provides an SDK for developing and deploying services on Windows, provides runtime environment to expose CLR types as services and consume services as CLR types. Building services with WCF is incredibly easy and it’s implementation provides a set of industry standards and off the shelf plumbing including service hosting, instance management, reliability, transaction management, security etc such that it greatly increases productivity Scenario: Lets consider a typical bank customer trying to create an account, deposit amount and transfer funds between accounts, i.e. checking and savings. To make it interesting, we are going to divide the functionality into multiple services and each of them working with database directly. We will run test cases with and without transactional support across services. In this post we will build contracts, services, data access layer, unit tests to verify end to end communication etc, nothing big stuff here and we dig into other features of the WCF in subsequent posts with incremental changes. In any distributed architecture we have two pieces i.e. services and clients. Services as the name implies provide functionality to execute various pieces of business logic on the server, and clients providing interaction to the end user. Services can be built with Web Services or with WCF. Service built on WCF have the advantage of binding independent, i.e. can run against TCP and HTTP protocol without any significant changes to the code. Solution Services Profile: For creating a new bank customer, getting details about existing customer ProfileContract ProfileService Checking Account: To get checking account balance, deposit or withdraw amount CheckingAccountContract CheckingAccountService Savings Account: To get savings account balance, deposit or withdraw amount SavingsAccountContract SavingsAccountService ServiceHost: To host services, i.e. running the services at particular address, binding and contract where client can connect to Client: Helps end user to use services like creating account and amount transfer between the accounts BankDAL: Data access layer to work with database     BankDAL It’s no brainer not to use an ORM as many matured products are available currently in market including Linq2Sql, Entity Framework (EF), LLblGenPro etc. For this exercise I am going to use Entity Framework 4.0, CTP 5 with code first approach. There are two approaches when working with data, data driven and code driven. In data driven we start by designing tables and their constrains in database and generate entities in code while in code driven (code first) approach entities are defined in code and the metadata generated from the entities is used by the EF to create tables and table constrains. In previous versions the entity classes had  to derive from EF specific base classes. In EF 4 it  is not required to derive from any EF classes, the entities are not only persistence ignorant but also enable full test driven development using mock frameworks.  Application consists of 3 entities, Customer entity which contains Customer details; CheckingAccount and SavingsAccount to hold the respective account balance. We could have introduced an Account base class for CheckingAccount and SavingsAccount which is certainly possible with EF mappings but to keep it simple we are just going to follow 1 –1 mapping between entity and table mappings. Lets start out by defining a class called Customer which will be mapped to Customer table, observe that the class is simply a plain old clr object (POCO) and has no reference to EF at all. using System;   namespace BankDAL.Model { public class Customer { public int Id { get; set; } public string FullName { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; } } }   In order to inform EF about the Customer entity we have to define a database context with properties of type DbSet<> for every POCO which needs to be mapped to a table in database. EF uses convention over configuration to generate the metadata resulting in much less configuration. using System.Data.Entity;   namespace BankDAL.Model { public class BankDbContext: DbContext { public DbSet<Customer> Customers { get; set; } } }   Entity constrains can be defined through attributes on Customer class or using fluent syntax (no need to muscle with xml files), CustomerConfiguration class. By defining constrains in a separate class we can maintain clean POCOs without corrupting entity classes with database specific information.   using System; using System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration;   namespace BankDAL.Model { public class CustomerConfiguration: EntityTypeConfiguration<Customer> { public CustomerConfiguration() { Initialize(); }   private void Initialize() { //Setting the Primary Key this.HasKey(e => e.Id);   //Setting required fields this.HasRequired(e => e.FullName); this.HasRequired(e => e.Address); //Todo: Can't create required constraint as DateOfBirth is not reference type, research it //this.HasRequired(e => e.DateOfBirth); } } }   Any queries executed against Customers property in BankDbContext are executed against Cusomers table. By convention EF looks for connection string with key of BankDbContext when working with the context.   We are going to define a helper class to work with Customer entity with methods for querying, adding new entity etc and these are known as repository classes, i.e., CustomerRepository   using System; using System.Data.Entity; using System.Linq; using BankDAL.Model;   namespace BankDAL.Repositories { public class CustomerRepository { private readonly IDbSet<Customer> _customers;   public CustomerRepository(BankDbContext bankDbContext) { if (bankDbContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException(); _customers = bankDbContext.Customers; }   public IQueryable<Customer> Query() { return _customers; }   public void Add(Customer customer) { _customers.Add(customer); } } }   From the above code it is observable that the Query methods returns customers as IQueryable i.e. customers are retrieved only when actually used i.e. iterated. Returning as IQueryable also allows to execute filtering and joining statements from business logic using lamba expressions without cluttering the data access layer with tens of methods.   Our CheckingAccountRepository and SavingsAccountRepository look very similar to each other using System; using System.Data.Entity; using System.Linq; using BankDAL.Model;   namespace BankDAL.Repositories { public class CheckingAccountRepository { private readonly IDbSet<CheckingAccount> _checkingAccounts;   public CheckingAccountRepository(BankDbContext bankDbContext) { if (bankDbContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException(); _checkingAccounts = bankDbContext.CheckingAccounts; }   public IQueryable<CheckingAccount> Query() { return _checkingAccounts; }   public void Add(CheckingAccount account) { _checkingAccounts.Add(account); }   public IQueryable<CheckingAccount> GetAccount(int customerId) { return (from act in _checkingAccounts where act.CustomerId == customerId select act); }   } } The repository classes look very similar to each other for Query and Add methods, with the help of C# generics and implementing repository pattern (Martin Fowler) we can reduce the repeated code. Jarod from ElegantCode has posted an article on how to use repository pattern with EF which we will implement in the subsequent articles along with WCF Unity life time managers by Drew Contracts It is very easy to follow contract first approach with WCF, define the interface and append ServiceContract, OperationContract attributes. IProfile contract exposes functionality for creating customer and getting customer details.   using System; using System.ServiceModel; using BankDAL.Model;   namespace ProfileContract { [ServiceContract] public interface IProfile { [OperationContract] Customer CreateCustomer(string customerName, string address, DateTime dateOfBirth);   [OperationContract] Customer GetCustomer(int id);   } }   ICheckingAccount contract exposes functionality for working with checking account, i.e., getting balance, deposit and withdraw of amount. ISavingsAccount contract looks the same as checking account.   using System.ServiceModel;   namespace CheckingAccountContract { [ServiceContract] public interface ICheckingAccount { [OperationContract] decimal? GetCheckingAccountBalance(int customerId);   [OperationContract] void DepositAmount(int customerId,decimal amount);   [OperationContract] void WithdrawAmount(int customerId, decimal amount);   } }   Services   Having covered the data access layer and contracts so far and here comes the core of the business logic, i.e. services.   .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } ProfileService implements the IProfile contract for creating customer and getting customer detail using CustomerRepository. using System; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel; using BankDAL; using BankDAL.Model; using BankDAL.Repositories; using ProfileContract;   namespace ProfileService { [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class Profile: IProfile { public Customer CreateAccount( string customerName, string address, DateTime dateOfBirth) { Customer cust = new Customer { FullName = customerName, Address = address, DateOfBirth = dateOfBirth };   using (var bankDbContext = new BankDbContext()) { new CustomerRepository(bankDbContext).Add(cust); bankDbContext.SaveChanges(); } return cust; }   public Customer CreateCustomer(string customerName, string address, DateTime dateOfBirth) { return CreateAccount(customerName, address, dateOfBirth); } public Customer GetCustomer(int id) { return new CustomerRepository(new BankDbContext()).Query() .Where(i => i.Id == id).FirstOrDefault(); }   } } From the above code you shall observe that we are calling bankDBContext’s SaveChanges method and there is no save method specific to customer entity because EF manages all the changes centralized at the context level and all the pending changes so far are submitted in a batch and it is represented as Unit of Work. Similarly Checking service implements ICheckingAccount contract using CheckingAccountRepository, notice that we are throwing overdraft exception if the balance falls by zero. WCF has it’s own way of raising exceptions using fault contracts which will be explained in the subsequent articles. SavingsAccountService is similar to CheckingAccountService. using System; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel; using BankDAL.Model; using BankDAL.Repositories; using CheckingAccountContract;   namespace CheckingAccountService { [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class Checking:ICheckingAccount { public decimal? GetCheckingAccountBalance(int customerId) { using (var bankDbContext = new BankDbContext()) { CheckingAccount account = (new CheckingAccountRepository(bankDbContext) .GetAccount(customerId)).FirstOrDefault();   if (account != null) return account.Balance;   return null; } }   public void DepositAmount(int customerId, decimal amount) { using(var bankDbContext = new BankDbContext()) { var checkingAccountRepository = new CheckingAccountRepository(bankDbContext); CheckingAccount account = (checkingAccountRepository.GetAccount(customerId)) .FirstOrDefault();   if (account == null) { account = new CheckingAccount() { CustomerId = customerId }; checkingAccountRepository.Add(account); }   account.Balance = account.Balance + amount; if (account.Balance < 0) throw new ApplicationException("Overdraft not accepted");   bankDbContext.SaveChanges(); } } public void WithdrawAmount(int customerId, decimal amount) { DepositAmount(customerId, -1*amount); } } }   BankServiceHost The host acts as a glue binding contracts with it’s services, exposing the endpoints. The services can be exposed either through the code or configuration file, configuration file is preferred as it allows run time changes to service behavior even after deployment. We have 3 services and for each of the service you need to define name (the class that implements the service with fully qualified namespace) and endpoint known as ABC, i.e. address, binding and contract. We are using netTcpBinding and have defined the base address with for each of the contracts .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="ProfileService.Profile"> <endpoint binding="netTcpBinding" contract="ProfileContract.IProfile"/> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Profile"/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> <service name="CheckingAccountService.Checking"> <endpoint binding="netTcpBinding" contract="CheckingAccountContract.ICheckingAccount"/> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Checking"/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> <service name="SavingsAccountService.Savings"> <endpoint binding="netTcpBinding" contract="SavingsAccountContract.ISavingsAccount"/> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Savings"/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> </services> </system.serviceModel> Have to open the services by creating service host which will handle the incoming requests from clients.   using System;   namespace ServiceHost { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { CreateHosts(); Console.ReadLine(); }   private static void CreateHosts() { CreateHost(typeof(ProfileService.Profile),"Profile Service"); CreateHost(typeof(SavingsAccountService.Savings), "Savings Account Service"); CreateHost(typeof(CheckingAccountService.Checking), "Checking Account Service"); }   private static void CreateHost(Type type, string hostDescription) { System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost host = new System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost(type); host.Open();   if (host.ChannelDispatchers != null && host.ChannelDispatchers.Count != 0 && host.ChannelDispatchers[0].Listener != null) Console.WriteLine("Started: " + host.ChannelDispatchers[0].Listener.Uri); else Console.WriteLine("Failed to start:" + hostDescription); } } } BankClient    The client has no knowledge about service business logic other than the functionality it exposes through the contract, end points and a proxy to work against. The endpoint data and server proxy can be generated by right clicking on the project reference and choosing ‘Add Service Reference’ and entering the service end point address. Or if you have access to source, you can manually reference contract dlls and update clients configuration file to point to the service end point if the server and client happens to be being built using .Net framework. One of the pros with the manual approach is you don’t have to work against messy code generated files.   <system.serviceModel> <client> <endpoint name="tcpProfile" address="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Profile" binding="netTcpBinding" contract="ProfileContract.IProfile"/> <endpoint name="tcpCheckingAccount" address="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Checking" binding="netTcpBinding" contract="CheckingAccountContract.ICheckingAccount"/> <endpoint name="tcpSavingsAccount" address="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Savings" binding="netTcpBinding" contract="SavingsAccountContract.ISavingsAccount"/>   </client> </system.serviceModel> The client uses a façade to connect to the services   using System.ServiceModel; using CheckingAccountContract; using ProfileContract; using SavingsAccountContract;   namespace Client { public class ProxyFacade { public static IProfile ProfileProxy() { return (new ChannelFactory<IProfile>("tcpProfile")).CreateChannel(); }   public static ICheckingAccount CheckingAccountProxy() { return (new ChannelFactory<ICheckingAccount>("tcpCheckingAccount")) .CreateChannel(); }   public static ISavingsAccount SavingsAccountProxy() { return (new ChannelFactory<ISavingsAccount>("tcpSavingsAccount")) .CreateChannel(); }   } }   With that in place, lets get our unit tests going   using System; using System.Diagnostics; using BankDAL.Model; using NUnit.Framework; using ProfileContract;   namespace Client { [TestFixture] public class Tests { private void TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(int customerId, decimal amount) { ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customerId, amount); ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customerId, amount); }   private void TransferFundsFromCheckingToSavingsAccount(int customerId, decimal amount) { ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customerId, amount); ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customerId, amount); }     [Test] public void CreateAndGetProfileTest() { IProfile profile = ProxyFacade.ProfileProxy(); const string customerName = "Tom"; int customerId = profile.CreateCustomer(customerName, "NJ", new DateTime(1982, 1, 1)).Id; Customer customer = profile.GetCustomer(customerId); Assert.AreEqual(customerName,customer.FullName); }   [Test] public void DepositWithDrawAndTransferAmountTest() { IProfile profile = ProxyFacade.ProfileProxy(); string customerName = "Smith" + DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); var customer = profile.CreateCustomer(customerName, "NJ", new DateTime(1982, 1, 1)); // Deposit to Savings ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 100); ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 25); Assert.AreEqual(125, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id)); // Withdraw ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customer.Id, 30); Assert.AreEqual(95, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id));   // Deposit to Checking ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 60); ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 40); Assert.AreEqual(100, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id)); // Withdraw ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customer.Id, 30); Assert.AreEqual(70, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id));   // Transfer from Savings to Checking TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(customer.Id,10); Assert.AreEqual(85, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id)); Assert.AreEqual(80, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id));   // Transfer from Checking to Savings TransferFundsFromCheckingToSavingsAccount(customer.Id, 50); Assert.AreEqual(135, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id)); Assert.AreEqual(30, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id)); }   [Test] public void FundTransfersWithOverDraftTest() { IProfile profile = ProxyFacade.ProfileProxy(); string customerName = "Angelina" + DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss");   var customerId = profile.CreateCustomer(customerName, "NJ", new DateTime(1972, 1, 1)).Id;   ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customerId, 100); TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(customerId,80); Assert.AreEqual(20, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customerId)); Assert.AreEqual(80, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customerId));   try { TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(customerId,30); } catch (Exception e) { Debug.WriteLine(e.Message); }   Assert.AreEqual(110, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customerId)); Assert.AreEqual(20, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customerId)); } } }   We are creating a new instance of the channel for every operation, we will look into instance management and how creating a new instance of channel affects it in subsequent articles. The first two test cases deals with creation of Customer, deposit and withdraw of month between accounts. The last case, FundTransferWithOverDraftTest() is interesting. Customer starts with depositing $100 in SavingsAccount followed by transfer of $80 in to checking account resulting in $20 in savings account.  Customer then initiates $30 transfer from Savings to Checking resulting in overdraft exception on Savings with $30 being deposited to Checking. As we are not running both the requests in transactions the customer ends up with more amount than what he started with $100. In subsequent posts we will look into transactions handling.  Make sure the ServiceHost project is set as start up project and start the solution. Run the test cases either from NUnit client or TestDriven.Net/Resharper which ever is your favorite tool. Make sure you have updated the data base connection string in the ServiceHost config file to point to your local database

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• C# Item system design approach, should I use abstract classes, interfaces or virutals?

  - by vexe

  I'm working on a Resident Evil 1/2/3/0/Remake type of game. Currently I've done a big part of the inventory system (here's a link if you wanna see my inventory, pretty outdated, added a lot of features and made a lot of enhancements) Now I'm thinking about how to approach the items system, If you've played any Resident Evil game or any of its likes you should be familiar with what I'm trying to achieve. Here's a very simple category I made for the items: So you have different items, with different operations you could perform on them, there are usable items that you could use, like for example herbs and first aid kits that 'using' them would affect your health, keys to unlock doors, and equipable items that you could 'equip' like weapons. Also, you can 'combine' two items together to get new one, like for example mixing a green and red herb would give you a new type of herb, or combining a lighter with a paper, would give you a burnt paper, or ammo with a gun, would reload the gun or something. etc. You know the usual RE drill. Not all items are 'transformable', in that, for example: lighter + paper = burnt paper (it's the paper that 'transforms' to burnt paper and not the lighter, the lighter is not transformable it will remain as it is) green herb + red herb = newHerb1 (both herbs will vanish and transform to this new type of herb) ammo + gun = reload gun (ammo state will remain as it is, it won't change but it will just decrease, nothing will happen to the gun it just gets reloaded) Also a key note to remember is that you can't just combine items randomly, each item has a 'mating' item(s). So to sum up, different items, and different operations on them. The question is, how to approach this, design-wise? I've been learning about interfaces, but it just doesn't quite get into my head, I mean, why not just use classes with the good old inheritance? I know the technical details of interfaces and that the cool thing about them is that they don't require an inheritance chain, but I just can't see how to use them properly, that is, if they were the right thing to use here. So should I go with just classes and inheritance? just like in the tree I showed you? or should I think more about how to use interfaces? (IUsable, IEquipable, ITransformable) - why not just use classes UsableItem, Equipable item, TransformableItem? I want something that won't give me headaches in the long run, something resilient/flexible to future changes. I'm OK using classes, but I smell something better here. The way I'm thinking is to possibly use both inheritance and interfaces, so that you have a branch like this: item - equipable - weapon. but then again, the weapon has methods like 'reload' 'examine' 'equip' some of them 'combine' so I'm thinking to make weapon implement ICombinable?... not all items get used the same way, using herbs will increase your health, using a key will open a door, so IUsable maybe? Should I use a big database (XML for example) for all the items, items names, mates, nRowsReq, nColsReq, etc? Thanks so much for your answers in advanced, note that demo 3 is coming after I'm done with items :D

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• Binding a select in a client template

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  I recently got a question on one of my client template posts asking me how to bind a select tag’s value to data in client templates. I was surprised not to find anything on the web addressing the problem, so I thought I’d write a short post about it. It really is very simple once you know where to look. You just need to bind the value property of the select tag, like this: <select sys:value="{binding color}"> If you do it from markup like here, you just need to use the sys: prefix. It just works. Here’s the full source code for my sample page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Binding a select tag</title> <script src=http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/beta/0911/Start.js type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> Sys.require(Sys.scripts.Templates, function() { var colors = [ "red", "green", "blue", "cyan", "purple", "yellow" ]; var things = [ { what: "object", color: "blue" }, { what: "entity", color: "purple" }, { what: "thing", color: "green" } ]; Sys.create.dataView("#thingList", { data: things, itemRendered: function(view, ctx) { Sys.create.dataView( Sys.get("#colorSelect", ctx), { data: colors }); } }); }); </script> <style type="text/css"> .sys-template {display: none;} </style> </head> <body xmlns:sys="javascript:Sys"> <div> <ul id="thingList" class="sys-template"> <li> <span sys:id="thingName" sys:style-color="{binding color}" >{{what}}</span> <select sys:id="colorSelect" sys:value="{binding color}" class="sys-template"> <option sys:value="{{$dataItem}}" sys:style-background-color="{{$dataItem}}" >{{$dataItem}}</option> </select> </li> </ul> </div> </body> </html> This produces the following page: Each of the items sees its color change as you select a different color in the drop-down. Other details worth noting in this page are the use of the script loader to get the framework from the CDN, and the sys:style-background-color syntax to bind the background color style property from markup. Of course, I’ve used a fair amount of custom ASP.NET Ajax markup in here, but everything could be done imperatively and with completely clean markup from the itemRendered event using Sys.bind.

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• Dark Sun Dispatch 001

  - by Chris Williams

  If you aren't into tabletop (aka pen & paper) RPGs, you might as well click to the next post now... Still here? Awesome. I've recently started running a new D&D 4.0 Dark Sun campaign. If you don't know anything about Dark Sun, here's a quick intro: The campaign take place on the world of Athas, formerly a lush green world that is now a desert wasteland. Forests are rare in the extreme, as is water and metal. Coins are made of ceramic and weapons are often made of hardened wood, bone or obsidian. The green age of Athas was centuries ago and the current state was brought about through the reckless use of sorcerous magic. (In this world, you can augment spells by drawing on the life force of the world & people around you. This is called defiling. Preserving magic draws upon the casters life force and does not damage the surrounding world, but it isn't as powerful.) Humans are pretty much unchanged, but the traditional fantasy races have changed quite a bit. Elves don't live in the forest, they are shifty and untrustworthy desert traders known for their ability to run long distances through the wastes. Halflings are not short, fat, pleasant little riverside people. Instead they are bloodthirsty feral cannibals that roam the few remaining forests and ride reptilians beasts akin to raptors. Gnomes are extinct, as are orcs. Dwarves are mostly farmers and gladiators, and live out in the sun instead of staying under the mountains. Goliaths are half-giants, not known for their intellect. Muls are a Dwarf & Human crossbreed that displays the best traits of both races (human height and dwarven stoutness.) Thri-Kreen are sentient mantis people that are extremely fast. Most of the same character classes are available, with a few new twists. There are no divine characters (such as Priests, Paladins, etc) because the gods are gone. Nobody alive today can remember a time when they were still around. Instead, some folks worship the elemental forces (although they don't give out spells.) The cities are all ruled by Sorcerer King tyrants (except one city: Tyr) who are hundreds of years old and still practice defiling magic whenever they please. Serving the Sorcerer Kings are the Templars, who are also defilers and psionicists. Crossing them is as bad, in many cases, as crossing the Kings themselves. Between the cities you have small towns and trading outposts, and mostly barren desert with sometimes 4-5 days on foot between towns and the nearest oasis. Being caught out in the desert without adequate supplies and protection from the elements is pretty much a death sentence for even the toughest heroes. When you add in the natural (and unnatural) predators that roam the wastes, often in packs, most people don't last long alone. In this campaign, the adventure begins in the (small) trading fortress of Altaruk, a couple weeks walking distance from the newly freed city of Tyr. A caravan carrying trade goods from Altaruk has not made it to Tyr and the local merchant house has dispatched the heroes to find out what happened and to retrieve the goods (and drivers) if possible. The unlikely heroes consist of a human shaman, a thri-kreen monk, a human wizard, a kenku assassin and a (void aspect) genasi swordmage. Gathering up supplies and a little liquid courage, they set out into the desert and manage to find the northbound tracks of the wagon. Shortly after finding the tracks, they are ambushed by a pack of silt-runners (small lizard people with very large teeth and poisoned pointy spears.) The party makes short work of the creatures, taking a few minor wounds in the process. Proceeding onward without resting, they find the remains of the wagon and manage to sneak up on a pack of Kruthiks picking through the rubble and spilled goods. Unfortunately, they failed to take advantage of the opportunity and had a hard fight ahead of them. The party defeated the kruthiks, but took heavy damage (and almost lost a couple of their own) in the process. Once the kruthiks were dispatched, they followed a set of tracks further north to a ruined tower...

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• The Changing Face of PASS

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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• Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure

  After successful automatic distribution of IPv6 address information via DHCPv6 in your local network it might be time to start offering some more services. Usually, we would use host names in order to communicate with other machines instead of their bare IPv6 addresses. During the following paragraphs we are going to enable our own DNS name server with IPv6 address resolving. This is the third 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. What's your name and your IPv6 address? $ sudo service bind9 status * bind9 is running If the service is not recognised, you have to install it first on your system. This is done very easy and quickly like so: $ sudo apt-get install bind9 Once again, there is no specialised package for IPv6. Just the regular application is good to go. But of course, it is necessary to enable IPv6 binding in the options. Let's fire up a text editor and modify the configuration file. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.optionsacl iosnet {        127.0.0.1;        192.168.1.0/24;        ::1/128;        2001:db8:bad:a55::/64;};listen-on { iosnet; };listen-on-v6 { any; };allow-query { iosnet; };allow-transfer { iosnet; }; Most important directive is the listen-on-v6. This will enable your named to bind to your IPv6 addresses specified on your system. Easiest is to specify any as value, and named will bind to all available IPv6 addresses during start. More details and explanations are found in the man-pages of named.conf. Save the file and restart the named service. As usual, check your log files and correct your configuration in case of any logged error messages. Using the netstat command you can validate whether the service is running and to which IP and IPv6 addresses it is bound to, like so: $ sudo service bind9 restart $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "named\W*$"tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:53        0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1734/named      tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1734/named      tcp6       0      0 :::53                 :::*                    LISTEN      1734/named      udp        0      0 192.168.1.2:53        0.0.0.0:*                           1734/named      udp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53          0.0.0.0:*                           1734/named      udp6       0      0 :::53                 :::*                                1734/named   Sweet! Okay, now it's about time to resolve host names and their assigned IPv6 addresses using our own DNS name server. $ host -t aaaa www.6bone.net 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Using domain server:Name: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Address: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2#53Aliases: www.6bone.net is an alias for 6bone.net.6bone.net has IPv6 address 2001:5c0:1000:10::2 Alright, our newly configured BIND named is fully operational. Eventually, you might be more familiar with the dig command. Here is the same kind of IPv6 host name resolve but it will provide more details about that particular host as well as the domain in general. $ dig @2001:db8:bad:a55::2 www.6bone.net. AAAA More details on the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (bind) daemon and IPv6 are available in Chapter 22.1 of Peter Bieringer's HOWTO on IPv6. Setting up your own DNS zone Now, that we have an operational named in place, it's about time to implement and configure our own host names and IPv6 address resolving. The general approach is to create your own zone database below the bind folder and to add AAAA records for your hosts. In order to achieve this, we have to define the zone first in the configuration file named.conf.local. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.local //// Do any local configuration here//zone "ios.mu" {        type master;        file "/etc/bind/zones/db.ios.mu";}; Here we specify the location of our zone database file. Next, we are going to create it and add our host names, our IP and our IPv6 addresses. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/zones/db.ios.mu $ORIGIN .$TTL 259200     ; 3 daysios.mu                  IN SOA  ios.mu. hostmaster.ios.mu. (                                2014031101 ; serial                                28800      ; refresh (8 hours)                                7200       ; retry (2 hours)                                604800     ; expire (1 week)                                86400      ; minimum (1 day)                                )                        NS      server.ios.mu.$ORIGIN ios.mu.server                  A       192.168.1.2server                  AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::2client1                 A       192.168.1.3client1                 AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::3client2                 A       192.168.1.4client2                 AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::4 With a couple of machines in place, it's time to reload that new configuration. Note: Each time you are going to change your zone databases you have to modify the serial information, too. Named loads the plain text zone definitions and converts them into an internal, indexed binary format to improve lookup performance. If you forget to change your serial then named will not use the new records from the text file but the indexed ones. Or you have to flush the index and force a reload of the zone. This can be done easily by either restarting the named: $ sudo service bind9 restart or by reloading the configuration file using the name server control utility - rndc: $ sudo rndc reconfig Check your log files for any error messages and whether the new zone database has been accepted. Next, we are going to resolve a host name trying to get its IPv6 address like so: $ host -t aaaa server.ios.mu. 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Using domain server:Name: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Address: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2#53Aliases: server.ios.mu has IPv6 address 2001:db8:bad:a55::2 Looks good. Alternatively, you could have just ping'd the system as well using the ping6 command instead of the regular ping: $ ping6 serverPING server(2001:db8:bad:a55::2) 56 data bytes64 bytes from 2001:db8:bad:a55::2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.615 ms64 bytes from 2001:db8:bad:a55::2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.407 ms^C--- ios1 ping statistics ---2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001msrtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.407/0.511/0.615/0.104 ms That also looks promising to me. How about your configuration? Next, it might be interesting to extend the range of available services on the network. One essential service would be to have web sites at hand.

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• Drawing texture does not work anymore with a small amount of triangles

  - by Paul

  When i draw lines, the vertices are well connected. But when i draw the texture inside the triangles, it only works with i<4 in the for loop, otherwise with i<5 for example, there is a EXC_BAD_ACCESS message, at @synthesize textureImage = _textureImage. I don't understand why. (The generatePolygons method seems to work fine as i tried to draw lines with many vertices as in the second image below. And textureImage remains the same for i<4 or i<5 : it's a 512px square image). Here are the images : What i want to achieve is to put the red points and connect them to the y-axis (the green points) and color the area (the green triangles) : If i only draw lines, it works fine : Then with a texture color, it works for i<4 in the loop (the red points in my first image, plus the fifth one to connect the last y) : But then, if i set i<5, the debug tool says EXC_BAD_ACCESS at the synthesize of _textureImage. Here is my code : I set a texture color in HelloWordLayer.mm with : CCSprite *textureImage = [self spriteWithColor:color3 textureSize:512]; _terrain.textureImage = textureImage; Then in the class Terrain, i create the vertices and put the texture in the draw method : @implementation Terrain @synthesize textureImage = _textureImage; //EXC_BAD_ACCESS for i<5 - (void)generatePath2{ CGSize winSize = [CCDirector sharedDirector].winSize; float x = 40; float y = 0; for(int i = 0; i < kMaxKeyPoints+1; ++i) { _hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(x, y); x = 150 + (random() % (int) 30); y += 30; } } -(void)generatePolygons{ _nPolyVertices = 0; float x1 = 0; float y1 = 0; int keyPoints = 0; for (int i=0; i<4; i++){ /* HERE : 4 = OK / 5 = crash */ //V0: at (0,0) _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(x1, y1); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(x1, y1); //V1: to the first "point" _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); keyPoints++; //from point at index 0 to 1 //V2, same y as point n°2: _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(0, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(0, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); //V1 again _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; //V2 again _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; //V3 = same x,y as point at index 1 _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); y1 = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices].y; _nPolyVertices++; } } - (id)init { if ((self = [super init])) { [self generatePath2]; [self generatePolygons]; } return self; } - (void) draw { //glDisable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glDisableClientState(GL_COLOR_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, _textureImage.texture.name); glColor4f(1, 1, 1, 1); glVertexPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, _polyVertices); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, _polyTexCoords); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, (GLsizei)_nPolyVertices); glColor4f(1, 1, 1, 1); for(int i = 1; i < 40; ++i) { ccDrawLine(_polyVertices[i-1], _polyVertices[i]); } // restore default GL states glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glEnableClientState(GL_COLOR_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); } Do you see anything wrong in this code? Thanks for your help

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• Paper-free Customer Engagement

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Appropriate repost from our friends at the AIIM blog: Digital Landfill -- John Mancini, supporting our mission of enabling customer engagement through better technology choices.  ---------- My wife didn't even give me a card for #wpfd - and they say husbands are bad at remembering anniversaries Well, today is the third World Paper Free Day.  I just got off the Tweet Jam, and there was a host of ideas for getting rid of -- or at least reducing -- paper. When we first started talking about "paper-free" most of the reasons raised to pursue this direction were "green" reasons.  I'm glad to see that the thinking has moved on to questions about how getting rid of paper and digitizing processes helps improve customer engagement.  And the bottom line.  And process responsiveness.  Not that the "green" reasons have gone away, but it's nice to see a maturation in the BUSINESS reasons to get rid of paper. Our World Paper Free Handbook (do not, do not, do not print it!) looks at how less paper in the workplace delivers significant benefits. Key findings show eliminating paper from processes can improve the responsiveness of customer service by 300 percent. Removing paper from business processes and moving content to PCs and tablets has the added advantage of helping companies adopt mobile-enable processes and eliminate elapsed time, lost forms, poor data and re-keying. To effectively mobile-enable processes and reduce reliance on paper, data should be captured as close to the point of origination as possible, which makes information easily available to whomever needs it, wherever they are, in the shortest time possible. This handbook summarizes the value of automating manual, paper-based processes. It then goes a step beyond to provide actionable steps that will set you on the path to productivity, profitability, and, yes, less paper.  Get your copy today and send the link around to your peers and colleagues.  Here's the link; please share it! http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Research/AIIM-White-Papers/WPFD-Revolution-Handbook And don't miss out on the real world discussions about increasing engagement with WebCenter in new webinars being offered over the next couple of weeks:  October 30, 2012:  ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter November 1, 2012: WebCenter Content for Applications: Streamline Processes with Oracle WebCenter Content Management for Human Resources Applications Available On-Demand:  Using Oracle WebCenter to Content-Enable Your Business Applications

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• Why are some of my view not aligned correctly at the bottom of my relative layout?

  - by Janusz

  I have problems getting some of my views aligned in a relative layout that I use inside a row of my listview. Here is a screenshot from the layout builder in Eclipse, this is what I think it should look like: The next image is from the emulator. Now the TestTestTest View is at the top and covers the name and distance Textviews. This is my layout: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:padding="4dip"> <ImageView android:id="@+id/logo" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:adjustViewBounds="true" android:scaleType="centerInside" android:src="@drawable/icon" android:layout_centerVertical="true" android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" android:background="@color/green" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/distance" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Distance" android:layout_alignParentRight="true" android:layout_alignParentTop="true" android:paddingRight="4dip" android:background="#000000" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/name" android:layout_width="fill_parent" style="@style/ListHeadText" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Name" android:layout_alignTop="@id/distance" android:layout_toRightOf="@id/logo" android:layout_toLeftOf="@id/distance" android:gravity="clip_horizontal" android:lines="1" android:paddingLeft="4dip" android:background="@color/red" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/number" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Number" android:paddingRight="4dip" android:layout_alignRight="@id/distance" android:background="@color/darkred" android:layout_below="@id/distance" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/subcategory" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Subcategory" android:paddingLeft="4dip" android:layout_alignLeft="@id/name" android:lines="1" android:gravity="clip_horizontal" android:layout_below="@id/distance" android:background="@color/green" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/test" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="TestTestTest" android:paddingLeft="4dip" android:layout_alignParentBottom="true" android:gravity="bottom" android:background="@color/red" /> Shouldnt align_parent_bottom put the view at the bottom of the cell in the list?

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• Android NDK Gaussian Blur radius stuck at 60

  - by rennoDeniro

  I implemented this NDK imeplementation of a Gaussian Blur, But I am having problems. I cannot increase the radius above 60, otherwise the activity just closes returning to a previous activity. No error message, nothing? Does anyone know why this could be? Note: This blur is based on the quasimondo implementation, here #include <jni.h> #include <string.h> #include <math.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <android/log.h> #include <android/bitmap.h> #define LOG_TAG "libbitmaputils" #define LOGI(...) __android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_INFO,LOG_TAG,__VA_ARGS__) #define LOGE(...) __android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_ERROR,LOG_TAG,__VA_ARGS__) typedef struct { uint8_t red; uint8_t green; uint8_t blue; uint8_t alpha; } rgba; JNIEXPORT void JNICALL Java_com_insert_your_package_ClassName_functionToBlur(JNIEnv* env, jobject obj, jobject bitmapIn, jobject bitmapOut, jint radius) { LOGI("Blurring bitmap..."); // Properties AndroidBitmapInfo infoIn; void* pixelsIn; AndroidBitmapInfo infoOut; void* pixelsOut; int ret; // Get image info if ((ret = AndroidBitmap_getInfo(env, bitmapIn, &infoIn)) < 0 || (ret = AndroidBitmap_getInfo(env, bitmapOut, &infoOut)) < 0) { LOGE("AndroidBitmap_getInfo() failed ! error=%d", ret); return; } // Check image if (infoIn.format != ANDROID_BITMAP_FORMAT_RGBA_8888 || infoOut.format != ANDROID_BITMAP_FORMAT_RGBA_8888) { LOGE("Bitmap format is not RGBA_8888!"); LOGE("==> %d %d", infoIn.format, infoOut.format); return; } // Lock all images if ((ret = AndroidBitmap_lockPixels(env, bitmapIn, &pixelsIn)) < 0 || (ret = AndroidBitmap_lockPixels(env, bitmapOut, &pixelsOut)) < 0) { LOGE("AndroidBitmap_lockPixels() failed ! error=%d", ret); } int h = infoIn.height; int w = infoIn.width; LOGI("Image size is: %i %i", w, h); rgba* input = (rgba*) pixelsIn; rgba* output = (rgba*) pixelsOut; int wm = w - 1; int hm = h - 1; int wh = w * h; int whMax = max(w, h); int div = radius + radius + 1; int r[wh]; int g[wh]; int b[wh]; int rsum, gsum, bsum, x, y, i, yp, yi, yw; rgba p; int vmin[whMax]; int divsum = (div + 1) >> 1; divsum *= divsum; int dv[256 * divsum]; for (i = 0; i < 256 * divsum; i++) { dv[i] = (i / divsum); } yw = yi = 0; int stack[div][3]; int stackpointer; int stackstart; int rbs; int ir; int ip; int r1 = radius + 1; int routsum, goutsum, boutsum; int rinsum, ginsum, binsum; for (y = 0; y < h; y++) { rinsum = ginsum = binsum = routsum = goutsum = boutsum = rsum = gsum = bsum = 0; for (i = -radius; i <= radius; i++) { p = input[yi + min(wm, max(i, 0))]; ir = i + radius; // same as sir stack[ir][0] = p.red; stack[ir][1] = p.green; stack[ir][2] = p.blue; rbs = r1 - abs(i); rsum += stack[ir][0] * rbs; gsum += stack[ir][1] * rbs; bsum += stack[ir][2] * rbs; if (i > 0) { rinsum += stack[ir][0]; ginsum += stack[ir][1]; binsum += stack[ir][2]; } else { routsum += stack[ir][0]; goutsum += stack[ir][1]; boutsum += stack[ir][2]; } } stackpointer = radius; for (x = 0; x < w; x++) { r[yi] = dv[rsum]; g[yi] = dv[gsum]; b[yi] = dv[bsum]; rsum -= routsum; gsum -= goutsum; bsum -= boutsum; stackstart = stackpointer - radius + div; ir = stackstart % div; // same as sir routsum -= stack[ir][0]; goutsum -= stack[ir][1]; boutsum -= stack[ir][2]; if (y == 0) { vmin[x] = min(x + radius + 1, wm); } p = input[yw + vmin[x]]; stack[ir][0] = p.red; stack[ir][1] = p.green; stack[ir][2] = p.blue; rinsum += stack[ir][0]; ginsum += stack[ir][1]; binsum += stack[ir][2]; rsum += rinsum; gsum += ginsum; bsum += binsum; stackpointer = (stackpointer + 1) % div; ir = (stackpointer) % div; // same as sir routsum += stack[ir][0]; goutsum += stack[ir][1]; boutsum += stack[ir][2]; rinsum -= stack[ir][0]; ginsum -= stack[ir][1]; binsum -= stack[ir][2]; yi++; } yw += w; } for (x = 0; x < w; x++) { rinsum = ginsum = binsum = routsum = goutsum = boutsum = rsum = gsum = bsum = 0; yp = -radius * w; for (i = -radius; i <= radius; i++) { yi = max(0, yp) + x; ir = i + radius; // same as sir stack[ir][0] = r[yi]; stack[ir][1] = g[yi]; stack[ir][2] = b[yi]; rbs = r1 - abs(i); rsum += r[yi] * rbs; gsum += g[yi] * rbs; bsum += b[yi] * rbs; if (i > 0) { rinsum += stack[ir][0]; ginsum += stack[ir][1]; binsum += stack[ir][2]; } else { routsum += stack[ir][0]; goutsum += stack[ir][1]; boutsum += stack[ir][2]; } if (i < hm) { yp += w; } } yi = x; stackpointer = radius; for (y = 0; y < h; y++) { output[yi].red = dv[rsum]; output[yi].green = dv[gsum]; output[yi].blue = dv[bsum]; rsum -= routsum; gsum -= goutsum; bsum -= boutsum; stackstart = stackpointer - radius + div; ir = stackstart % div; // same as sir routsum -= stack[ir][0]; goutsum -= stack[ir][1]; boutsum -= stack[ir][2]; if (x == 0) vmin[y] = min(y + r1, hm) * w; ip = x + vmin[y]; stack[ir][0] = r[ip]; stack[ir][1] = g[ip]; stack[ir][2] = b[ip]; rinsum += stack[ir][0]; ginsum += stack[ir][1]; binsum += stack[ir][2]; rsum += rinsum; gsum += ginsum; bsum += binsum; stackpointer = (stackpointer + 1) % div; ir = stackpointer; // same as sir routsum += stack[ir][0]; goutsum += stack[ir][1]; boutsum += stack[ir][2]; rinsum -= stack[ir][0]; ginsum -= stack[ir][1]; binsum -= stack[ir][2]; yi += w; } } // Unlocks everything AndroidBitmap_unlockPixels(env, bitmapIn); AndroidBitmap_unlockPixels(env, bitmapOut); LOGI ("Bitmap blurred."); } int min(int a, int b) { return a > b ? b : a; } int max(int a, int b) { return a > b ? a : b; }

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• UITableView UITableViewCell not reloading on reloadData

  - by David van Dugteren

  This question has been asked a few times now, but there exists no answer on the web that has solved the problem for me yet... See the code: { const NSInteger TOP_LABEL_TAG = 1001; static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"CellIdentifier"; UITableViewCell *cell = [theTableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; } getAQuestionToAnswer = [[QuestionsToAnswer sharedInstance] getLatestLoadedQuestion]; UILabel *topLabel; topLabel = [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame: CGRectMake ( 50, 18, 260, 75)] autorelease]; [cell.contentView addSubview:topLabel]; topLabel.tag = TOP_LABEL_TAG; topLabel.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; topLabel.textColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:0.25 green:0.0 blue:0.0 alpha:1.0]; topLabel.highlightedTextColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:1.0 green:1.0 blue:0.9 alpha:1.0]; [topLabel setFont:[UIFont fontWithName:@"MarkerFelt-Thin" size:13]]; topLabel.numberOfLines = 4; topLabel = (UILabel *)[cell viewWithTag:TOP_LABEL_TAG]; topLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", [getAQuestionToAnswer valueForKey:@"question"] ]; Some code is omitted but the basics is there, I'm updating by means of a shake gesture, the NSLog confirms that the getAQuestionToAnswer is indeed updated with a new question after the gesture. Yet at run time, no matter what I do... e.g. [self.tableview reloaddata]; nothing works. It just doesn't want to refresh.

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• asp.net mvc2 - controller for master page?

  - by ile

  I've just finished my first ASP.NET MVC (2) CMS. Next step is to build website that will show data from CMS's database. This is website design: #1 (Red box) - displays article categories. ViewModel: public class CategoriesDisplay { public CategoriesDisplay() { } public int CategoryID { set; get; } public string CategoryTitle { set; get; } } #2 (Brown box) - displays last x articles; skips those from green box #3. Viewmodel: public class ArticleDisplay { public ArticleDisplay() { } public int CategoryID { set; get; } public string CategoryTitle { set; get; } public int ArticleID { set; get; } public string ArticleTitle { set; get; } public string URLArticleTitle { set; get; } public DateTime ArticleDate; public string ArticleContent { set; get; } } #3 (green box) - Displays last x articles. Uses the same ViewModel as brown box #2 #4 (blue box) - Displays list of upcoming events. Uses dataContext.Model.Event as ViewModel Boxes #1, #2 and #4 will repeat all over the site and they are part of Master Page. So, my question is: what is the best way to transfer this data from Model to Controller and finally to View pages? Should I make a controller for master page and ViewModel class that will wrap all this classes together OR Should I create partial Views for every of these boxes and make each of them inherit appropriate class (if it is even possible that it works this way?) OR Should I put this repeated code in all controllers and all additional data transfer via ViewData, which would be probably the worse way :) OR There is maybe a better and more simple way but I don't know/see it? Thanks in advance, Ile

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• jQuery plugin for Event Driven Architecture?

  - by leeand00

  Are there any Event Driven Architecture jQuery plugins? Step 1: Subscribing The subscribers subscribe to the event handler in the middle, and pass in a callback method, as well as the name of the event they are listening for... i.e. The two green subscribers will be listening for p0 events. And the blue subscriber will be listening for p1 events. Step 2: The p0 event is fired by another component to the Event Handler A p0 event is fired to the Event Handler The event handler notifies it's subscribers of the event, calling the callback methods they specified when they subscribed in Step 1: Subscribing. Note that the blue subscriber is not notified because it was not listening for p0 events. Step 3: The p1 event is fired a component to the Event Handler The p1 event is fired by another component Just as before except that now the blue subscriber receives the event through its callback and the other two green subscribers do not receive the event. Images by leeand00, on Flickr I can't seem to find one, but my guess is that they just call it something else in Javascript/jquery Also is there a name for this pattern? Because it isn't just a basic publisher/subscriber, it has to be called something else I would think.

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• Passing in defaults within window.onload?

  - by Matrym

  I now understand that the following code will not work because I'm assigning window.onload to the result of the function, not the function itself. But if I remove the parens, I suspect that I have to explicitly call a separate function to process the config before the onload. So, where I now have: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <HEAD> <script type="text/javascript" src="lb-core.js"></script> <script type="application/javascript"> var lbp = { defaults: { color: "blue" }, init: function(config) { if(config) { for(prop in config){ setBgcolor.defaults[prop] = config[prop]; } } var bod = document.body; bod.style.backgroundColor = setBgcolor.defaults.color; } } var config = { color: "green" } window.onload = lbp.init(config); </script> </HEAD> <body> <div id="container">test</div> </body> </HTML> I imagine I would have to change it to: var lbp = { defaults: { color: "blue" }, configs: function(config){ for(prop in config){ setBgcolor.defaults[prop] = config[prop]; } }, init: function() { var bod = document.body; bod.style.backgroundColor = setBgcolor.defaults.color; } } var config = { color: "green" } lbp.configs(config); window.onload = lbp.init; Then, for people to use this script and pass in a configuration, they would need to call both of those bottom lines separately (configs and init). Is there a better way of doing this? Note: If your answer is to bundle a function of window.onload, please also confirm that it is not hazardous to assign window.onload within scripts. It's my understanding that another script coming after my own could, in fact, overwrite what I'd assigned to onload.

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• Complex regex question, data may or may not be in brackets

  - by martinpetts

  I need to extract data from a source that presents it in one of two ways. The data could be formatted like this: Francis (Lab) 18,077 (60.05%); Waller (LD) 4,140 (13.75%); Evans (PC) 3,545 (11.78%); Rees-Mogg (C) 3,064 (10.18%); Wright (Veritas) 768 (2.55%); La Vey (Green) 510 (1.69%) Or like this: Lab 8,994 (33.00%); C 7,924 (29.07%); LD 5,197 (19.07%); PC 3,818 (14.01%); Others 517 (1.90%); Green 512 (1.88%); UKIP 296 (1.09%) The data I need to extract is the percentage and the party (these are election results), which is either in brackets (first example) or is the only non-numeric text. So far I have this: preg_match('/(.*)\(([^)]*)%\)/', $value, $match); Which is giving me the following matches (for first example): Array ( [0] => Francis (Lab) 18,077 (60.05%) [1] => Francis (Lab) 18,077 [2] => 60.05 ) So I have the percentage, but I also need the party label, which may or may not be in brackets and may or may not be the only text. Can anyone help?

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• How does one convert 16-bit RGB565 to 24-bit RGB888?

  - by jleedev

  I’ve got my hands on a 16-bit rgb565 image (specifically, an Android framebuffer dump), and I would like to convert it to 24-bit rgb888 for viewing on a normal monitor. The question is, how does one convert a 5- or 6-bit channel to 8 bits? The obvious answer is to shift it. I started out by writing this: uint16_t buf; while (read(0, &buf, sizeof buf)) { unsigned char red = (buf & 0xf800) >> 11; unsigned char green = (buf & 0x07c0) >> 5; unsigned char blue = buf & 0x003f; putchar(red << 3); putchar(green << 2); putchar(blue << 3); } However, this doesn’t have one property I would like, which is for 0xffff to map to 0xffffff, instead of 0xf8fcf8. I need to expand the value in some way, but I’m not sure how that should work. The Android SDK comes with a tool called ddms (Dalvik Debug Monitor) that takes screen captures. As far as I can tell from reading the code, it implements the same logic; yet its screenshots are coming out different, and white is mapping to white. Here’s the raw framebuffer, the smart conversion by ddms, and the dumb conversion by the above algorithm. (By the way, this conversion is implemented in ffmpeg, but it’s just performing the dumb conversion listed above, leaving the LSBs at all zero.) I guess I have two questions: What’s the most sensible way to convert rgb565 to rgb888? How is DDMS converting its screenshots?

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• Alternating table row colors in freemarker

  - by itsadok

  What's a good, simple way to have alternate row coloring with freemarker? Is this really the best way? <#assign row=0> <#list items as item> <#if (row % 2) == 0> <#assign bgcolor="green"> <#else> <#assign bgcolor="red"> </#if> <tr style='background-color: ${bgcolor}'><td>${item}</td></tr> <#assign row = row + 1> </#list> I tried doing this: <#assign row=0> <#list items as item> <tr style='background-color: ${(row % 2) == 0 ? "green" : "blue"}'><td>${item}</td></tr> <#assign row = row + 1> </#list> But apparently you can't user the ternary operator in there. Note: I guess I should have mentioned it earlier, but I can't use css classes or javascript, since this HTML is going into an email message.

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• Possible to create an implicit cast for an anonymous type to a dictionary?

  - by Ralph

  I wrote a method like this: using AttrDict = System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<string, object>; using IAttrDict = System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair<string, object>>; static string HtmlTag(string tagName, string content = null, IAttrDict attrs = null) { var sb = new StringBuilder("<"); sb.Append(tagName); if(attrs != null) foreach (var attr in attrs) sb.AppendFormat(" {0}=\"{1}\"", attr.Key, attr.Value.ToString().EscapeQuotes()); if (content != null) sb.AppendFormat(">{0}</{1}>", content, tagName); else sb.Append(" />"); return sb.ToString(); } Which you can call like HtmlTag("div", "hello world", new AttrDict{{"class","green"}}); Not too bad. But what if I wanted to allow users to pass an anonymous type in place of the dict? Like HtmlTag("div", "hello world", new {@class="green"}); Even better! I could write the overload easily, but the problem is I'm going to have about 50 functions like this, I don't want to overload each one of them. I was hoping I could just write an implicit cast to do the work for me... public class AttrDict : Dictionary<string, object> { public static implicit operator AttrDict(object obj) { // conversion from anonymous type to AttrDict here } } But C# simply won't allow it: user-defined conversions to or from a base class are not allowed So what can I do?

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• Is CSS Inheritance in Internet Explorer 8 still buggy?

  - by rrrr

  I have a situation that I am looking at where certain CSS properties will not be inherited. This revolves around tables and IE8. Using the sample HTML below I cannot get the text within the table to inherit the green colour. This works in Firefox and Chrome, but not IE8 and from reading up this seems to have always been a problem in IE but was meant to be working in version 8 from what I read. I have tried to specify the inherit value everywhere possible, but to no avail so the question is whether the CSS inheritance support in IE8 is buggy, or am I missing something? I don't want answer changing inline CSS to be classes and I certainly dont wan't any comments on tables as this all stems from building and designing HTML emails where inline CSS and tables are essential. <html> <head></head> <body> <table style="color: green;"> <tr> <td> <span>Span</span> <p>Paragraph</p> <div>Div</div> <table style="color:inherit;"> <tr> <td>Table</td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>

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• RegistryKey ValueCount/SubKeyCount wrong

  - by Mark J Miller

  I am trying to query the following registry key values: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\SharedMemoryOn HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\SuperSocketNetLib\ProtocolOrder But depending on which machine I'm running the program the query returns null. When I debug on my local machine and I inspect the value for ValueCount for: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\SuperSocketNetLib The count is 0 and OpenSubKey returns null. I am a domain admin, in the local administrators group and have added the following to my app.manifest: <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" uiAccess="false" /> Any idea why? private static void ValidateSqlClientSettings() { Console.WriteLine("\r\n/////////////// LOCAL SQL CLIENT PROTOCOLS ////////////////"); RegistryKey keyHKLM = Registry.LocalMachine; ///TODO: nullreferenceexception - connect to remote machine and find out why RegistryKey sqlClientKey = keyHKLM.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client"); if (sqlClientKey == null) { WriteLine2Console(@"WARNING: unable to read registry key '{0}\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client'", ConsoleColor.Yellow); } var cliKeyNames = from k in sqlClientKey.GetSubKeyNames() where k == "SuperSocketNetLib" select k; ///TODO: find out why these values are always missing (even if I can see them in regedit) Console.Write("Shared Memory Disabled (cliconfg): "); if (Convert.ToBoolean(sqlClientKey.GetValue("SharedMemoryOn"))) WriteLine2Console("FAILED", ConsoleColor.Red); else if(sqlClientKey.GetValue("SharedMemoryOn") == null) WriteLine2Console(String.Format("WARNING - unable to read '{0}\\SharedMemoryOn'", sqlClientKey.Name), ConsoleColor.Yellow); else WriteLine2Console("PASS", ConsoleColor.Green); Console.Write("Client Protocol Order (cliconfg - tcp first): "); foreach (string cliKey in cliKeyNames) { RegistryKey subKey = sqlClientKey.OpenSubKey(cliKey); object order = subKey.GetValue("ProtocolOrder"); if (order != null && order.ToString().StartsWith("tcp") == false) { WriteLine2Console("FAILED", ConsoleColor.Red); } else if (order == null) { WriteLine2Console(String.Format("WARNING - unable to read '{0}\\ProtocolOrder'", subKey.Name), ConsoleColor.Yellow); } else { WriteLine2Console("PASS", ConsoleColor.Green); } subKey.Close(); } sqlClientKey.Close(); keyHKLM.Close(); }

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