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• How to Animate Text and Objects in PowerPoint 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for an eye catching way to keep your audience interested in your PowerPoint presentations? Today we’ll take a look at how to add animation effects to objects in PowerPoint 2010. Select the object you wish to animate and then click the More button in the Animation group of the Animation tab.   Animations are grouped into four categories. Entrance effects, Exit effects, Emphasis effects, and Motion Paths. You can get a Live Preview of how the animation will look by hovering your mouse over an animation effect.   When you select a Motion Path, your object will move along the dashed path line as shown on the screen. (This path is not displayed in the final output) Certain aspects of the Motion Path effects are editable. When you apply a Motion Path animation to an object, you can select the path and drag the end to change the length or size of the path. The green marker along the motion path marks the beginning of the  path and the red marks the end. The effects can be rotated by clicking and the bar near the center of the effect.   You can display additional effects by choosing one of the options at the bottom. This will pop up a Change Effect window. If you have Preview Effect checked at the lower left you can preview the effects by single clicking.   Apply Multiple Animations to an Object Select the object and then click the Add Animation button to display the animation effects. Just as we did with the first effect, you can hover over to get a live preview. Click to apply the effect. The animation effects will happen in the order they are applied. Animation Pane You can view a list of the animations applied to a slide by opening the Animation Pane. Select the Animation Pane button from the Advanced Animation group to display the Animation Pane on the right. You’ll see that each animation effect in the animation pane has an assigned number to the left.    Timing Animation Effects You can change when your animation starts to play. By default it is On Click. To change it, select the effect in the Animation Pane and then choose one of the options from the Start dropdown list. With Previous starts at the same time as the previous animation and After Previous starts after the last animation. You can also edit the duration that the animations plays and also set a delay.   You can change the order in which the animation effects are applied by selecting the effect in the animation pane and clicking Move Earlier or Move Later from the Timing group on the Animation tab. Effect Options If the Effect Options button is available when your animation is selected, then that particular animation has some additional effect settings that can be configured. You can access the Effect Option by right-clicking on the the animation in the Animation Pane, or by selecting Effect Options on the ribbon.   The available options will vary by effect and not all animation effects will have Effect Options settings. In the example below, you can change the amount of spinning and whether the object will spin clockwise or counterclockwise.   Under Enhancements, you can add sound effects to your animation. When you’re finished click OK.   Animating Text Animating Text works the same as animating an object. Simply select your text box and choose an animation. Text does have some different Effect Options. By selecting a sequence, you decide whether the text appears as one object, all at once, or by paragraph. As is the case with objects, there will be different available Effect Options depending on the animation you choose. Some animations, such as the Fly In animation, will have directional options.   Testing Your Animations Click on the Preview button at any time to test how your animations look. You can also select the Play button on the Animation Pane. Conclusion Animation effects are a great way to focus audience attention on important points and hold viewers interest in your PowerPoint presentations. Another cool way to spice up your PPT 2010 presentations is to add video from the web. What tips do you guys have for making your PowerPoint presentations more interesting? Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010Preview Before You Paste with Live Preview in Office 2010Embed True Type Fonts in Word and PowerPoint 2007 DocumentsHow to Add Video from the Web in PowerPoint 2010Add Artistic Effects to Your Pictures in Office 2010 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials

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• Adopting DBVCS

  - by Wes McClure

  Identify early adopters Pick a small project with a small(ish) team.  This can be a legacy application or a green-field application. Strive to find a team of early adopters that will be eager to try something new. Get the team on board! Research Research the tool(s) that you want to use.  Some tools provide all of the features you would need while some only provide a slice of the pie.  DBVCS requires the ability to manage a set of change scripts that update a database from one version to the next.  Ideally a tool can track database versions and automatically apply updates.  The change script generation process can be manual, but having diff tools available to automatically generate it can really reduce the overhead to adoption.  Finally, an automated tool to generate a script file per database object is an added bonus as your version control system can quickly identify what was changed in a commit (add/del/modify), just like with code changes. Don’t settle on just one tool, identify several.  Then work with the team to evaluate the tools.  Have the team do some tests of the following scenarios with each tool: Baseline an existing database: can the migration tool work with legacy databases?  Caution: most migration platforms do not support baselines or have poor support, especially the fad of fluent APIs. Add/drop tables Add/drop procedures/functions/views Alter tables (rename columns, add columns, remove columns) Massage data – migrations sometimes involve changing data types that cannot be implicitly casted and require you to decide how the data is explicitly cast to the new type.  This is a requirement for a migrations platform.  Think about a case where you might want to combine fields, or move a field from one table to another, you wouldn’t want to lose the data. Run the tool via the command line.  If you cannot automate the tool in Continuous Integration what is the point? Create a copy of a database on demand. Backup/restore databases locally. Let the team give feedback and decide together, what tool they would like to try out. My recommendation at this point would be to include TSqlMigrations and RoundHouse as SQL based migration platforms.  In general I would recommend staying away from the fluent platforms as they often lack baseline capabilities and add overhead to learn a new API when SQL is already a very well known DSL.  Code migrations often get messy with procedures/views/functions as these have to be created with SQL and aren’t cross platform anyways.  IMO stick to SQL based migrations. Reconciling Production If your project is a legacy application, you will need to reconcile the current state of production with your development databases.  Find changes in production and bring them down to development, even if they are old and need to be removed.  Once complete, produce a baseline of either dev or prod as they are now in sync.  Commit this to your VCS of choice. Add whatever schema changes tracking mechanism your tool requires to your development database.  This often requires adding a table to track the schema version of that database.  Your tool should support doing this for you.  You can add this table to production when you do your next release. Script out any changes currently in dev.  Remove production artifacts that you brought down during reconciliation.  Add change scripts for any outstanding changes in dev since the last production release.  Commit these to your repository.   Say No to Shared Dev DBs Simply put, you wouldn’t dream of sharing a code checkout, why would you share a development database?  If you have a shared dev database, back it up, distribute the backups and take the shared version offline (including the dev db server once all projects are using DB VCS).  Doing DB VCS with a shared database is bound to cause problems as people won’t be able to easily script out their own changes from those that others are working on.   First prod release Copy prod to your beta/testing environment.  Add the schema changes table (or mechanism) and do a test run of your changes.  If successful you can schedule this to be run on production.   Evaluation After your first release, evaluate the pain points of the process.  Try to find tools or modifications to existing tools to help fix them.  Don’t leave stones unturned, iteratively evolve your tools and practices to make the process as seamless as possible.  This is why I suggest open source alternatives.  Nothing is set in stone, a good example was adding transactional support to TSqlMigrations.  We ran into situations where an update would break a database, so I added a feature to do transactional updates and rollback on errors!  Another good example is generating change scripts.  We have been manually making these for months now.  I found an open source project called Open DB Diff and integrated this with TSqlMigrations.  These were things we just accepted at the time when we began adopting our tool set.  Once we became comfortable with the base functionality, it was time to start automating more of the process.  Just like anything else with development, never be afraid to try to find tools to make your job easier!   Enjoy -Wes

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• Using CMS for App Configuration - Part 1, Deploying Umbraco

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/06/04/using-cms-for-app-configurationndashpart-1-deploy-umbraco.aspxSince my last post on using CMS for semi-static API content, How about a new platform for your next API… a CMS?, I’ve been using the idea for centralized app configuration, and this post is the first in a series that will walk through how to do that, step-by-step. The approach gives you a platform-independent, easily configurable way to specify your application configuration for different environments, with a built-in approval workflow, change auditing and the ability to easily rollback to previous settings. It’s like Azure Web and Worker Roles where you can specify settings that change at runtime, but it's not specific to Azure - you can use it for any app that needs changeable config, provided it can access the Internet. The series breaks down into four posts: Deploying Umbraco – the CMS that will store your configurable settings and the current values; Publishing your config – create a document type that encapsulates your settings and a template to expose them as JSON; Consuming your config – in .NET, a simple client that uses dynamic objects to access settings; Config lifecycle management – how to publish, audit, and rollback settings. Let’s get started. Deploying Umbraco There’s an Umbraco package on Azure Websites, so deploying your own instance is easy – but there are a couple of things to watch out for, so this step-by-step will put you in a good place. Create From Gallery The easiest way to get started is with an Azure subscription, navigate to add a new Website and then Create From Gallery. Under CMS, you’ll see an Umbraco package (currently at version 7.1.3): Configure Your App For high availability and scale, you’ll want your CMS on separate kit from anything else you have in Azure, so in the configuration of Umbraco I’d create a new SQL Azure database – which Umbraco will use to store all its content: You can use the free 20mb database option if you don’t have demanding NFRs, or if you’re just experimenting. You’ll need to specify a password for a SQL Server account which the Umbraco service will use, and changing from the default username umbracouser is probably wise. Specify Database Settings You can create a new database on an existing server if you have one, or create new. If you create a new server *do not* use the same username for the database server login as you used for the Umbraco account. If you do, the deployment will fail later. Think of this as the SQL Admin account that you can use for managing the db, the previous account was the service account Umbraco uses to connect. Make Tea If you have a fast kettle. It takes about two minutes for Azure to create and provision the website and the database. Install Umbraco So far we’ve deployed an empty instance of Umbraco using the Azure package, and now we need to browse to the site and complete installation. My Website was called my-app-config, so to complete installation I browse to http://my-app-config.azurewebsites.net:   Enter the credentials you want to use to login – this account will have full admin rights to the Umbraco instance. Note that between deploying your new Umbraco instance and completing installation in this step, anyone can browse to your website and complete the installation themselves with their own credentials, if they know the URL. Remote possibility, but it’s there. From this page *do not* click the big green Install button. If you do, Umbraco will configure itself with a local SQL Server CE database (.sdf file on the Web server), and ignore the SQL Azure database you’ve carefully provisioned and may be paying for. Instead, click on the Customize link and: Configure Your Database You need to enter your SQL Azure database details here, so you’ll have to get the server name from the Azure Management Console. You don’t need to explicitly grant access to your Umbraco website for the database though. Click Continue and you’ll be offered a “starter” website to install: If you don’t know Umbraco at all (but you are familiar with ASP.NET MVC) then a starter website is worthwhile to see how it all hangs together. But after a while you’ll have a bunch of artifacts in your CMS that you don’t want and you’ll have to work out which you can safely delete. So I’d click “No thanks, I do not want to install a starter website” and give yourself a clean Umbraco install. When it completes, the installation will log you in to the welcome screen for managing Umbraco – which you can access from http://my-app-config.azurewebsites.net/umbraco: That’s It Easy. Umbraco is installed, using a dedicated SQL Azure instance that you can separately scale, sync and backup, and ready for your content. In the next post, we’ll define what our app config looks like, and publish some settings for the dev environment.

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• SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at.  I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event.  I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees.  Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd.  So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival     Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm.  I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups.  Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident.  I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps.  Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner”     Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.”  I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday.  By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night.  Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions     The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot.  The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation     I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues.  As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos.  As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V.  As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V.  About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector…     As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation.  Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive.  Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP.  Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far.  The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards.  Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files     For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below.  Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate.  As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session   Picture Albums     For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend.  The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.)  The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion     A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI.  As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session.  For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well.  Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels.  Thanks for reading my recap.  Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences.         -Frog Out   links: Michigan image

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• BizTalk host throttling &ndash; Singleton pattern and High database size

  - by S.E.R.

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/06/30/biztalk-host-throttling-ndash-singleton-pattern-and-high-database-size.aspxI have worked for some days around the singleton pattern (for those unfamiliar with it, read this post by Victor Fehlberg) and have come across a few very interesting posts, among which one dealt with performance issues (here, also by Victor Fehlberg). Simply put: if you have an orchestration which implements the singleton pattern, then performances will continuously decrease as the orchestration receives and consumes messages, and that behavior is more obvious when the orchestration never ends (ie : it keeps looping and never terminates or completes). As I experienced the same kind of problem (actually I was alerted by SCOM, which told me that the host was being throttled because of High database size), I thought it would be a good idea to dig a little bit a see what happens deep inside BizTalk and thus understand the reasons for this behavior. NOTE: in this article, I will focus on this High database size throttling condition. I will try and work on the other conditions in some not too distant future… Test conditions The singleton orchestration For the purpose of this study, I have created the following orchestration, which is a very basic implementation of a singleton that piles up incoming messages, then does something else when a certain timeout has been reached without receiving another message: Throttling settings I have two distinct hosts : one that hosts the receive port (basic FILE port) : Ports_ReceiveHostone that hosts the orchestration : ProcessingHost In order to emphasize the throttling mechanism, I have modified the throttling settings for each of these hosts are as follows (all other parameters are set to the default value): [Throttling thresholds] Message count in database: 500 (default value : 50000) Evolution of performance counters when submitting messages Since we are investigating the High database size throttling condition, here are the performance counter that we should take a look at (all of them are in the BizTalk:Message Agent performance object): Database sizeHigh database sizeMessage delivery throttling stateMessage publishing throttling stateMessage delivery delay (ms)Message publishing delay (ms)Message delivery throttling state durationMessage publishing throttling state duration (If you are not used to Perfmon, I strongly recommend that you start using it right now: it is a wonderful tool that allows you to open the hood and see what is going on inside BizTalk – and other systems) Database size It is quite obvious that we will start by watching the database size and high database size counters, just to see when the first reaches the configured threshold (500) and when the second rings the alarm. NOTE : During this test I submitted 600 messages, one message at a time every 10ms to see the evolution of the counters we have previously selected. It might not show very well on this screenshot, but here is what happened: From 15:46:50 to 15:47:50, the database size for the Ports_ReceiveHost host (blue line) kept growing until it reached a maximum of 504.At 15:47:50, the high database size alert fires At first I was surprised by this result: why is it the database size of the receiving host that keeps growing since it is the processing host that piles up messages? Actually, it makes total sense. This counter measures the size of the database queue that is being filled by the host, not consumed. Therefore, the high database size alert is raised on the host that fills the queue: Ports_ReceiveHost. More information is available on the Public MPWiki page. Now, looking at the Message publishing throttling state for the receiving host (green line), we can see that a throttling condition has been reached at 15:47:50: We can also see that the Message publishing delay(ms) (blue line) has begun growing slowly from this point. All of this explains why performances keep decreasing when a singleton keeps processing new messages: the database size grows and when it has exceeded the Message count in database threshold, the host is throttled and the publishing delay keeps increasing. Digging further So, what happens to the database queue then? Is it flushed some day or does it keep growing and growing indefinitely? The real question being: will the host be throttled forever because of this singleton? To answer this question, I set the Message count in database threshold to 20 (this value is very low in order not to wait for too long, otherwise I certainly would have fallen asleep in front of my screen) and I submitted 30 messages. The test was started at 18:26. At 18:56 (ie : exactly 30min later) the throttling was stopped and the database size was divided by 2. 30 min later again, the database size had dropped to almost zero: I guess I’ll have to find some documentation and do some more testing before I sort this out! My guess is that some maintenance job is at work here, though I cannot tell which one Digging even further If we take a look at the Message delivery throttling state counter for the processing host, we can see that this host was also throttled during the submission of the 600 documents: The value for the counter was 1, meaning that Message delivery incoming rate for the host instance exceeds the Message delivery outgoing rate * the specified Rate overdrive factor (percent) value. We will see this another day… :) A last word Let’s end this article with a warning: DO NOT CHANGE THE THROTTLING SETTINGS LIGHTLY! The temptation can be great to just bypass throttling by setting very high values for each parameter (or zero in some cases, which simply disables throttling). Nevertheless, always keep in mind that this mechanism is here for a very good reason: prevent your BizTalk infrastructure from exploding!! So whatever you do with those settings, do a lot of testing and benchmarking!

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• Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC Review

  - by Ben Griswold

  A few years back I started dallying with test-driven development, but I never fully committed to the practice. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the value of TDD; it was more a matter of not completely understanding how to incorporate “test first” into my everyday development. Back in my web forms days, I could point fingers at the framework for my ignorance and laziness. After all, web forms weren’t exactly designed for testability so who could blame me for not embracing TDD in those conditions, right? But when I switched to ASP.NET MVC and quickly found myself fresh out of excuses and it became instantly clear that it was time to get my head around red-green-refactor once and for all or I would regretfully miss out on one of the biggest selling points the new framework had to offer. I have previously written about how I learned ASP.NET MVC. It was primarily hands on learning but I did read a couple of ASP.NET MVC books along the way. The books I read dedicated a chapter or two to TDD and they certainly addressed the benefits of TDD and how MVC was designed with testability in mind, but TDD was merely an afterthought compared to, well, teaching one how to code the model, view and controller. This approach made some sense, and I learned a bunch about MVC from those books, but when it came to TDD the books were just a teaser and an opportunity missed.  But then I got lucky – Jonathan McCracken contacted me and asked if I’d review his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, and it was just what I needed to get over the TDD hump. As the title suggests, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC takes a different approach to learning MVC as it focuses on testing right from the very start. McCracken wastes no time and swiftly familiarizes us with the framework by building out a trivial Quote-O-Matic application and then dedicates the better part of his book to testing first – first by explaining TDD and then coding a full-featured Getting Organized application inspired by David Allen’s popular book, Getting Things Done. If you are a learn-by-example kind of coder (like me), you will instantly appreciate and enjoy McCracken’s style – its fast-moving, pragmatic and focused on only the most relevant information required to get you going with ASP.NET MVC and TDD. The book continues with the test-first theme but McCracken moves away from the sample application and incorporates other practical skills like persisting models with NHibernate, leveraging Inversion of Control with the IControllerFactory and building a RESTful web service. What I most appreciated about this section was McCracken’s use of and praise for open source libraries like Rhino Mocks, SQLite and StructureMap (to name just a few) and productivity tools like ReSharper, Web Platform Installer and ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard.  McCracken’s emphasis on real world, pragmatic development was clearly demonstrated in every tool choice, straight-forward code block and developer tip. Whether one is already familiar with the tools/tips or not, McCracken’s thought process is easily understood and appreciated. The final section of the book walks the reader through security and deployment – everything from error handling and logging with ELMAH, to ASP.NET Health Monitoring, to using MSBuild with automated builds, to the deployment  of ASP.NET MVC to various web environments. These chapters, like those prior, offer enough information and explanation to simply help you get the job done.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will turn you into an expert MVC developer overnight?  Well, no.  I don’t think any book can make that claim.  If that were possible, I think book list prices would skyrocket!  That said, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC provides a solid foundation and a unique (and dare I say necessary) approach to learning ASP.NET MVC.  Along the way McCracken shares loads of very practical software development tips and references numerous tools and libraries. The bottom line is it’s a great ASP.NET MVC primer – if you’re new to ASP.NET MVC it’s just what you need to get started.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will give you everything you need to start employing TDD in your everyday development?  Well, I used to think that learning TDD required a lot of practice and, if you’re lucky enough, the guidance of a mentor or coach.  I used to think that one couldn’t learn TDD from a book alone. Well, I’m still no pro, but I’m testing first now and Jonathan McCracken and his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, played a big part in making this happen.  If you are an MVC developer and a TDD newb, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC is just the book for you.

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• Silverlight Firestarter Wrap Up and WCF RIA Services Talk Sample Code

  - by dwahlin

  I had a great time attending and speaking at the Silverlight Firestarter event up in Redmond on December 2, 2010. In addition to getting a chance to hang out with a lot of cool people from Microsoft such as Scott Guthrie, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Brian Goldfarb, John Allwright, David Pugmire, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Handley, Yavor Georgiev, Jossef Goldberg, Mike Cook and many others, I also had a chance to chat with a lot of people attending the event and hear about what projects they’re working on which was awesome. If you didn’t get a chance to look through all of the new features coming in Silverlight 5 check out John Papa’s post on the subject. While at the Silverlight Firestarter event I gave a presentation on WCF RIA Services and wanted to get the code posted since several people have asked when it’d be available. The talk can be viewed by clicking the image below. Code from the talk follows as well as additional links. I had a few people ask about the green bracelet on my left hand since it looks like something you’d get from a waterpark. It was used to get us access down a little hall that led backstage and allowed us to go backstage during the event. I thought it looked kind of dorky but it was required to get through security. Sample Code from My WCF RIA Services Talk (To login to the 2 apps use “user” and “P@ssw0rd”. Make sure to do a rebuild of the projects in Visual Studio before running them.) View All Silverlight Firestarter Talks and Scott Guthrie’s Keynote WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4 WCF RIA Services Code Samples (including some SP1 samples) Improved binding support in EntitySet and EntityCollection with SP1 (Kyle McClellan’s Blog) Introducing an MVVM-Friendly DomainDataSource: The DomainCollectionView (Kyle McClellan’s Blog) I’ve had the chance to speak at a lot of conferences but never with as many cameras, streaming capabilities, people watching live and overall hype involved. Over 1000 people registered to attend the conference in person at the Microsoft campus and well over 15,000 to watch it through the live stream.  The event started for me on Tuesday afternoon with a flight up to Seattle from Phoenix. My flight was delayed 1 1/2 hours (I seem to be good at booking delayed flights) so I didn’t get up there until almost 8 PM. John Papa did a tech check at 9 PM that night and I was scheduled for 9:30 PM. We basically plugged in my laptop backstage (amazing number of servers, racks and audio devices back there) and made sure everything showed up properly on the projector and the machines recording the presentation. In addition to a dedicated show director, there were at least 5 tech people back stage and at least that many up in the booth running lights, audio, cameras, and other aspects of the show. I wish I would’ve taken a picture of the backstage setup since it was pretty massive – servers all over the place. I definitely gained a new appreciation for how much work goes into these types of events. Here’s what the room looked like right before my tech check– not real exciting at this point. That’s Yavor Georgiev (who spoke on WCF Services at the Firestarter) in the background. We had plenty of monitors to reference during the presentation. Two monitors for slides (right and left side) and a notes monitor. The 4th monitor showed the time and they’d type in notes to us as we talked (such as “You’re over time!” in my case since I went around 4 minutes over :-)). Wednesday morning I went back on campus at Microsoft and watched John Papa film a few Silverlight TV episodes with Dave Campbell and Ryan Plemons.   Next I had the chance to watch the dry run of the keynote with Scott Guthrie and John Papa. We were all blown away by the demos shown since they were even better than expected. Starting at 1 PM on Wednesday I went over to Building 35 and listened to Yavor Georgiev (WCF Services), Jaime Rodriguez (Windows Phone 7), Jesse Liberty (Data Binding) and Jossef Goldberg and Mike Cook (Silverlight Performance) give their different talks and we all shared feedback with each other which was a lot of fun. Jeff Handley from the RIA Services team came afterwards and listened to me give a dry run of my WCF RIA Services talk. He had some great feedback that I really appreciated getting. That night I hung out with John Papa and Ward Bell and listened to John walk through his keynote demos. I also got a sneak peak of the gift given to Dave Campbell for all his work with Silverlight Cream over the years. It’s a poster signed by all of the key people involved with Silverlight: Thursday morning I got up fairly early to get to the event center by 8 AM for speaker pictures. It was nice and quiet at that point although outside the room there was a huge line of people waiting to get in.     At around 8:30 AM everyone was let in and the main room was filled quickly. Two other overflow rooms in the Microsoft conference center (Building 33) were also filled to capacity. At around 9 AM Scott Guthrie kicked off the event and all the excitement started! From there it was all a blur but it was definitely a lot of fun. All of the sessions for the Silverlight Firestarter were recorded and can be watched here (including the keynote). Corey Schuman, John Papa and I also released 11 lab exercises and associated videos to help people get started with Silverlight. Definitely check them out if you’re interested in learning more! Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7

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• PHP OCI8 and Oracle 11g DRCP Connection Pooling in Pictures

  - by christopher.jones

  Here is a screen shot from a PHP OCI8 connection pooling demo that I like to run. It graphically shows how little database host memory is needed when using DRCP connection pooling with Oracle Database 11g. Migrating to DRCP can be as simple as starting the pool and changing the connection string in your PHP application. The script that generated the data for this graph was a simple "Parts" query application being run under various simulated user loads. I was running the database on a small Oracle Linux server with just 2G of memory. I used PHP OCI8 1.4. Apache is in pre-fork mode, as needed for PHP. Each graph has time on the horizontal access in arbitrary 'tick' time units. Click the image to see it full sized. Pooled connections Beginning with the top left graph, At tick time 65 I used Apache's 'ab' tool to start 100 concurrent 'users' running the application. These users connected to the database using DRCP: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl:pooled'); A second hundred DRCP users were added to the system at tick 80 and a final hundred users added at tick 100. At about tick 110 I stopped the test and restarted Apache. This closed all the connections. The bottom left graph shows the number of statements being executed by the database per second, with some spikes for background database activity and some variability for this small test. Each extra batch of users adds another 'step' of load to the system. Looking at the top right Server Process graph shows the database server processes doing the query work for each web user. As user load is added, the DRCP server pool increases (in green). The pool is initially at its default size 4 and quickly ramps up to about (I'm guessing) 35. At tick time 100 the pool increases to my configured maximum of 40 processes. Those 40 processes are doing the query work for all 300 web users. When I stopped the test at tick 110, the pooled processes remained open waiting for more users to connect. If I had left the test quiet for the DRCP 'inactivity_timeout' period (300 seconds by default), the pool would have shrunk back to 4 processes. Looking at the bottom right, you can see the amount of memory being consumed by the database. During the initial quiet period about 500M of memory was in use. The absolute number is just an indication of my particular DB configuration. As the number of pooled processes increases, each process needs more memory. You can see the shape of the memory graph echoes the Server Process graph above it. Each of the 300 web users will also need a few kilobytes but this is almost too small to see on the graph. Non-pooled connections Compare the DRCP case with using 'dedicated server' processes. At tick 140 I started 100 web users who did not use pooled connections: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl'); This connection string change is the only difference between the two tests. At ticks 155 and 165 I started two more batches of 100 simulated users each. At about tick 195 I stopped the user load but left Apache running. Apache then gradually returned to its quiescent state, killing idle httpd processes and producing the downward slope at the right of the graphs as the persistent database connection in each Apache process was closed. The Executions per Second graph on the bottom left shows the same step increases as for the earlier DRCP case. The database is handling this load. But look at the number of Server processes on the top right graph. There is now a one-to-one correspondence between Apache/PHP processes and DB server processes. Each PHP processes has one DB server processes dedicated to it. Hence the term 'dedicated server'. The memory required on the database is proportional to all those database server processes started. Almost all my system's memory was consumed. I doubt it would have coped with any more user load. Summary Oracle Database 11g DRCP connection pooling significantly reduces database host memory requirements allow more system memory to be allocated for the SGA and allowing the system to scale to handled thousands of concurrent PHP users. Even for small systems, using DRCP allows more web users to be active. More information about PHP and DRCP can be found in the PHP Scalability and High Availability chapter of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual.

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• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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• What is the most efficient way to convert to binary and back in C#?

  - by Saad Imran.

  I'm trying to write a general purpose socket server for a game I'm working on. I know I could very well use already built servers like SmartFox and Photon, but I wan't to go through the pain of creating one myself for learning purposes. I've come up with a BSON inspired protocol to convert the the basic data types, their arrays, and a special GSObject to binary and arrange them in a way so that it can be put back together into object form on the client end. At the core, the conversion methods utilize the .Net BitConverter class to convert the basic data types to binary. Anyways, the problem is performance, if I loop 50,000 times and convert my GSObject to binary each time it takes about 5500ms (the resulting byte[] is just 192 bytes per conversion). I think think this would be way too slow for an MMO that sends 5-10 position updates per second with a 1000 concurrent users. Yes, I know it's unlikely that a game will have a 1000 users on at the same time, but like I said earlier this is supposed to be a learning process for me, I want to go out of my way and build something that scales well and can handle at least a few thousand users. So yea, if anyone's aware of other conversion techniques or sees where I'm loosing performance I would appreciate the help. GSBitConverter.cs This is the main conversion class, it adds extension methods to main datatypes to convert to the binary format. It uses the BitConverter class to convert the base types. I've shown only the code to convert integer and integer arrays, but the rest of the method are pretty much replicas of those two, they just overload the type. public static class GSBitConverter { public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this short value) { return BitConverter.GetBytes(value); } public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<short> value) { List<byte> bytes = new List<byte>(); short length = (short)value.Count(); bytes.AddRange(length.ToGSBinary()); for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) bytes.AddRange(value.ElementAt(i).ToGSBinary()); return bytes.ToArray(); } public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this bool value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<bool> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<byte> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this int value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<int> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this long value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<long> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this float value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<float> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this double value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<double> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this string value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<string> value); public static string GetHexDump(this IEnumerable<byte> value); } Program.cs Here's the the object that I'm converting to binary in a loop. class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { GSObject obj = new GSObject(); obj.AttachShort("smallInt", 15); obj.AttachInt("medInt", 120700); obj.AttachLong("bigInt", 10900800700); obj.AttachDouble("doubleVal", Math.PI); obj.AttachStringArray("muppetNames", new string[] { "Kermit", "Fozzy", "Piggy", "Animal", "Gonzo" }); GSObject apple = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Apple"); apple.AttachString("color", "red"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", true); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)1.5); GSObject lemon = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Lemon"); apple.AttachString("color", "yellow"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", false); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)0.8); GSObject apricoat = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Apricoat"); apple.AttachString("color", "orange"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", true); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)1.9); GSObject kiwi = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Kiwi"); apple.AttachString("color", "green"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", true); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)2.3); GSArray fruits = new GSArray(); fruits.AddGSObject(apple); fruits.AddGSObject(lemon); fruits.AddGSObject(apricoat); fruits.AddGSObject(kiwi); obj.AttachGSArray("fruits", fruits); Stopwatch w1 = Stopwatch.StartNew(); for (int i = 0; i < 50000; i++) { byte[] b = obj.ToGSBinary(); } w1.Stop(); Console.WriteLine(BitConverter.IsLittleEndian ? "Little Endian" : "Big Endian"); Console.WriteLine(w1.ElapsedMilliseconds + "ms"); } Here's the code for some of my other classes that are used in the code above. Most of it is repetitive. GSObject GSArray GSWrappedObject

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• Recent Innovations to ILOM

  - by B.Koch

  by Josh Rosen If you are wondering how Oracle can make some of the most advanced, reliable, and fault tolerant servers on the market, look no further than Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager or ILOM.  We build ILOM into every server we create, from Oracle x86 Systems such as X3-2 to the SPARC T-Series family. Oracle ILOM is an embedded service processor, but it's really more than that.  It's a computer within a computer.  It's smart, it's tightly integrated into all aspects of the server's operation, and it's a big reason why Oracle servers are used for some of the most mission-critical workloads out there. To understand the value of ILOM, there is no better place to start than its fault management capability.  We have taken the sophisticated fault management architecture from Solaris, developed and refined over a decade, and built it into each and every ILOM. ILOM detects a potential issue at its earliest stage, watching low-level sensors.   If the root cause of a problem is not clear from a single error reading, ILOM will look for other clues and combine multiple pieces of information to correctly identify a failing component. ILOM provides peace of mind. We tailor our fault management for each new server platform that we produce.  You can rest assured that it's always actively keeping the server healthy.  And if there is a problem, you can be confident it will let you know by sending you a notification by e-mail or trap. We also heard IT managers tell us they needed a Ph.D. in computer engineering to manage today's servers. It doesn't have to be that way.  Thanks to the latest innovations to Oracle ILOM, we present hardware inventory and status in way that makes sense – to anyone.  Green means everything is healthy and red means something is wrong.  When a component needs to be replaced a clear message indicates where the problem is and points you at a knowledge article about that problem.  It's that simple. Simpler management and simple interfaces mean reduced complexity and lower costs to manage.  And we know that's really important. ILOM does all this while also providing advanced service processor features you depend on for managing enterprise class systems.  You can remotely control the server power, interact with a virtual video console for the server, and mount media on the server remotely.  There is no need to spend money on a KVM switch to get this functionality. And when people hear how advanced ILOM is, they can't believe ILOM is free.  All features are enabled and included with each Oracle server that you buy.  There are no advanced licenses you need to purchase or features to unlock. Configuring ILOM has also never been easier.  It is now possible to configure almost all aspects of the server directly from ILOM.  This includes changing BIOS settings, persistently modifying boot order, and optimizing power settings -- all directly from ILOM. But Oracle's innovation does not stop with ILOM.  Oracle has engineered Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to integrate directly with ILOM, providing centralized management across all of our servers. Ops Center will discover each of your Oracle servers over the network by searching for ILOMs.  When it finds one, it knows how to communicate with ILOM to monitoring and configure that server from application to disk. Since every server that Oracle produces, from x86 Systems to SPARC T-Series up and down the line, comes with Oracle ILOM, you can manage all Oracle servers in the same way.  And while all of our servers may have different components on the inside, each with their specialized functions, the way you integrate them and the way you monitor and manage them is exactly the same. Oracle ILOM is state-of-art.  If you are looking for a server that make systems management simple and is easy to integrate and maintain, check out the latest advances to Oracle ILOM. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle and previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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• Integrating Code Metrics in TFS 2010 Build

  - by Jakob Ehn

  The build process template and custom activity described in this post is available here: http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/CodeMetricsSample.zip Running code metrics has been available since VS 2008, but only from inside the IDE. Yesterday Microsoft finally releases a Visual Studio Code Metrics Power Tool 10.0, a command line tool that lets you run code metrics on your applications.  This means that it is now possible to perform code metrics analysis on the build server as part of your nightly/QA builds (for example). In this post I will show how you can run the metrics command line tool, and also a custom activity that reads the output and appends the results to the build log, and also fails he build if the metric values exceeds certain (configurable) treshold values. The code metrics tool analyzes all the methods in the assemblies, measuring cyclomatic complexity, class coupling, depth of inheritance and lines of code. Then it calculates a Maintainability Index from these values that is a measure f how maintanable this method is, between 0 (worst) and 100 (best). For information on hwo this value is calculated, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codeanalysis/archive/2007/11/20/maintainability-index-range-and-meaning.aspx. After this it aggregates the information and present it at the class, namespace and module level as well. Running Metrics.exe in a build definition Running the actual tool is easy, just use a InvokeProcess activity last in the Compile the Project sequence, reference the metrics.exe file and pass the correct arguments and you will end up with a result XML file in the drop directory. Here is how it is done in the attached build process template: In the above sequence I first assign the path to the code metrics result file ([BinariesDirectory]\result.xml) to a variable called MetricsResultFile, which is then sent to the InvokeProcess activity in the Arguments property. Here are the arguments for the InvokeProcess activity: Note that we tell metrics.exe to analyze all assemblies located in the Binaries folder. You might want to do some more intelligent filtering here, you probably don’t want to analyze all 3rd party assemblies for example. Note also the path to the metrics.exe, this is the default location when you install the Code Metrics power tool. You must of course install the power tool on all build servers. Using the standard output logging (in the Handle Standard Output/Handle Error Output sections), we get the following output when running the build: Integrating Code Metrics into the build Having the results available next to the build result is nice, but we want to have results integrated in the build result itself, and also to affect the outcome of the build. The point of having QA builds that measure, for example, code metrics is to make it very clear how the code being built measures up to the standards of the project/company. Just having a XML file available in the drop location will not cause the developers to improve their code, but a (partially) failing build will! To do this, we need to write a custom activity that parses the metrics result file, logs it to the build log and fails the build if the values frfom the metrics is below/above some predefined treshold values. The custom activity performs the following steps Parses the XML. I’m using Linq 2 XSD for this, since the XML schema for the result file is available, it is vey easy to generate code that lets you query the structure using standard Linq operators. Runs through the metric result hierarchy and logs the metrics for each level and also verifies maintainability index and the cyclomatic complexity with the treshold values. The treshold values are defined in the build process template are are sent in as arguments to the custom activity If the treshold values are exceeded, the activity either fails or partially fails the current build. For more information about the structure of the code metrics result file, read Cameron Skinner's post about it. It is very simpe and easy to understand. I won’t go through the code of the custom activity here, since there is nothing special about it and it is available for download so you can look at it and play with it yourself. The treshold values for Maintainability Index and Cyclomatic Complexity is defined in the build process template, and can be modified per build definition: I have taken the default value for these settings from my colleague Terje Sandström post on Code Metrics - suggestions for approriate limits. You’ll notice that this is quite an improvement compared to using code metrics inside the IDE, where Red/Yellow/Green limits are fixed (and the default values are somewaht strange, see Terjes post for a discussion on this) This is the first version of the code metrics integration with TFS 2010 Build, I will proabably enhance the functionality and the logging (the “tree view” structure in the log becomes quite hard to read) soon. I will also consider adding it to the Community TFS Build Extensions site when it becomes a bit more mature. Another obvious improvement is to extend the data warehouse of TFS and push the metric results back to the warehouse and make it visible in the reports.

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• GLSL Atmospheric Scattering Issue

  - by mtf1200

  I am attempting to use Sean O'Neil's shaders to accomplish atmospheric scattering. For now I am just using SkyFromSpace and GroundFromSpace. The atmosphere works fine but the planet itself is just a giant dark sphere with a white blotch that follows the camera. I think the problem might rest in the "v3Attenuation" variable as when this is removed the sphere is show (albeit without scattering). Here is the vertex shader. Thanks for the time! uniform mat4 g_WorldViewProjectionMatrix; uniform mat4 g_WorldMatrix; uniform vec3 m_v3CameraPos; // The camera's current position uniform vec3 m_v3LightPos; // The direction vector to the light source uniform vec3 m_v3InvWavelength; // 1 / pow(wavelength, 4) for the red, green, and blue channels uniform float m_fCameraHeight; // The camera's current height uniform float m_fCameraHeight2; // fCameraHeight^2 uniform float m_fOuterRadius; // The outer (atmosphere) radius uniform float m_fOuterRadius2; // fOuterRadius^2 uniform float m_fInnerRadius; // The inner (planetary) radius uniform float m_fInnerRadius2; // fInnerRadius^2 uniform float m_fKrESun; // Kr * ESun uniform float m_fKmESun; // Km * ESun uniform float m_fKr4PI; // Kr * 4 * PI uniform float m_fKm4PI; // Km * 4 * PI uniform float m_fScale; // 1 / (fOuterRadius - fInnerRadius) uniform float m_fScaleDepth; // The scale depth (i.e. the altitude at which the atmosphere's average density is found) uniform float m_fScaleOverScaleDepth; // fScale / fScaleDepth attribute vec4 inPosition; vec3 v3ELightPos = vec3(g_WorldMatrix * vec4(m_v3LightPos, 1.0)); vec3 v3ECameraPos= vec3(g_WorldMatrix * vec4(m_v3CameraPos, 1.0)); const int nSamples = 2; const float fSamples = 2.0; varying vec4 color; float scale(float fCos) { float x = 1.0 - fCos; return m_fScaleDepth * exp(-0.00287 + x*(0.459 + x*(3.83 + x*(-6.80 + x*5.25)))); } void main(void) { gl_Position = g_WorldViewProjectionMatrix * inPosition; // Get the ray from the camera to the vertex and its length (which is the far point of the ray passing through the atmosphere) vec3 v3Pos = vec3(g_WorldMatrix * inPosition); vec3 v3Ray = v3Pos - v3ECameraPos; float fFar = length(v3Ray); v3Ray /= fFar; // Calculate the closest intersection of the ray with the outer atmosphere (which is the near point of the ray passing through the atmosphere) float B = 2.0 * dot(m_v3CameraPos, v3Ray); float C = m_fCameraHeight2 - m_fOuterRadius2; float fDet = max(0.0, B*B - 4.0 * C); float fNear = 0.5 * (-B - sqrt(fDet)); // Calculate the ray's starting position, then calculate its scattering offset vec3 v3Start = m_v3CameraPos + v3Ray * fNear; fFar -= fNear; float fDepth = exp((m_fInnerRadius - m_fOuterRadius) / m_fScaleDepth); float fCameraAngle = dot(-v3Ray, v3Pos) / fFar; float fLightAngle = dot(v3ELightPos, v3Pos) / fFar; float fCameraScale = scale(fCameraAngle); float fLightScale = scale(fLightAngle); float fCameraOffset = fDepth*fCameraScale; float fTemp = (fLightScale + fCameraScale); // Initialize the scattering loop variables float fSampleLength = fFar / fSamples; float fScaledLength = fSampleLength * m_fScale; vec3 v3SampleRay = v3Ray * fSampleLength; vec3 v3SamplePoint = v3Start + v3SampleRay * 0.5; // Now loop through the sample rays vec3 v3FrontColor = vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec3 v3Attenuate; for(int i=0; i<nSamples; i++) { float fHeight = length(v3SamplePoint); float fDepth = exp(m_fScaleOverScaleDepth * (m_fInnerRadius - fHeight)); float fScatter = fDepth*fTemp - fCameraOffset; v3Attenuate = exp(-fScatter * (m_v3InvWavelength * m_fKr4PI + m_fKm4PI)); v3FrontColor += v3Attenuate * (fDepth * fScaledLength); v3SamplePoint += v3SampleRay; } vec3 first = v3FrontColor * (m_v3InvWavelength * m_fKrESun + m_fKmESun); vec3 secondary = v3Attenuate; color = vec4((first + vec3(0.25,0.25,0.25) * secondary), 1.0); // ^^ that color is passed to the frag shader and is used as the gl_FragColor } Here is also an image of the problem image

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• Check Your Spelling, Grammar, and Style in Firefox and Chrome

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you tired of making simple writing mistakes that get past your browser’s spell-check?  Here’s how you can get advanced grammar check and more in Firefox and Chrome with After the Deadline. Microsoft Word has spoiled us with grammar, syntax, and spell checking, but the default spell check in Firefox and Chrome still only does basic checks.  Even webapps like Google Docs don’t check more than basic spelling errors.  However, WordPress.com is an exception; it offers advanced spelling, grammar, and syntax checking with its After the Deadline proofing system.  This helps you keep from making embarrassing mistakes on your blog posts, and now, thanks to a couple free browser plugins, it can help you keep from making these mistakes in any website or webapp. After the Deadline in Google Chrome Add the After the Deadline extension (link below) to Chrome as usual. As soon as it’s installed, you’re ready to start improving your online writing.  To check spelling, grammar, and more, click the ABC button that you’ll now see at the bottom of most text boxes online. After a quick scan, grammar mistakes are highlighted in green, complex expressions and other syntax problems are highlighted in blue, and spelling mistakes are highlighted in red as would be expected.  Click on an underlined word to choose one of its recommended changes or ignore the suggestion. Or, if you want more explanation about what was wrong with that word or phrase, click Explain for more info. And, if you forget to run an After the Deadline scan before submitting a text entry, it will automatically check to make sure you still want to submit it.  Click Cancel to go back and check your writing first.   To change the After the Deadline settings, click its icon in the toolbar and select View Options.  Additionally, if you want to disable it on the site you’re on, you can click Disable on this site directly from the popup. From the settings page, you can choose extra things to check for such as double negatives and redundant phrases, as well as add sites and words to ignore. After the Deadline in Firefox Add the After the Deadline add-on to Firefox (link below) as normal. After the Deadline basically the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome.  Select the ABC icon in the lower right corner of textboxes to check them for problems, and After the Deadline will underline the problems as it did in Chrome.  To view a suggested change in Firefox, right-click on the underlined word and select the recommended change or ignore the suggestion. And, if you forget to check, you’ll see a friendly reminder asking if you’re sure you want to submit your text like it is. You can access the After the Deadline settings in Firefox from the menu bar.  Click Tools, then select AtD Preferences.  In Firefox, the settings are in a options dialog with three tabs, but it includes the same options as the Chrome settings page.  Here you can make After the Deadline as correction-happy as you like.   Conclusion The web has increasingly become an interactive place, and seldom does a day go by that we aren’t entering text in forms and comments that may stay online forever.  Even our insignificant tweets are being archived in the Library of Congress.  After the Deadline can help you make sure that your permanent internet record is as grammatically correct as possible.  Even though it doesn’t catch every problem, and even misses some spelling mistakes, it’s still a great help. Links Download the After the Deadline extension for Google Chrome Download the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Disable Favicons in FirefoxStupid Geek Tricks: Duplicate a Tab with a Shortcut Key in Chrome or FirefoxHow to Disable the New Geolocation Feature in Google ChromeStupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeStop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

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• [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 3: Windows Defender and a Malware-Free System

  - by Ciprian Rusen

  In this second lesson we are going to talk about one of the most confusing security products that are bundled with Windows: Windows Defender. In the past, this product has had a bad reputation and for good reason – it was very limited in its capacity to protect your computer from real-world malware. However, the latest version included in Windows 8.x operating systems is much different than in the past and it provides real protection to its users. The nice thing about Windows Defender in its current incarnation, is that it protects your system from the start, so there are never gaps in coverage. We will start this lesson by explaining what Windows Defender is in Windows 7 and Vista versus what it is in Windows 8, and what product to use if you are using an earlier version. We next will explore how to use Windows Defender, how to improve its default settings, and how to deal with the alerts that it displays. As you will see, Windows Defender will have you using its list of quarantined items a lot more often than other security products. This is why we will explain in detail how to work with it and remove malware for good or restore those items that are only false alarms. Lastly, you will learn how to turn off Windows Defender if you no longer want to use it and you prefer a third-party security product in its place and then how to enable it back, if you have changed your mind about using it. Upon completion, you should have a thorough understanding of your system’s default anti-malware options, or how to protect your system expeditiously. What is Windows Defender? Unfortunately there is no one clear answer to this question because of the confusing way Microsoft has chosen to name its security products. Windows Defender is a different product, depending on the Windows operating system you are using. If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7, then Windows Defender is a security tool that protects your computer from spyware. This but one form of malware made out of tools and applications that monitor your movements on the Internet or the activities you make on your computer. Spyware tends to send the information that is collected to a remote server and it is later used in all kinds of malicious purposes, from displaying advertising you don’t want, to using your personal data, etc. However, there are many other types of malware on the Internet and this version of Windows Defender is not able to protect users from any of them. That’s why, if you are using Windows 7 or earlier, we strongly recommend that you disable Windows Defender and install a more complete security product like Microsoft Security Essentials, or third-party security products from specialized security vendors. If you use Windows 8.x operating systems, then Windows Defender is the same thing as Microsoft Security Essentials: a decent security product that protects your computer in-real time from viruses and spyware. The fact that this product protects your computer also from viruses, not just from spyware, makes a huge difference. If you don’t want to pay for security products, Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials (in Windows 7 or earlier) are good alternatives. Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials are the same product, only their name is different. In this lesson, we will use the Windows Defender version from Windows 8.x but our instructions apply also to Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. If you want to download Microsoft Security Essentials and try it out, we recommend you to use this page: Download Microsoft Security Essentials. There you will find both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of this product as well versions in multiple languages. How to Use and Configure Windows Defender Using Windows Defender (MSE) is very easy to use. To start, search for “defender” on the Windows 8.x Start screen and click or tap the “Windows Defender” search result. In Windows 7, search for “security” in the Start Menu search box and click “Microsoft Security Essentials”. Windows Defender has four tabs which give you access to the following tools and options: Home – here you can view the security status of your system. If everything is alright, then it will be colored in green. If there are some warnings to consider, then it will be colored in yellow, and if there are threats that must be dealt with, everything will be colored in red. On the right side of the “Home” tab you will find options for scanning your computer for viruses and spyware. On the bottom of the tab you will find information about when the last scan was performed and what type of scan it was. Update – here you will find information on whether this product is up-to-date. You will learn when it was last updated and the versions of the definitions it is using. You can also trigger a manual update. History – here you can access quarantined items, see which items you’ve allowed to run on your PC even if they were identified as malware by Windows Defender, and view a complete list with all the malicious items Windows Defender has detected on your PC. In order to access all these lists and work with them, you need to be signed in as an administrator. Settings – this is the tab where you can turn on the real-time protection service, exclude files, file types, processes, and locations from its scans as well as access a couple of more advanced settings. The only difference between Windows Defender in Windows 8.x and Microsoft Security Essentials (in Windows 7 or earlier) is that, in the “Settings” tab, Microsoft Security Essentials allows you to set when to run scheduled scans while Windows Defender lacks this option.

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• Monitoring almost anything with BizTalk 360

  - by Michael Stephenson

  When you work in an integration environment it is common that you will find yourself in a situation where you integrate with some unusual applications or have some unusual dependencies. That is the nature of integration. When you work with BizTalk one of the common problems is that BizTalk often is the place where problems with applications you integrate with are highlighted and these external applications may have poor monitoring solutions. Fortunately if you are a working with a customer who uses BizTalk 360 then it contains a feature called the "Web Endpoint Manager". Typically the web endpoint manager is used to monitor web services that you integrate with and will ping them at appropriate times to make sure they return the expected HTTP status code. When you have an usual situation where you want to monitor something which is key to the success to your solution but you find yourself having to consider a significant custom solution to monitor the external dependency then the Web Endpoint Manager could be your friend. The endpoint manager monitors a url and checks for a certain status code. This means that you can create your own aspx web page and then make BizTalk 360 monitor this web page. Behind the web page you could write any code you wished. An example of this is architecture is shown in the below diagram.     In the custom web page you would implement some custom code to do whatever it is that you want to monitor. In the below code snippet you can see how the Page_Load default method is doing some kind of check then depending on the result of the check it returns a certain HTTP code. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { var result = CheckSomething();   if (result == "Success") Response.StatusCode = 202; else if (result == "DatabaseError") Response.StatusCode = 510; else if (result == "SystemError") Response.StatusCode = 512; else Response.StatusCode = 513;   }   In BizTalk 360 you would go into the Monitor and Notify tab and then to BizTalk Environment which gives you access to the Web Endpoint Manager. You need an alarm setup which configures how the endpoint will be checked. I'm not going to go through the details of creating the alarm as this is already documented in the BizTalk 360 documentation. One point to note is that in the example I am using I setup a threshold alarm which means that the url is checked about every minute and if there is an error that persists for a period of time then the alarm will raise the alert notification. In my example I configured the alarm to fire if the error persisted for 3 minutes. The below picture shows accessing the endpoint manager.   In the web endpoint manager you would then configure your endpoint to monitor and the HTTP response code which indicates all is working fine. The below picture shows this. I now have my endpoint monitoring setup and BizTalk 360 should be checking my custom endpoint to see that it is available. If I wanted to manually sanity check that the endpoints I have registered are working fine then clicking the Refresh button will show if they are all good or not. If my custom ASP.net page which is checking my dependency gets a problem you will see in the endpoint manager that the status code does not match the expected return code and your endpoints will display in red and you can see the problem. The below picture shows this. If I use specific HTTP response codes for the errors the custom ASP.net page might encounter I can easily interpret these to know what the problem is. Using the alarms and notifications with BizTalk 360 it means when your endpoint goes into an error state you can easily configure email or SMS notifications from BizTalk 360 to tell you that your endpoint is having problems and you can use BizTalk 360 to help correlate what the problem is to allow you to investigate further. Below you can see the email which tells me my endpoint is not working.   When everything returns to normal you will see the status is now fixed and you will see a situation like below where you can see the WebEndpoints are now green and the return code matches what is expected.   Conclusion As you can see it is really easy to plug your own custom ASP.net page into the BizTalk 360 web endpoint monitoring feature. This extension then gives you the power to really extend the monitoring to almost anything you want as long as you can write some .net code to check that the dependency is available and working. It would be interesting to hear of any ideas people have around things they would monitor with this extension. More details on the end point monitor can be found on the following link: http://www.biztalk360.com/tour/monitoring_notifications

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• BizTalk 2009 - Installing BizTalk Server 2009 on XP for Development

  - by StuartBrierley

  At my previous employer, when developing for BizTalk Server 2004 using Visual Studio 2003, we made use of separate development and deployment environments; developing in Visual Studio on our client PCs and then deploying to a seperate shared BizTalk 2004 Server from there.  This server was part of a multi-server Standard BizTalk environment comprising of separate BizTalk Server 2004 and SQL Server 2000 servers.  This environment was implemented a number of years ago by an outside consulting company, and while it worked it did occasionally cause contention issues with three developers deploying to the same server to carry out unit testing! Now that I am making the design and implementation decisions about the environment that BizTalk will be developed in and deployed to, I have chosen to create a single "server" installation on my development PC, installling SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009 on a single system.  The client PC in use is actually a MacBook Pro running Windows XP; not the most powerful of systems for high volume processing but it should be powerful enough to allow development and initial unit testing to take place. I did not need to, and so chose not to, install all of the components detailed in the Microsoft guide for installing BizTalk 2009 on Windows XP but I did follow the basics of the procedures detailed within.  Outlined below are the highlights of this process and any details of what choices I made.   Install IIS I had previsouly installed Windows XP, including all current service packs and critical updates.  At the time of installation this included Service Pack 3, the .Net Framework 3.5 and MS Windows Installer 3.1.  Having a running XP system, my first step was to install IIS - this is quite straightforward and posed no difficulties. Install Visual Studio 2008 The next step for me was to install Visual Studio 2008.  Making sure to select a custom installation is crucial at this point, as you need to make sure that you deselect SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as it can cause the BizTalk installation to fail.  The installation guide suggests that you only select Visual C# when selecting features to install, but  I decided that due to some legacy systems I have code for that I would also select the VB and ASP options. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Following the completion of the installation of Visual Studio itself you should then install the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition The next step before intalling BizTalk Server 2009 itself is to install SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. On the feature selection screen make sure that you select the follwoing options: Database Engine Services SQL Server Replication Full-Text Search Analysis Services Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio Client Tools Connectivity Integration Services Management Tools Basic and Complete Use the default instance and the same accounts for all SQL server instances - in my case I used the Network Service and Local Service accounts for the two sets of accounts. On the database engine configuration screen I selected windows authentication and added the current user, adding the same user again on the Analysis services Configuration screen.  All other screens were left on the default settings. The SQL Server 2008 installation also included the installation of hotfix for XP KB942288-v3, the Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable. System Configuration At this stage I took a moment to disable the SQL Server shared memory protocol and enable the Named Pipes and TCP/IP protocols.  These can be found in the SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLServer.  I also made sure that the DTC settings were configured correctley.   BizTalk Server 2009 The penultimate step is to install BizTalk Server 2009 Standard Edition. I had previsouly downloaded the redistributable prerequisites as a CAB file so was able to make use of this when carrying out the installation. When selecting which components to install I selected: Server Runtime BizTalk EDI/AS2 Runtime WCF Adapter Runtime Portal Components Administrative Tools WFC Administartion Tools Developer Tools and SDK, Enterprise SSO Administration Module Enterprise SSO Master Secret Server Business Rules Components BAM Alert Provider BAM Client BAM Eventing Once installation has completed clear the launch BizTalk Server Configuration check box and select finish. Verify the Installation Before configuring BizTalk Server it is a good idea to check that BizTalk Server 2009 is installed and that SQL Server 2008 has started correctly.  The easiest way to verify the BizTalk installation is check the Programs and Features in Control panel.  Check that SQL is started by looking in the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Configure BizTalk Server 2009 Finally we are ready to configure BizTalk Server 2009.  To start this I opted for a custom configuration that allowed me to choose in more detail the settings to be used. For all databases I selected the local server and default database names. For all Accounts I used a local account that had been created specifically for the BizTalk Services. For all windows groups I allowed the configuration wizard to create the default local groups. The configuration wizard then ran:   Upon completion you will be presented with a screen detailing the success or failure of the configuration.  If your configuration failed you will need to sort out the issues and try again (it is possible to save the configuration settings for later use if you want too - except passwords of course!).  If you see lots of nice green ticks - congratulations BizTalk Server 2009 on XP is now installed and configured ready for development.

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• Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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• SOA Suite 11g Dynamic Payload Testing with soapUI Free Edition

  - by Greg Mally

  Overview Many web service developers use soapUI for various tests like: smoke test, unit test, and load testing because you can get a free edition that is fairly robust. However, if you need to venture into more complex testing that requires a dynamic payload, then the free edition doesn't necessarily make it easy. This feature does exist in soapUI, but for obvious reasons it is in the Pro version. In this blog I will show you how to use soapUI free edition for dynamic payloads in a simplified example. Hopefully this will open the doors for you to expand into more complex scenarios. The following assumes that you have a working knowledge of soapUI and will not go into concepts like setting up a project etc. For the basics, please review the documentation for soapUI: http://www.soapui.org/Getting-Started/. Additionally, we will be using asynchronous web services and you can review the setup for this in my blog: SOA Suite 11g Asynchronous Testing with soapUI. Features in soapUI Free Edition Relating to this Topic The soapUI test tool provides a very feature rich environment that can do many things provided you are willing to go beyond point and click. For this example, we will be leveraging just a couple features for our dynamic payload example: Test Case Properties Scripting with Groovy Basically, we will be using a property as a global variable and we will manipulate that property using a Groovy script. Setting Up Our Property Properties are available throughout soapUI and here is a snippet from the soapUI website defining the locations: Projects : for handling Project scope values, for example a subscription ID TestSuite : for handling TestSuite scoped values, can be seen as "arguments" to a TestSuite TestCases : for handling TestCase scoped values, can be seen as "arguments" to a TestCase Properties TestStep : for providing local values/state within a TestCase Local TestStep properties : several TestStep types maintain their own list of properties specific to their functionality : DataSource, DataSink, Run TestCase MockServices : for handling MockService scoped values/arguments MockResponses : for handling MockResponse scoped values Global Properties : for handling Global properties, optionally from an external source For our example, we will be defining a custom property in a TestCase called SimpleAsyncPayload. The property can be created in either the Custom Properties tab located at the bottom of the Navigator panel when the TestCase is selected in the Navigator or the Properties label in the TestCase editor: Navigator Panel TestCase Editor You will notice that I set a value of “0” for the custom property. For this simplified example, we will need to retrieve that value and manipulate it prior to making the web service request invocation. In order to accomplish this, we will need to get Groovy ;) Let's Get Groovy We will now add a new Groovy Script step to the TestCase called Manipulate Payload: TestCase Editor > Append Step > Groovy Script Once we have added the Groovy Script step to our TestCase, we can open the Groovy Script editor to add the code to: Get the current value of the property we created called SimpleAsyncPayload. Convert the value of the property to an integer. Increment the value. Store the incremented value back into the TestCase property called SimpleAsyncPayload. The script should look something like the following: Groovy Script Editor – Manipulate Payload At this point we can test the script to see if it is working by simply running the TestCase (left-click on the green triangle in the upper left-hand corner of the TestCase editor). To verify if it ran correctly, we can look at the value of the SimpleAsyncPayload property which should now be 1: TestCase Editor – Run Results All that is left to complete the TestCase is to append another step of type Test Request. The information required to append the request is a name and an operation to invoke. In this example we will use the default name and select the SimpleAsyncBPELProcessBingd -> process as the operation (any other information being requested, simply use the defaults unless you are calling an asynchronous operation then do not add any assertions). We are now in familiar ground with the Test Request editor. Depending upon the type of operation you are invoking (synchronous or asynchronous), please update the request with the necessary information (e.g., callback information for asynchronous operations). We will now tweak the Test Request payload to retrieve the value of the SimpleAsyncPayload property. The soapUI editor makes this very simple: right-click in the payload and navigate to the property (e.g., right-click > Get Data.. > TestCase: [Groovy TestCase] > Property [SimpleAsyncPayload]): Test Request Editor – Insert Property Value Your payload should now look something like the following: Test Request Editor – Inserted Property Value Just like before, we are now ready to run the TestCase. If everything goes as expected we should see a response like the following: Message Viewer – Results of TestCase Run We are now setup to be able to run a stress test where the payload will change for each request. This simple example can be expanded to include multiple payload values, complex calculations in the scripts, or whatever can be done via the soapUI scripting. Hopefully you have found this useful and happy testing to you :)

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the second in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Part 2 is nice and easy. From Part 1 we exposed our service over the Azure Service Bus Relay using the netTcpRelayBinding and verified we could set up our network to listen for relayed messages. Assuming we want to consume that service in .NET from an environment which is fairly unrestricted for us, but quite restricted for attackers, we can use netTcpRelay and shared secret authentication. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the consumer can run .NET in full trust the environment does not restrict use of external DLLs the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the service does not need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is So for example, the consumer is an ASP.NET website sitting in a cloud VM or Azure worker role, where we can keep the shared secret in web.config and we don't need to flow any identity through to the on-premise service. The service doesn't care who the consumer or end-user is - say it's a reference data service that provides a list of vehicle manufacturers. Provided you can authenticate with ACS and have access to Service Bus endpoint, you can use the service and it doesn't care who you are. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using netTcpRelay. The code for Part 2 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 2 Authenticating and authorizing with ACS In this scenario the consumer is a server in a controlled environment, so we can use a shared secret to authenticate with ACS, assuming that there is governance around the environment and the codebase which will prevent the identity being compromised. From the provider's side, we will create a dedicated service identity for this consumer, so we can lock down their permissions. The provider controls the identity, so the consumer's rights can be revoked. We'll add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS , just as we did for the serviceProvider identity in Part 1. I've named the identity fullTrustConsumer. We then need to add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus (see Part 1 for a walkthrough creating Service Idenitities): Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: fullTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send This sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. Adding a Service Reference The Part 2 sample client code is ready to go, but if you want to replicate the steps, you’re going to add a WSDL reference, add a reference to Microsoft.ServiceBus and sort out the ServiceModel config. In Part 1 we exposed metadata for our service, so we can browse to the WSDL locally at: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc?wsdl If you add a Service Reference to that in a new project you'll get a confused config section with a customBinding, and a set of unrecognized policy assertions in the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2009/05/servicebus/connect. If you NuGet the ASB package (“windowsazure.servicebus”) first and add the service reference - you'll get the same messy config. Either way, the WSDL should have downloaded and you should have the proxy code generated. You can delete the customBinding entries and copy your config from the service's web.config (this is already done in the sample project in Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient), specifying details for the client:     <client>       <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                 behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret"                 binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                 contract="FormatService.IFormatService" />     </client>     <behaviors>       <endpointBehaviors>         <behavior name="SharedSecret">           <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">             <clientCredentials>               <sharedSecret issuerName="fullTrustConsumer"                             issuerSecret="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/>             </clientCredentials>           </transportClientEndpointBehavior>         </behavior>       </endpointBehaviors>     </behaviors>   The proxy is straight WCF territory, and the same client can run against Azure Service Bus through any relay binding, or directly to the local network service using any WCF binding - the contract is exactly the same. The code is simple, standard WCF stuff: using (var client = new FormatService.FormatServiceClient()) { outputString = client.ReverseString(inputString); } Running the sample First, update Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml with your service bus namespace, and your service identity credentials for the netTcpClient and the provider:   <!-- ACS credentials for the full trust consumer (Part2): -->   <netTcpClient identityName="fullTrustConsumer"                 symmetricKey="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/> Then rebuild the solution and verify the unit tests work. If they’re green, your service is listening through Azure. Check out the client by navigating to http://localhost:53835/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient. Enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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• Beginner Guide to User Styles for Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  While the default styles for most websites are nice there may be times when you would love to tweak how things look. See how easy it can be to change how websites look with the Stylish Extension for Firefox. Note: Scripts from Userstyles.org can also be added to Greasemonkey if you have it installed. Getting Started After installing the extension you will be presented with a first run page. You may want to keep it open so that you can browse directly to the Userstyles.org website using the link in the upper left corner. In the lower right corner you will have a new Status Bar Icon. If you have used Greasemonkey before this icon works a little differently. It will be faded out due to no user style scripts being active at the moment. You can use either a left or right click to access the Context Menu. The user style script management section is also added into your Add-ons Management Window instead of being separate. When you reach the user style scripts homepage you can choose to either learn more about the extension & scripts or… Start hunting for lots of user style script goodness. There will be three convenient categories to get you jump-started if you wish. You could also conduct a search if you have something specific in mind. Here is some information directly from the website provided for your benefit. Notice the reference to using these scripts with Greasemonkey… This section shows you how the scripts have been categorized and can give you a better idea of how to search for something more specific. Finding & Installing Scripts For our example we decided to look at the Updated Styles Section”first. Based on the page number listing at the bottom there are a lot of scripts available to look through. Time to refine our search a little bit… Using the drop-down menu we selected site styles and entered Yahoo in the search blank. Needless to say 5 pages was a lot easier to look through than 828. We decided to install the Yahoo! Result Number Script. When you do find a script (or scripts) that you like simply click on the Install with Stylish Button. A small window will pop up giving you the opportunity to preview, proceed with the installation, edit the code, or cancel the process. Note: In our example the Preview Function did not work but it may be something particular to the script or our browser’s settings. If you decide to do some quick editing the window shown above will switch over to this one. To return to the previous window and install the user style script click on the Switch to Install Button. After installing the user style the green section in the script’s webpage will actually change to this message… Opening up the Add-ons Manager Window shows our new script ready to go. The script worked perfectly when we conducted a search at Yahoo…the Status Bar Icon also changed from faded out to full color (another indicator that everything is running nicely). Conclusion If you prefer a custom look for your favorite websites then you can have a lot of fun experimenting with different user style scripts. Note: See our article here for specialized How-To Geek User Style Scripts that can be added to your browser. Links Download the Stylish Extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Visit the Userstyles.org Website Install the Yahoo! Result Number User Style Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Spice Up that Boring about:blank Page in FirefoxExpand the Add Bookmark Dialog in Firefox by DefaultEnjoy How-To Geek User Style Script GoodnessAuto-Hide Your Cluttered Firefox Status Bar ItemsBeginner Geek: Delete User Accounts in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes Twelve must-have Google Chrome plugins

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• Polite busy-waiting with WRPAUSE on SPARC

  - by Dave

  Unbounded busy-waiting is an poor idea for user-space code, so we typically use spin-then-block strategies when, say, waiting for a lock to be released or some other event. If we're going to spin, even briefly, then we'd prefer to do so in a manner that minimizes performance degradation for other sibling logical processors ("strands") that share compute resources. We want to spin politely and refrain from impeding the progress and performance of other threads — ostensibly doing useful work and making progress — that run on the same core. On a SPARC T4, for instance, 8 strands will share a core, and that core has its own L1 cache and 2 pipelines. On x86 we have the PAUSE instruction, which, naively, can be thought of as a hardware "yield" operator which temporarily surrenders compute resources to threads on sibling strands. Of course this helps avoid intra-core performance interference. On the SPARC T2 our preferred busy-waiting idiom was "RD %CCR,%G0" which is a high-latency no-nop. The T4 provides a dedicated and extremely useful WRPAUSE instruction. The processor architecture manuals are the authoritative source, but briefly, WRPAUSE writes a cycle count into the the PAUSE register, which is ASR27. Barring interrupts, the processor then delays for the requested period. There's no need for the operating system to save the PAUSE register over context switches as it always resets to 0 on traps. Digressing briefly, if you use unbounded spinning then ultimately the kernel will preempt and deschedule your thread if there are other ready threads than are starving. But by using a spin-then-block strategy we can allow other ready threads to run without resorting to involuntary time-slicing, which operates on a long-ish time scale. Generally, that makes your application more responsive. In addition, by blocking voluntarily we give the operating system far more latitude regarding power management. Finally, I should note that while we have OS-level facilities like sched_yield() at our disposal, yielding almost never does what you'd want or naively expect. Returning to WRPAUSE, it's natural to ask how well it works. To help answer that question I wrote a very simple C/pthreads benchmark that launches 8 concurrent threads and binds those threads to processors 0..7. The processors are numbered geographically on the T4, so those threads will all be running on just one core. Unlike the SPARC T2, where logical CPUs 0,1,2 and 3 were assigned to the first pipeline, and CPUs 4,5,6 and 7 were assigned to the 2nd, there's no fixed mapping between CPUs and pipelines in the T4. And in some circumstances when the other 7 logical processors are idling quietly, it's possible for the remaining logical processor to leverage both pipelines. Some number T of the threads will iterate in a tight loop advancing a simple Marsaglia xor-shift pseudo-random number generator. T is a command-line argument. The main thread loops, reporting the aggregate number of PRNG steps performed collectively by those T threads in the last 10 second measurement interval. The other threads (there are 8-T of these) run in a loop busy-waiting concurrently with the T threads. We vary T between 1 and 8 threads, and report on various busy-waiting idioms. The values in the table are the aggregate number of PRNG steps completed by the set of T threads. The unit is millions of iterations per 10 seconds. For the "PRNG step" busy-waiting mode, the busy-waiting threads execute exactly the same code as the T worker threads. We can easily compute the average rate of progress for individual worker threads by dividing the aggregate score by the number of worker threads T. I should note that the PRNG steps are extremely cycle-heavy and access almost no memory, so arguably this microbenchmark is not as representative of "normal" code as it could be. And for the purposes of comparison I included a row in the table that reflects a waiting policy where the waiting threads call poll(NULL,0,1000) and block in the kernel. Obviously this isn't busy-waiting, but the data is interesting for reference. _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } _td { border: 1px green solid; } _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } Aggregate progress T = #worker threads Wait Mechanism for 8-T threadsT=1T=2T=3T=4T=5T=6T=7T=8 Park thread in poll() 32653347334833483348334833483348 no-op 415 831 124316482060249729303349 RD %ccr,%g0 "pause" 14262429269228623013316232553349 PRNG step 412 829 124616702092251029303348 WRPause(8000) 32443361333133483349334833483348 WRPause(4000) 32153308331533223347334833473348 WRPause(1000) 30853199322432513310334833483348 WRPause(500) 29173070315032223270330933483348 WRPause(250) 26942864294930773205338833483348 WRPause(100) 21552469262227902911321433303348

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• Reading train stop display names from a resource bundle

  - by Frank Nimphius

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} In Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1, you set the display name of a train stop of an ADF bounded task flow train model by using the Oracle JDeveloper Structure Window. To do so Double-click onto the bounded task flow configuration file (XML) located in the Application Navigator so the task flow diagram open In the task flow diagram, select the view activity node for which you want to define the display name. In the Structure Window., expand the view activity node and then the train-stop node therein Add the display name element by using the right-click context menu on the train-stop node, selecting Insert inside train-stop > Display Name Edit the Display Name value with the Property Inspector Following the steps outlined above, you can define static display names – like "PF1" for page fragment 1 shown in the image below - for train stops to show at runtime. In the following, I explain how you can change the static display string to a dynamic string that reads the display label from a resource bundle so train stop labels can be internationalized. There are different strategies available for managing message bundles within an Oracle JDeveloper project. In this blog entry, I decided to build and configure the default properties file as indicated by the projects properties. To learn about the suggested file name and location, open the JDeveloper project properties (use a right mouse click on the project node in the Application Navigator and choose Project Properties. Select the Resource Bundle node to see the suggested name and location for the default message bundle. Note that this is the resource bundle that Oracle JDeveloper would automatically create when you assign a text resource to an ADF Faces component in a page. For the train stop display name, we need to create the message bundle manually as there is no context menu help available in Oracle JDeveloper. For this, use a right mouse click on the JDeveloper project and choose New | General | File from the menu and in the opened dialog. Specify the message bundle file name as the name looked up before in the project properties Resource Bundle option. Also, ensure that the file is saved in a directory structure that matches the package structure shown in the Resource Bundle dialog. For example, you would save the properties file in the View Project's src > adf > sample directory if the package structure was "adf.sample" (adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle). Edit the properties file and define key – values pairs for the train stop component. In the sample, such key value pairs are TrainStop1=Train Stop 1 TrainStop2=Train Stop 2 TrainStop3=Train Stop 3 Next, double click the faces-config.xml file and switch the opened editor to the Overview tab. Select the Application category and press the green plus icon next to the Resource Bundle section. Define the resource bundle Base Name as the package and properties file name, for example adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle Finally, define a variable name for the message bundle so the bundle can be accessed from Expression Language. For this blog example, the name is chosen as "messageBundle". <resource-bundle>   <base-name>adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle</base-name>   <var>messageBundle</var> </resource-bundle> Next, select the display-name element in the train stop node (similar to when creating the display name) and use the Property Inspector to change the static display string to an EL expression referencing the message bundle. For example: #{messageBundle.TrainStop1} At runtime, the train stops now show display names read from a message bundle (the properties file).

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• Composing Silverlight Applications With MEF

  - by PeterTweed

  Anyone who has written an application with complexity enough to warrant multiple controls on multiple pages/forms should understand the benefit of composite application development.  That is defining your application architecture that can be separated into separate pieces each with it’s own distinct purpose that can then be “composed” together into the solution. Composition can be useful in any layer of the application, from the presentation layer, the business layer, common services or data access.  Historically people have had different options to achieve composing applications from distinct well known pieces – their own version of dependency injection, containers to aid with composition like Unity, the composite application guidance for WPF and Silverlight and before that the composite application block. Microsoft has been working on another mechanism to aid composition and extension of applications for some time now – the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF for short.  With Silverlight 4 it is part of the Silverlight environment.  MEF allows a much simplified mechanism for composition and extensibility compared to other mechanisms – which has always been the primary issue for adoption of the earlier mechanisms/frameworks. This post will guide you through the simple use of MEF for the scenario of composition of an application – using exports, imports and composition.  Steps: 1.     Create a new Silverlight 4 application. 2.     Add references to the following assemblies: System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll System.ComponentModel.Composition.Initialization.dll 3.     Add a new user control called LeftControl. 4.     Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml:     <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Beige" Margin="40" >         <Button Content="Left Content" Margin="30"></Button>     </Grid> 5.     Add the following statement to the top of the LeftControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 6.     Add the following attribute to the LeftControl class     [Export(typeof(LeftControl))]   This attribute tells MEF that the type LeftControl will be exported – i.e. made available for other applications to import and compose into the application. 7.     Add a new user control called RightControl. 8.     Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml:     <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Green" Margin="40"  >         <TextBlock Margin="40" Foreground="White" Text="Right Control" FontSize="16" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" ></TextBlock>     </Grid> 9.     Add the following statement to the top of the RightControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 10.   Add the following attribute to the RightControl class     [Export(typeof(RightControl))] 11.   Add the following xaml to the LayoutRoot Grid in MainPage.xaml:         <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center">             <Border Name="LeftContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border>             <Border Name="RightContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border>         </StackPanel>   The borders will hold the controls that will be imported and composed via MEF. 12.   Add the following statement to the top of the MainPage.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 13.   Add the following properties to the MainPage class:         [Import(typeof(LeftControl))]         public LeftControl LeftUserControl { get; set; }         [Import(typeof(RightControl))]         public RightControl RightUserControl { get; set; }   This defines properties accepting LeftControl and RightControl types.  The attrributes are used to tell MEF the discovered type that should be applied to the property when composition occurs. 14.   Replace the MainPage constructore with the following code:         public MainPage()         {             InitializeComponent();             CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this);             LeftContent.Child = LeftUserControl;             RightContent.Child = RightUserControl;         }   The CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this) function call tells MEF to discover types related to the declared imports for this object (the MainPage object).  At that point, types matching those specified in the import defintions are discovered in the executing assembly location of the application and instantiated and assigned to the matching properties of the current object. 15.   Run the application and you will see the left control and right control types displayed in the MainPage:   Congratulations!  You have used MEF to dynamically compose user controls into a parent control in a composite application model. In the next post we will build on this topic to cover using MEF to compose Silverlight applications dynamically in download on demand scenarios – so .xap packages can be downloaded only when needed, avoiding large initial download for the main application xap. Take the Slalom Challenge at www.slalomchallenge.com!

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• The Sound of Two Toilets Flushing: Constructive Criticism for Virgin Atlantic Complaints Department

  - by Geertjan

  I recently had the experience of flying from London to Johannesburg and back with Virgin Atlantic. The good news was that it was the cheapest flight available and that the take off and landing were absolutely perfect. Hence I really have no reason to complain. Instead, I'd like to offer some constructive criticism which hopefully Richard Branson will find sometime while googling his name. Or maybe someone from the Virgin Atlantic Complaints Department will find it, whatever, just want to put this information out there. Arrangement of restroom facilities. Maybe next time you design an airplane, consider not putting your toilets at a right angle right next to your rows of seats. Being able to reach, without even needing to stretch your arm, from your seat to close, yet again, a toilet door that someone, someone obviously sitting very far from the toilets, carelessly forgot to close is not an indicator of quality interior design. Have you noticed how all other airplanes have their toilets in a cubicle separated from the rows of seats? On those airplanes, people sitting in the seats near the toilets are not constantly being woken up throughout the night whenever someone enters/exits the toilet, whenever the light in the toilet is suddenly switched on, and whenever one of the toilets flushes. Bonus points for Virgin Atlantic passengers in the seats adjoining the toilets is when multiple toilets are flushed simultaneously and multiple passengers enter/exit them at the same time, a bit like an unasked for low budget musical of suddenly illuminated grumpy people in crumpled clothes. What joy that brings at 3 AM is hard to describe. Seats with extra leg room. You know how other airplanes have the seats with the extra leg room? You know what those seats tend to have? Extra leg room. It's really interesting how Virgin Atlantic's seats with extra leg room actually have no extra leg room at all. It should have been a give away, the fact that these special seats are found in the same rows as the standard seats, rather than on the cusp of real glory which is where most airlines put their extra leg room seats, with the only actual difference being that they have a slightly different color. Had you called them "seats with a different color" (i.e., almost not quite green, rather than something vaguely hinting at blue), at least I'd have known what I was getting. Picture the joy at 3 AM, rudely awakened from nightmarish slumber, partly grateful to have been released from a grayish dream of faceless zombies resembling one or two of those in a recent toilet line, by multiple adjoining toilets flushing simultaneously, while you're sitting in a seat with extra leg room that has exactly as much leg room as the seats in neighboring rows. You then have a choice of things to be sincerely annoyed about. Food from the '80's. In the '80's, airplane food came in soggy containers and even breakfast, the most important meal of the day, was a sad heap of vaguely gray colors. The culinary highlight tended to be a squashed tomato, which must have been mashed to a pulp with a brick prior to being regurgitated by a small furry animal, and there was also always a piece of immensely horrid pumpkin, as well as a slice of spongy something you'd never seen before. Sausages and mash at 6 AM on an airplane was always a heavy lump of horribleness. Thankfully, all airlines throughout the world changed from this puke inducing strategy around 1987 sometime. Not Virgin Atlantic, of course. The fatty sausages and mash are still there, bringing you flashbacks to Duran Duran, which is what you were listening to (on your walkman) the last time you saw it in an airplane. Even the golden oldie "squashed tomato attached by slime to three wet peas" is on the menu. How wonderful to have all this in a cramped seat with a long row of early morning bleariness lined up for the toilets, right at your side, bumping into your elbow, groggily, one by one, one after another, more and more, fumble-open-door-silence-flush-fumble-open-door, and on and on, while you tentatively push your fork through a soggy pile of colorless mush, fighting the urge to throw up on the stinky socks of whatever nightmarish zombie is bumping into your elbow at the time. But, then again, the plane landed without a hitch, in fact, extremely smoothly, so I'm certainly not blaming the pilots.

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