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  • How do I add a new ItemTemplate to a Guidance Automation Toolkit vs2010 .vsix package?

    - by Maslow
    I have a vs2008 GAT package that has been updated to work on vs2010 which walks a developer through creating a custom solution complete with a Service layer project, Domain, usercontrol, and unit test project. I'd like to add a new ItemTemplate to the package to create a user control or dialog that adheres to our current practices. So far it seems I need a Recipe, but I can not find any reference for the GuidancePackage.xml file and how to properly add things to it, let alone how to add a new Item Template or guidance steps and decisions. How can I add an item template to my add-in?

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  • Faster alternative to Python's SimpleHTTPServer

    - by Drew Noakes
    Python's SimpleHTTPServer is a great way of serve the contents of the current directory from the command line: python -m SimpleHTTPServer However, as far as web servers go, it's very slooooow... It behaves as though it's single threaded, and occasionally causes timeout errors when loading JavaScript AMD modules using RequireJS. It can take five to ten seconds to load a simple page with no images. What's a faster alternative that is just as convenient?

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  • Automatically registering "commands" for a command line program in python

    - by seandavi
    I would like to develop a command-line program that can process and give "help" for subcommands. To be concrete, say I have a single script called "cgent" and I would like to have subcommands "abc", "def", and "xyz" execute and accept the rest of the sys.args for processing by optparse. cgent abc [options] cgent help abc .... All of this is straightforward if I hard-code the subcommand names. However, I would like to be able to continue to add subcommands by adding a class or module (?). This is similar to the idea that is used by web frameworks for adding controllers, for example. I have tried digging through pylons to see if I can recreate what is done there, but I have not unravelled the logic. Any suggestions on how to do this? Thanks, Sean

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  • Zend Framework 1.1 Modules setup

    - by jiewmeng
    i used zend_tool to setup a project then to create module blog with index controller etc but i guess the default config setup by zend_tool does not work with modules so i edited it resources.frontController.moduleDirectory = APPLICATION_PATH "/modules" resources.frontController.moduleDirectoryControllerName = "controllers" i guess these are required for modules? also i moved the folders, controllers, models, views into the modules/ folder but i get a blank screen when i try to go to http://servername which shld load Default module's index controller and action. even if i try to go http://servername/nonexistentpage it also shows a blank screen instead of a 404

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  • Advice on selecting programming languages to concentrate on? (2nd year IT security student)

    - by Tyler J Fisher
    I'm in the process of considering which programming languages I should devote the majority of my coding studies to. I'm a 2nd year CS student, majoring in IT security. What I want to do/work with: Intelligence gathering Relational databases Virus design Snort network IPS Current coding experience (what I'm going to keep): Java - intermediate HTML5 - intermediate SQL (MySQL, Oracle 11g) - basic BASH - basic I'm going to need to learn (at least) one of the following languages in order to be successful in my field. Languages to add (at least 1): Ruby (+Metasploit) C++ (virus design, low-level driver interaction, computationally intensive applications) Python (import ALL the things) My dilemma: If I diversify too broadly, I won't be able to focus on, and improve in a specific niche. Does anyone have any advice as to how I should select a language? What I'm considering + why I'm leaning towards Ruby because of Metasploit support, despite lower efficiency when compared to Python. Any suggestions based on real-world experience? Should I focus on Ruby, Python, or C++? Both Ruby, and Python have been regarded as syntactically similar to Java which my degree is based around. I'm going to be studying C++ in two years as a component of my malicious code class. Thanks, Tyler

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  • Advice for programming a lobby for a network multiplayer game?

    - by Milo
    I'm working on learning network programming. I'm working on a simple card game. The basic idea is: Players enter the lobby Players see tables Players sit at an empty seat Once they sit, they do not need any information from the lobby, they see the card table and the data about the other players and so forth. I've programmed the server portion for the game itself. The clients connect to my server object and the server then receives and sends messages; quite simple. The tricky concepts for me are: What's a good way to run many tables at the same time? What's a good way to keep the lobby consistently updated for each person in the lobby (eg: MSG_TABLE_FILLED, 22) Ideally I'd like to have 1 server exe for all of this and to have to deal with multithreading as little as possible. I'm going to use the enet library. I was thinking that each time a game session starts, I push a new Game and I map the client IPs to that table, then I just route messages from those clients to that Game. Since enet supports channels I was thinking of using 2 channels per table, one for the game messages and one for in game chat. Would something like this work? Does anyone have any advice / design ideas for a game with a lobby and many tables? Is there a usual way this is done that I'm overlooking? Any conceptual ideas or even c/c++ code examples would be very helpful. Thanks

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  • Architecture advice for converting biz app from old school to new school?

    - by Aaron Anodide
    I've got a WinForms business application that evolved over the past few years. It's forms over data with a number custom UI experiences taylored to the business, so I don't think it's a candidate to port to something like SharePoint or re-write in LightSwitch (at least not without significant investment). When I started it in 2009 I was new to this type of development (coming from more low level programming and my RDBMS knowledge was just slightly greater than what I got from school). Thus, when I was confronted with a business model that operates on a strict monthly accounting cycle, I made the unfortunate decision to create a separate database for each accounting period. Also, when I started I knew DataSets, then I learned Linq2Sql, then I learned EntityFramework. The screens are a mix and match of those. Now, after a few years developing this thing by myself I've finally got a small team. Ultimately, I want a web front end (for remote access to more straight up screens with grids of data) and a thick client (for the highly customized interfaces). My question is: can you offer me some broad strokes architecture advice that will help me formulate a battle plan to convert over to a single database and lay the foundations for my future goals at the same time? Here's a screen shot showing how an older screen uses DataSets and a newer screen uses EF (I'm thinking this might make it more real for someone reading the question - I'm willing to add any amount of detail if someone is willing to help).

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  • "Don't do programming after a few years of starting career". Is this a fair advice?

    - by Muhammad Yasir
    I am a little experienced developer having approximately 5 years experience in PHP and somewhat less in Java, C# and trying to learn some Python nowadays. Since the start of my career as a programmer I have been told every now and then by fellow programmers that programming is suitable for a few early years of a career (most of them take it as 5 years) and that one must change the direction after it. The reason they present include headaches and pressures associated with programming. They also say that programmers are less social and don't usually like to give time to their families, etc. and especially "Oh come on, you can not do programming your entire life!" I am somewhat confused here and need to ask others about it. If I leave programming then what do I do?! I guess teaching may be a good option in this case, but it will require to first earn a PhD degree perhaps. It may also be noteworthy that in my country (Pakistan) the life of a programmer is not very good in that normally they must give 2-3 extra hours in the office to accomplish urgent programming tasks. I have a sense that situation is somewhat similar in other countries and regions as well. Do you think it is fair advice to change career from programming to something else after spending 5 years in this field? UPDATE Oh wow... I never knew people can have 40+ years of experience in this field. I am both excited and amazed seeing that people are doing it since 1971... That means 15 years before my birth! It is nice to be able to talk to such experienced people, we don't get such a chance here in Pakistan.

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  • Unit Tests as a learning tool - a good idea?

    - by Ekkehard.Horner
    I'm interested in ways and means for learning (a) programming language(s) efficiently. I believe that using Unit Test concepts and infrastructure early in that process is a good thing, even better than starting with "Hello world". Why: To write a decent program even for a toy/restricted problem in a new language, you'll have to master many heterogenous concepts (control flow & variables & IO ...), you are tempted to glance over details just to get your program 'to work'. Putting (your understanding of) the facts about the new language in assertions with good descriptions (=success messages) enforces thinking thru/clearness/precision. Grouping topics and adding assertions to such groups is much easier than incorporation features from the 2. chapter of your "Learning X" book to your chapter 1 program. Why not: 'Real' Unit Tests are meant to output "1234 tests ok; 1 failure: saveWorld() chokes on negative input"; 'didactic' Unit Tests should output relevant facts about the new language like perl6 10-string.t # ### p5chop ... ok 13 - p5chop( "cbä" ) returns "ä" ok 14 - after that, victim is changed to "cb" # ### (p6) chop ... ok 27 - (p6) chop( "cbä" ) returns chopped copy: "cb" ok 18 - after that, victim is unchanged: "cbä" # ### chomp ... So (mis?)using Unit Tests may be counterproductive - practicing actions while learning you wouldn't use professionally. How: Writing 'didactic' Unit Tests in languages with lightweight testing systems (Perl 5/6) is easy; (mis?)using more elaborate systems (JUnit, CppUnit) may be not worth the effort or not suitable for a person just starting with a new language. So Is using Unit Tests as a learning tool a bad idea? Can the Unit Test tool(s) of your favourite language(s) used didactically? Should implementation details (eventually) be discussed here or over at stackoverflow.com?

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  • "Don't do programming after a few years of starting career" Is this a fair advice?

    - by Muhammad Yasir
    I am a little experienced developer having around 5 years experience in PHP and somewhat less in Java, C# and trying to learn some Python now a days. Since the start of my career as a programmer I have been told every now and then by fellow programmers that programming is suitable for a few early years of carrier (most of them take it as 5 years) and that one must change the direction after it. The reason they present is that headaches and pressures associated with programming. They also say that programmers are less social and don't usually like to give time to their families etc. and specially "Oh come on, you can not do programming in your entire life!" I am somewhat confused here and need to ask others about it. If I leave programming then what do I do?! I guess teaching may be a good option in this case but it will require to first earn a PhD degree perhaps. It may also be noteworthy that in my country (Pakistan) the life of a programmer is not very good in that normally they must give 2-3 extra hours in office to accomplish urgent programming tasks. I have a sense that situation is somewhat similar in other countries and regions as well. So the question is, do you think it is a fair advice to change career from programming to something else after spending 5 years in this field? Thanks for sharing thoughts!

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  • I'm hoping to start an online supermarket and needs advice on open source shopping cart software and applications..

    - by Betterman Simidi
    I have been researching on both open source software and off-the-shelf software for an online supermarket project in Africa. I have now narrowed by search to X-cart and the PHP based PrestaShop shopping carts. My plan is to acquire an open source shopping cart either by purchasing or as a free open source cart and hire a local developer to customize it to our local needs. I have been doing the demo for x-cart for three weeks now and had thought it might work best for us but after going through the 600 page manual and I'm concerned with how far it can be localized. Yesterday i was looking at the possible Prestashop free open source cart and i seem to like the back-end. Didn't like the back-end for Magento much but from reviews conducted by third-parties they seem to recommend it. I'm now wondering whether i should have a developer start the whole project from scratch, or use an open source software such us PrestaShop or get x-cart which can then be customized. Note that my store will have thousands of products and services including groceries and so i want something that can handle upto 500,000 products and over. Kindly advice. 93276

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  • Is there a shell-independent HUD-like menu search tool for Xfce/GNOME/Cinnamon?

    - by Redsandro
    The Ubuntu Heads-Up Display (HUD) - you love it or you hate it. Personally I rather like a classic desktop, so I use Xfce or GNOME-fork Cinnamon, and I'd like to keep those menu's where they are. But the HUD is pretty awesome when your menus are complex and you forgot where an option sits. This makes that search trick very interesting. I know the HUD is Unity specific. I am looking for a HUD-like tool to complement the menu in shells other than Unity. There is Appmenu Runner for KDE that does this. There is also appmenu-qt for KDE. Problem with the above is that it uses KDE libs, and it only works for KDE apps. This is Linux, there aught to be something like this for GNOME/GTK apps, right? Looking for any tool that can search the menus. I already use(d) Synapse, Kupfer and GNOME Do, but those are simply app-launchers (with some tricks). Something like that would suffice if only they included searching the menus for the currently focused application. The HUD allows users to activate menu items by typing part of the name. It uses a fuzzy search algorithm that will highlight partial matches. It can match menu items that are multiple layers deep in an application's menu hierarchy. The feature, which replaces traditional menu accelerators, is activated by pressing the alt key. Similar questions: Is there a way to search a menu bar in Debian? - Unix.StackExchange How can I access menu bar items alike hud (unity)? - Unix.StackExchange HUD in other window managers (especially xmonad) - AskUbuntu

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  • Is there a shell-independent HUD-like menu search tool for Gnome?

    - by Redsandro
    The Ubuntu HUD - you love it or you hate it. Personally I rather like a classic desktop, so I use Xfce and Cinnamon, and I don't want to lose my menu in applications. But the HUD is pretty awesome when your menus are complex and you forgot where an option sits. This makes that search trick very interesting. I know the HUD is Unity specific. I am looking for a HUD-like tool to complement the menu in shells other than Unity. There is Appmenu Runner for KDE that does this. There is also appmenu-qt for KDE. Problem with the above is that it uses KDE libs, and it only works for KDE apps. This is Linux, there aught to be something like this for GNOME/GTK apps, right? Looking for any tool that can search the menus. I already use(d) Kupfer and Gnome-do, something like that would suffice if only it includes searching the menus for the currently focussed application.

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  • How do I remove the tool tips on the launch bar?

    - by Sephethus
    The title is the question. These tool tips stay until I try to click past them. They're annoying since they constantly pop up and block the view of what I'm trying to do. Unfortunately I need the launch bar because Ubuntu is running on VMware and the console does not allow me to use the keyboard for switching tasks (to my knowledge). How do I disable them? I'd post an image as an example, but this site will not let me. UPDATE: unity 5.16.0 UPDATE 2: I discovered that this may only be a problem with users who run Ubuntu on a full screen VMware console that is situated on the right monitor. When the mouse is moved to the left monitor the tooltips popup and remain until the mouse is clicked twice in the VMware console window to make it active. Unfortunately my problem is one involving a rare situation I think. However, I'd love to be able to disable these tool tips if possible. It would also be nice if new features were added that can allow further customization of the launch bar.

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  • Is there a product planning tool that has these specific features? [closed]

    - by acjohnson55
    I am working on a web startup in the early stages, and we are struggling a bit to manage the scope and scheduling of our product. We have loads of high-level features in the pipeline, but we need a good way of scheduling them for release iterations and breaking them into actual tasks that can be scheduled (that could be a separate tool, but integration would be preferred). I would say that our product can be pretty cleanly divided into "aspects", and we want to be able to separate features by the aspect to which they apply. Perhaps most importantly, it should be really simple to create and move features between target release points. We don't have physical space for a war room type setup, so whatever we settle upon should ideally have a cloud-type web interface. Right now, we're using Excel to make a grid of product aspects vs. target releases, and we store features at the intersections. But this is not providing a good way of indexing tasks to those features or being able to move them around. I would much rather have something that automates the grid overview. I'm less interested in something that helps with low-level scheduling than I am in something that is good at organizing the product plan at the long-term, high-level view. Is there a product planning tool out there that matches these specifications?

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  • Java or Python? Career/Start-up advice needed [closed]

    - by vim
    I have a full-time PHP job and I've been working with PHP for 5 years. As you can guess after spending 5 years I'm not willing to stay within this technology stack any more. I also worked with Java for 2 year before, so for me it looks more obvious to switch back to Java. However during last 5 years I was thinking about starting my own project, and now I think I have a very good SAAS idea. I'm completely confused what technology should I use for my project. I don't want to do it in PHP, and after reading many articles about rapid prototype development it seems to me that Django/Ruby is the best option. I will continue to work full time for my current employer because I need to pay my bills and will work on my project in my free time. The concern I have is should I do my project in Java or Python? To be realistic there is always a risk when you are doing your own project/start-up. If I do it in Java in the worst case scenario I believe I will be able to find a full time Java position because I already have some experience in Java + recent experience in my project. With regards to Python it looks like it is not very popular in my area and salaries are much more lower then for Java. On the other hand I have a feeling that if I chose Java it will take me a way longer to finish my project. Guys I'm completely confused and I need your advice. P.S. I have moved to London 2 years ago from another country, local guys are very welcome to share their thoughts about London's job market.

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  • Need advice for approach for a web-based app that loads excel worksheet but exposes only the charts

    - by John
    I'm looking for suggestions on the Visual Studio approach to take for a web application that is in the conceptual stage. My environment has a lot of tools: Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 64bit Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition Sharepoint 2010 Server Enterprise Edition SQL Server 2008 R2 Office 2010 Professional I know I will need this app to retrieve data from a database (or a web service - not sure exactly at this point). The data needs to be placed in an Excel workbook dynamically. The app will need to have a nice user interface (standard web controls - perhaps with some Javascript effects). The Excel ribbon and worksheet grid will need to be hidden. Some web control(s) will cause the Excel chart(s) to be rendered. I am thinking this sounds like Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) so as to leverage .Net and hide Excel. Can you offer suggestions regarding: One ASP.Net Web App Project One Class Library Project for Excel or perhaps which one of the several different Excel 2010 project types (addin, template, document) Would Excel Services for Sharepoint be useful (or required) ? I am feeling a little overwhelmed with so many choices at this early stage of conceptualizing the app. Can you suggest some ideas for this sort of thing? Also, I am a bit more experienced with C# but I've read VB.Net is better for work with the Excel object model. What are general advises with regard to tool choice and overall approach tradeoffs?

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  • Advice for moving from custom domain hosted on blogspot to new custom domain on hosting provider [closed]

    - by Chan
    Need some advice :) a) Facts: 1. Currently, we have a blog www.thebigbigsky.net hosted on blogspot.com. The site has been up for around a year and google had cached some of the posts. 2. The idea for setting up the blog was to promote/share articles/write-up about personal development and self-growth, and also to offer counseling services related to them. 3. There is another subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net hosting similar blog posts but in Chinese. This is hosted on blogspot as well. b) What we want to do: 1. We did some research on the internet and understood that, to make a website more popular, it is better to have a domain name that is related to the content of the site. Hence, in our case, a domain name containing "personal development" would be more ideal and easier for people to remember. 2. Hence, we are thinking to move away from blogspot to a meaningful new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com) and move all contents there. The new domain will be hosted on a hosting provider e.g. hostgator.com c) Here are the steps we have in mind: 1. Register the new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com) 2. Get a hosting provider hostgator.com 3. Setup a new site based on Wordpress, import all contents from existing blog to this new site - personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com. 4. Switch current blog back to thebigbigsky.blogspot.com 5. Switch DNS of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to the new site on hostgator.com 6. On hostgator.com, setup permanent redirect 301 of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to personaldevelopmetnwithxyz.com by following the tutorial mentioned here - http://www.blogbloke.com/migrating-redirecting-blogger-wordpress-htaccess-apache-best-method/ Questions: 1. Will it have major impact on the current google pagerank or SEO of thebigbigsky.net? As the site is not that popular, we assumed that the impact would not be a major one. 2. Is the domain personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com considered too long? (For SEO etc) 3. Steps c.4 and c.5 above - Will this work for our case? 4. How about the subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net? We would like keep it as separate blog with the domain e.g. chinese.personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com 5. We added "facebook comments" to the existing post on www.thebigtbigsky.net and would not want to lose it. Will the comments still be there after we moved to the new domain? 6. Any better idea to do it? :) Thank you very much! regards, -chan

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  • Career advice: stay with PHP or start a new career in something else ( .Net?)

    - by Christian P
    I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not topic here. I don't want to start a new fight about which language is better. Knowing programming language is not the most important thing for being a software developer. To be a really good developer you need to know OOP, design patterns, testing... and language is just a tool to make things happen. So back to my question. I have mixed experience in IT - 1 year as an IT support guy (Windows administration and support), around 2 years of experience in embedded programming (VB.Net 2005) and for the last 2 years I'm working with PHP/MySQL. I have worked with Magento web shop, assisted in some projects in Symfony, modified few Drupal sites. My main concerns are following: Do I continue to improve my skills in PHP e.g. to start learning some major PHP framework like Zend, Symfony maybe get some PHP certification. Or do I start learning .NET or Java. I'm more familiar to .NET so I'll probably choose it if choice falls between .NET and Java ( or you could convince me to choose Java :). Career-wise, I don't know what is the best choice. Learning new framework and language is more time consuming then improving my existing skills in PHP. But with .NET you have a lot of possibilities (Windows 7 Phone development, Silverlight, WPF) and possibly bigger chances to find better jobs. PHP jobs are less payed then .NET, at least, according to my researches (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I start now with .NET I'm just a beginner and my salary will be low. I need at least 2+ years of experience in some language to even try to find some job that is paying higher than $50-60k in NY. My main goal in next 2-3 years is to try to find a job in a $60-80k category. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just chasing money, but money is an important factor when you're trying to start a family. I'm 27 years old and I feel that there isn't a lot of room for wrong decisions regarding my career, so any advice will be very welcome. Update Thank you all for spending time to help me with my problem. All of the answers and comments have been very helpful. I have decided to stick with PHP but also to learn C# and Silverlight 4. We'll see where the life will take me.

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  • SQL SERVER – Introduction to Adaptive ETL Tool – How adaptive is your ETL?

    - by pinaldave
    I am often reminded by the fact that BI/data warehousing infrastructure is very brittle and not very adaptive to change. There are lots of basic use cases where data needs to be frequently loaded into SQL Server or another database. What I have found is that as long as the sources and targets stay the same, SSIS or any other ETL tool for that matter does a pretty good job handling these types of scenarios. But what happens when you are faced with more challenging scenarios, where the data formats and possibly the data types of the source data are changing from customer to customer?  Let’s examine a real life situation where a health management company receives claims data from their customers in various source formats. Even though this company supplied all their customers with the same claims forms, they ended up building one-off ETL applications to process the claims for each customer. Why, you ask? Well, it turned out that the claims data from various regional hospitals they needed to process had slightly different data formats, e.g. “integer” versus “string” data field definitions.  Moreover the data itself was represented with slight nuances, e.g. “0001124” or “1124” or “0000001124” to represent a particular account number, which forced them, as I eluded above, to build new ETL processes for each customer in order to overcome the inconsistencies in the various claims forms.  As a result, they experienced a lot of redundancy in these ETL processes and recognized quickly that their system would become more difficult to maintain over time. So imagine for a moment that you could use an ETL tool that helps you abstract the data formats so that your ETL transformation process becomes more reusable. Imagine that one claims form represents a data item as a string – acc_no(varchar) – while a second claims form represents the same data item as an integer – account_no(integer). This would break your traditional ETL process as the data mappings are hard-wired.  But in a world of abstracted definitions, all you need to do is create parallel data mappings to a common data representation used within your ETL application; that is, map both external data fields to a common attribute whose name and type remain unchanged within the application. acc_no(varchar) is mapped to account_number(integer) expressor Studio first claim form schema mapping account_no(integer) is also mapped to account_number(integer) expressor Studio second claim form schema mapping All the data processing logic that follows manipulates the data as an integer value named account_number. Well, these are the kind of problems that that the expressor data integration solution automates for you.  I’ve been following them since last year and encourage you to check them out by downloading their free expressor Studio ETL software. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Business Intelligence, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: ETL, SSIS

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  • Is there tool agnostic terminology for source control activities?

    - by C. Ross
    My team is entering into some discussions on source control (process and possibly tools) and we would like a tool agnostic terminology for the various activities. The environment does have multiple (old) VCS's, and multiple desired (new) VCS's. Is there a standard definition of activities, or at least some commonly accepted set? Example activities (in CVS terminology): Branch Check out Update Merge

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  • Is there a tool to do round trip software engineering between a sequence diagram and a group of objects that message back and forth?

    - by DeveloperDon
    Is there a tool to do round trip software engineering between a sequence diagram and a group of objects that message back and forth? Perhaps this seems a little exotic, but it seems like a function that includes message calls or even method invocations on other objects could be automatically converted to a sequence diagram given that it is not hard to do manually. Similarly, when a sequence diagram is modified, based on the message name and type of message, should it not be possible to add a message or method to the calling object?

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  • Create Image Maps with GIMP

    - by SGWellens
    Having a clickable image in a web page is not a big deal. Having an image in a web page with clickable hotspots is a big deal. The powerful GIMP editor has a tool to make creating clickable hotspots much easier. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Its home page and download links are here: http://www.gimp.org/ (it is completely free). Beware: GIMP is an extraordinarily advanced and powerful image editor. If you wish to use it for general image editing tasks, you have a steep learning curve to climb. FYI: I used it to create the shadows you see on the images below. Fortunately, the tool to make Image Maps is separate from the main program. To start, open an image with GIMP or, drag and drop an image onto the GIMP main window. I'm using the image of a bar graph. Next, we have to find the Image Map tool and launch it (Filters->Web->Image Map…): Why is the Image Map tool under Filters and not Tools? I don't know. It's mystery—much like the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, or why my socks keep disappearing when I do laundry. I swear I've got twenty single unmatched socks. But I digress… Here is what the Image Map tool looks like: If we click the blue 'I' button, we can add information to the Image Map: Now we'll use the rectangle tool to create some clickable hotspots. Select the Blue Rectangle tool, drag a rectangle, click when done and you'll get something like this: You can also make circle/oval and polygon areas. You can edit all the parameters of an image map area after drawing it. Rectangle settings (for fine tweaking): JavaScript functions (it's up to you to write them): Here is a setup with two rectangles and one polygon area: When you hit save a map file is generated that looks something like this: Paste the contents into a web page and you are almost there. I made some tweaks before it became usable: Replaced &apos; with apostrophes in the javascript functions. Changed the image path so it would find the image in my images directory Tweaked the href urls. Added Title="Some Text" to get tool tips. Cleaned out the comments. Result: The final markup (with JavaScript function): function ImageMapMouseHover(Msg) { $("#Label1").html(Msg); } It may seem like a lot of bother but, the tool does the heavy lifting: i.e. the coordinates. Getting the regions positioned and sized is easy using a visual tool…much better than doing it by hand. This, of course, isn't a full treatise on the tool but it should give you enough information to decide if it's helpful. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens

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  • what tool should I use for drawing 2d OpenGL shapes?

    - by Kenny Winker
    I'm working on a very simple OpenGL ES 2.0 game, and I'm not sure what tool to use to create the vertex data I need. My first thought was adobe illustrator, but I can't seem to google up any info on how to convert an .ai file to vertices. I'm only going to be using very simple 2d shapes so I wonder if I need to use a 3d modelling program? How is this typically done, when you are working with 2d non-sprite shapes?

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