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• Why is my javascript function sometimes "not defined"?

  - by harpo

  Problem: I call my javascript function, and sometimes I get the error 'myFunction is not defined'. But it is defined. For example. I'll occasionally get 'copyArray is not defined' even in this example: function copyArray( pa ) { var la = []; for (var i=0; i < pa.length; i++) la.push( pa[i] ); return la; } Function.prototype.bind = function( po ) { var __method = this; var __args = []; // sometimes errors -- in practice I inline the function as a workaround __args = copyArray( arguments ); return function() { /* bind logic omitted for brevity */ } } As you can see, copyArray is defined right there, so this can't be about the order in which script files load. I've been getting this in situations that are harder to work around, where the calling function is located in another file that should be loaded after the called function. But this was the simplest case I could present, and appears to be the same problem. It doesn't happen 100% of the time, so I do suspect some kind of load-timing-related problem. But I have no idea what. @Hojou: That's part of the problem. The function in which I'm now getting this error is itself my addLoadEvent, which is basically a standard version of the common library function. @James: I understand that, and there is no syntax error in the function. When that is the case, the syntax error is reported as well. In this case, I am getting only the 'not defined' error. @David: The script in this case resides in an external file that is referenced using the normal <script src="file.js"></script> method in the page's head section. @Douglas: Interesting idea, but if this were the case, how could we ever call a user-defined function with confidence? In any event, I tried this and it didn't work. @sk: This technique has been tested across browsers and is basically copied from the prototype library.

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• Creating a simple templated control. Having issues...

  - by Jimock

  Hi, I'm trying to create a really simple templated control. I've never done it before, but I know a lot of my controls I have created in the past would have greatly benefited if I included templating ability - so I'm learning now. The problem I have is that my template is outputted on the page but my property value is not. So all I get is the static text which I include in my template. I must be doing something correctly because the control doesn't cause any errors, so it knows my public property exists. (e.g. if I try to use Container.ThisDoesntExist it throws an exception). I'd appreciate some help on this. I may be just being a complete muppet and missing something. Online tutorials on simple templated server controls seem few and far between, so if you know of one I'd like to know about it. A cut down version of my code is below. Many Thanks, James Here is my code for the control: [ParseChildren(true)] public class TemplatedControl : Control, INamingContainer { private TemplatedControlContainer theContainer; [TemplateContainer(typeof(TemplatedControlContainer)), PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty)] public ITemplate ItemTemplate { get; set; } protected override void CreateChildControls() { Controls.Clear(); theContainer = new TemplatedControlContainer("Hello World"); this.ItemTemplate.InstantiateIn(theContainer); Controls.Add(theContainer); } } Here is my code for the container: [ToolboxItem(false)] public class TemplatedControlContainer : Control, INamingContainer { private string myString; public string MyString { get { return myString; } } internal TemplatedControlContainer(string mystr) { this.myString = mystr; } } Here is my mark up: <my:TemplatedControl runat="server"> <ItemTemplate> <div style="background-color: Black; color: White;"> Text Here: <%# Container.MyString %> </div> </ItemTemplate> </my:TemplatedControl>

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• How can i use a duration setting on .animate if it is inside the callback from a .fadeOut effect?

  - by Jannis

  I am trying to just fade the content of section#secondary out and once the content has been faded out, the parent (section#secondary) should animate 'shut' in a slider animation. All this is working however the durations are not and I cannot figure out why. Here is my code: HTML <section id="secondary"> <a href="#" class="slide_button">&laquo;</a> <!-- slide in/back button --> <article> <h1>photos</h1> <div class="album_nav"><a href="#">photo 1 of 6</a> | <a href="#">create an album</a></div> <div class="bar"> <p class="section_title">current image title</p> </div> <section class="image"> <div class="links"> <a class="_back album_link" href="#">« from the album: james new toy</a> <nav> <a href="#" class="_back small_button">back</a> <a href="#" class="_next small_button">next</a> </nav> </div> <img src="http://localhost/~jannis/3781_doggie_wonderland/www/preview/static/images/sample-image-enlarged.jpg" width="418" height="280" alt="" /> </section> </article> <footer> <embed src="http://localhost/~jannis/3781_doggie_wonderland/www/preview/static/flash/secondary-footer.swf" wmode="transparent" width="495" height="115" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> </footer> </section> <!-- close secondary --> jQuery // ============================= // = Close button (slide away) = // ============================= $('a.slide_button').click(function() { $(this).closest('section#secondary').children('*').fadeOut('slow', function() { $('section#secondary').animate({'width':'0'}, 3000); }); }); Because the content of section#secondary is variable I use the * selector. What happens is that the fadeOut uses the appropriate slow speed but as soon as the callback fires (once the content is faded out) the section#secondary animates to width: 0 within a couple of milliseconds and not the 3000 ms ( 3 sec ) I set the animation duration to. Any ideas would be appreciated. PS: I cannot post an example at this point but since this is more a matter of theory of jQuery I don't think an example is necessary here. Correct me if I am wrong..

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• Structs, strtok, segmentation fault

  - by FILIaS

  I'm trying to make a programme with structs and files.The following is just a part of my code(it;s not all). What i'm trying to do is: ask the user to write his command. eg. delete John eg. enter John James 5000 ipad purchase. The problem is that I want to split the command in order to save its 'args' for a struct element. That's why i used strtok. BUT I'm facing another problem in who to 'put' these on the struct. #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #define MAX 100 char command[1500]; struct catalogue { char short_name[50]; char surname[50]; signed int amount; char description[1000]; }*catalog[MAX]; int main ( int argc, char *argv[] ) { int i,n; char choice[3]; printf(">sort1: Print savings sorted by surname\n"); printf(">sort2: Print savings sorted by amount\n"); printf(">search+name:Print savings of each name searched\n"); printf(">delete+full_name+amount: Erase saving\n"); printf(">enter+full_name+amount+description: Enter saving \n"); printf(">quit: Update + EXIT program.\n"); printf("Choose your selection:\n>"); gets(command); //it save the whole command /*in choice it;s saved only the first 2 letters(needed for menu choice again)*/ strncpy(choice,command,2); choice[2]='\0'; char** args = (char**)malloc(strlen(command)*sizeof(char*)); memset(args, 0, sizeof(char*)*strlen(command)); char* curToken = strtok(command, " \t"); for (n = 0; curToken != NULL; ++n) { args[n] = strdup(curToken); curToken = strtok(NULL, " \t"); *catalog[n]->short_name=*args[1]; *catalog[n]->surname=args[2]; catalog[n]->amount=atoi(args[3]); *catalog[n]->description=args[4]; } return 0; } I get a warning (warning: assignment makes integer from pointer without a cast) for the lines: *catalog[n]->short_name=*args[1]; *catalog[n]->surname=args[2]; *catalog[n]->description=args[4]; As a result, after running the program i get a Segmentation Fault... Any help? Any ideas?

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• JavaFX - question regarding binding button's disabled state

  - by jamiebarrow

  I'm trying to create a dummy application that maintains a list of tasks. For now, all I'm trying to do is add to the list. I enter a task name in a text box, click on the add task button, and expect the list to be updated with the new item and the task name input to be cleared. I only want to be able to add tasks if the task name is not empty. The below code is my implementation, but I have a question regarding the binding. I'm binding the textbox's text variable to a string in my view model, and the button's disable variable to a boolean in my view model. I have a trigger to update the disabled state when the task name changes. When the binding of the task name happens the boolean is updated accordingly, but the button still appears disabled. But then when I mouse over the button, it becomes enabled. I believe this is due to JavaFX 1.3's binding being lazy - only updates the bound variable when it is read. Also, when I've added the task, I clear the task name in the model, but the textbox's text doesn't change - even though I'm using bind with inverse. Is there a way to make the textbox's text and the button's disabled state update automatically via the binding as I was expecting? Thanks, James AddTaskViewModel.fx: package jamiebarrow; import java.lang.System; public class AddTaskViewModel { function logChange(prop:String,oldValue,newValue):Void { println("{System.currentTimeMillis()} : {prop} [{oldValue}] to [{newValue}] "); } public var newTaskName: String on replace old { logChange("newTaskName",old,newTaskName); isAddTaskDisabled = (newTaskName == null or newTaskName.trim().length() == 0); }; public var isAddTaskDisabled: Boolean on replace old { logChange("isAddTaskDisabled",old,isAddTaskDisabled); }; public var taskItems = [] on replace old { logChange("taskItems",old,taskItems); }; public function addTask() { insert newTaskName into taskItems; newTaskName = ""; } } Main.fx: package jamiebarrow; import javafx.scene.control.Button; import javafx.scene.control.TextBox; import javafx.scene.control.ListView; import javafx.scene.Scene; import javafx.scene.layout.VBox; import javafx.stage.Stage; import javafx.scene.layout.HBox; def viewModel = AddTaskViewModel{}; var txtName: TextBox = TextBox { text: bind viewModel.newTaskName with inverse onKeyTyped: onKeyTyped }; function onKeyTyped(event): Void { txtName.commit(); // ensures model is updated cmdAddTask.disable = viewModel.isAddTaskDisabled;// the binding only occurs lazily, so this is needed } var cmdAddTask = Button { text: "Add" disable: bind viewModel.isAddTaskDisabled with inverse action: onAddTask }; function onAddTask(): Void { viewModel.addTask(); } var lstTasks = ListView { items: bind viewModel.taskItems with inverse }; Stage { scene: Scene { content: [ VBox { content: [ HBox { content: [ txtName, cmdAddTask ] }, lstTasks ] } ] } }

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• Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'length' of undefined

  - by AnApprentice

  I'm working to built a contact list that is grouped by the first letter of the contact's last name. After a succesfull ajax request, the contact is pushed to addContact: Ajax success: ko.utils.arrayForEach(dataJS.contactList, function(c) { contactsModel.addContact(c); }); contactsModel.addContact: //add a contact in the right spot under the right letter contactsModel.addContact = function(newContact) { //grab first character var firstLetter = (newContact.lname || "").charAt(0).toUpperCase(); //if it is a number use # if (!isNaN(firstLetter)) { firstLetter = "#"; } //do we already have entries for this letter if (!this.letterIndex[firstLetter]) { //new object to track this letter's contacts var letterContacts = { letter: firstLetter, contacts: ko.observableArray([]) }; this.letterIndex[firstLetter] = letterContacts; //easy access to it //put the numbers at the end if (firstLetter === "#") { this.contactsByLetter.push(letterContacts); } else { //add the letter in the right spot for (var i = 0, lettersLength = this.contactsByLetter().length; i < lettersLength; i++) { var letter = this.contactsByLetter()[i].letter; if (letter === "#" || firstLetter < letter) { break; } } this.contactsByLetter.splice(i, 0, letterContacts); } } var contacts = this.letterIndex[firstLetter].contacts; //now we have a letter to add our contact to, but need to add it in the right spot var newContactName = newContact.lname + " " + newContact.fname; for (var j = 0, contactsLength = contacts().length; j < contactsLength; j++) { var contactName = contacts()[j].lName + " " + contacts()[j].fName; if (newContactName < contactName) { break; } } //add the contact at the right index contacts.splice(j, 0, newContact); }.bind(contactsModel); The contacts json object from the server looks like this: { "total_pages": 10, "page": page, "contactList": [{ "photo": "http://homepage.mac.com/millhouse/Family%20Tree/images/PersonListIcon.png", "lname": "Bond", "id": 241, "fname": "James", "email": "[email protected]"}, While this works in jsfiddle, when I try it locally, I get the following error during the first push to addContact: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'length' of undefined jQuery.jQuery.extend._Deferred.deferred.resolveWithjquery-1.5.1.js:869 donejquery-1.5.1.js:6591 jQuery.ajaxTransport.send.callbackjquery-1.5.1.js:7382 Ideas? Thanks

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• LINQ Except operator and object equality

  - by Abhijeet Patel

  Here is an interesting issue I noticed when using the Except Operator: I have list of users from which I want to exclude some users: The list of users is coming from an XML file: The code goes like this: interface IUser { int ID { get; set; } string Name { get; set; } } class User: IUser { #region IUser Members public int ID { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } #endregion public override string ToString() { return ID + ":" +Name; } public static IEnumerable<IUser> GetMatchingUsers(IEnumerable<IUser> users) { IEnumerable<IUser> localList = new List<User> { new User{ ID=4, Name="James"}, new User{ ID=5, Name="Tom"} }.OfType<IUser>(); var matches = from u in users join lu in localList on u.ID equals lu.ID select u; return matches; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("Users.xml"); IEnumerable<IUser> users = doc.Element("Users").Elements("User").Select (u => new User { ID = (int)u.Attribute("id"), Name = (string)u.Attribute("name") } ).OfType<IUser>(); //still a query, objects have not been materialized var matches = User.GetMatchingUsers(users); var excludes = users.Except(matches); // excludes should contain 6 users but here it contains 8 users } } When I call User.GetMatchingUsers(users) I get 2 matches as expected. The issue is that when I call users.Except(matches) The matching users are not being excluded at all! I am expecting 6 users ut "excludes" contains all 8 users instead. Since all I'm doing in GetMatchingUsers(IEnumerable users) is taking the IEnumerable and just returning the IUsers whose ID's match( 2 IUsers in this case), my understanding is that by default "Except" will use reference equality for comparing the objects to be excluded. Is this not how "Except" behaves? What is even more interesting is that if I materialize the objects using .ToList() and then get the matching users, and call "Except", everything works as expected! Like so: IEnumerable users = doc.Element("Users").Elements("User").Select (u = new User { ID = (int)u.Attribute("id"), Name = (string)u.Attribute("name") } ).OfType().ToList(); //explicity materializing all objects by calling ToList() var matches = User.GetMatchingUsers(users); var excludes = users.Except(matches); // excludes now contains 6 users as expected I don't see why I should need to materialize objects for calling "Except" given that its defined on IEnumerable? Any suggesstions / insights would be much appreciated.

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• Is it possible to use .data() as a search criteria?

  - by Andrew

  I have a pretty complex chat application going on, and there are multiple chat panes, chat entries, chat submits, etc. going on in the same window. At first I was going to do something like.... <input type="text" class="chattext" id="chattext-42"> <input type="text" class="chattext" id="chattext-93"> <input type="button" class="chatsubmit" id="chatsubmit-42"> <input type="button" class="chatsubmit" id="chatsubmit-93"> ... etc. (of course this is vastly simplified, they'd be in separate divs, separate visibilities, etc) So, when they clicked on a .chatsubmit, it would then get the id of that and find the last two characters for the chat ID. This presents some problems, as it would require rewrites if IDs changed lengths, and seems just plain inelegant to me. I then remembered the .data() facility in jQuery... I thought, maybe I could do it more like this: <input type="text" class="chattext"> ... and add a .data("id", 42) to this one <input type="button" class="chatsubmit"> ... and add a .data("id", 42) So that when they click chatsubmit, it gets the ID, and then finds the chattext with that ID and processes it. But looking at the documentation, I don't see an easy way to search by this. For example, let's say the event target in this case is the chatsubmit with the data('id') of 42... var ID = $(event.target).data('id'); // Sets it to 42 var chattext = ... And here I run into the trouble. How do I find which DOM element matches a class of chattext and a data('id') of 42? Is there any easy method, or do I have to search every .chattext for the one with an id of 42? Or is there another easy way of doing this? I did consider the possibility of the container div having the ID, which would make it, I think,? slightly easier to get. But if this works, it could be dealing with things in other container divs as well, making that not a long-term solution. Edit: Literally seconds after posting this, I found this: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/extending-jquerys-selector-capabilities/ which includes information on extending the selector to data. So I'll try that out, and in the meantime, is this a completely foolhardy way of handling this?

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• VB.NET IF() Coalesce and “Expression Expected” Error

  - by Jeff Widmer

  I am trying to use the equivalent of the C# “??” operator in some VB.NET code that I am working in. This StackOverflow article for “Is there a VB.NET equivalent for C#'s ?? operator?” explains the VB.NET IF() statement syntax which is exactly what I am looking for... and I thought I was going to be done pretty quickly and could move on. But after implementing the IF() statement in my code I started to receive this error: Compiler Error Message: BC30201: Expression expected. And no matter how I tried using the “IF()” statement, whenever I tried to visit the aspx page that I was working on I received the same error. This other StackOverflow article Using VB.NET If vs. IIf in binding/rendering expression indicated that the VB.NET IF() operator was not available until VS2008 or .NET Framework 3.5.  So I checked the Web Application project properties but it was targeting the .NET Framework 3.5: So I was still not understanding what was going on, but then I noticed the version information in the detailed compiler output of the error page: This happened to be a C# project, but with an ASPX page with inline VB.NET code (yes, it is strange to have that but that is the project I am working on).  So even though the project file was targeting the .NET Framework 3.5, the ASPX page was being compiled using the .NET Framework 2.0.  But why?  Where does this get set?  How does ASP.NET know which version of the compiler to use for the inline code? For this I turned to the web.config.  Here is the system.codedom/compilers section that was in the web.config for this project: <system.codedom>     <compilers>         <compiler language="c#;cs;csharp" extension=".cs" warningLevel="4" type="Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089">             <providerOption name="CompilerVersion" value="v3.5" />             <providerOption name="WarnAsError" value="false" />         </compiler>     </compilers> </system.codedom> Keep in mind that this is a C# web application project file but my aspx file has inline VB.NET code.  The web.config does not have any information for how to compile for VB.NET so it defaults to .NET 2.0 (instead of 3.5 which is what I need). So the web.config needed to include the VB.NET compiler option.  Here it is with both the C# and VB.NET options (I copied the VB.NET config from a new VB.NET Web Application project file).     <system.codedom>         <compilers>             <compiler language="c#;cs;csharp" extension=".cs" warningLevel="4" type="Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089">                 <providerOption name="CompilerVersion" value="v3.5" />                 <providerOption name="WarnAsError" value="false" />             </compiler>       <compiler language="vb;vbs;visualbasic;vbscript" extension=".vb" warningLevel="4" type="Microsoft.VisualBasic.VBCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089">         <providerOption name="CompilerVersion" value="v3.5"/>         <providerOption name="OptionInfer" value="true"/>         <providerOption name="WarnAsError" value="false"/>       </compiler>     </compilers>     </system.codedom>   So the inline VB.NET code on my aspx page was being compiled using the .NET Framework 2.0 when it really needed to be compiled with the .NET Framework 3.5 compiler in order to take advantage of the VB.NET IF() coalesce statement.  Without the VB.NET web.config compiler option, the default is to compile using the .NET Framework 2.0 and the VB.NET IF() coalesce statement does not exist (at least in the form that I want it in).  FYI, there is an older IF statement in VB.NET 2.0 compiler which is why it is giving me the unusual “Expression Expected” error message – see this article for when VB.NET got the new updated version. EDIT (2011-06-20): I had made a wrong assumption in the first version of this blog post.  After a little more research and investigation I was able to figure out that the issue was in the web.config and not with the IIS App Pool.  Thanks to the comment from James which forced me to look into this again.

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• Wishful Thinking: Why can't HTML fix Script Attacks at the Source?

  - by Rick Strahl

  The Web can be an evil place, especially if you're a Web Developer blissfully unaware of Cross Site Script Attacks (XSS). Even if you are aware of XSS in all of its insidious forms, it's extremely complex to deal with all the issues if you're taking user input and you're actually allowing users to post raw HTML into an application. I'm dealing with this again today in a Web application where legacy data contains raw HTML that has to be displayed and users ask for the ability to use raw HTML as input for listings. The first line of defense of course is: Just say no to HTML input from users. If you don't allow HTML input directly and use HTML Encoding (HttyUtility.HtmlEncode() in .NET or using standard ASP.NET MVC output @Model.Content) you're fairly safe at least from the HTML input provided. Both WebForms and Razor support HtmlEncoded content, although Razor makes it the default. In Razor the default @ expression syntax:@Model.UserContent automatically produces HTML encoded content - you actually have to go out of your way to create raw HTML content (safe by default) using @Html.Raw() or the HtmlString class. In Web Forms (V4) you can use:<%: Model.UserContent %> or if you're using a version prior to 4.0:<%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(Model.UserContent) %> This works great as a hedge against embedded <script> tags and HTML markup as any HTML is turned into text that displays as HTML but doesn't render the HTML. But it turns any embedded HTML markup tags into plain text. If you need to display HTML in raw form with the markup tags rendering based on user input this approach is worthless. If you do accept HTML input and need to echo the rendered HTML input back, the task of cleaning up that HTML is a complex task. In the projects I work on, customers are frequently asking for the ability to post raw HTML quite frequently.  Almost every app that I've built where there's document content from users we start out with text only input - possibly using something like MarkDown - but inevitably users want to just post plain old HTML they created in some other rich editing application. See this a lot with realtors especially who often want to reuse their postings easily in multiple places. In my work this is a common problem I need to deal with and I've tried dozens of different methods from sanitizing, simple rejection of input to custom markup schemes none of which have ever felt comfortable to me. They work in a half assed, hacked together sort of way but I always live in fear of missing something vital which is *really easy to do*. My Wishlist Item: A <restricted> tag in HTML Let me dream here for a second on how to address this problem. It seems to me the easiest place where this can be fixed is: In the browser. Browsers are actually executing script code so they have a lot of control over the script code that resides in a page. What if there was a way to specify that you want to turn off script code for a block of HTML? The main issue when dealing with HTML raw input isn't that we as developers are unaware of the implications of user input, but the fact that we sometimes have to display raw HTML input the user provides. So the problem markup is usually isolated in only a very specific part of the document. So, what if we had a way to specify that in any given HTML block, no script code could execute by wrapping it into a tag that disables all script functionality in the browser? This would include <script> tags and any document script attributes like onclick, onfocus etc. and potentially also disallow things like iFrames that can potentially be scripted from the within the iFrame's target. I'd like to see something along these lines:<article> <restricted allowscripts="no" allowiframes="no"> <div>Some content</div> <script>alert('go ahead make my day, punk!");</script> <div onfocus="$.getJson('http://evilsite.com/')">more content</div> </restricted> </article> A tag like this would basically disallow all script code from firing from any HTML that's rendered within it. You'd use this only on code that you actually render from your data only and only if you are dealing with custom data. So something like this:<article> <restricted> @Html.Raw(Model.UserContent) </restricted> </article> For browsers this would actually be easy to intercept. They render the DOM and control loading and execution of scripts that are loaded through it. All the browser would have to do is suspend execution of <script> tags and not hookup any event handlers defined via markup in this block. Given all the crazy XSS attacks that exist and the prevalence of this problem this would go a long way towards preventing at least coded script attacks in the DOM. And it seems like a totally doable solution that wouldn't be very difficult to implement by vendors. There would also need to be some logic in the parser to not allow an </restricted> or <restricted> tag into the content as to short-circuit the rstricted section (per James Hart's comment). I'm sure there are other issues to consider as well that I didn't think of in my off-the-back-of-a-napkin concept here but the idea overall seems worth consideration I think. Without code running in a user supplied HTML block it'd be pretty hard to compromise a local HTML document and pass information like Cookies to a server. Or even send data to a server period. Short of an iFrame that can access the parent frame (which is another restriction that should be available on this <restricted> tag) that could potentially communicate back, there's not a lot a malicious site could do. The HTML could still 'phone home' via image links and href links potentially and basically say this site was accessed, but without the ability to run script code it would be pretty tough to pass along critical information to the server beyond that. Ahhhh… one can dream… Not holding my breath of course. The design by committee that is the W3C can't agree on anything in timeframes measured less than decades, but maybe this is one place where browser vendors can actually step up the pressure. This is something in their best interest to reduce the attack surface for vulnerabilities on their browser platforms significantly. Several people commented on Twitter today that there isn't enough discussion on issues like this that address serious needs in the web browser space. Realistically security has to be a number one concern with Web applications in general - there isn't a Web app out there that is not vulnerable. And yet nothing has been done to address these security issues even though there might be relatively easy solutions to make this happen. It'll take time, and it's probably not going to happen in our lifetime, but maybe this rambling thought sparks some ideas on how this sort of restriction can get into browsers in some way in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  HTML5  HTML  Security   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• XNA Notes 010

  - by George Clingerman

  With GDC 2011 wrapping up there were a LOT of great interviews and posts with and about XNA and XBLIG and some of our more notorious developers. Definitely worth spending many, many hours watching, listening and reading all those. Very inspiring! Also, don’t forget to get signed up for Dream Build Play! And just as an early warning reminder do NOT, I repeat do NOT wait to submit your game the last day. There are major issues submitting the last day every year and you do not want all your hard work to be hanging on whether your entry actually went through in that last day. Plan on submitting a few days if not a week before. I’m serious, you’ll thank yourself later! Now on to what’s happening in the XNA community! Time Critical XNA News: PAX East Meet Up (really wish I was going!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71921/439262.aspx Want to stay panicked about the countdown to Dream Build Play? Mike McLaughlin shares his DBP countdown clock http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/44454458960252928 XNA Team: Nick Gravelyn Only needs less than 600 new users in his unique marketing plan for Pixel Man 2 http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ And hares his ad revenue numbers with his XNA WP7 games http://theoneswiththelight.com/2011/my-results-with-ad-revenue-for-wp7-games/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn posts his 15,000th App Hub forum post and shares a few thoughts on the MVP summit http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx Chris Williams shares his thoughts on the MVP summit http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx XNA Developers: Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best games Wraps up GDC http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-wrapped.html And shares the wonderful screenshots from Serious Sam. (I’m so jealous people at PAX East willl be playing a demo of this game!) http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/serious-sam-double-d.html James Silva of Ska Studios announces http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/09/vampire-smile-at-hotel-sierra/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/08/vengeance-begins-april-6th/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/04/good-morning-gato-52/ Michael McLaughlin writes an extremely useful set of tips for XNA WP7 developers http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/10/tips-for-xna-wp7-developers.aspx Robert Boyd “the one man XBLIG improving machine” posts his 9 tips for marketing an Xbox LIVE Indie Gam http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110309/7183/9_Tips_for_XBLIG_Marketing.php http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/77534/470586.aspx#470586 And shares his day by day experience at GDC this year http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7118/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_1.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7123/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_2.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110303/7129/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_3.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7133/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_4.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7160/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_5.php Phillipe Da Silva releases new IGF Pong Sample preview http://www.vimeo.com/20904070 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Gamergeddon posts XBox Indie Game Roundup for March 6th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/03/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-march-6th/ Dealspwn interviews FortressCraft developer Projector Games http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-minecraft-clones-venting-haters-part-1/ http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-part-2-trials-tribulations-indie-development/ Writings of Mass Destruction continues the Xbox LIVE Indie Game a day campaign, here’s his take on FishCraft (be sure to check out his other posts!) http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/03/05/day-116-fishcraft/ Tom Ogburn shares his GDC notes on the XBLIG panel jotted quickly while attending the panel http://twitter.com/#!/TOgburn/status/44454191028125696 http://www.starlitskygames.com/blogs/site_news/archive/2011/03/06/802.aspx Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus has crazy good coverage on XNA and Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers at GDC 2011. Interviews and articles all extremely well done! http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/06/gdc-2011-successful-indie-developers-share-insight-on-microsofts-self-publishing-service/ There’s honestly so many posts and interviews you should just hit his front page and scroll down through all of the latest ones. http://www.armlessoctopus.com/ GameMarx Episode 12 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/27/ep-12-march-4-2011.aspx B.U.T.T.O.N now on Steam! http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/03/button_party_game_now_on_steam.php German Xbox Dashboard gets review program from GamePro http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/07/gamepo-indie-review-show-debuts-on-german-xbox-dashboard/ XboxIndies.com (one of the best XNA sites out there at this point!) continues to add review sites to it’s main review feed. (And don’t forget to play with that awesome XBLIG pivot control!) http://xboxindies.com/ Kris Steele of FunInfused Games shares early footage of his game World of Chalk http://twitter.com/#!/kriswd40/status/45007114371989504 Raymond Matthews of Darkstarmatryx reviews FunInfused Games Abduction Action http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=264 TheVideoGamerRob reviews Zombie Football Carnage http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/xblig-review-zombie-football-carnage/ XBLIG Square Off Making the Jump to WP7 http://www.wp7connect.com/2011/03/08/xblig-square-off-will-make-the-jump-to-windows-phone/ Mommy’s Best Games making the news round with their Serious Sam announcement http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/09/serious-sam-gets-serious-indie-cred-with-new-indie-series/ Most quoted and linked XBLIG article of the week with the least amount of actual facts and reporting. Shared only because it makes me sad that this is the best coverage we get. (Hey reporters, there’s LOT and LOTS of XBLIG and XNA experts you can contact if you need to check up on facts or wonder why on questions like, Why can’t XBLIGs have Nazis? There’s actually a real answer for that..) http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/06/xblig-facts-nazi-killing-a-no-no-revenue-a-yes-yes/ XNA Development: Mort8088 has been in an XNA tutorial writing frenzy releasing 4 XNA 4.0 entry level tutorials this week! http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-0-intro/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-1-fonts/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-2-sprites/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-3-input-from-keyboard/ Interesting discussion on what it means to be a community (you do have to sign up to be a member of the XNA UK forums to read it...) http://twitter.com/#!/XNAUK/status/44705269254594560 Slyprid continues his incredible pace on Transmute and shares screens of his new Animation Builder http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/45169271847911424 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/ Philippe Da Silva wants to know who is using IGF for their games. If it’s you, drop him a note letting him know! http://twitter.com/#!/philippedasilva/status/44325893719588864 New Sunburn Video Tutorials released http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/03/07/new-documentation-video-tutorials.aspx Loading and rendering animated collada models using XNA 4.0 http://bunkernetz.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/loading-and-rendering-animated-collada-models-using-xna-4-0/ XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 6 Accelerometer Input http://buzzgamesnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/xna-for-silverlight-developers-part-6.html

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• Package management fails in update-manager with gzip problems and compilation errors. U12.04LTS

  - by HarveyP

  Similar to but not the same as Package management system corrupted. Cannot install or remove packages. U12.04LTS (an earlier problem) with package management system. Followed all of L. D. James suggestions in his answer to no avail. This time as well as the gzip error I am also getting compilation errors. The difference may be due to a lack of compilation in my earlier problem so it may be the same error. The packages concerned are enumerated in the output from update-manager below. Also included below that is the output from apt-get -f install apt-get autoremove gives same output. Tried update without SSL updates - 9 to install and got "Unhandled Error in aptdaemon". Output number 3 below. One at a time - output 4 - is for firefox, first in the list of packages. Falls over at libssl1.0.0 despite deselection of it from update ... Tried apt-get install --reinstall dpkg which succeeded, apt-get install --reinstall tar and apt-get install --reinstall gzip both of which failed at libssl1.0.0 as ever. (as suggested by Subv3rsion elsewhere in this forum) Now cannot apt-get update with complete success even after changing server and apt-get clean - output number 5 below ... 1). Output from update-manager The following packages will be upgraded:<> firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-locale-en libavcodec-extra-53 libavformat53 libavutil-extra-51 libjson0 libpostproc52 libssl1.0.0 libswscale2 openssl 11 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.<br> Need to get 0 B/46.5 MB of archives. After this operation, 1,416 kB of additional disk space will be used.<br> Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y debconf: Perl may be unconfigured (Bareword "gensym" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Handle.pm line 67. BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Handle.pm line 366. Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Seekable.pm line 9. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Seekable.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/File.pm line 11. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/File.pm line 11. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl/5.14/FileHandle.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at (eval 1) line 3. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 3. ) -- aborting (Reading database ... 160575 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace libssl1.0.0 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14 (using .../libssl1.0.0_1.0.1-4ubuntu5.15_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement libssl1.0.0 ... dpkg-deb (subprocess): data: internal gzip read error: '<fd:4>: data error' dpkg-deb: error: subprocess <decompress> returned error exit status 2 dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libssl1.0.0_1.0.1-4ubuntu5.15_i386.deb (--unpack):<br> subprocess dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile returned error exit status 2 No apport report written because MaxReports has already been reached Bareword "gensym" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Handle.pm line 67. BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Handle.pm line 366. Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Seekable.pm line 9. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Seekable.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/File.pm line 11. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/File.pm line 11. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl/5.14/FileHandle.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Template.pm line 8. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Template.pm line 8. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 8. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 8. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 7. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 7. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Log.pm line 10. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Db.pm line 7. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Db.pm line 7. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/debconf/frontend line 6. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/debconf/frontend line 6. dpkg: error whale cleanang up: subprgcess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libssl1.0.0_1.0.1-4ubuntu5.15_i386.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) 2). Output from install -f harveyp@harveyp:~$ sudo apt-get -f install [sudo] password for harveyp: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 11 not to upgrade. 1 not fully installed or removed.<br> After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. E: Internal Error, No file name for libssl1.0.0 3). Unhandled error from aptdaemon Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1045, in _simulate trans.unauthenticated = self.__simulate(trans) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1160, in __simulate unauthenticated = self._get_unauthenticated() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 347, in _get_unauthenticated for pkg in self._iterate_packages(): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1356, in _iterate_packages for enum, pkg in enumerate(self._cache): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 216, in __iter__ yield self[pkgname] File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 201, in __getitem__ pkg = self._weakref[key] = Package(self, self._cache[key]) KeyError: 'librqrcode-rubq-doc 4). output from update of firefox installArchives() failed: Error in function: < Setting up libssl1.0.0 (1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14) ... Bareword "gensym" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Handle.pm line 67. BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Handle.pm line 366. Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Seekable.pm line 9. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/Seekable.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/File.pm line 11. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl/5.14/IO/File.pm line 11. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl/5.14/FileHandle.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Template.pm line 8. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Template.pm line 8. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 8. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 8. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 7. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 7. Compilation failed in require at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Log.pm line 10. 5. output from apt-get update ...snip ... Hit http://ubuntu-archive.mirrors.free.org precise-security/multiverse Translation-en Hit http://ubuntu-archive.mirrors.free.org precise-security/restricted Translation-en Hit http://ubuntu-archive.mirrors.free.org precise-security/universe Translation-en Fetched 368 kB in 6s (59.5 kB/s) W: Failed to fetch gzip:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/ubuntu-archive.mirrors.free.org_ubuntu_dists_precise_universe_source_Sources Hash Sum mismatch E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

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• Ten - oh, wait, eleven - Eleven things you should know about the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update

  - by Jon Galloway

  Today, just a little over two months after the big ASP.NET 4.5 / ASP.NET MVC 4 / ASP.NET Web API / Visual Studio 2012 / Web Matrix 2 release, the first preview of the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update is out. Here's what you need to know: There are no new framework bits in this release - there's no change or update to ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC or Web Forms features. This means that you can start using it without any updates to your server, upgrade concerns, etc. This update is really an update to the project templates and Visual Studio tooling, conceptually similar to the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update. It's a relatively lightweight install. It's a 41MB download. I've installed it many times and usually takes 5-7 minutes; it's never required a reboot. It adds some new project templates to ASP.NET MVC: Facebook Application and Single Page Application templates. It adds a lot of cool enhancements to ASP.NET Web API. It adds some tooling that makes it easy to take advantage of features like SignalR, Friendly URLs, and Windows Azure Authentication. Most of the new features are installed via NuGet packages. Since ASP.NET is open source, nightly NuGet packages are available, and the roadmap is published, most of this has really been publicly available for a while. The official name of this drop is the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update BUILD Prerelease. Please do not attempt to say that ten times fast. While the EULA doesn't prohibit it, it WILL legally change your first name to Scott. As with all new releases, you can find out everything you need to know about the Fall Update at http://asp.net/vnext (especially the release notes!) I'm going to be showing all of this off, assisted by special guest code monkey Scott Hanselman, this Friday at BUILD: Bleeding edge ASP.NET: See what is next for MVC, Web API, SignalR and more… (and I've heard it will be livestreamed). Let's look at some of those things in more detail. No new bits ASP.NET 4.5, MVC 4 and Web API have a lot of great core features. I see the goal of this update release as making it easier to put those features to use to solve some useful scenarios by taking advantage of NuGet packages and template code. If you create a new ASP.NET MVC application using one of the new templates, you'll see that it's using the ASP.NET MVC 4 RTM NuGet package (4.0.20710.0): This means you can install and use the Fall Update without any impact on your existing projects and no worries about upgrading or compatibility. New Facebook Application Template ASP.NET MVC 4 (and ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms) included the ability to authenticate your users via OAuth and OpenID, so you could let users log in to your site using a Facebook account. One of the new changes in the Fall Update is a new template that makes it really easy to create full Facebook applications. You could create Facebook application in ASP.NET already, you'd just need to go through a few steps: Search around to find a good Facebook NuGet package, like the Facebook C# SDK (written by my friend Nathan Totten and some other Facebook SDK brainiacs). Read the Facebook developer documentation to figure out how to authenticate and integrate with them. Write some code, debug it and repeat until you got something working. Get started with the application you'd originally wanted to write. What this template does for you: eliminate steps 1-3. Erik Porter, Nathan and some other experts built out the Facebook Application template so it automatically pulls in and configures the Facebook NuGet package and makes it really easy to take advantage of it in an ASP.NET MVC application. One great example is the the way you access a Facebook user's information. Take a look at the following code in a File / New / MVC / Facebook Application site. First, the Home Controller Index action: [FacebookAuthorize(Permissions = "email")] public ActionResult Index(MyAppUser user, FacebookObjectList<MyAppUserFriend> userFriends) { ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your Facebook application using ASP.NET MVC."; ViewBag.User = user; ViewBag.Friends = userFriends.Take(5); return View(); } First, notice that there's a FacebookAuthorize attribute which requires the user is authenticated via Facebook and requires permissions to access their e-mail address. It binds to two things: a custom MyAppUser object and a list of friends. Let's look at the MyAppUser code: using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Facebook.Attributes; using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Facebook.Models; // Add any fields you want to be saved for each user and specify the field name in the JSON coming back from Facebook // https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ namespace MvcApplication3.Models { public class MyAppUser : FacebookUser { public string Name { get; set; } [FacebookField(FieldName = "picture", JsonField = "picture.data.url")] public string PictureUrl { get; set; } public string Email { get; set; } } } You can add in other custom fields if you want, but you can also just bind to a FacebookUser and it will automatically pull in the available fields. You can even just bind directly to a FacebookUser and check for what's available in debug mode, which makes it really easy to explore. For more information and some walkthroughs on creating Facebook applications, see: Deploying your first Facebook App on Azure using ASP.NET MVC Facebook Template (Yao Huang Lin) Facebook Application Template Tutorial (Erik Porter) Single Page Application template Early releases of ASP.NET MVC 4 included a Single Page Application template, but it was removed for the official release. There was a lot of interest in it, but it was kind of complex, as it handled features for things like data management. The new Single Page Application template that ships with the Fall Update is more lightweight. It uses Knockout.js on the client and ASP.NET Web API on the server, and it includes a sample application that shows how they all work together. I think the real benefit of this application is that it shows a good pattern for using ASP.NET Web API and Knockout.js. For instance, it's easy to end up with a mess of JavaScript when you're building out a client-side application. This template uses three separate JavaScript files (delivered via a Bundle, of course): todoList.js - this is where the main client-side logic lives todoList.dataAccess.js - this defines how the client-side application interacts with the back-end services todoList.bindings.js - this is where you set up events and overrides for the Knockout bindings - for instance, hooking up jQuery validation and defining some client-side events This is a fun one to play with, because you can just create a new Single Page Application and hit F5. Quick, easy install (with one gotcha) One of the cool engineering changes for this release is a big update to the installer to make it more lightweight and efficient. I've been running nightly builds of this for a few weeks to prep for my BUILD demos, and the install has been really quick and easy to use. The install takes about 5 minutes, has never required a reboot for me, and the uninstall is just as simple. There's one gotcha, though. In this preview release, you may hit an issue that will require you to uninstall and re-install the NuGet VSIX package. The problem comes up when you create a new MVC application and see this dialog: The solution, as explained in the release notes, is to uninstall and re-install the NuGet VSIX package: Start Visual Studio 2012 as an Administrator Go to Tools->Extensions and Updates and uninstall NuGet. Close Visual Studio Navigate to the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update installation folder: For Visual Studio 2012: Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Stack\Visual Studio 2012 For Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web: Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Stack\Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web Double click on the NuGet.Tools.vsix to reinstall NuGet This took me under a minute to do, and I was up and running. ASP.NET Web API Update Extravaganza! Uh, the Web API team is out of hand. They added a ton of new stuff: OData support, Tracing, and API Help Page generation. OData support Some people like OData. Some people start twitching when you mention it. If you're in the first group, this is for you. You can add a [Queryable] attribute to an API that returns an IQueryable<Whatever> and you get OData query support from your clients. Then, without any extra changes to your client or server code, your clients can send filters like this: /Suppliers?$filter=Name eq ‘Microsoft’ For more information about OData support in ASP.NET Web API, see Alex James' mega-post about it: OData support in ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET Web API Tracing Tracing makes it really easy to leverage the .NET Tracing system from within your ASP.NET Web API's. If you look at the \App_Start\WebApiConfig.cs file in new ASP.NET Web API project, you'll see a call to TraceConfig.Register(config). That calls into some code in the new \App_Start\TraceConfig.cs file: public static void Register(HttpConfiguration configuration) { if (configuration == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("configuration"); } SystemDiagnosticsTraceWriter traceWriter = new SystemDiagnosticsTraceWriter() { MinimumLevel = TraceLevel.Info, IsVerbose = false }; configuration.Services.Replace(typeof(ITraceWriter), traceWriter); } As you can see, this is using the standard trace system, so you can extend it to any other trace listeners you'd like. To see how it works with the built in diagnostics trace writer, just run the application call some API's, and look at the Visual Studio Output window: iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Request, Method=GET, Url=http://localhost:11147/api/Values, Message='http://localhost:11147/api/Values' iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Values', Operation=DefaultHttpControllerSelector.SelectController iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='WebAPI.Controllers.ValuesController', Operation=DefaultHttpControllerActivator.Create iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='WebAPI.Controllers.ValuesController', Operation=HttpControllerDescriptor.CreateController iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Selected action 'Get()'', Operation=ApiControllerActionSelector.SelectAction iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=HttpActionBinding.ExecuteBindingAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=QueryableAttribute.ActionExecuting iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Action returned 'System.String[]'', Operation=ReflectedHttpActionDescriptor.ExecuteAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Will use same 'JsonMediaTypeFormatter' formatter', Operation=JsonMediaTypeFormatter.GetPerRequestFormatterInstance iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Selected formatter='JsonMediaTypeFormatter', content-type='application/json; charset=utf-8'', Operation=DefaultContentNegotiator.Negotiate iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ApiControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionAsync, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=QueryableAttribute.ActionExecuted, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ValuesController.ExecuteAsync, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Response, Status=200 (OK), Method=GET, Url=http://localhost:11147/api/Values, Message='Content-type='application/json; charset=utf-8', content-length=unknown' iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=JsonMediaTypeFormatter.WriteToStreamAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ValuesController.Dispose API Help Page When you create a new ASP.NET Web API project, you'll see an API link in the header: Clicking the API link shows generated help documentation for your ASP.NET Web API controllers: And clicking on any of those APIs shows specific information: What's great is that this information is dynamically generated, so if you add your own new APIs it will automatically show useful and up to date help. This system is also completely extensible, so you can generate documentation in other formats or customize the HTML help as much as you'd like. The Help generation code is all included in an ASP.NET MVC Area: SignalR SignalR is a really slick open source project that was started by some ASP.NET team members in their spare time to add real-time communications capabilities to ASP.NET - and .NET applications in general. It allows you to handle long running communications channels between your server and multiple connected clients using the best communications channel they can both support - websockets if available, falling back all the way to old technologies like long polling if necessary for old browsers. SignalR remains an open source project, but now it's being included in ASP.NET (also open source, hooray!). That means there's real, official ASP.NET engineering work being put into SignalR, and it's even easier to use in an ASP.NET application. Now in any ASP.NET project type, you can right-click / Add / New Item... SignalR Hub or Persistent Connection. And much more... There's quite a bit more. You can find more info at http://asp.net/vnext, and we'll be adding more content as fast as we can. Watch my BUILD talk to see as I demonstrate these and other features in the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update, as well as some other even futurey-er stuff!

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – November 2011

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity glassfish GlassFish Marek’s JAX-RS 2.0 content from Devoxx 2011 – bit.ly/sp2NJO chriscmuir chriscmuir New blog post: ADF bug: missing af:column borders in af:table for IE7 – t.co/81np2jug chriscmuir chriscmuir Reading: Oracle’s ADF Rich Client User Interface (RCUI) Guidelines – oracle.com/webfolder/ux/m… netbeans NetBeans Team Bottlenecks be gone! #Java Performance Tuning workshop in Munich w Kirk Pepperdine, Nov 29-Dec 2: ow.ly/7Akh5 OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Creating ADF Faces Comamnd Button at Runtime ow.ly/1fM9dE alexismp Alexis MP blogged "GlassFish Back from Devoxx 2011, Mature Java EE 6 and EE 7 well on its way" – bit.ly/rP8LV0 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Usage of jQuery in ADF dlvr.it/x3t84 20 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Webcast: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c: Developer Deep Dive – Dec 1 – 11am PT / 2pm ET bit.ly/t61W4G oraclepartners ORCL PartnerNetwork Brand new Oracle WebLogic 12c will launch on December 1, 10AM PT with a global Webcast highlighting salient… t.co/aflQQ3IX OracleBlogs OracleBlogs JDeveloper and ADF at UKOUG t.co/2CQTiB9n fnimphiu Frank Nimphius Attending UKOUG? All ADF sessions at a glance: t.co/TcMNTMXp 21 Nov Favorite Retweet Reply JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Free Webinar ‘ADF Task Flows for Beginners’, information and registration t.co/66jXnGgo via javafx4you javafx4you Java Developer Workshop #2 – Dec 1, 2011 @ Oracle Aoyama center in Tokyo t.co/8p9q3W2B AMIS_Services AMIS Services #vacature #Oracle #ADF ontwikkelaars. bit.ly/AMISADF Gun jezelf een nieuwe uitdaging? Meer op: dld.bz/azZ5N OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Launch Invitation: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c t.co/bRxCKwAk fnimphiu Frank Nimphius The brand new WebLogic 12c will be released on December 1st 2011 !!! Register for online launch event t.co/pPScg4Xh glassfish GlassFish Announcing Oracle WebLogic 12c – t.co/qh8TdFEl AdamBien Adam Bien Sun Coding Conventions–The Only Standard (Stop Inventing): Code written according to the Sun Coding Conventions… t.co/qaUWp5Mz wlscommunity WebLogic Community Launch Invitation: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c wp.me/p1LMIb-4y andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Custom Exception Registration for ADF BC EO Attribute fb.me/1m6nXQD52 MNEMONIC01 Michel Schildmeijer Blog by Michel Schildmeijer: "Oracle WebLogic 12c has been announced" bit.ly/vk6WQL glassfish GlassFish Tab Sweep – Coherence, SBT for GlassFish, OSGi in question, Java EE plugins, … t.co/tVIL95lj OracleBlogs OracleBlogs JavaFX 2.0 at Devoxx 2011 ow.ly/1fJ5iT JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Experimenting with ADF BC Application Module Pool Tuning dlvr.it/wjLC1 OracleWebLogic Oracle WebLogic Brand New #WebLogic 12c Launch Event, Dec 1 10am PT. Hasan Rizvi, SVP Fusion Middleware. Developer session. bit.ly/weblogic12clau… JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF PopUp and Esc/Cancel operations. ADF 11g dlvr.it/whrmC JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF BPM Workspace: issue loading ADF task flows t.co/vk1gKPx5 OpenJDK OpenJDK Kelly O’Hair — OpenJDK B24 Available : t.co/1bFws6Nw JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Oracle ADF setting Task flow to use same page definition file of caller page t.co/9k6UIoYZ JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Master Detail Data presentation and CRUD Operations. Detail records in an Editable Popup. ADF 11g t.co/H8uudR0Y JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Entity Attribute Validation Rule (Business Rule) based on Master View Object Attribute Example ADF 11g t.co/1agxEQcZ oracletechnet Justin Kestelyn Webcast: Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Launch/Developer Deep-Dive (Dec. 1) t.co/OVBdGKzC JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF How to render different node icons for different tree levels dlvr.it/wY2jL JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Query Component with ‘dynamic’ view criteria dlvr.it/wXlF1 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF How to play Flash .swf file in Oracle ADF application t.co/zaSONWAH Devoxx Devoxx Duke at the #Devoxx 2011 Noxx Party! pic.twitter.com/bVJWyu1Z brhubart Bob Rhubart Adam Leftik: JavaEE adoption continues to increase, reaching 40+ million downloads this year. #qconsf11 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Free #ODTUG Seminar – #ADF Task Flows for Beginners – sign up today. www3.gotomeeting.com/register/13372… java Java New Project: OpenJFX j.mp/tI4k3s #javafx #openjdk #devoxx << JavaFX is open source! /via frankmunz Frank Munz WebLogic 12c launch event Dec 1st. t.co/jQKinBqN brhubart Bob Rhubart Spring to Java EE Migration | David Heffelfinger feedly.com/k/td8ccG odtug ODTUG Mark your calendars and register for our upcoming webinars: bit.ly/dWKG1C ADF Task Flows & Measuring Scalability & Performance w/TCP myfear Markus Eisele Anybody willing to take this question? Using #JavaMail with #Weblogic Server bit.ly/stJOET AMIS_Services AMIS Services 20-22 december #training #Oracle JHeadstart #11g, productief ontwikkelen met ADF. Schrijf je in op: amis.nl/trainingen/ora… AdamBien Adam Bien Stress Testing Java EE 6 Applications – Free Article In Free Java Magazine: In the November / December 2011 issu… bit.ly/vmzKkc java Java New Tech Article: Spring to #JavaEE Migration t.co/0EvdHNxb OracleBlogs OracleBlogs WebLogic Java record SPARC T4-4 Servers Set World Record on SPECjEnterprise2010 t.co/Eu1b6ZE0 OracleBlogs OracleBlogs What Is JavaFX? ow.ly/1frb6I OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat The openJDK Windows Binary Download | Adam Bien ow.ly/7fRiG wlscommunity WebLogic Community WebLogic – Java record – SPARC T4-4 Servers Set World Record on SPECjEnterprise2010 glassfish GlassFish "youtube.com/java" blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/en… OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Beta Testing Concludes: 1Z1-102 – "Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: System Administration I" (Oracle Certification) ow.ly/7fJCl wlscommunity WebLogic Community A deep dive in Oracle WebLogic! @ Contribute – November 29th, 2011 Kontich Belgium wp.me/p1LMIb-4u glassfish GlassFish Gartner’s Latest Enterprise Application Server Magic Quadrant – Oracle’s leadership t.co/aYDqipD8 OpenJDK OpenJDK Terrence Barr – Open sourcing of JavaFX: OpenJFX Project proposed – bit.ly/uKVnEl OpenJDK OpenJDK Maurizio Cimadamore – Testing overload resolution: bit.ly/vgXAbQ java Java Java User Groups Roundup, November 2011 : t.co/hea6vVnk /via @robilad << in German JavaSpotlight The Java Spotlight Java Spotlight Episode 54: Stuart Marks on the Coinification of JDK7 goo.gl/fb/3UXoM OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Article Series: Migrating Spring to Java EE 6 | Arun Gupta bit.ly/twUJtz glassfish GlassFish New Java EE 6 Hands-On lab, Devoxx-approved! bit.ly/vup5uE java Java Brian Goetz’s enthusiasm for Java is palpable! #devoxx interview adf_emg ADF EMG "ADF testing with a mock framework" – what is a mock framework? Visit the forum and see: groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/… java Java Taping a bunch of interviews today with Java experts at #devoxx. View on Parleys.com tomorrow. glassfish GlassFish New screencast to configure and run a cross-machine cluster using GlassFish 3.1.1 in < 7 mins faissalb.blogspot.com/2011/11/glassf… (via @bfaissal) glassfish GlassFish Oracle Contributor Agreements – New Home! bit.ly/tD2eLo OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Java Magazine – by and for the Java Community- inaugural issue bit.ly/tTv8UD OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat The Heroes of Java: Michael Hüttermann | @MyFear bit.ly/rYYOFe javafx4you javafx4you Development with #JavaFX on #Linux j.mp/uOpe69 #not_for_the_faint_of_heart java Java Contribute Technical Questions for Java Experts at #devoxx bit.ly/up2cN0 netbeans NetBeans Team A simple REST service using #NetBeans 7, #Java Servlet, and #JAXB: t.co/pKkufsD8 AdamBien Adam Bien The most beautiful, and portable slide of the whole #jaxcon for "Die Hard Java EE 6"session checked-in: kenai.com/projects/javae… jaxlondon JAX London Mark Little’s (@nmcl) excellent keynote from #jaxlondon ‘Middleware Everywhere…’ is available in full – t.co/8vBmtDJ1 AdamBien Adam Bien Calculator sample from "Die Hard Java EE 6" #jaxcon session checked-in: t.co/0UqaULfg OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat ADF Faces – a logic bomb in the order of bean instantiations | @ChrisCMuir bit.ly/vjqRaZ OracleBlogs OracleBlogs ODI 11g y JMS Queue de Weblogic ow.ly/1fzfQJ frankmunz Frank Munz Which WebLogic book do you recommend? Review of S. Alapati’s WebLogic 11g Administration Handbook. bit.ly/rP0RtW JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF PageFlowScope with Unbounded Task Flows: the magic sauce for multi-browser-tab support in JDeveloper ADF applications dlvr.it/vNFgn OracleBlogs OracleBlogs 3 New ADF Insider Essential training videos published. ow.ly/1fz94q OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials book and eBook t.co/ykzwIaqs OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your Events t.co/qTgyEpY4 wlscommunity WebLogic Community Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials book and eBook andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Intern… andrejusb.blogspot.com/2011/11/stress… OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Frank Nimphius presenting a full day of Oracle ADF in Switzerland ow.ly/1fxU78 java Java #JavaEE and #GlassFish: #JavaOne11 Slides, Demos, Replays, Hands-on Labs t.co/tLM0ehrD OracleBlogs OracleBlogs weblogic.security.SecurityInitializationException: Authentication for user weblogic denied ow.ly/1fxmiu glassfish GlassFish The Last Migration – GlassFish Wiki : t.co/Dc5FT1SJ OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat A Successful Year of @MiddlewareMagic t.co/amcGGTTk OracleWebLogic Oracle WebLogic Unbeatable Performance for your Cloud Applications with Exalogic, #OracleCoherence and #WebLogic. ow.ly/7lYKm OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Passivation and Activation | @AndrejusB bit.ly/sASssL OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Review: "Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials" by Michel Schildmeijer | @MyFear t.co/ll6ra0J9 OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat GlassFish 3.1.2 themes and features | The Aquarium bit.ly/vVqr9r Andre_van_Dalen Andre van Dalen Masterclass: Advanced Oracle ADF 11g lnkd.in/M_45Pi AdamBien Adam Bien The "lunch" edition of RentACar is pushed into: kenai.com/projects/javae… #wjax AdamBien Adam Bien In munich, room munich at #wjax. Welcome to #javaee workshop. Gather your questions. 15 minutes to go lucasjellema Lucas Jellema Review by Markus of Michel’s book: t.co/41U9wvOb In short: valuable for novice WLS users, maybe not so much for die-hard WLS admin. biemond Edwin Biemond “@myfear: [blog] #Review: "#Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials" t.co/LsODcb3e” got the same conclusion on amazon glassfish GlassFish Practical advice for deploying Lift apps to GlassFish: bit.ly/t3KUml glassfish GlassFish The unbearable lightness of GlassFish t.co/v9307SEJ javafx4you javafx4you Building Java EE applications in JavaFX: JavaFX 2.0, FXML and Spring j.mp/tiMDUh andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Passiv… andrejusb.blogspot.com/2011/11/stress… wlscommunity WebLogic Community “@AMIS_Services: Follow @amis_services To Win a copy of SOA Suite 11g Handbook by @lucasjellema dld.bz/axD22 pls RT” excellent book! glassfish GlassFish GlassFish 3.1.2 themes and features bit.ly/uEc6uZ biemond Edwin Biemond Weblogic pre-sales exam was hard, you really need to know the versions , upgrade path and have a score above 80% monkchips James Governor The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java. JAX 2011 london keynote. how big data and the web are floating the boat. slidesha.re/u3Kzlo glassfish GlassFish Tab Sweep – Jersey, Hudson, GlassFish Hosting, GC’s compared, Spring to JavaEE, Modularity, … bit.ly/u9Cc30 oracletechnet Justin Kestelyn Oracle Tuxedo: A renewed acquaintance t.co/gp0mmf20 OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, OEPE 11.1.1.8 bit.ly/tC3eKp OracleBlogs OracleBlogs NetBeans HTML Editor and Groovy Editor in a Multiview Component (Part 2) ow.ly/1ftCeI myfear Markus Eisele [blog] #Oracle 2008 – 2011 in Gartners Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers t.co/2Bs1vgMZ myfear Markus Eisele [blog] #EclipseCon Europe – Java 7 in the Enterprise goo.gl/fb/r80df #ece2011 #java7 javafx4you javafx4you JavaFX 2.0 for Mac build b07 (developer preview) is available for download j.mp/vSwmBP Enjoy! #JavaFX #Mac OracleBlogs OracleBlogs A deep dive in Oracle WebLogic! @ Contribute November 29th, 2011 Kontich Belgium ow.ly/1fsEZs arungupta Arun Gupta #JavaEE7 slides from #jaxlondon and #jfall11 now available: slidesha.re/sh4iFq AdamBien Adam Bien Just checked-in the results of the #jaxlondon community night (somehow beer related): kenai.com/projects/javae… glassfish GlassFish GlassFish Podcast Episode #080 – User Stories, Part 3: Adam Bien and Sean Comerford (ESPN) blogs.oracle.com/glassfishpodca… glassfish GlassFish Story: t.co/jQPqihJb using GlassFish blogs.oracle.com/stories/entry/… "3000+ requests/sec" and more enterprisejava Java EE Mentions New blog post WebLogic deployment status checks for CI wp.me/pOOSs-F #weblogic #continuousintegration /vi… bit.ly/uZz0fk The become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please first login at http://partner.oracle.com and then visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress

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• Craftsmanship is ALL that Matters

  - by Wayne Molina

  Today, I'm going to talk about a touchy subject: the notion of working in a company that doesn't use the prescribed "best practices" in its software development endeavours.  Over the years I have, using a variety of pseudonyms, asked this question on popular programming forums.  Although I always add in some minor variation of the story to avoid suspicion that it's the same person posting, the crux of the tale remains the same: A Programmer’s Tale A junior software developer has just started a new job at an average company, creating average line-of-business applications for internal use (the most typical scenario programmers find themselves in).  This hypothetical newbie has spent a lot of time reading up on the "theory" of software development, devouring books, blogs and screencasts from well-known and respected software developers in the community in order to broaden his knowledge and "do what the pros do".  He begins his new job, eager to apply what he's learned on a real-world project only to discover that his new teammates doesn't use any of those concepts and techniques.  They hack their way through development, or in a best-case scenario use some homebrew, thrown-together semblance of a framework for their applications that follows not one of the best practices suggested by the “elite” in the software community - things like TDD (TDD as a "best practice" is the only subjective part of this post, but it's included here due to a very large following of respected developers who consider it one), the SOLID principles, well-known and venerable tools, even version control in a worst case and truly nightmarish scenario.  Our protagonist is frustrated that he isn't doing things the "proper" way - a way he's spent personal time digesting and learning about and, more importantly, a way that some of the top developers in the industry advocate - and turns to a forum to ask the advice of his peers. Invariably the answer I, in the guise of the concerned newbie, will receive is that A) I don't know anything and should just shut my mouth and sling code the bad way like everybody else on the team, and B) These "best practices" are fade or a joke, and the only thing that matters is shipping software to your customers. I am here today to say that anyone who says this, or anything like it, is not only full of crap but indicative of exactly the type of “developer” that has helped to give our industry a bad name.  Here is why: One Who Knows Nothing, Understands Nothing On one hand, you have the cognoscenti of the .NET development world.  Guys like James Avery, Jeremy Miller, Ayende Rahien and Rob Conery; all well-respected and noted programmers that are pretty much our version of celebrities.  These guys write blogs, books, and post videos outlining the "correct" way of writing software to make sure it not only works but is maintainable and extensible and a joy to work with.  They tout the virtues of the SOLID principles, or of using TDD/BDD, or using a mature ORM like NHibernate, Subsonic or even Entity Framework. On the other hand, you have Joe Everyman, Lead Software Developer at Initrode Corporation - in our hypothetical story Joe is the junior developer's new boss.  Joe's been with Initrode for 10 years, starting as the company’s very first programmer and over the years building up a little fiefdom of his own until at the present he’s in charge of all Initrode’s software development.  Joe writes code the same way he always has, without bothering to learn much, if anything.  He looked at NHibernate once and found it was "too hard", so he uses a primitive implementation of the TableDataGateway pattern as a wrapper around SqlClient.SqlConnection and SqlClient.SqlCommand instead of an actual ORM (or, in a better case scenario, has created his own ORM); the thought of using LINQ or Entity Framework or really anything other than his own hastily homebrew solution has never occurred to him.  He doesn't understand TDD and considers “testing” to be using the .NET debugger to step through code, or simply loading up an app and entering some values to see if it works.  He doesn't really understand SOLID, and he doesn't care to.  He's worked as a programmer for years, and that's all that counts.  Right?  WRONG. Who would you rather trust?  Someone with years of experience and who writes books, creates well-known software and is akin to a celebrity, or someone with no credibility outside their own minute environment who throws around their clout and company seniority as the "proof" of their ability?  Joe Everyman may have years of experience at Initrode as a programmer, and says to do things "his way" but someone like Jeremy Miller or Ayende Rahien have years of experience at companies just like Initrode, THEY know ten times more than Joe Everyman knows or could ever hope to know, and THEY say to do things "this way". Here's another way of thinking about it: If you wanted to get into politics and needed advice on the best way to do it, would you rather listen to the mayor of Hicktown, USA or Barack Obama?  One is a small-time nobody while the other is very well-known and, as such, would probably have much more accurate and beneficial advice. NOTE: The selection of Barack Obama as an example in no way, shape, or form suggests a political affiliation or political bent to this post or blog, and no political innuendo should be mistakenly read from it; the intent was merely to compare a small-time persona with a well-known persona in a non-software field.  Feel free to replace the name "Barack Obama" with any well-known Congressman, Senator or US President of your choice. DIY Considered Harmful I will say right now that the homebrew development environment is the WORST one for an aspiring programmer, because it relies on nothing outside it's own little box - no useful skill outside of the small pond.  If you are forced to use some half-baked, homebrew ORM created by your Director of Software, you are not learning anything valuable you can take with you in the future; now, if you plan to stay at Initrode for 10 years like Joe Everyman, this is fine and dandy.  However if, like most of us, you want to advance your career outside a very narrow space you will do more harm than good by sticking it out in an environment where you, to be frank, know better than everybody else because you are aware of alternative and, in almost most cases, better tools for the job.  A junior developer who understands why the SOLID principles are good to follow, or why TDD is beneficial, or who knows that it's better to use NHibernate/Subsonic/EF/LINQ/well-known ORM versus some in-house one knows better than a senior developer with 20 years experience who doesn't understand any of that, plain and simple.  Anyone who disagrees is either a liar, or someone who, just like Joe Everyman, Lead Developer, relies on seniority and tenure rather than adapting their knowledge as things evolve. In many cases, the Joe Everymans of the world act this way out of fear - they cannot possibly fathom that a “junior” could know more than them; after all, they’ve spent 10 or more years in the same company, doing the same job, cranking out the same shoddy software.  And here comes a newbie who hasn’t spent 10+ years doing the same things, with a fresh and often radical take on the craft, and Joe Everyman is afraid he might have to put some real effort into his career again instead of just pointing to his 10 years of service at Initrode as “proof” that he’s good, or that he might have to learn something new to improve; in most cases the problem is Joe Everyman, and by extension Initrode itself, has a mentality of just being “good enough”, and mediocrity is the rule of the day. A Thorn Bush is No Place for a Phoenix My advice is that if you work on a team where they don't use the best practices that some of the most famous developers in our field say is the "right" way to do things (and have legions of people who agree), and YOU are aware of these practices and can see why they work, then LEAVE the company.  Find a company where they DO care about quality, and craftsmanship, otherwise you will never be happy.  There is no point in "dumbing" yourself down to the level of your co-workers and slinging code without care to craftsmanship.  In 95% of these situations there will be no point in bringing it to the attention of Joe Everyman because he won't listen; he might even get upset that someone is trying to "upstage" him and fire the newbie, and replace someone with loads of untapped potential with a drone that will just nod affirmatively and grind out the tasks assigned without question. Find a company that has people smart enough to listen to the "best and brightest", and be happy.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste away in a job working for ignorant people.  At the end of the day software development IS a craft, and a level of craftsmanship is REQUIRED for any serious professional.  When you have knowledgeable people with the credibility to back it up saying one thing, and small-time people who are, to put it bluntly, nobodies in the field saying and doing something totally different because they can't comprehend it, leave the nobodies to their own devices to fade into obscurity.  Work for a company that uses REAL software engineering techniques and really cares about craftsmanship.  The biggest issue affecting our career, and the reason software development has never been the respected, white-collar career it was meant to be, is because hacks and charlatans can pass themselves off as professional programmers without following a lick of good advice from programmers much better at the craft than they are.  These modern day snake-oil salesmen entrench themselves in companies by hoodwinking non-technical businesspeople and customers with their shoddy wares, end up in senior/lead/executive positions, and push their lack of knowledge on everybody unfortunate enough to work with/for/under them, crushing any dissent or voices of reason and change under their tyrannical heel and leaving behind a trail of dismayed and, often, unemployed junior developers who were made examples of to keep up the facade and avoid the shadow of doubt being cast upon them. To sum this up another way: If you surround yourself with learned people, you will learn.  Surround yourself with ignorant people who can't, as the saying goes, see the forest through the trees, and you'll learn nothing of any real value.  There is more to software development than just writing code, and the end goal should not be just "shipping software", it should be shipping software that is extensible, maintainable, and above all else software whose creation has broadened your knowledge in some capacity, even if a minor one.  An eager newbie who knows theory and thirsts for knowledge can easily be moulded and taught the advanced topics, but the same can't be said of someone who only cares about the finish line.  This industry needs more people espousing the benefits of software craftsmanship and proper software engineering techniques, and less Joe Everymans who are unwilling to adapt or foster new ways of thinking. Conclusion - I Cast “Protection from Fire” I am fairly certain this post will spark some controversy and might even invite the flames.  Please keep in mind these are opinions and nothing more.  A little healthy rant and subsequent flamewar can be good for the soul once in a while.  To paraphrase The Godfather: It helps to get rid of the bad blood.

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• Delay of mail delivery - Hosted exchange provider

  - by alex

  Hi, I recently signed up to a new hosted email provider. When I send mail (from OWA, OR Outlook) there is a delay of up to 3 minutes from when i send the message, to when it's received (in my gmail account for example) I've listed the headers below. Is there anything I can advise my new email host to do? My previous email host delivers within 5 seconds!! New email provider: Delivered-To: ****.*****@******.co.uk.test-google-a.com Received: by 10.223.120.148 with SMTP id d20cs333125far; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:49:43 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.213.106.202 with SMTP id y10mr4864870ebo.35.1259599782838; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:49:42 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: Received: from relay005.apm-internet.net (relay005.apm-internet.net [85.119.248.8]) by mx.google.com with SMTP id 26si13016480ewy.43.2009.11.30.08.49.42; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:49:42 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 85.119.248.8 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of ****@*******.com) client-ip=85.119.248.8; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 85.119.248.8 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of ****@*******.com) smtp.mail=****@*******.com Received: (qmail 63915 invoked from network); 30 Nov 2009 16:49:41 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mx-out-manc2.simplymailsolutions.com) (88.151.129.22) by relay005.apm-internet.net with SMTP; 30 Nov 2009 16:49:42 -0000 X-APM-IP: 88.151.129.22 X-APM-Score: 4 Received-SPF: none (relay005.apm-internet.net: domain at alexjamesbrown.com does not designate permitted sender hosts) Received: from [10.1.20.1] (helo=win-s-manc1.shared.ifeltd.com) by mx-out-manc2.simplymailsolutions.com with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1NF9QZ-0005By-Hw for ****.*****@******.co.uk; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:46 +0000 Received: from sha-exch8.shared.ifeltd.com ([10.1.20.8]) by win-s-manc1.shared.ifeltd.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:34 +0000 Received: from sha-exch9.shared.ifeltd.com ([10.1.20.9]) by sha-exch8.shared.ifeltd.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:34 +0000 Received: from SHA-EXCH13.shared.ifeltd.com (10.1.20.13) by sha-exch9.shared.ifeltd.com (10.1.20.9) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id 8.1.393.1; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:25 +0000 Received: from SHA-EXCH12.shared.ifeltd.com ([fe80::ecba:36d0:eec5:c928]) by SHA-EXCH13.shared.ifeltd.com ([fe80::212b:916c:70c7:a4e5%11]) with mapi; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:05 +0000 From: Alex Brown To: "****.*****@*****.co.uk" Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:04 +0000 Subject: testing Thread-Topic: testing Thread-Index: AQHKcdzZg4oiDsOYIEio/7k6bCk8BQ== Message-ID: Accept-Language: en-US, en-GB Content-Language: en-GB X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: acceptlanguage: en-US, en-GB Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable MIME-Version: 1.0 X-OriginalArrivalTime: 30 Nov 2009 16:48:34.0235 (UTC) FILETIME=[F48178B0:01CA71DC] Here are the headers using my previous exchange host: Delivered-To: ****.*****@******.co.uk.test-google-a.com Received: by 10.223.120.148 with SMTP id d20cs333076far; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:48:35 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.213.2.70 with SMTP id 6mr4797985ebi.25.1259599715739; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:48:35 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: Received: from relay005.apm-internet.net (relay005.apm-internet.net [85.119.248.8]) by mx.google.com with SMTP id 26si13030993ewy.23.2009.11.30.08.48.35; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:48:35 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 85.119.248.8 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of ****@*********.com) client-ip=85.119.248.8; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 85.119.248.8 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of ****@*********.com) smtp.mail=****@*********.com Received: (qmail 60920 invoked from network); 30 Nov 2009 16:48:34 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO MTAb.MsExchange2007.com) (89.31.236.50) by relay005.apm-internet.net with SMTP; 30 Nov 2009 16:48:35 -0000 X-APM-IP: 89.31.236.50 X-APM-Score: 1 Received-SPF: none (relay005.apm-internet.net: domain at alexjamesbrown.com does not designate permitted sender hosts) Received: from EXHUB02.SL.local (no.ptr.hostlogic.biz [89.31.236.28]) by MTAb.MsExchange2007.com (Spam Firewall) with ESMTP id B677A34FE0F for ; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:33 +0000 (GMT) Received: from EXHUB02.SL.local (no.ptr.hostlogic.biz [89.31.236.28]) by MTAb.MsExchange2007.com with ESMTP id 8X5B8V4tExVzoNyU for ; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:34 +0000 (GMT) Received: from EXCCR03STORE.SL.local ([10.0.0.2]) by EXHUB02.SL.local ([192.168.92.64]) with mapi; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:31 +0000 From: Alex James Brown To: "****.*****@******.co.uk" Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:30 +0000 Subject: testing from o Thread-Topic: testing from o Thread-Index: AQHKcdzyY1iBFWiol0ykG6xPQUZiTg== Message-ID: Accept-Language: en-US, en-GB Content-Language: en-GB X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: acceptlanguage: en-US, en-GB Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable MIME-Version: 1.0

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 03, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 03, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 1.1 - free javascript menu: menu4web 1.1 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 22 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Quest: Quest 5.3 Beta: New features in Quest 5.3 include: Grid-based map (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Changable POV (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Game log (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Customisable object link colour (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) More room description options (by James Gregory) More mathematical functions now available to expressions Desktop Player uses the same UI as WebPlayer - this will make it much easier to implement customisation options New sorting functions: ObjectListSort(list,...Mi-DevEnv: Development 0.1: First Drop This is the first drop of files now placed under source control. Today the system ran end to end, creating a virtual machine and installing multiple products without a single prompt or key press being required. This is a snapshot of the first release. All files are under source control. Assumes Hyper-V under Server 2012 or Windows 8, using Windows Management Framework with PowerShell 3.Chinook Database: Chinook Database 1.4: Chinook Database 1.4 This is a sample database available in multiple formats: SQL scripts for multiple database vendors, embeded database files, and XML format. The Chinook data model is available here. ChinookDatabase1.4_CompleteVersion.zip is a complete package for all supported databases/data sources. There are also packages for each specific data source. Supported Database ServersDB2 EffiProz MySQL Oracle PostgreSQL SQL Server SQL Server Compact SQLite Issues Resolved293...RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: RiP-Ripper 2.9.34: changes FIXED: Thanks Function when "Download each post in it's own folder" is disabled FIXED: "PixHub.eu" linksCleverBobCat: CleverBobCat 1.1.2: Changes: - Control loss of cart when decoupled fixed - Some problems with energy transfer usage if disabled system fixedD3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.6: Updated to work with D3 version 1.0.6.13300DirectQ: DirectQ II 2012-11-29: A (slightly) modernized port of Quake II to D3D9. You need SM3 or better hardware to run this - if you don't have it, then don't even bother. It should work on Windows Vista, 7 or 8; it may also work on XP but I haven't tested. Known bugs include: Some mods may not work. This is unfortunately due to the nature of Quake II's game DLLs; sometimes a recompile of the game DLL is all that's needed. In any event, ensure that the game DLL is compatible with the last release of Quake II first (...Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.2: new UI for the Administration console Bugs fixes and improvement version 2.2.215.3JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2.5: What's new in JayData 1.2.5For detailed release notes check the release notes. Handlebars template engine supportImplement data manager applications with JayData using Handlebars.js for templating. Include JayDataModules/handlebars.js and begin typing the mustaches :) Blogpost: Handlebars templates in JayData Handlebars helpers and model driven commanding in JayData Easy JayStorm cloud data managementManage cloud data using the same syntax and data management concept just like any other data ...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.70: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Search engine optimization. ID-less URLs for products, categories, and manufacturers. • Added ACL support (access control list) on products and categories. • Minify and bundle JavaScript files. • Allow a store owner to decide which billing/shipping address fields are enabled/disabled/required (like it's already done for the registration page). • Moved to MVC 4 (.NET 4.5 is required). • Now Visual Studio 2012 is required to work ...SQL Server Partition Management: Partition Management Release 3.0: Release 3.0 adds support for SQL Server 2012 and is backward compatible with SQL Server 2008 and 2005. The release consists of: • A Readme file • The Executable • The source code (Visual Studio project) Enhancements include: -- Support for Columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 -- Ability to create TSQL scripts for staging table and index creation operations -- Full support for global date and time formats, locale independent -- Support for binary partitioning column types -- Fixes to is...NHook - A debugger API: NHook 1.0: x86 debugger Resolve symbol from MS Public server Resolve RVA from executable's image Add breakpoints Assemble / Disassemble target process assembly More information here, you can also check unit tests that are real sample code.PDF Library: PDFLib v2.0: Release notes This new version include many bug fixes and include support for stream objects and cross-reference object streams. New FeatureExtract images from the PDFDocument.Editor: 2013.5: Whats new for Document.Editor 2013.5: New Read-only File support New Check For Updates support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.10: Critical Update to 2.3.9: Changelog for 2.3.10 (32bit and 64bit) 1. AsfBin executable missing from build 2. Removed extra references from build to avoid conflict 3. Showanalyzer installation now checked on remote engine machine Changelog for 2.3.9 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for WTV output profile 2. Added support for minimizing MCEBuddy to the system tray 3. Added support for custom archive folder 4. Added support to disable subdirectory monitoring 5. Added support for better TS fil...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 07.00.00: Major Highlights Fixed issue that caused profiles of deleted users to be available Removed the postback after checkboxes are selected in Page Settings > Taxonomy Implemented the functionality required to edit security role names and social group names Fixed JavaScript error when using a ";" semicolon as a profile property Fixed issue when using DateTime properties in profiles Fixed viewstate error when using Facebook authentication in conjunction with "require valid profile fo...CODE Framework: 4.0.21128.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.76: Fixed a typo in ObjectLiteralProperty.IsConstant that caused all object literals to be treated like they were constants, and possibly moved around in the code when they shouldn't be.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.3.0: New features: Dropdown/Radio/Checkbox Lists no longer references the userkey. Instead they refer to the UUID field for input value. You can now delete, export, import content from database in the site settings. Labels can now be imported and exported. You can now set the required password strength and maximum number of incorrect login attempts. Child sites can inherit plugins from its parent sites. The view parameter can be changed through the page_context.current value. Addition of c...New ProjectsASP.NET Youtube Clone: ASP.NET Youtube Clone is a complete script with basic and advance features which allow you to build complex social media sharing website in asp.net, c#, vb.net.Assembly - Halo Research Tool: Assembly is a program designed to aid in the development of creative modifications for the Xbox 360 Halo games. It also includes a .NET library for programmers.Async ContentPlaceHolder: Load your ASP.Net content placeholder asynchronously.Automate Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 with Powershell: Scripts to automate Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager with PowershellAzMan Contrib: AzMan Contrib aims to provide a better experience when using AzMan with ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.Badhshala Jackpot: Facebook application that features Slotmachine with 3 slots where each slot's position is predicted randomly. Tools Used: ASP.Net MVC 4, SQL Server, csharpsdk BREIN Messaging Infrastructure: This project allows for hiding & encapsulating an (WS based) infrastructure by providing the means for dynamic message routing. The gateway thereby enhances the messaging channels to enforce any amount of policies upon in- and outcoming messages. CricketWorldCup2011Trivia: Simple trivia game written in C# based on the 2011 Cricket World Cup.Flee#: A C# Port of the Flee evaluator. It's an expression evaluator for C# that compiles the expressions into IL code, resulting in very fast and efficient execution.Hamcast for multi station coordination: Amateur Radio multiple station operation tends to have loggers and operators striving to get particular information from each other, like what IP address and so forth, so I write this small multicast utility to help them. Supports N1MM and other popular loggers.LDAP/AD Claim Provider For SharePoint 2010: This claim provider implements search on LDAP and AD for SAML authentication (claims mode) in SharePoint 2010MicroData Parser: This library is preliminary implementation of the HTML5 MicroData specification, in C#.PCC.Framework: NET???????????ResumeSharp: ResumeSharp is a resume building tool designed to help keep your resume up-to-date easily. Additionally, you can quickly generate targeted resumes on the fly. It's developed in C#.Sharepoint SPConstant generator: This utility creates a hierarchally representation of a WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 Site Collection and generates a C# Source Code File (SPConstant.cs) with a nested structure of structs with static const string fields. This enables you to do the following: SPList list = web.Lists[SPConstant.Lists.Tasklist.Name]; You will then just have to regenerate the SPConstant file (eg. from within VS 2005 or from Command line) to update the name. Description is added to the XML-comments in the generated file ...SoftServe Tasks: a couple of tasks from the 'softserve' courses.Solid Edge Community Extensions: Solid Edge SDKStar Fox XNA Edition: Development of videogames for Microsoft platforms using XNA Game Studio. Remake of the classic videogame Star Fox (1993) for SNES game console.TinySimpleCMS: a tiny and simple cmsUgly Animals: Crossing of Angry Birds and Yeti SportsVIENNA Advantage ERP and CRM: A real cloud based ERP and CRM in C#.Net offering enterprise level functionality for PC, Mac, iPhone, Surface and Android with HTML5 and Silverlight UI.WebSitemap Localizer: WebSitemap Localizer is a utility to auto-convert your Web.sitemap file to support localization.

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• Big GRC: Turning Data into Actionable GRC Intelligence

  - by Jenna Danko

  While it’s no longer headline news that Governments have carried out large scale data-mining programmes aimed at terrorism detection and identifying other patterns of interest across a wide range of digital data sources, the debate over the ethics and justification over this action, will clearly continue for some time to come. What is becoming clear is that these programmes are a framework for the collation and aggregation of massive amounts of unstructured data and from this, the creation of actionable intelligence from analyses that allowed the analysts to explore and extract a variety of patterns and then direct resources. This data included audio and video chats, phone calls, photographs, e-mails, documents, internet searches, social media posts and mobile phone logs and connections. Although Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professionals are not looking at the implementation of such programmes, there are many similar GRC “Big data” challenges to be faced and potential lessons to be learned from these high profile government programmes that can be applied a lot closer to home. For example, how can GRC professionals collect, manage and analyze an enormous and disparate volume of data to create and manage their own actionable intelligence covering hidden signs and patterns of criminal activity, the early or retrospective, violation of regulations/laws/corporate policies and procedures, emerging risks and weakening controls etc. Not exactly the stuff of James Bond to be sure, but it is certainly more applicable to most GRC professional’s day to day challenges. So what is Big Data and how can it benefit the GRC process? Although it often varies, the definition of Big Data largely refers to the following types of data: Traditional Enterprise Data – includes customer information from CRM systems, transactional ERP data, web store transactions, and general ledger data. Machine-Generated /Sensor Data – includes Call Detail Records (“CDR”), weblogs and trading systems data. Social Data – includes customer feedback streams, micro-blogging sites like Twitter, and social media platforms like Facebook. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will grow 44x between 2009 and 2020. But while it’s often the most visible parameter, volume of data is not the only characteristic that matters. In fact, according to sources such as Forrester there are four key characteristics that define big data: Volume. Machine-generated data is produced in much larger quantities than non-traditional data. This is all the data generated by IT systems that power the enterprise. This includes live data from packaged and custom applications – for example, app servers, Web servers, databases, networks, virtual machines, telecom equipment, and much more. Velocity. Social media data streams – while not as massive as machine-generated data – produce a large influx of opinions and relationships valuable to customer relationship management as well as offering early insight into potential reputational risk issues. Even at 140 characters per tweet, the high velocity (or frequency) of Twitter data ensures large volumes (over 8 TB per day) need to be managed. Variety. Traditional data formats tend to be relatively well defined by a data schema and change slowly. In contrast, non-traditional data formats exhibit a dizzying rate of change. Without question, all GRC professionals work in a dynamic environment and as new services, new products, new business lines are added or new marketing campaigns executed for example, new data types are needed to capture the resultant information.  Value. The economic value of data varies significantly. Typically, there is good information hidden amongst a larger body of non-traditional data that GRC professionals can use to add real value to the organisation; the greater challenge is identifying what is valuable and then transforming and extracting that data for analysis and action. For example, customer service calls and emails have millions of useful data points and have long been a source of information to GRC professionals. Those calls and emails are critical in helping GRC professionals better identify hidden patterns and implement new policies that can reduce the amount of customer complaints.   Now on a scale and depth far beyond those in place today, all that unstructured call and email data can be captured, stored and analyzed to reveal the reasons for the contact, perhaps with the aggregated customer results cross referenced against what is being said about the organization or a similar peer organization on social media. The organization can then take positive actions, communicating to the market in advance of issues reaching the press, strengthening controls, adjusting risk profiles, changing policy and procedures and completely minimizing, if not eliminating, complaints and compensation for that specific reason in the future. In this one example of many similar ones, the GRC team(s) has demonstrated real and tangible business value. Big Challenges - Big Opportunities As pointed out by recent Forrester research, high performing companies (those that are growing 15% or more year-on-year compared to their peers) are taking a selective approach to investing in Big Data.  "Tomorrow's winners understand this, and they are making selective investments aimed at specific opportunities with tangible benefits where big data offers a more economical solution to meet a need." (Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence and Big Data, Q4 2012) As pointed out earlier, with the ever increasing volume of regulatory demands and fines for getting it wrong, limited resource availability and out of date or inadequate GRC systems all contributing to a higher cost of compliance and/or higher risk profile than desired – a big data investment in GRC clearly falls into this category. However, to make the most of big data organizations must evolve both their business and IT procedures, processes, people and infrastructures to handle these new high-volume, high-velocity, high-variety sources of data and be able integrate them with the pre-existing company data to be analyzed. GRC big data clearly allows the organization access to and management over a huge amount of often very sensitive information that although can help create a more risk intelligent organization, also presents numerous data governance challenges, including regulatory compliance and information security. In addition to client and regulatory demands over better information security and data protection the sheer amount of information organizations deal with the need to quickly access, classify, protect and manage that information can quickly become a key issue  from a legal, as well as technical or operational standpoint. However, by making information governance processes a bigger part of everyday operations, organizations can make sure data remains readily available and protected. The Right GRC & Big Data Partnership Becomes Key  The "getting it right first time" mantra used in so many companies remains essential for any GRC team that is sponsoring, helping kick start, or even overseeing a big data project. To make a big data GRC initiative work and get the desired value, partnerships with companies, who have a long history of success in delivering successful GRC solutions as well as being at the very forefront of technology innovation, becomes key. Clearly solutions can be built in-house more cheaply than through vendor, but as has been proven time and time again, when it comes to self built solutions covering AML and Fraud for example, few have able to scale or adapt appropriately to meet the changing regulations or challenges that the GRC teams face on a daily basis. This has led to the creation of GRC silo’s that are causing so many headaches today. The solutions that stand out and should be explored are the ones that can seamlessly merge the traditional world of well-known data, analytics and visualization with the new world of seemingly innumerable data sources, utilizing Big Data technologies to generate new GRC insights right across the enterprise.Ultimately, Big Data is here to stay, and organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be the ones that are well positioned to make the most of it. A Blueprint and Roadmap Service for Big Data Big data adoption is first and foremost a business decision. As such it is essential that your partner can align your strategies, goals, and objectives with an architecture vision and roadmap to accelerate adoption of big data for your environment, as well as establish practical, effective governance that will maintain a well managed environment going forward. Key Activities: While your initiatives will clearly vary, there are some generic starting points the team and organization will need to complete: Clearly define your drivers, strategies, goals, objectives and requirements as it relates to big data Conduct a big data readiness and Information Architecture maturity assessment Develop future state big data architecture, including views across all relevant architecture domains; business, applications, information, and technology Provide initial guidance on big data candidate selection for migrations or implementation Develop a strategic roadmap and implementation plan that reflects a prioritization of initiatives based on business impact and technology dependency, and an incremental integration approach for evolving your current state to the target future state in a manner that represents the least amount of risk and impact of change on the business Provide recommendations for practical, effective Data Governance, Data Quality Management, and Information Lifecycle Management to maintain a well-managed environment Conduct an executive workshop with recommendations and next steps There is little debate that managing risk and data are the two biggest obstacles encountered by financial institutions.  Big data is here to stay and risk management certainly is not going anywhere, and ultimately financial services industry organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be best positioned to make the most of it. Matthew Long is a Financial Crime Specialist for Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at matthew.long AT oracle.com.

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• Loading PNGs into OpenGL performance issues - Java & JOGL much slower than C# & Tao.OpenGL

  - by Edward Cresswell

  I am noticing a large performance difference between Java & JOGL and C# & Tao.OpenGL when both loading PNGs from storage into memory, and when loading that BufferedImage (java) or Bitmap (C# - both are PNGs on hard drive) 'into' OpenGL. This difference is quite large, so I assumed I was doing something wrong, however after quite a lot of searching and trying different loading techniques I've been unable to reduce this difference. With Java I get an image loaded in 248ms and loaded into OpenGL in 728ms The same on C# takes 54ms to load the image, and 34ms to load/create texture. The image in question above is a PNG containing transparency, sized 7200x255, used for a 2D animated sprite. I realise the size is really quite ridiculous and am considering cutting up the sprite, however the large difference is still there (and confusing). On the Java side the code looks like this: BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(new File(fileName)); texture = TextureIO.newTexture(image, false); texture.setTexParameteri(GL.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL.GL_LINEAR); texture.setTexParameteri(GL.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL.GL_LINEAR); The C# code uses: Bitmap t = new Bitmap(fileName); t.RotateFlip(RotateFlipType.RotateNoneFlipY); Rectangle r = new Rectangle(0, 0, t.Width, t.Height); BitmapData bd = t.LockBits(r, ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb); Gl.glBindTexture(Gl.GL_TEXTURE_2D, tID); Gl.glTexImage2D(Gl.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, Gl.GL_RGBA, t.Width, t.Height, 0, Gl.GL_BGRA, Gl.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, bd.Scan0); Gl.glTexParameteri(Gl.GL_TEXTURE_2D, Gl.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, Gl.GL_LINEAR); Gl.glTexParameteri(Gl.GL_TEXTURE_2D, Gl.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, Gl.GL_LINEAR); t.UnlockBits(bd); t.Dispose(); After quite a lot of testing I can only come to the conclusion that Java/JOGL is just slower here - PNG reading might not be as quick, or that I'm still doing something wrong. Thanks. Edit2: I have found that creating a new BufferedImage with format TYPE_INT_ARGB_PRE decreases OpenGL texture load time by almost half - this includes having to create the new BufferedImage, getting the Graphics2D from it and then rendering the previously loaded image to it. Edit3: Benchmark results for 5 variations. I wrote a small benchmarking tool, the following results come from loading a set of 33 pngs, most are very wide, 5 times. testStart: ImageIO.read(file) -> TextureIO.newTexture(image) result: avg = 10250ms, total = 51251 testStart: ImageIO.read(bis) -> TextureIO.newTexture(image) result: avg = 10029ms, total = 50147 testStart: ImageIO.read(file) -> TextureIO.newTexture(argbImage) result: avg = 5343ms, total = 26717 testStart: ImageIO.read(bis) -> TextureIO.newTexture(argbImage) result: avg = 5534ms, total = 27673 testStart: TextureIO.newTexture(file) result: avg = 10395ms, total = 51979 ImageIO.read(bis) refers to the technique described in James Branigan's answer below. argbImage refers to the technique described in my previous edit: img = ImageIO.read(file); argbImg = new BufferedImage(img.getWidth(), img.getHeight(), TYPE_INT_ARGB_PRE); g = argbImg.createGraphics(); g.drawImage(img, 0, 0, null); texture = TextureIO.newTexture(argbImg, false); Any more methods of loading (either images from file, or images to OpenGL) would be appreciated, I will update these benchmarks.

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• Need help to debug application using .Net and MySQL

  - by Tim Murphy

  What advice can you give me on how to track down a bug I have while inserting data into MySQL database with .Net? The error message is: MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlException: Duplicate entry '26012' for key 'StockNumber_Number_UNIQUE' Reviewing of the log proves that StockNumber_Number of 26012 has not been inserted yet. Products in use. Visual Studio 2008. mysql.data.dll 6.0.4.0. Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and Windows 2003 32 bit. Custom built ORM framework (have source code). Importing data from Access 2003 database. The code works fine for 3000 - 5000 imports. The record being imported that causes the problem in a full run works fine if just importing by itself. I've also seen the error on other records if I sort the data to be imported a different way. Have tried import with and without transactions. Have logged the hell out of the system. The SQL command to create the table: CREATE TABLE `RareItems_RareItems` ( `RareItemKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, `StockNumber_Text` VARCHAR(7) NOT NULL, `StockNumber_Number` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, UNIQUE INDEX `StockNumber_Number_UNIQUE` (`StockNumber_Number` ASC), `OurPercentage` NUMERIC , `SellPrice` NUMERIC(19, 2) , `Author` VARCHAR(250) , `CatchWord` VARCHAR(250) , `Title` TEXT , `Publisher` VARCHAR(250) , `InternalNote` VARCHAR(250) , `DateOfPublishing` VARCHAR(250) , `ExternalNote` LONGTEXT , `Description` LONGTEXT , `Scrap` LONGTEXT , `SuppressionKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `TypeKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueStatusKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueRevisedDate` DATETIME , `CatalogueRevisedByKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `DontInsure` BIT NOT NULL, `ExtraCosts` NUMERIC(19, 2) , `IsWebReady` BIT NOT NULL, `LocationKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `LanguageKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `CatalogueDescription` VARCHAR(250) , `PlacePublished` VARCHAR(250) , `ToDo` LONGTEXT , `Headline` VARCHAR(250) , `DepartmentKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `Temp1` INT , `Temp2` INT , `Temp3` VARCHAR(250) , `Temp4` VARCHAR(250) , `InternetStatusKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `InternetStatusInfo` LONGTEXT , `PurchaseKey` CHAR(36) NOT NULL, `ConsignmentKey` CHAR(36) , `IsSold` BIT NOT NULL, `RowCreated` DATETIME NOT NULL, `RowModified` DATETIME NOT NULL ); The SQL command and parameters to insert the record: INSERT INTO `RareItems_RareItems` (`RareItemKey`, `StockNumber_Text`, `StockNumber_Number`, `OurPercentage`, `SellPrice`, `Author`, `CatchWord`, `Title`, `Publisher`, `InternalNote`, `DateOfPublishing`, `ExternalNote`, `Description`, `Scrap`, `SuppressionKey`, `TypeKey`, `CatalogueStatusKey`, `CatalogueRevisedDate`, `CatalogueRevisedByKey`, `CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey`, `DontInsure`, `ExtraCosts`, `IsWebReady`, `LocationKey`, `LanguageKey`, `CatalogueDescription`, `PlacePublished`, `ToDo`, `Headline`, `DepartmentKey`, `Temp1`, `Temp2`, `Temp3`, `Temp4`, `InternetStatusKey`, `InternetStatusInfo`, `PurchaseKey`, `ConsignmentKey`, `IsSold`, `RowCreated`, `RowModified`) VALUES (@RareItemKey, @StockNumber_Text, @StockNumber_Number, @OurPercentage, @SellPrice, @Author, @CatchWord, @Title, @Publisher, @InternalNote, @DateOfPublishing, @ExternalNote, @Description, @Scrap, @SuppressionKey, @TypeKey, @CatalogueStatusKey, @CatalogueRevisedDate, @CatalogueRevisedByKey, @CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey, @DontInsure, @ExtraCosts, @IsWebReady, @LocationKey, @LanguageKey, @CatalogueDescription, @PlacePublished, @ToDo, @Headline, @DepartmentKey, @Temp1, @Temp2, @Temp3, @Temp4, @InternetStatusKey, @InternetStatusInfo, @PurchaseKey, @ConsignmentKey, @IsSold, @RowCreated, @RowModified) @RareItemKey = 0b625bd6-776d-43d6-9405-e97159d172a6 @StockNumber_Text = 199305 @StockNumber_Number = 26012 @OurPercentage = 22.5 @SellPrice = 1250 @Author = SPARRMAN, Anders. @CatchWord = COOK: SECOND VOYAGE @Title = A Voyage Round the World with Captain James Cook in H.M.S. Resolution… Introduction and notes by Owen Rutter, wood engravings by Peter Barker-Mill. @Publisher = @InternalNote = @DateOfPublishing = 1944 @ExternalNote = The first English translation of Sparrman’s narrative, which had originally been published in Sweden in 1802-1818, and the only complete version of his account to appear in English. The eighteenth-century translation had appeared some time before the Swedish publication of the final sections of his account. Sparrman’s observant and well-written narrative of the second voyage contains much that appears nowhere else, emphasising naturally his interests in medicine, health, and natural history.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;One of 350 numbered copies: a handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated work. @Description = Small folio, wood-engravings in the text; original olive glazed cloth, top edges gilt, a very good copy. London, Golden Cockerel Press, 1944. @Scrap = @SuppressionKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @TypeKey = 93f58155-7471-46ad-84c5-262ab9dd37e8 @CatalogueStatusKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000003 @CatalogueRevisedDate = @CatalogueRevisedByKey = c4f6fc06-956d-44c4-b393-0d5462cbffec @CatalogueToBeRevisedByKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @DontInsure = False @ExtraCosts = @IsWebReady = False @LocationKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @LanguageKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @CatalogueDescription = @PlacePublished = Golden Cockerel Press @ToDo = @Headline = @DepartmentKey = 529578a3-9189-40de-b656-eef9039d00b8 @Temp1 = @Temp2 = @Temp3 = @Temp4 = v @InternetStatusKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @InternetStatusInfo = @PurchaseKey = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 @ConsignmentKey = @IsSold = True @RowCreated = 8/04/2010 8:49:16 PM @RowModified = 8/04/2010 8:49:16 PM Suggestions on what is causing the error and/or how to track down what is causing the problem?

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• JavaScript and XML Dom - Nested Loop

  - by BSteck

  So I'm a beginner in XML DOM and JavaScript but I've run into an issue. I'm using the script to display my XML data in a table on an existing site. The problem comes in nesting a loop in my JavaScript code. Here is my XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <book_list> <author> <first_name>Mary</first_name> <last_name>Abbott Hess</last_name> <books> <title>The Healthy Gourmet Cookbook</title> </books> </author> <author> <first_name>Beverly</first_name> <last_name>Bare Bueher</last_name> <books> <title>Cary Grant: A Bio-Bibliography</title> <title>Japanese Films</title> </books> </author> <author> <first_name>James P.</first_name> <last_name>Bateman</last_name> <books> <title>Illinois Land Use Law</title> </books> </author> </book_list> I then use this JavaScript code to read and display the data: > <script type="text/javascript"> if > (window.XMLHttpRequest) { > xhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); } else > // Internet Explorer 5/6 { > xhttp=new > ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); > } xhttp.open("GET","books.xml",false); > xhttp.send(""); > xmlDoc=xhttp.responseXML; > > document.write("<table>"); var > x=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("author"); > for (i=0;i<x.length;i++) { > document.write("<tr><td>"); > document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("first_name")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue); > document.write("&nbsp;"); > document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("last_name")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue); > document.write("</td><td>"); > document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("title")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue); > document.write("</td></tr>"); } > document.write("</table>"); </script> The code works well except it only returns the first title element of each author. I somewhat understand why it's doing that, but I don't know how to nest another loop so when the script runs it displays all the titles for an author, not just the first. Whenever I try to nest a loop it breaks the entire script.

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• Writing more efficient xquery code (avoiding redundant iteration)

  - by Coquelicot

  Here's a simplified version of a problem I'm working on: I have a bunch of xml data that encodes information about people. Each person is uniquely identified by an 'id' attribute, but they may go by many names. For example, in one document, I might find <person id=1>Paul Mcartney</person> <person id=2>Ringo Starr</person> And in another I might find: <person id=1>Sir Paul McCartney</person> <person id=2>Richard Starkey</person> I want to use xquery to produce a new document that lists every name associated with a given id. i.e.: <person id=1> <name>Paul McCartney</name> <name>Sir Paul McCartney</name> <name>James Paul McCartney</name> </person> <person id=2> ... </person> The way I'm doing this now in xquery is something like this (pseudocode-esque): let $ids := distinct-terms( [all the id attributes on people] ) for $id in $ids return <person id={$id}> { for $unique-name in distinct-values ( for $name in ( [all names] ) where $name/@id=$id return $name ) return <name>{$unique-name}</name> } </person> The problem is that this is really slow. I imagine the bottleneck is the innermost loop, which executes once for every id (of which there are about 1200). I'm dealing with a fair bit of data (300 MB, spread over about 800 xml files), so even a single execution of the query in the inner loop takes about 12 seconds, which means that repeating it 1200 times will take about 4 hours (which might be optimistic - the process has been running for 3 hours so far). Not only is it slow, it's using a whole lot of virtual memory. I'm using Saxon, and I had to set java's maximum heap size to 10 GB (!) to avoid getting out of memory errors, and it's currently using 6 GB of physical memory. So here's how I'd really like to do this (in Pythonic pseudocode): persons = {} for id in ids: person[id] = set() for person in all_the_people_in_my_xml_document: persons[person.id].add(person.name) There, I just did it in linear time, with only one sweep of the xml document. Now, is there some way to do something similar in xquery? Surely if I can imagine it, a reasonable programming language should be able to do it (he said quixotically). The problem, I suppose, is that unlike Python, xquery doesn't (as far as I know) have anything like an associative array. Is there some clever way around this? Failing that, is there something better than xquery that I might use to accomplish my goal? Because really, the computational resources I'm throwing at this relatively simple problem are kind of ridiculous.

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• jqgrid with asp.net webmethod and json working with sorting, paging, searching and LINQ

  - by aimlessWonderer

  THIS WORKS! Most topics covering jqgrid and asp.net seem to relate to just receiving JSON, or working in the MVC framework, or utilizing other handlers or web services... but not many dealt with actually passing parameters back to an actual webmethod in the codebehind. Furthermore, scarce are the examples that contain successful implementation the AJAX paging, sorting, or searching along with LINQ to SQL for asp.net jqGrid. Below is a working example that may help others who need help to pass parameters to jqGrid in order to have correct paging, sorting, filtering.. it uses pieces from here and there... ================================================== First, THE JAVASCRIPT <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var grid = $("#list"); $("#list").jqGrid({ // setup custom parameter names to pass to server prmNames: { search: "isSearch", nd: null, rows: "numRows", page: "page", sort: "sortField", order: "sortOrder" }, // add by default to avoid webmethod parameter conflicts postData: { searchString: '', searchField: '', searchOper: '' }, // setup ajax call to webmethod datatype: function(postdata) { mtype: "GET", $.ajax({ url: 'PageName.aspx/getGridData', type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", data: JSON.stringify(postdata), dataType: "json", success: function(data, st) { if (st == "success") { var grid = jQuery("#list")[0]; grid.addJSONData(JSON.parse(data.d)); } }, error: function() { alert("Error with AJAX callback"); } }); }, // this is what jqGrid is looking for in json callback jsonReader: { root: "rows", page: "page", total: "totalpages", records: "totalrecords", cell: "cell", id: "id", //index of the column with the PK in it userdata: "userdata", repeatitems: true }, colNames: ['Id', 'First Name', 'Last Name'], colModel: [ { name: 'id', index: 'id', width: 55, search: false }, { name: 'fname', index: 'fname', width: 200, searchoptions: { sopt: ['eq', 'ne', 'cn']} }, { name: 'lname', index: 'lname', width: 200, searchoptions: { sopt: ['eq', 'ne', 'cn']} } ], rowNum: 10, rowList: [10, 20, 30], pager: jQuery("#pager"), sortname: "fname", sortorder: "asc", viewrecords: true, caption: "Grid Title Here" }).jqGrid('navGrid', '#pager', { edit: false, add: false, del: false }, {}, // default settings for edit {}, // add {}, // delete { closeOnEscape: true, closeAfterSearch: true}, //search {} ) }); </script> ================================================== Second, THE C# WEBMETHOD [WebMethod] public static string getGridData(int? numRows, int? page, string sortField, string sortOrder, bool isSearch, string searchField, string searchString, string searchOper) { string result = null; MyDataContext db = null; try { //--- retrieve the data db = new MyDataContext("my connection string path"); var query = from u in db.TBL_USERs select u; //--- determine if this is a search filter if (isSearch) { searchOper = getOperator(searchOper); // need to associate correct operator to value sent from jqGrid string whereClause = String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", searchField, searchOper, "@" + searchField); //--- associate value to field parameter Dictionary<string, object> param = new Dictionary<string, object>(); param.Add("@" + searchField, searchString); query = query.Where(whereClause, new object[1] { param }); } //--- setup calculations int pageIndex = page ?? 1; //--- current page int pageSize = numRows ?? 10; //--- number of rows to show per page int totalRecords = query.Count(); //--- number of total items from query int totalPages = (int)Math.Ceiling((decimal)totalRecords / (decimal)pageSize); //--- number of pages //--- filter dataset for paging and sorting IQueryable<TBL_USER> orderedRecords = query.OrderBy(sortfield); IEnumerable<TBL_USER> sortedRecords = orderedRecords.ToList(); if (sortorder == "desc") sortedRecords= sortedRecords.Reverse(); sortedRecords= sortedRecords .Skip((pageIndex - 1) * pageSize) //--- page the data .Take(pageSize); //--- format json var jsonData = new { totalpages = totalPages, //--- number of pages page = pageIndex, //--- current page totalrecords = totalRecords, //--- total items rows = ( from row in sortedRecords select new { i = row.USER_ID, cell = new string[] { row.USER_ID.ToString(), row.FNAME.ToString(), row.LNAME } } ).ToArray() }; result = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(jsonData); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine(ex); } finally { if (db != null) db.Dispose(); } return result; } ================================================== Third, NECESSITIES In order to have dynamic OrderBy clauses in the LINQ, I had to pull in a class to my AppCode folder called 'Dynamic.cs'. You can retrieve the file from downloading here. You will find the file in the "DynamicQuery" folder. That file will give you the ability to utilized dynamic ORDERBY clause since we don't know what column we're filtering by except on the initial load. To serialize the JSON back from the C-sharp to the JS, I incorporated the James Newton-King JSON.net DLL found here : http://json.codeplex.com/releases/view/37810. After downloading, there is a "Newtonsoft.Json.Compact.dll" which you can add in your Bin folder as a reference Here's my USING's block using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.Services; using System.Linq.Dynamic; For the Javascript references, I'm using the following scripts in respective order in case that helps some folks: 1) jquery-1.3.2.min.js ... 2) jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js ... 3) json.min.js ... 4) i18n/grid.locale-en.js ... 5) jquery.jqGrid.min.js For the CSS, I'm using jqGrid's necessities as well as the jQuery UI Theme: 1) jquery_theme/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css ... 2) ui.jqgrid.css The key to getting the parameters from the JS to the WebMethod without having to parse an unserialized string on the backend or having to setup some JS logic to switch methods for different numbers of parameters was this block postData: { searchString: '', searchField: '', searchOper: '' }, Those parameters will still be set correctly when you actually do a search and then reset to empty when you "reset" or want the grid to not do any filtering Hope this helps some others!!!! Please reply if you find major issues or ways of refactoring or doing better that I haven't considered.

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• Help with Design for Vacation Tracking System (C#/.NET/Access/WebServices/SOA/Excel) [closed]

  - by Aaronaught

  I have been tasked with developing a system for tracking our company's paid time-off (vacation, sick days, etc.) At the moment we are using an Excel spreadsheet on a shared network drive, and it works pretty well, but we are concerned that we won't be able to "trust" employees forever and sometimes we run into locking issues when two people try to open the spreadsheet at once. So we are trying to build something a little more robust. I would like some input on this design in terms of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, etc. It's a pretty simple workflow we need to represent right now: I started with a basic MS Access schema like this: Employees (EmpID int, EmpName varchar(50), AllowedDays int) Vacations (VacationID int, EmpID int, BeginDate datetime, EndDate datetime) But we don't want to spend a lot of time building a schema and database like this and have to change it later, so I think I am going to go with something that will be easier to expand through configuration. Right now the vacation table has this schema: Vacations (VacationID int, PropName varchar(50), PropValue varchar(50)) And the table will be populated with data like this: VacationID | PropName | PropValue -----------+--------------+------------------ 1 | EmpID | 4 1 | EmpName | James Jones 1 | Reason | Vacation 1 | BeginDate | 2/24/2010 1 | EndDate | 2/30/2010 1 | Destination | Spectate Swamp 2 | ... | ... I think this is a pretty good, extensible design, we can easily add new properties to the vacation like the destination or maybe approval status, etc. I wasn't too sure how to go about managing the database of valid properties, I thought of putting them in a separate PropNames table but it gets complicated to manage all the different data types and people say that you shouldn't put CLR type names into a SQL database, so I decided to use XML instead, here is the schema: <VacationProperties> <PropertyNames>EmpID,EmpName,Reason,BeginDate,EndDate,Destination</PropertyNames> <PropertyTypes>System.Int32,System.String,System.String,System.DateTime,System.DateTime,System.String</PropertyTypes> <PropertiesRequired>true,true,false,true,true,false</PropertiesRequired> </VacationProperties> I might need more fields than that, I'm not completely sure. I'm parsing the XML like this (would like some feedback on the parsing code): string xml = File.ReadAllText("properties.xml"); Match m = Regex.Match(xml, "<(PropertyNames)>(.*?)</PropertyNames>"; string[] pn = m.Value.Split(','); // do the same for PropertyTypes, PropertiesRequired Then I use the following code to persist configuration changes to the database: string sql = "DROP TABLE VacationProperties"; sql = sql + " CREATE TABLE VacationProperties "; sql = sql + "(PropertyName varchar(100), PropertyType varchar(100) "; sql = sql + "IsRequired varchar(100))"; for (int i = 0; i < pn.Length; i++) { sql = sql + " INSERT VacationProperties VALUES (" + pn[i] + "," + pt[i] + "," + pv[i] + ")"; } // GlobalConnection is a singleton new SqlCommand(sql, GlobalConnection.Instance).ExecuteReader(); So far so good, but after a few days of this I then realized that a lot of this was just a more specific kind of a generic workflow which could be further abstracted, and instead of writing all of this boilerplate plumbing code I could just come up with a workflow and plug it into a workflow engine like Windows Workflow Foundation and have the users configure it: In order to support routing these configurations throw the workflow system, it seemed natural to implement generic XML Web Services for this instead of just using an XML file as above. I've used this code to implement the Web Services: public class VacationConfigurationService : WebService { [WebMethod] public void UpdateConfiguration(string xml) { // Above code goes here } } Which was pretty easy, although I'm still working on a way to validate that XML against some kind of schema as there's no error-checking yet. I also created a few different services for other operations like VacationSubmissionService, VacationReportService, VacationDataService, VacationAuthenticationService, etc. The whole Service Oriented Architecture looks like this: And because the workflow itself might change, I have been working on a way to integrate the WF workflow system with MS Visio, which everybody at the office already knows how to use so they could make changes pretty easily. We have a diagram that looks like the following (it's kind of hard to read but the main items are Activities, Authenticators, Validators, Transformers, Processors, and Data Connections, they're all analogous to the services in the SOA diagram above). The requirements for this system are: (Note - I don't control these, they were given to me by management) Main workflow must interface with Excel spreadsheet, probably through VBA macros (to ease the transition to the new system) Alerts should integrate with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMS (text messages). We also want to interface it with the company Voice Mail system but that is not a "hard" requirement. Performance requirements: Must handle 250,000 Transactions Per Second Should be able to handle up to 20,000 employees (right now we have 3) 99.99% uptime ("four nines") expected Must be secure against outside hacking, but users cannot be required to enter a username/password. Platforms: Must support Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, DOS 2.0, VAX, IRIX, PDP-11, Apple IIc. Time to complete: 6 to 8 weeks. My questions are: Is this a good design for the system so far? Am I using all of the recommended best practices for these technologies? How do I integrate the Visio diagram above with the Windows Workflow Foundation to call the ConfigurationService and persist workflow changes? Am I missing any important components? Will this be extensible enough to support any scenario via end-user configuration? Will the system scale to the above performance requirements? Will we need any expensive hardware to run it? Are there any "gotchas" I should know about with respect to cross-platform compatibility? For example would it be difficult to convert this to an iPhone app? How long would you expect this to take? (We've dedicated 1 week for testing so I'm thinking maybe 5 weeks?) Many thanks for your advices, Aaron

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• Working with PivotTables in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. 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