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  • Silverlight Cream for March 24, 2010 -- #819

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Nokola, Tim Heuer, Christian Schormann, Brad Abrams, David Kelley, Phil Middlemiss, Michael Klucher, Brandon Watson, Kunal Chowdhury, Jacek Ciereszko, and Unni. Shoutouts: Michael Klucher has a short post up For Love of the Game (Development)…, where he's looking for some input from the developer community. Shawn Hargreaves has a link post up of all the Windows Phone MIX10 presentations Chris Cavanagh has a Soft-Body Physics for Windows Phone 7 post up that goes along with one he did 1-1/2 years ago! Jeff Weber posted An Open Letter To Microsoft Regarding The Silverlight Game Development Community Pete Brown posted his MIX10 Recap ... lots of information, and discussion of what he was up to ... I liked the Trivia app Pete... glad to hear that was yours :) I've changed my mind and added a WP7 tag to SilverlightCream. I'll straighten out all the Mobile plus Silverlight links to point at the WP7 tab hopefully tonight. From SilverlightCream.com: EasyPainter Source Pack 3: Adorners, Mouse Cursors and Frames Nokola has been busy with EasyPainter adding in Custom, Extensible Mouse Cursors and Customizable Adorners with extensible adorner frames, and best of all... all with source code! Simulate Geo Location in Silverlight Windows Phone 7 emulator Among the things we don't have in our WP7 emulators is Geo Location... Tim Heuer comes to the rescue with a simulator for it... too cool, Tim! Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part II Christian Schormann is back with Part 2 of his tutorial sequence on the new Path Layout. Really good info and definitely cool presentations of the control. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services Brad Abrams continues his series with a post on exposing OData services. This looks like a great tutorial on the topic... will probably resolve some questions I've been having :) No Silverlight and Preloader Experience(ish) - in 10 seconds... David Kelley exposes the code he uses on his site, designed to be friendly to Silverlight and non-Silverlight users alike. Merged Dictionaries of Style Resources and Blend Phil Middlemiss has a nice article up on Merged Dictionaries and using multiple resource dictionaries that the app chooses, but also be compatible with Prism and Blend while not eating your system resources out of house and home. XNA Game Studio and Windows Phone Emulator Compatibility Michael Klucher has a definitive post up about getting your XNA and system up-to-speed for WP7... a must-read if you've been running any of the other XNA drops. Windows Phone 7 301 Redirect Bug Brandon Watson reports a 301 Redirect bug on WP7 ... see the code and how he got it, then follow along as he explains all the debug paths he took and what the resolution (?) really is :) Silverlight 4: How to use the new Printing API? Kunal Chowdhury has a tutorial up on printing with Silverlight 4 RC... from the project layout to printing and then printing a smaller section... all good Printing problem in Silverlight 4.0 RC - loading images in code behind Jacek Ciereszko also is writing about printing, and in his case he had problems with loading an image dynamically and printing it... plus he provides a solution to the 'blank page' problem. ToolboxExampleAttribute - a new extension point in Blend 4 (and a few other extensibility related changes) Unni has an article up about Expression Blend 4's new ToolboxExampleAttribute which allow you to have multiple examples of the same type resulting in different XAML produced. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone    MIX10

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2010 -- #1008

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight" Chris Klug WP7: "Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter" Jaime Rodriguez Training: "Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1 Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring. Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1 Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture. 4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text. 5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch. Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it. Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked... The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend. Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution. Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment. Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF #twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7) Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out... Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev) Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above. Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code. UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that? Details on the Push Notification app limits Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Failure Sucks, But Does It Have To?

    - by steve.diamond
    Hey Folks--It's "elephant in the room" time. Imagine a representative from a CRM VENDOR discussing CRM FAILURES. Well. I recently saw this blog post from Michael Krigsman on "six ways CRM projects go wrong." Now, I know this may come off defensive, but my comments apply to ALL CRM vendors, not just Oracle. As I perused the list, I couldn't find any failures related to technology. They all seemed related to people or process. Now, this isn't about finger pointing, or impugning customers. I love customers! And when they fail, WE fail. Although I sit in the cheap seats, i.e., I haven't funded any multi-million dollar CRM initiatives lately, I kept wondering how to convert the perception of failure as something that ends and is never to be mentioned again (see Michael's reason #4), to something that one learns from and builds upon. So to continue my tradition of speaking in platitudes, let me propose the following three tenets: 1) Try and get ahead of your failures while they're very very small. 2) Immediately assess what you can learn from those failures. 3) With more than 15 years of CRM deployments, seek out those vendors that have a track record both in learning from "misses" and in supporting MANY THOUSANDS of CRM successes at companies of all types and sizes. Now let me digress briefly with an unpleasant (for me, anyway) analogy. I really don't like flying. Call it 'fear of dying' or 'fear of no control.' Whatever! I've spoken with quite a few commercial pilots over the years, and they reassure me that there are multiple failures on most every flight. We as passengers just don't know about them. Most of them are too miniscule to make a difference, and most of them are "caught" before they become LARGER failures. It's typically the mid-sized to colossal failures we hear about, and a significant percentage of those are due to human error. What's the point? I'd propose that organizations consider the topic of FAILURE in five grades. On one end, FAILURE Grade 1 is a minor/miniscule failure. On the other end, FAILURE Grade 5 is a colossal failure A Grade 1 CRM FAILURE could be that a particular interim milestone was missed. Why? What can we learn from that? How can we prevent that from happening as we proceed through the project? Individual organizations will need to define their own Grade 2 and Grade 3 failures. The opportunity is to keep those Grade 3 failures from escalating any further. Because honestly, a GRADE 5 failure may not be recoverable. It could result in a project being pulled, countless amounts of hours and dollars lost, and jobs lost. We don't want to go there. In closing, I want to thank Michael for opening my eyes up to the world of "color," versus thinking of failure as both "black and white" and a dead end road that organizations can't learn from and avoid discussing like the plague.

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  • Silverlight Cream for January 16, 2011 -- #1029

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Michael Washington, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata(-2-, -3-, -4-), Sergey Barskiy(-2-), Miroslav Nedyalkov, Jeff Prosise, and Matthias Shapiro(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Building a Multi-Page Silverlight LOB Application" Deborah Kurata WP7: "Windows Phone 7 [Controls] Project" Sergey Barskiy Sketchflow: "Sketchflow To Final" Michael Washington From SilverlightCream.com: Sketchflow To Final Check out this post by Michael Washington detailing the Sketchflow he did of his app, and how the final result tracks amazingly well. Windows Phone From Scratch #19 – MVVM Light Toolkit Soup To Nuts #4 Continuing to try to catch up to Jesse Liberty is this post, number 19 in the Windows Phone series and the 4th in that series about MVVMLight, and discussing binding a collection in the ViewModel to a ListBox in the view. Building a Multi-Page Silverlight LOB Application Deborah Kurata has the first 4 parts up (in 2 days) in a 6-part tutorial series she's doing on building a Silverlight LOB app. The first post was an intro and link to the rest as they become available. This 2nd post is getting the app newed up and making sure you've got your head wrapped around multiple pages. Theming a Silverlight Application using Existing Themes Deborah Kurata's next part is about getting started with themes in your app using the themes provided in the toolkit specifically. Theming a Silverlight Application using Custom Themes Deborah Kurata's next tutorial in the series is also about themes, but this time it's about custom themes... or rather customized from a 'standard' one in this case. Adding a New Page to a Multi-Page Silverlight Application Deborah Kurata's last available post in the tutorial series is this one on adding a new page to the app. Windows Phone 7 Project Sergey Barskiy has a pair of posts up about a calendar control that he is building and has out on CodePlex... nice-looking control too! Windows Phone 7 Controls Project Update Sergey Barskiy's second post is an update to the calendar... the biggest update being the ability to use the Toolkit context menu. How to Create Ad Rotator with Telerik TransitionControl and CoverFlow control for Silverlight Miroslav Nedyalkov uses the Telerik TransitionControl and CoverFlow controls to produce a great-looking ad rotator using any ContentControl or ListBox... very nice demo on the page.... Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 2 Jeff Prosise has part 2 of his tutorial series on WP7 Touch Interfaces up... and he's processing touch events directly in this one. Fixing the ListPicker / ScrollViewer Problem in Windows Phone 7 Matthias Shapiro has a couple of posts out that I've missed... this one is on an issue with ListPickers in a ScrollViewer where the listpicker gets hit rather than the scroll, and of course he has a work-around... but you'll need the source for the ListPicker to do it. Embedding a Sound File in Windows Phone 7 app (Silverlight) The next post by Matthias Shapiro is an explanation of embedding a sound file in a WP7 app with 2 conditions: 1) it downloads with your app, and 2) it plays no matter what. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 27, 2010 -- #1016

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Sacha Barber, David Anson, Jesse Liberty, Shawn Wildermuth, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Martin Krüger, Ryan Alford(-2-), Michael Crump, Peter Kuhn(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Part 4 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers" Michael Crump WP7: "Navigating with the WebBrowser Control on WP7" Shawn Wildermuth Shoutouts: John Papa posted that the open call is up for MIX11 presenters: Your Chance to Speak at MIX11 From SilverlightCream.com: Aspect Examples (INotifyPropertyChanged via aspects) If you're wanting to read a really in-depth discussion of aspect oriented programming (AOP), check out the article Sacha Barber has up at CodeProject discussing INPC via aspects. How to: Localize a Windows Phone 7 application that uses the Windows Phone Toolkit into different languages David Anson has a nice tutorial up on localizing your WP7 app, including using the Toolkit and controls such as DatePicker... remember we're talking localized Windows Phone From Scratch – Animation Part 1 Jesse Liberty continues in his 'From Scratch' series with this first post on WP7 Animation... good stuff, Jesse! Navigating with the WebBrowser Control on WP7 In building his latest WP7 app, Shawn Wildermuth ran into some obscure errors surrounding browser.InvokeScript. He lists the simple solution and his back, refresh, and forward button functionality for us. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #7 In the time I was out, Jeff Blankenburg got ahead of me, so I'll catch up 2 at a time... in this number 7 he discusses making videos of your apps, links to the Learn Visual Studio series, and his new website What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #8 Jeff Blankenburg's number 8 is a very cool tip on using the return key on the keyboard to handle the loss of focus and handling of text typed into a textbox. Resize of a grid by using thumb controls Martin Krüger has a sample in the Expression Gallery of a grid that is resizable by using 'thumb controls' at the 4 corners... all source, so check it out! Silverlight 4 – Productivity Power Tools and EF4 Ryan Alford found a very interesting bug associated with EF4 and the Productivity Power Tools, and the way to get out of it is just weird as well. Silverlight 4 – Toolkit and Theming Ryan Alford also had a problem adding a theme from the Toolkit, and what all you might have to do to get around this one.... Part 4 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers. Michael Crump has part 4 of his series on Silverlight Development tips and tricks. This is numbers 16 through 20 and covers topics such as Version information, Using Lambdas, Specifying a development port, Disabling ChildWindow Close button, and XAML cleanup. The XML content importer and Windows Phone 7 Peter Kuhn wanted to use the XML content inporter with a WP7 app and ran into problems implementing the process and a lack of documentation as well... he pounded through it all and has a class he's sharing for loading sounds via XML file settings. WP7 snippet: analyzing the hyperlink button style In a second post, Peter Kuhn responds to a forum discussion about the styles for the hyperlink button in WP7 and why they're different than SL4 ... and styles-to-go to get all the hyperlink goodness you want... wrapped text, or even non-text content. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Silverlight Cream for May 11, 2010 -- #859

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this All Submittal Issue: Colin Eberhardt, Ken Johnson, Alan Beasley, Pencho Popadiyn, Phil Middlemiss, Khawar(-2-), Levente Mihály, Alex van Beek, Bart Czernicki, Michael Washington, and Mark Monster. Shoutout: Not Silverlight necessarily, but definitely VS2010, read what Brett Balmer has to say In Defense of Portrait Mode From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MultiBinding solution for Silverlight 4 Colin Eberhardt updated his Silverlight Multibinding solution to Silverlight 4. Great article with explanatory graphics, and links to the code... congrats on the use in the FaceBook Client too! Spirograph Shapes: WPF Bezier shapes from math formulae Wow... I haven't seen this much math since my Master's Thesis! ... Check out all the shapes Ken Johnson has built... don't let the math scare you... just use it :) Busy Dizzy Bee-sley Spirographic Animation in Expression Blend and Silverlight This is just fun... I saw Michael Washington playing with this yesterday at the Arizona Day of .NET but didn't have a chance to ask what it was.. Alan Beasley had a good time building this, and is sharing a very detailed tutorial with us. ModalDialogs, IEditableObject and MVVM in Silverlight 4 Pencho Popadiyn said the 'M' word over at SilverlightShow... actually the 'MVVM' word :) ... he's discussing Modal dialogs with no code in the View ... check out how he did it. A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 6 Phil Middlemiss is up to episode 6 in his Theme-building tutorial... this time out, he's giving the TabControl and TabItem new clothes ... specifically discussing what to change and what to allow to inherit ... good stuff! Silverlight 4 Fonts gotcha Check out Khawar's ATM Machine demo -- there's a link on the page for this post... he had an issue with fonts, ratted it out, and explains it for all of us... thanks Khawar Demystifying Silverlight Obfuscation Khawar also has a good post up on Obfuscating your Silverlight... definitely showing that it's not all that difficult to do. geoGallery, a WinPhone7 sample OK this is interesting... using the geoLocation feature of WP7, Levente Mihály hits Google Picasa to find pictures... good write-up and all the code. Silverlight 4: Digitally signing a XAP with Visual Studio 2010 Alex van Beek has a nice tutorial on Signing your XAP file using Visual Studio 2010... of course you may want to visit Tim Heuer's blog (search at SC) to find the two good deals on certificates that are still in play. Creating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Expression Blend 4 for Business Intelligence applications In an interesting post, Bart Czernicki describes using the shape assets in Blend 4 to produce a KPI display in Silverlight or WPF. A discussion of the shape's evolution for KPI is included as well as some alternate shape uses. A DotNetNuke Silverlight 4 Drag and Drop File Manager Michael Washington has blogged about his Drag and Drop File Manager using the View Model Style pattern. This is covered in two CodeProject articles listed in the post. The design work was done by Alan Beasely and links to his work is there as well as covered in other SC posts. How to select a ListItem on Hover Mark Monster had a Use Case for Selecting a ListBox entry by hovering ... but he did it with a Behavior and for a ListBox and PathListBox and it works with DataBinding... Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 07, 2010 -- #1004

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: András Velvárt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), AvraShow, Gill Cleeren, Ian T. Lackey, Richard Waddell, Joe McBride, Michael Crump, Xpert360, keyboardP, and Pete Vickers(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Grouping Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "Phone 7 Back Button and the ListPicker control" Ian T. Lackey Shoutouts: Colin Eberhardt has some Silverlight 5 Adoption Predictions you may want to check out. Michael Crump has a post up showing lots of the goodness of Silverlight 5 from the Firestarter... screenshots, code snippets, etc: Silverlight 5 – What’s New? (Including Screenshots & Code Snippets) Kunal Chowdhury has a pretty complete Silverlight 5 feature set from the Firestarter and an embedded copy of Scott Guthrie's kenote running on the page: New Features Announced for Silverlight 5 Beta From SilverlightCream.com: Just how productive is WP7 development compared to iOS, Android and mobile Web? András Velvárt blogged about a contest he took part in to build a WP7 app in 1-1/2 hours without any prior knowledge of it's funtion. He and his team-mate were pitted against other teams on Android, IOS, and mobile Web... guess who got (almost) their entire app running? ... just too cool Andras! ... Grouping Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView Kunal Chowdhury has a couple good posts up, this first one is on using the PagedCollectionView to group the records in a DataGrid... code included. Filtering Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView Kunal Chowdhury then continues with another post on the PagedCollectionView only this time is showing how to do some filtering. DeepZoom Tips and Techniques AvraShow has a post up discussing using DeepZoom to explore, in his case, a Printed Circuit Board, with information about how he proceeded in doing that, and some tips and techniques along the way. The validation story in Silverlight (Part 2) Gill Cleeren has Part 2 of his Silverlight Validation series up at SilverlightShow. This post gets into IDataErrorInfo and INotifyDataErrorInfo. Lots of code and the example is available for download. Phone 7 Back Button and the ListPicker control Ian T. Lackey has a post up about the WP7 backbutton and what can get a failure from the Marketplace in that area, and how that applies to the ListPicker as well. Very Simple Example of ICommand CanExecute Method and CanExecuteChanged Event Richard Waddell has a nice detailed tutorial on ICommand and dealing with CanExecute... lots of Blend love in this post. Providing an Alternating Background Color for an ItemsControl Joe McBride has a post up discussing putting an alternating background color on an ItemsControl... you know, how you do on a grid... interesting idea, and all the code... Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter Michael Crump has a great Firestarter post up ... where and how to get the videos, the labs... a good Firestarter resource for sure. Adventures with PivotViewer Part 7: Slider control Xpert360 has part 7 of the PivotViewer series they're doing up. This time they're demonstrating taking programmatic control of the Zoom slider. Creating Transparent Lockscreen Wallpapers for WP7 I don't know keyboardP's name, but he's got a cool post up about getting an image up for the WP7 lock screen that has transparent regions on it... pretty cool actually. Windows Phone 7 Linq to XML 'strangeness' Pete Vickers has a post up describing a problem he found with Linq to XML on WP7. He even has a demo app that has the problem, and the fix... and it's all downloadable. Windows Phone 7 multi-line radio buttons Pete Vickers has another quick post up on radio buttons with so much text that it needs wrapping ... this is for WP7, but applies to Silverlight in general. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Top 10 Linked Blogs of 2010

    - by Bill Graziano
    Each week I send out a SQL Server newsletter and include links to interesting blog posts.  I’ve linked to over 500 blog posts so far in 2010.  Late last year I started storing those links in a database so I could do a little reporting.  I tend to link to posts related to the OLTP engine.  I also try to link to the individual blogger in the group blogs.  Unfortunately that wasn’t possible for the SQLCAT and CSS blogs.  I also have a real weakness for posts related to PASS. These are the top 10 blogs that I linked to during the year ordered by the number of posts I linked to. Paul Randal – Paul writes extensively on the internals of the relational engine.  Lots of great posts around transactions, transaction log, disaster recovery, corruption, indexes and DBCC.  I also linked to many of his SQL Server myths posts. Glenn Berry – Glenn writes very interesting posts on how hardware affects SQL Server.  I especially like his posts on the various CPU platforms.  These aren’t necessarily topics that I’m searching for but I really enjoy reading them. The SQLCAT Team – This Microsoft team focuses on the largest and most interesting SQL Server installations.  The regularly publish white papers and best practices. SQL Server CSS Team – These are the top engineers from the Microsoft Customer Service and Support group.  These are the folks you finally talk to after your case has been escalated about 20 times.  They write about the interesting problems they find. Brent Ozar – The posts I linked to mostly focused on the relational engine: CPU, NUMA, SSD drives, performance monitoring, etc.  But Brent writes about a real variety of topics including blogging, social networking, speaking, the MCM, SQL Azure and anything else that seems to strike his fancy.  His posts are always well written and though provoking. Jeremiah Peschka – A number of Jeremiah’s posts weren’t about SQL Server.  He’s very active in the “NoSQL” area and I linked to a number of those posts.  I think it’s important for people to know what other technologies are out there. Brad McGehee – Brad writes about being a DBA including maintenance plans, DBA checklists, compression and audit. Thomas LaRock – I linked to a variety of posts from PBM to networking to 24 Hours of PASS to TDE.  Just a real variety of topics.  Tom always writes with an interesting style usually mixing in a movie theme and/or bacon. Aaron Bertrand – Many of my links this year were Denali features.  He also had a great series on bad habits to kick. Michael J. Swart – This last one surprised me.  There are some well known SQL Server bloggers below Michael on this list.  I linked to posts on indexes, hierarchies, transactions and I/O performance and a variety of other engine related posts.  All are interesting and well thought out.  Many of his non-SQL posts are also very good.  He seems to have an interest in puzzles and other brain teasers.  Michael, I won’t be surprised again!

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  • Hidden Features of C#?

    - by Serhat Özgel
    This came to my mind after I learned the following from this question: where T : struct We, C# developers, all know the basics of C#. I mean declarations, conditionals, loops, operators, etc. Some of us even mastered the stuff like Generics, anonymous types, lambdas, linq, ... But what are the most hidden features or tricks of C# that even C# fans, addicts, experts barely know? Here are the revealed features so far: Keywords yield by Michael Stum var by Michael Stum using() statement by kokos readonly by kokos as by Mike Stone as / is by Ed Swangren as / is (improved) by Rocketpants default by deathofrats global:: by pzycoman using() blocks by AlexCuse volatile by Jakub Šturc extern alias by Jakub Šturc Attributes DefaultValueAttribute by Michael Stum ObsoleteAttribute by DannySmurf DebuggerDisplayAttribute by Stu DebuggerBrowsable and DebuggerStepThrough by bdukes ThreadStaticAttribute by marxidad FlagsAttribute by Martin Clarke ConditionalAttribute by AndrewBurns Syntax ?? operator by kokos number flaggings by Nick Berardi where T:new by Lars Mæhlum implicit generics by Keith one-parameter lambdas by Keith auto properties by Keith namespace aliases by Keith verbatim string literals with @ by Patrick enum values by lfoust @variablenames by marxidad event operators by marxidad format string brackets by Portman property accessor accessibility modifiers by xanadont ternary operator (?:) by JasonS checked and unchecked operators by Binoj Antony implicit and explicit operators by Flory Language Features Nullable types by Brad Barker Currying by Brian Leahy anonymous types by Keith __makeref __reftype __refvalue by Judah Himango object initializers by lomaxx format strings by David in Dakota Extension Methods by marxidad partial methods by Jon Erickson preprocessor directives by John Asbeck DEBUG pre-processor directive by Robert Durgin operator overloading by SefBkn type inferrence by chakrit boolean operators taken to next level by Rob Gough pass value-type variable as interface without boxing by Roman Boiko programmatically determine declared variable type by Roman Boiko Static Constructors by Chris Easier-on-the-eyes / condensed ORM-mapping using LINQ by roosteronacid Visual Studio Features select block of text in editor by Himadri snippets by DannySmurf Framework TransactionScope by KiwiBastard DependantTransaction by KiwiBastard Nullable<T> by IainMH Mutex by Diago System.IO.Path by ageektrapped WeakReference by Juan Manuel Methods and Properties String.IsNullOrEmpty() method by KiwiBastard List.ForEach() method by KiwiBastard BeginInvoke(), EndInvoke() methods by Will Dean Nullable<T>.HasValue and Nullable<T>.Value properties by Rismo GetValueOrDefault method by John Sheehan Tips & Tricks nice method for event handlers by Andreas H.R. Nilsson uppercase comparisons by John access anonymous types without reflection by dp a quick way to lazily instantiate collection properties by Will JavaScript-like anonymous inline-functions by roosteronacid Other netmodules by kokos LINQBridge by Duncan Smart Parallel Extensions by Joel Coehoorn

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  • Google Map API v3 — set bounds and center

    - by Michael Bradley
    Hi, I've recently switched to Google Maps API V3. I'm working of a simple example which plots markers from an array, however I do not know how to center and zoom automatically with respect to the markers. I've searched the net high and low, including Google's own documentation, but have not found a clear answer. I know I could simply take an average of the co-ordinates, but how would I set the zoom accordingly? Could somebody please point me in the right direction? Perhaps you know of a good tutorial. Many thanks in advance, Michael function initialize() { var myOptions = { zoom: 10, center: new google.maps.LatLng(-33.9, 151.2), mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP } var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map_canvas"),myOptions); setMarkers(map, beaches); } var beaches = [ ['Bondi Beach', -33.890542, 151.274856, 4], ['Coogee Beach', -33.423036, 151.259052, 5], ['Cronulla Beach', -34.028249, 121.157507, 3], ['Manly Beach', -33.80010128657071, 151.28747820854187, 2], ['Maroubra Beach', -33.450198, 151.259302, 1] ]; function setMarkers(map, locations) { var image = new google.maps.MarkerImage('images/beachflag.png', new google.maps.Size(20, 32), new google.maps.Point(0,0), new google.maps.Point(0, 32)); var shadow = new google.maps.MarkerImage('images/beachflag_shadow.png', new google.maps.Size(37, 32), new google.maps.Point(0,0), new google.maps.Point(0, 32)); var lat = map.getCenter().lat(); var lng = map.getCenter().lng(); var shape = { coord: [1, 1, 1, 20, 18, 20, 18 , 1], type: 'poly' }; for (var i = 0; i < locations.length; i++) { var beach = locations[i]; var myLatLng = new google.maps.LatLng(beach[1], beach[2]); var marker = new google.maps.Marker({ position: myLatLng, map: map, shadow: shadow, icon: image, shape: shape, title: beach[0], zIndex: beach[3] }); } }

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  • WCF and Unity - Dependecy Injection

    - by Michael
    I'm trying to hock up WCF with dependecy injection. All the examples that I have found is based on the assumptions that you either uses a .svc (ServiceHostFactory) service or uses app.config to configure the container. Other examples is also based on that the container is passed around to the classes. I would like a solution where the container is not passed around (not tightly coupled to Unity). Where I don't uses a config file to configure the container and where I use self-hosted services. The problem is - as I see it - that the ServiceHost is taking the type of the service implementation as a parameter so what different does it do to use the InstanceProvider? The solution I have come up with at the moment is to register the ServiceHost (or a specialization) an register a Type with a name ( e.g. container.RegisterInstance<Type>("ServiceName", typeof(Service);). And then container.RegisterType<UnityServiceHost>(new InjectionConstructor(new ResolvedParameter<Type>("ServiceName"))); to register the ServiceHost. Any better solutions out there? I'm I perhaps way of in my assumptions. Best regards, Michael

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  • Stop UITextView from jumping when programatically setting text

    - by Michael Waterfall
    Hi there, I have to update a small amount of text in a scrolling UITextView. I'll only be inserting a character where the cursor currently is, and I'll be doing this on a press of a button on my navigation bar. My problem is that whenever I call the setText method of the text view, it jumps to the bottom of the text. I've tried using contentOffset and resetting the selectedRange but it doesn't work! Here's my example: // Remember offset and selection CGPoint contentOffset = [entryTextView contentOffset]; NSRange selectedRange = [entryTextView selectedRange]; // Update text entryTextView.text = entryTextView.text; // Try and reset offset and selection [entryTextView setContentOffset:contentOffset animated:NO]; [entryTextView setSelectedRange: selectedRange]; Is there any way you can update the text without any scroll movement at all... as if they'd just typed something on the keyboard? Many thanks, Michael Edit: I've tried using the textViewDidChange: delegate method but it's still not scrolling up to the original location. - (void)textViewDidChange:(UITextView *)textView { if (self.programChanged) { [textView setSelectedRange:self.selectedRange]; [textView setContentOffset:self.contentOffset animated:NO]; self.programChanged = NO; } } - (void)changeButtonPressed:(id)sender { // Remember position self.programChanged = YES; self.contentOffset = [entryTextView contentOffset]; self.selectedRange = [entryTextView selectedRange]; // Update text entryTextView.text = entryTextView.text; }

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  • Detection of page refresh / F5 key in ASP.NET MVC 2

    - by Michael
    How would one go about detecting a page refresh / F5 key push on the controller handling the postback? I need to distinguish between the user pressing one of two buttons (e.g., Next, Previous) and when the F5 / page refresh occurs. My scenario is a single wizard page that has different content shown between each invocation of the user pressing the "Next" or "Previous" buttons. The error that I am running into is when the user refreshes the page / presses the F5 key, the browser re-sends the request back to the controller, which is handled as a post-back and the FormCollection type is used to look for the "submitButton" key and obtain its value (e.g., "Next," "Send"). This part was modeled after the post by Dylan Beattie at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/442704/how-do-you-handle-multiple-submit-buttons-in-asp-net-mvc-framework. Maybe I'm trying to bend MVC 2 to where it isn't meant to go but I'd like to stay with the current design in that the underlying database drives the content and order of what is shown. This allows us to add new content into the database without modifying the code the displays the content. Thanks, Michael

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  • Help matching fields between two classes

    - by Michael
    I'm not too experienced with Java yet, and I'm hoping someone can steer me in the right direction because right now I feel like I'm just beating my head against a wall... The first class is called MeasuredParams, and it's got 40+ numeric fields (height, weight, waistSize, wristSize - some int, but mostly double). The second class is a statistical classifier called Classifier. It's been trained on a subset of the MeasuredParams fields. The names of the fields that the Classifier has been trained on is stored, in order, in an array called reqdFields. What I need to do is load a new array, toClassify, with the values stored in the fields from MeasuredParams that match the field list (including order) found in reqdFields. I can make any changes necessary to the MeasuredParams class, but I'm stuck with Classifier as it is. My brute-force approach was to get rid of the fields in MeasuredParams and use an arrayList instead, and store the field names in an Enum object to act as an index pointer. Then loop through the reqdFields list, one element at a time, and find the matching name in the Enum object to find the correct position in the arrayList. Load the value stored at that positon into toClassify, and then continue on to the next element in reqdFields. I'm not sure how exactly I would search through the Enum object - it would be a lot easier if the field names were stored in a second arrayList. But then the index positions between the two would have to stay matched, and I'm back to using an Enum. I think. I've been running around in circles all afternoon, and I keep thinking there must be an easier way of doing it. I'm just stuck right now and can't see past what I've started. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks so much! Michael

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  • qt on Win CE 5.0 crash

    - by Michael
    Good day all, It's the first time I am using Qt on Windows CE and I ran into an issue. Maybe someone can help me with it. I will describe my set up. I am using XP with Visual Studio 2005 an Qt Add-in version 1.1.2. I downloaded Qt source for Windows CE and followed the instructions on these (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/install-wince.html) instructions to build the library for CE. I then used the Visual Studio to create a minimal Qt Windows CE Application. The program runs fine in the CE emulator, but once I try to deploy it on the device it crashes with the following message: Load module: qt_ce_3.exe Load module: QtGui4.dll Load module: msvcr80.dll Load module: QtCore4.dll Load module: CEShell.DLL Load module: OLEAUT32.dll Load module: commctrl.dll.0409.MUI Load module: commctrl.dll Load module: aygshell.dll Load module: WS2.dll Load module: WINSOCK.dll Load module: coredll.dll.0409.MUI Load module: ossvcs.dll Load module: ole32.dll Load module: coredll.dll Load module: MMTimer.dll Data Abort: Thread=8fb09a40 Proc=8c4ecea0 'qt_ce_3.exe' AKY=00040001 PC=012a80b0(qtcore4.dll+0x000680b0) RA=012a8168(qtcore4.dll+0x00068168) BVA=676e4574 FSR=000000f5 Unhandled exception at 0x012a80b0 in qt_ce_3.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x676e4574. I tried it on two devices from different manufacturers, and the result is the same. Debug version worked on one of them, ran out of memory on the other. Does anyone have any idea what this could be? Thanks in advance, Michael

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  • Crashing when pushing a XIB based view controller onto navigation controller stack

    - by Michael
    I was attempting to clean up the implementation for a sub-panel on a navigation controller stack, so that the navigation bar could be customized in the XIB instead of doing it manually in the viewDidLoad method. The original (working) setup had the XIB set up with the "File's Owner" class set to the view controller class, and then the view at the top level. This works fine. In the "Interface Builder User Guide", p. 71, it describes the recommended way to build the XIBs for sub-panels ("additional navigation levels"). This approach leaves the "File's Owner" class as NSObject, but adds a UIViewController at the top level, and nests the view (and navigation item) underneath it. The UIViewController's view automatically gets connected to the contained view. When I try to push the controller init'd with this new XIB, the app crashes because of a missing view: SettingsViewController *controller = [[SettingsViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"SettingsView" bundle:nil]; [self.navigationController pushViewController:controller animated:YES]; 2010-04-23 11:17:37.135 xxxx[1173:207] * Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: '-[UIViewController _loadViewFromNibNamed:bundle:] loaded the "SettingsTestView" nib but the view outlet was not set.' I've double checked everything, and tried building a clean XIB from scratch, but get the same result. I looked through a number of the code sample projects, and NONE of them use the documented/recommended approach--they all use the File's Owner class and manually set up the navigation bar in viewDidLoad like I originally had it. Is it possible to get it working the "recommended" way? Thanks! Michael

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  • Question about using adaptive layout + print style sheet

    - by Michael
    Hey everyone, In my web design class, we looked at creating different style sheets for different window sizes and using a javascript that detects the window size and loads the right style sheet. In the head, I'm linking to three external style sheets, as well as a link to the javascript file. So the adaptive layout works fine. However... I also need to be able to use a print style sheet with this particular webpage (it's the requirement for this project). The problem is this that the way the javascript was written makes it so that it ignores the print style sheet. When I go to print preview, it ignores the print style sheet and the preview shows me all of my webpage unstyled. It looks like just the html when opened in a browser. I am using the javascript by Kevin Hale at ParticleTree, and I'm sure there are those familiar with this :] http://particletree.com/examples/dynamiclayouts/ I would like to know what needs to be changed so that the print style sheet isn't ignored. I've shown this to my professor. However, her email wasn't clear enough, but I understand that somehow the script is ignoring the print.css and that's why the print preview shows a css-less preview. Since it's the weekend, I won't be able to get an answer until Monday, and I was hoping someone can help me out. Thank you very much! Michael

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  • ODBC and NLS_LANG

    - by Michael S.
    Let's say that I've created two different program executables, e.g. in C++. For some reason, the two programs internals representation of text are different from each other. Let's say the first program is using text representation A and the other text representation B. It could be a specific 8-bit ANSI codepage, Unicode/UTF-8 or Unicode/UTF-16 or whatever. Now each program want to communicate text (add/retrieve data) to/from the same database table on a (database) server. Each program communicates with the database through ODBC. So the programs do not know what database system they they are communicating with. In this specific case through the database is actually a Oracle RDMS database and the database server administrator has setup the database to use UTF-8. On the system on which the programs are running an appropriate ODBC driver is available, so that the programs can connect through ODBC. Each program will treat and convert from the ODBC data type SQL_C_CHAR to its internal text representation appropriately. I assume that the programs cannot do no other than to assume a specific encoding returned for SQL_C_CHAR text. If not the programs has to be told which encoding that is. For Oracle, I know that the NLS_LANG environment variable can be used on the client. I assume it affects the ODBC driver (related to SQL_C_CHAR) to convert from a specific encoding (as given by NLS_LANG) to the internal encoding of the database (in this example UTF-8) and vice-versa. If the machine running my programs are having a NLS_LANG this setting will affect the byte sequences returned for SQL_C_CHAR so my programs cannot suddenly assume a specific encoding for the text returned via SQL_C_CHAR. Is it possible to setup the ODBC connection (preferably programmatically at runtime), so that it takes care of text conversions appropriately for the two programs, i.e. from/to representation to/from UTF-8 and from/to representation B to/from UTF-8? Regards, /Michael PS. As the programs are connecting through ODBC I don't think it would be nice that they should now anything about NLS_LANG as this is a Orcacle specific environment variable.

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  • IE7 div floating bug

    - by Michael Frey
    I have the following <div id="border" style="width:100%; border:8px solid #FFF"> <div id="menu" style="width:250px; float:left;" > Some menu </div> <div id="content" style="padding-left:270px; width:520px;" > Main page content </div> </div> This gives me a left aligned menu and the content to the right of it, all surrounded by a border. On all browsers including IE8 it displays correctly. But on IE7 the content only starts below the menu, and leaves a big open space to the right of the menu. I have searched all kind of solutions and tried all kinds of combinations of right, left, none for float. clearing left right both. It always displays different on the browsers. Any help is appreciated. Michael

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  • Need to close a popup after javascript completes image upload then load new page

    - by Michael Robinson
    I got a problem. I have a image upload script that runs on a popup up when you select "upload button", after it is complete instead of closing it stays in the uploader.html window. I need it to close and go to a new page. Here is some of the xml that the script uses, can I change the "urlOnUploadSucess" line to close the popup and load a new page on the original page I came from? .....<upload preload="Preloading images:" upload="Uploading images to server:" prepare="Processing and image compression:" of="of" cancel="Cancel" start="Start" warning_empty_required_field="Warning! One of the required fields is empty!" confirm="Will be uploaded:"/> <urls urlToUpload="upload.php?" urlOnUploadSuccess="http://www.baublet.com/purchase.html" urlOnUploadFail="http://www.baublet.com/tryagain.html" urlUpdateFlashPlayer="http://www.baublet.com/flashalternative.html" useMessageBoxesAfterUpload="false" messageOnUploadSuccess="Images were successfully uploaded!" messageOnUploadFail="Error! Images failed to upload!" jsFunctionNameOnUpload=""/> ..... Thanks, Michael

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  • jQuery .each() function. Resetting the index?

    - by Michael
    Hi there, I have multiple lists with the same class. I'd like to loop each list and its LI's and prepend the current number before each. The current code I have is: $jQuery(".numberList li").each(function(i) { var index = i + 1; $jQuery(this).prepend("<span>" + index + "</span>"); }); The problem is, is that the index doesn't restart back at 0 for each list it goes through, it just keeps going up. For example, the output I get now is: First list 1. item 2. item 3. item Second list 4. item 5. item 6. item Second list should start at 1 again by having the index back at 0. Could someone point out where I'm going wrong? I'm not a jQuery expert or anything...clearly :) Many thanks, Michael.

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  • BPEL, initialize variable and repeating onAlarm eventHandler

    - by Michael
    I have a little problem I can't solve so far. In BPEL I want to create an onAlarm eventHandler which fires immediatly (i.e. the "for" element is set to 'PT0S') and repeats every 2 seconds. This eventHandler shall contain a counter which increments every time the alarm fires. The question is: How to initialize the counter? If the variable will be initialized within the onAlarm scope the value would not increment anymore. In the "normal" control flow the value also cannot be initialized, because it is not defined if the process or the onAlarm scope runs first. So I would get every now and then an uninitializedVariable exception. My solution would be to not initialize the variable neither in the process scope nor in the onAlarm scope, but create a faultHandler wherein the variable will be initialized and afterwards the onAlarm flow will be executed. Problem is every uninitializedVariable execution will be caught now by this faultHandler and there may be another too. So is there another possibility to deal with this problem or can I somehow find out which variable wasn't initialized properly so the faultHandler can get two control flows? The solution should work on every BPEL engine. Thanks, Michael

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  • Concatenate 2 text elements on a line with full-width border using CSS only

    - by Michael Horne
    Okay, I'm a newbie to CSS3, so please be gentle. ;-) I'm working with some Wordpress code (Woocommerce plugin, to be exact), and I'm trying to format a line of code in a sidebar so that 2 separate text items (one in an <a, the other in a <span are all on the same line, the full width of the column, and with a bottom border. It looks something like this (except the bottom border on each text do not go all the way across the enclosing sidebar box): http://www.dalluva.com/temp/browse-catalog.JPG (sorry, I'm new and can't post inline images yet) Here's the code fragment I'm trying to live with (i.e. I don't want to change it): <div class="widget"> ... <ul class="product-categories"> <li class="cat-item"> <a href="http://localhost/dalluva/shop/product-category/books/">Books</a> <span class="count">(5)</span> </li> ... And here's the CSS I have now: .widget ul li a { border-bottom: 1px solid #e9e9e9; line-height:1.0; padding: 5px 0 5px 22px; display: inline-block; } .widget ul li span { border-bottom: 1px solid #e9e9e9; line-height: 1.0; padding: 5px 0 5px 0; display: inline-block; } The output in the image above looks right for this CSS code, but when I change the 'span' CSS to include a width:100%, it causes the span element to wrap to the next line, looking like this: http://www.dalluva.com/temp/browse-catalog-2.JPG I've played with white-space:nowrap, overflow:hidden, etc, but I can't seem to find a way to have both the <a and the <span text on the same line with the border extending the full width of the column. Any suggestions on getting the desired effect through CSS only? Thanks. Michael

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  • ListView causing OutOfMemory Error

    - by Michael
    So I am not really given a reason to the right of this error message. I am not exactly sure why this is happening but my guess though is that it has to do with the fact that there are around ~50 good quality drawables. Upon scrolling really fast, the app crashes. I feel as if I am mitigating most common issues with ListView and crashing such as using View Holders as well as only initiating the inflater once. Process: com.example.michael.myandroidappactivity, PID: 20103 java.lang.OutOfMemoryError at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.nativeDecodeAsset(Native Method) Here is the code public class ImageAdapter extends BaseAdapter { private Context context; private ArrayList<Integer> imageIds; private static LayoutInflater inflater; public ImageAdapter(Context _context, ArrayList<Integer> _imageIds) { context = _context; imageIds = _imageIds; } @Override public int getCount() { return imageIds.size(); } @Override public Object getItem(int position) { return null; } @Override public long getItemId(int position) { return 0; } static class ViewHolder{ ImageView img; } @Override public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { ViewHolder holder = null; View rowView = null; if(rowView==null) { LayoutInflater inflater = (LayoutInflater) context .getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE); rowView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.listview_layout, parent, false); holder = new ViewHolder(); holder.img = (ImageView) rowView.findViewById(R.id.flag); rowView.setTag(holder); } else { holder = (ViewHolder) rowView.getTag(); } holder.img.setImageResource(imageIds.get(position)); return rowView; } }

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  • C#: System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue vs. Queue

    - by James Michael Hare
    I love new toys, so of course when .NET 4.0 came out I felt like the proverbial kid in the candy store!  Now, some people get all excited about the IDE and it’s new features or about changes to WPF and Silver Light and yes, those are all very fine and grand.  But me, I get all excited about things that tend to affect my life on the backside of development.  That’s why when I heard there were going to be concurrent container implementations in the latest version of .NET I was salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the dinner bell. They seem so simple, really, that one could easily overlook them.  Essentially they are implementations of containers (many that mirror the generic collections, others are new) that have either been optimized with very efficient, limited, or no locking but are still completely thread safe -- and I just had to see what kind of an improvement that would translate into. Since part of my job as a solutions architect here where I work is to help design, develop, and maintain the systems that process tons of requests each second, the thought of extremely efficient thread-safe containers was extremely appealing.  Of course, they also rolled out a whole parallel development framework which I won’t get into in this post but will cover bits and pieces of as time goes by. This time, I was mainly curious as to how well these new concurrent containers would perform compared to areas in our code where we manually synchronize them using lock or some other mechanism.  So I set about to run a processing test with a series of producers and consumers that would be either processing a traditional System.Collections.Generic.Queue or a System.Collection.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue. Now, I wanted to keep the code as common as possible to make sure that the only variance was the container, so I created a test Producer and a test Consumer.  The test Producer takes an Action<string> delegate which is responsible for taking a string and placing it on whichever queue we’re testing in a thread-safe manner: 1: internal class Producer 2: { 3: public int Iterations { get; set; } 4: public Action<string> ProduceDelegate { get; set; } 5: 6: public void Produce() 7: { 8: for (int i = 0; i < Iterations; i++) 9: { 10: ProduceDelegate(“Hello”); 11: } 12: } 13: } Then likewise, I created a consumer that took a Func<string> that would read from whichever queue we’re testing and return either the string if data exists or null if not.  Then, if the item doesn’t exist, it will do a 10 ms wait before testing again.  Once all the producers are done and join the main thread, a flag will be set in each of the consumers to tell them once the queue is empty they can shut down since no other data is coming: 1: internal class Consumer 2: { 3: public Func<string> ConsumeDelegate { get; set; } 4: public bool HaltWhenEmpty { get; set; } 5: 6: public void Consume() 7: { 8: bool processing = true; 9: 10: while (processing) 11: { 12: string result = ConsumeDelegate(); 13: 14: if(result == null) 15: { 16: if (HaltWhenEmpty) 17: { 18: processing = false; 19: } 20: else 21: { 22: Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(10)); 23: } 24: } 25: else 26: { 27: DoWork(); // do something non-trivial so consumers lag behind a bit 28: } 29: } 30: } 31: } Okay, now that we’ve done that, we can launch threads of varying numbers using lambdas for each different method of production/consumption.  First let's look at the lambdas for a typical System.Collections.Generics.Queue with locking: 1: // lambda for putting to typical Queue with locking... 2: var productionDelegate = s => 3: { 4: lock (_mutex) 5: { 6: _mutexQueue.Enqueue(s); 7: } 8: }; 9:  10: // and lambda for typical getting from Queue with locking... 11: var consumptionDelegate = () => 12: { 13: lock (_mutex) 14: { 15: if (_mutexQueue.Count > 0) 16: { 17: return _mutexQueue.Dequeue(); 18: } 19: } 20: return null; 21: }; Nothing new or interesting here.  Just typical locks on an internal object instance.  Now let's look at using a ConcurrentQueue from the System.Collections.Concurrent library: 1: // lambda for putting to a ConcurrentQueue, notice it needs no locking! 2: var productionDelegate = s => 3: { 4: _concurrentQueue.Enqueue(s); 5: }; 6:  7: // lambda for getting from a ConcurrentQueue, once again, no locking required. 8: var consumptionDelegate = () => 9: { 10: string s; 11: return _concurrentQueue.TryDequeue(out s) ? s : null; 12: }; So I pass each of these lambdas and the number of producer and consumers threads to launch and take a look at the timing results.  Basically I’m timing from the time all threads start and begin producing/consuming to the time that all threads rejoin.  I won't bore you with the test code, basically it just launches code that creates the producers and consumers and launches them in their own threads, then waits for them all to rejoin.  The following are the timings from the start of all threads to the Join() on all threads completing.  The producers create 10,000,000 items evenly between themselves and then when all producers are done they trigger the consumers to stop once the queue is empty. These are the results in milliseconds from the ordinary Queue with locking: 1: Consumers Producers 1 2 3 Time (ms) 2: ---------- ---------- ------ ------ ------ --------- 3: 1 1 4284 5153 4226 4554.33 4: 10 10 4044 3831 5010 4295.00 5: 100 100 5497 5378 5612 5495.67 6: 1000 1000 24234 25409 27160 25601.00 And the following are the results in milliseconds from the ConcurrentQueue with no locking necessary: 1: Consumers Producers 1 2 3 Time (ms) 2: ---------- ---------- ------ ------ ------ --------- 3: 1 1 3647 3643 3718 3669.33 4: 10 10 2311 2136 2142 2196.33 5: 100 100 2480 2416 2190 2362.00 6: 1000 1000 7289 6897 7061 7082.33 Note that even though obviously 2000 threads is quite extreme, the concurrent queue actually scales really well, whereas the traditional queue with simple locking scales much more poorly. I love the new concurrent collections, they look so much simpler without littering your code with the locking logic, and they perform much better.  All in all, a great new toy to add to your arsenal of multi-threaded processing!

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