music addicted - Page 90

TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

- by BuckWoody

Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs. So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts. Preparing for Travel When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need. Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled. For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there. I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around. Packing Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take. For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide. For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard. If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag. Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water. At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else. I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change. Working While Away While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well. I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it. So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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WP7 Tips–Part I– Media File Coding Techniques to help pass the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Certification Requirements

- by seaniannuzzi

Overview Developing an application that plays media files on a Windows Phone 7 Device seems fairly straight forward. However, what can make this a bit frustrating are the necessary requirements in order to pass the WP7 marketplace requirements so that your application can be published. If you are new to this development, be aware of these common challenges that are likely to be made. Below are some techniques and recommendations on how optimize your application to handle playing MP3 and/or WMA files that needs to adhere to the marketplace requirements. Windows Phone 7 Certification Requirements Windows Phone 7 Developers Blog Some common challenges are: Not prompting the user if another media file is playing in the background before playing your media file Not allowing the user to control the volume Not allowing the user to mute the sound Not allowing the media to be interrupted by a phone call To keep this as simple as possible I am only going to focus on what “not to do” and what “to do” in order to implement a simple media solution. Things you will need or may be useful to you before you begin: Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2010 Feature Packs Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Windows Phone Emulator Resources Silverlight 4 Tools For Visual Studio XNA Game Studio 4.0 Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone Note: Please keep in mind you do not need all of these downloaded and installed, it is just easier to have all that you need now rather than add them on later. Objective Summary Create a Windows Phone 7 – Windows Media Sample Application. The application will implement many of the required features in order to pass the WP7 marketplace certification requirements in order to publish an application to WP7’s marketplace. (Disclaimer: I am not trying to indicate that this application will always pass as the requirements may change or be updated) Step 1: – Create a New Windows Phone 7 Project Step 2: – Update the Title and Application Name of your WP7 Application For this example I changed: the Title to: “DOTNETNUZZI WP7 MEDIA SAMPLE - v1.00” and the Page Title to: “media magic”. Note: I also updated the background. Step 3: – XAML - Media Element Preparation and Best Practice Before we begin the next step I just wanted to point out a few things that you should not do as a best practice when developing an application for WP7 that is playing music. Please keep in mind that these requirements are not the same if you are playing Sound Effects and are geared towards playing media in the background. If you have coded this – be prepared to change it: To avoid a failure from the market place remove all of your media source elements from your XAML or simply create them dynamically. To keep this simple we will remove the source and set the AutoPlay property to false to ensure that there are no media elements are active when the application is started. Proper example of the media element with No Source: Some Additional Settings - Add XAML Support for a Mute Button Step 4: – Boolean to handle toggle of Mute Feature Step 5: – Add Event Handler for Main Page Load Step 6: – Add Reference to the XNA Framework Step 7: – Add two Using Statements to Resolve the Namespace of Media and the Application Bar using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; using Microsoft.Phone.Shell; Step 8: – Add the Method to Check the Media State as Shown Below Step 9: – Add Code to Mute the Media File Step 10: – Add Code to Play the Media File //if the state of the media has been checked you are good to go. media_sample.Play(); Note: If we tried to perform this operation at this point you will receive the following error: System.InvalidOperationException was unhandled Message=FrameworkDispatcher.Update has not been called. Regular FrameworkDispatcher.Update calls are necessary for fire and forget sound effects and framework events to function correctly. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=193853 for details. StackTrace: at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.FrameworkDispatcher.AddNewPendingCall(ManagedCallType callType, UInt32 arg) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.UserAsyncDispatcher.HandleManagedCallback(ManagedCallType managedCallType, UInt32 managedCallArgs) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.UserAsyncDispatcher.AsyncDispatcherThreadFunction() It is not recommended that you just add the FrameworkDispatcher.Update(); call before playing the media file. It is recommended that you implement the following class to your solution and implement this class in the app.xaml.cs file. Step 11: – Add FrameworkDispatcher Features I recommend creating a class named XNAAsyncDispatcher and adding the following code: After you have added the code accordingly, you can now implement this into your app.xaml.cs file as highlighted below. Note: If you application sound file is not playing make sure you have the proper “Build Action” set such as Content. Running the Sample Now that we have some of the foundation created you should be able to run the application successfully. When the application launches your sound options should be set accordingly when the “checkMediaState” method is called. As a result the application will properly setup the media options and/or alert the user accordinglyper the certification requirements. In addition, the sample also shows a quick way to mute the sound in your application by simply removing the URI source of the media file. If everything successfully compiled the application should look similar to below. <sound playing> Summary At this point we have a fully functional application that provides techniques on how to avoid some common challenges when working with media files and developing applications for Windows Phone 7. The techniques mentioned above should make things a little easier and helpful in getting your WP7 application approved and published on the Marketplace. The next blog post will be titled: WP7 Tips–Part II - How to write code that will pass the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Requirements for Themes (light and dark). If anyone has any questions or comments please comment on this blog.

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Build an Organization Chart In Visio 2010

- by Mysticgeek

With trying to manage a business these days, it’s very important to have an Organization Chart to keep everything manageable. Here we’ll show you how to build one in Visio 2010. This Guest Article was written by our friends over at Office 2010 Club. Need for Organization Charts The need of creating Organization Charts are becoming indispensable these days, as companies start focusing on extensive hiring for far reach availability, increase in productivity and targeting diverse markets. Considering this rigorous change, creating an organization chart can help stakeholders in comprehending the ever growing organization structure & hierarchy with an ease. It shows the basic structure of organization along with defining the relationships between employees working in different departments. Opportunely, Microsoft Visio 2010 offers an easy way to create Organization chart. As before now, orthodox ways of listing organization hierarchy have been used for defining the structure of departments along with communication possible including; horizontal and vertical communications. To transform these lists which defines organizational structure, into a detailed chart, Visio 2010 includes an add-in for importing Excel spreadsheet, which comes in handy for pulling out data from spreadsheet to create an organization chart. Importantly, you don’t need to indulge yourself in maze of defining organizational hierarchies and chalking-out structure, as you just need to specify the column & row headers, along with data you need to import and it will automatically create out chart defining; organizational hierarchies with specified credentials of each employee, categorized in their corresponding departments. Creating Organization Charts in Visio 2010 To start off with, we have created an Excel spreadsheet having fields, Name, Supervisor, Designation, Department and Phone. The Name field contains name of all the employees working in different departments, whereas Supervisor field contains name of supervisors or team leads. This field is vital for creating Organization Chart, as it defines the basic structure & hierarchy in chart. Now launch Visio 2010, head over to View tab, under Add-Ons menu, from Business options, click Organization Chart Wizard. This will start Organization Chart Wizard, in the first step, enable Information that’s already stored in a file or database option, and click Next. As we are importing Excel sheet, select the second option for importing Excel spreadsheet. Specify the Excel file path and click Next to continue. In this step, you need to specify the fields which actually defines the structure of an organization. In our case, these are Name & Supervisor fields. After specifying fields, click Next to Proceed further. As organization chart is primarily for showing the hierarchy of departments/employees working in organization along with how they are linked together, and who supervises whom. Considering this, in this step we will leave out Supervisor field, because it’s inclusion wouldn’t be necessary as Visio automatically chalks-out the basic structure defined in Excel sheet. Add the rest of the fields under Displayed fields category, and click Next. Now choose the fields which you want to include in Organization Chart’s shapes and click Next. This step is about breaking the chart into multiple pages, if you are dealing with 100+ employees, you may want to specify numbers of pages on which Organization Chart will be displayed. But in our case, we are dealing with much less amount of data, so we will enable I want the wizard to automatically break my organization chart across pages option. Specify the name you need to show on the top of the page. If you are having less than 20 hierarchies, enter the name of the highest ranked employee in organization and click Finish to end the wizard. It will instantly create an Organization chart out of specified Excel spreadsheet. Highest ranked employee will be shown on top of the organization chart, supervising various employees from different departments. As shown below, his immediate subordinates further manages other employees and so on. For advance customizations, head over to Org Chart tab, here you will find different groups for setting up the Org Chart’s hierarchy and manage other employees’ positions. Under Arrange group, shapes’ arrangements can be changed and it provides easy navigation through the chart. You can also change the type of the position and hide subordinates of selected employee. From Picture group, you can insert a picture of the employees, departments, etc. From synchronization group, you have the option of creating a synced copy and expanding subordinates of selected employee. Under Organization Data group, you can change whole layout of Organization chart from Display Options including; shape display, show divider, enable/disable imported fields, change block position, and fill colors, etc. If at any point of time, you need to insert new position or announce vacancy, Organization Chart stencil is always available on the left sidebar. Drag the desired Organization Chart shape into main diagram page, to maintain the structure integrity, i.e, for inserting subordinates for a specific employee, drag the position shape over the existing employee shape box. For instance, We have added a consultant in organization, who is directly under CEO, for maintaining this, we have dragged the Consultant box and just dropped it over the CEO box to make the immediate subordinate position. Adding details to new position is a cinch, just right-click new position box and click Properties. This will open up Shape Data dialog, start filling in all the relevant information and click OK. Here you can see the newly created position is easily populated with all the specified information. Now expanding an Organization Chart doesn’t require maintenance of long lists any more. Under Design tab, you can also try out different designs & layouts over organization chart to make it look more flamboyant and professional. Conclusion An Organization Chart is a great way of showing detailed organizational hierarchies; with defined credentials of employees, departments structure, new vacancies, newly hired employees, recently added departments, and importantly shows most convenient way of interaction between different departments & employees, etc. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Reviews: Using Dia as a Free Replacement for Microsoft VisioMysticgeek Blog: Create Appealing Charts In Excel 2007Create Charts in Excel 2007 the Easy Way with Chart AdvisorCreate a Hyperlink in a Word 2007 Flow Chart and Hide Annoying ScreenTipsCreate A Flow Chart In Word 2007 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 HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 06, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 06, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC | SCAFFOLD: Add-in para Visual Studio 2008 que adiciona um poderoso scaffold para o ASP.NET MVC, com suporte ao Entity Framework.ASP.Net Permission Manager: This is an extension of ASP.Net Permission Manager that permission to roles.Babelfish.NET: Babelfish was created as a common framework for navigating several different node-to-node structured data sources, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, X...CollaSuite: Collaboration Suite, Chat Client ServerdnyFramework: Denny FrameWorkDocxToHtml: DocxToHtmlDomain Driven Design and ASP.NET MVC 2 sample: It's a simple application ASP.NET MVC 2 with DDD modeling approach. It's about how to build maintainable applications applying DDD, IoC and infrast...DRP Address Book: A web based address book implementation using SQL Server 2008, ASP.NET, C#, and CSLA.NETFileSystemHelper SQL Server CLR: FileSystemHelper SQL Server CLR provides a collection of CLR stored procedures and functions for interacting with the file system. Using these sto...Foothill: This is an asp.net Web AppHouseFly controls: Controls for my upcomming app: HouseFlyiTunes Artwork App: This project is related to my iTunes Artwork App blog series. The application will automate the process of collecting album art for music tracks i...Logwiz - Automate the collection of Performance monitor logs using logman.exe: This tool is used to automate the process of collecting Performance monitoring data using the logman.exe on Windows Vista/Windows 7/Windows 2008 an...MailSharp - Beyond MailMessage: An easy-to-use library for .NET developers to send HTML formatted emails using templates with merge tags and embedded images instead of pointing at...MSTests.Fluently: MSTests.Fluently makes it easier for developers and testers to read and write tests with the Visual Studio Unit-Testing Framework. The Sentence-lik...openSIS dot net - Open Source SIS written in C#, built on dotnet 3.5 framework: openSIS dotnet is the dot net version of the popular openSIS Student Information System from OS4ED. This openSIS version is written in C# and is ba...PHP.net: PHP.net is a PHP IDE written in C# for Windows. The IDE will eventually be a complete standalone PHP development enviroment, including a developmen...Recommender System for Optus Website: <Recommender System for Optus Website>This project is trying to apply some recommeder system techniques to telecom company websites. This project ...Sendkeys: This is a tool for remote controlling any Windows Application.Shamil: Shamil WorkSite Directory for SharePoint 2010 (from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK): A solution which provides 'site directory' functionality for SharePoint 2010. Refer to [file:Solution Description|Microsoft.MCSUK.SPSiteDirectory...SPD Workflow action to add user to a security group: This is a custom SPD workflow step developed to facilitate the process of adding users from a list to the security group. Keep in mind this is run...Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Source for the Star Trooper XNA 2d Tutorial on XNA-UK (www.XNA-UK.co.uk), including the full set of code and each phase of the tutorial. Additio...TFS WitAdminUI: Team Foundation Server 2010 RC WitAdmin simple application with UIWindows Phone 7 Panorama control: The Windows Phone 7 Panorama control is a sample implementation of a Silverlight control that allows to create "Hub" applications on Windows Phone ...Yulu: Yulu helps you maintain short quotations or your thoughts with your Windows Mobile phones.New ReleasesASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.0: Atomic CMS 2.0 was released. Please visit http://atomiccms.com/ for download documentation, last release and get more information about Atomic CMS ...ASP.Net Permission Manager: Mal.Web.Security.dll v1.0.2.0: Mal.Web.Security.dll Relealse v1.0.2.0CycleMania Starter Kit EAP - ASP.NET 4 Problem - Design - Solution: Cyclemania 0.08.48: The application now uses Windows Communication Foundation services. See Source Code tab for other recent changes.dotNetInstaller: setup bootstrapper for Windows: 1.10 (Development): Build 1.10.6588.0. Features - Added support for .exe setup components with an optional response file. - Added has_value_disabled option to user-de...Examine: RC 1: This is Examine RC1 release. It includes: Examine UmbracoExamine Lucene.Net 2.9.2Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.010: Improved the pentagone crazy quizFileSystemHelper SQL Server CLR: FileSystemHelper CLR Project: Source code for FileSystemHelper CLR assembly.GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0.5-Logging: Added Logging functionality to track down bugs.iSun Shut - PC Auto Shutdown: iSun Shut 2.5: Relase Notes: -To properly view the source code please install DotNetBar 8.3 (http://www.devcomponents.com) -The Shutdown after firefox download f...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.10: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...MIC Pattern: !MIC Pattern DAL: Data Access Layer Este arquivo contem a DLL que faz acesso a dados e simplifica as operações de INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE e SELECT em bases de dados ...MVC Foolproof Validation: Alpha 0.1: Server side validation is stable. Client side validation is fairly stable aside from some border cases I hope to address soon. I’m actually using t...OpenGL ES 2.0 Compact Framework Wrapper: First binary release: CAB-installer for installing the sample application provided with the solution. Demonstrates a simple quad with rotation animation. Changes from l...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop8: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT: PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT - V3: The Beta Version 3 of the Programmable Software Development Environment features the random generator, longitudinal and cryptographic commands whi...RoTwee: RoTwee (9.0.0.0): New feature in this version : 17102 Tweet rotated count.SharePhone: SharePhone v.1.0.3: Added search functionality. Use clientContext.SearchProvider.Search(..) or clientContext.SearchProvider.KeywordSearch(..) A few examples here: ht...SharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.2.4.3: UI has been improved. Some bugs have been resolved.SPD Workflow action to add user to a security group: Version 1 custom workflow action: A custom SPD workflow step that automatically adds user to the correct security group, the user name can be driven from a list item or document li...SQL Server Metadata Toolkit 2008: SQL Server Metadata Toolkit Alpha 5: This release addresses the Issue 10567, which was a recursive view recursing more than 100 times. This was caused by the addition of SQL Parsing in...TFS WitAdminUI: WitAdminUI ver1.0: Download zip file and unzip to TFS2010 RC. And Excute WitAdminUI.exe. Because WitAdmin is made by .net v4.0 so I can't my application with MSI.TFTP Server: TFTP Server 1.0 Installer: Installer for the binary release of TFTP server v 1.0VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.1.0: Version 7.1.0 of VivoSocial has been released. If you experienced any issues with the previous version, please update your modules to the 7.1.0 rel...WAFFLE: Windows Authentication Functional Framework (LE): 1.3 (Development): Build 1.3.9740.0. Features Added waffle-jna-auth.jar, native Java with JNA port. Misc Project upgraded to Visual Studio 2008.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryImage Resizer Powertoy Clone for WindowsSkype Voice ChangerAll-In-One Code FrameworkWindows Live Calendar GadgetMDownloaderWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolDroid ExplorerEnhSimMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.Facebook Developer ToolkitRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with PexFarseer Physics EngineNcqrs Framework - The CQRS framework for .NETIonics Isapi Rewrite Filter

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My Thoughts On the Xbox 180

- by Chris Gardner

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/06/21/my-thoughts-on-the-xbox-180.aspx Everyone seems to be putting their 0.00237 cents into the wishing well over Microsoft's recent decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. However, there have been a few issues that nobody has touched. As such, I have decided to dig 0.00237 cents out of my pocket. First, let me be clear about this point. I do not support the decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. I wanted that point to be expressed first and unambiguously. I will say it again. I do not support the decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. Now that I have that out of the way, let me go into my rationale. This decision removes most of the cool features that enticed me to pre-order the console. No, I didn't cancel my pre-order. There is still five months before the release of the console, and there is still a plethora of information that we, as consumers, do not have. With that, it should be noted that much of the talk in this post is speculation and rhetoric. I do not have any insider information that you do not possess. The persistent connection would have allowed the console to do many of the functions for which we have been begging. That demo where someone was playing Ryse, seamlessly accepted a multiplayer challenge in Killer Instinct, played the match (and a rematch,) and then jumped back into Ryse. That's gone, if you bought the game on disc. The new, DRM free system will require the disc in the system to play a game. That bullet point where one Xbox Live account could have up to 10 slave accounts so families could play together, no matter where they were located. That's gone as well. The promise of huge, expansive, dynamically changing worlds that was brought to us with the power of cloud computing. Well, "the people" didn't want there to be a forced, persistent connection. As such, developers can't rely on a connection and, as such, that feature is gone. This is akin to the removal of the hard drive on the Xbox 360. The list continues, but the enthusiast press has enumerated the list far better than I wish. All of this is because the Xbox team saw the HUGE success of Steam and decided to borrow a few ideas. Yes, Steam. The service that everyone hated for the first six months (for the same reasons the Xbox One is getting flack.) There was an initial growing pain. However, it is now lauded as the way games distribution should be handled. Unless you are Microsoft. I do find it curious that many of the features were originally announced for the PS4 during its unveiling. However, much of that was left strangely absent for Sony's E3 press conference. Instead, we received a single, static slide that basically said the exact opposite of Microsoft's plans. It is not farfetched to believe that slide came into existence during the approximately seven hours between the two media briefings. The thing that majorly annoys me over this whole kerfuffle is that the single thing that caused the call to arms is, really, not an issue. Microsoft never said they were going to block used sales. They said it was up to the publisher to make that decision. This would have allowed publishers to reclaim some of the costs of development in subsequent sales of the product. If you sell your game to GameStop for 7 USD, GameStop is going to sell it for 55 USD. That is 48 USD pure profit for them. Some publishers asked GameStop for a small cut. Was this a huge, money grubbing scheme? Well, yes, but the idea was that they have to handle server infrastructure for dormant accounts, etc. Of course, GameStop flatly refused, and the Online Pass was born. Fortunately, this trend didn’t last, and most publishers have stopped the practice. The ability to sell "licenses" has already begun to be challenged. Are you living in the EU? If so, companies must allow you to sell digital property. With this precedent in place, it's only a matter of time before other areas follow suit. If GameStop were smart, they should have immediately contacted every publisher out there to get the rights to become a clearing house for these licenses. Then, they keep their business model and could reduce their brick and mortar footprint. The digital landscape is changing. We need to not block this process. As Seth MacFarlane best said "Some issues are so important that you should drag people kicking and screaming." I believe this was said on an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher about the issue of Gay Marriages. Much like the original source, this is an issue that we need to drag people to the correct, progressive position. Microsoft, as a company, actually has the resources to weather the transition period. They have a great pool of first and second party developers that can leverage this new framework to prove the validity. Over time, the third party developers will get excited to use these tools. As an old C++ guy, I resisted C# for years. Now, I think it's one of the best languages I've ever used. I have a server room and a Co-Lo full of servers, so I originally didn't see the value in Azure. Now, I wish I could move every one of my projects into the cloud. I still LOVE getting physical packaging, which my music and games collection will proudly attest. However, I have started to see the value in pure digital, and have found ways to integrate this into the ways I consume those products. I can, honestly, understand how some parts of the population would be very apprehensive about this new landscape. There were valid arguments about people with no internet access. There are ways to combat these problems. These methods do not require us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. However, the number of people in the computer industry that I have seen cry foul is truly appalling. We are the forward looking people that help show how technology can improve people's lives. If we can't see the value of the brief pain involved with an exciting new ecosystem, than who will?

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MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 2 Silverlight + Windows 7 Phone

- by GeekAgilistMercenary

Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay. Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote. Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing. The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together. Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps of various environments. Silverlight Scott Guthrie, as one would guess, kicked off the keynote. His first point was that user experience has become a priority at Microsoft. This can be seen by any observant soul with the release and push of Expression, Silverlight, and the other tools. This is even more apparent when one takes note of Microsoft bringing in people that can actually do good design and putting them at the forefront. The next thing Scott brought up was a few key points about Silverlight. Currently Silverlight is a little over 2 years old and has achieved a pretty solid 60% penetration. Silverlight has all sorts of capabilities that have been developed and are now provided as open source including; ad injection, smoothing, playback editing, and more. Another thing he showed, which really struck me as awesome being in the analytics space, was the Olympics and a quick glimpse of the ad statistics, viewer experience, video playback performance, audience trends, and overall viewer participation. All of it rendered in Silverlight in beautiful detail. The key piece of Scott's various points were all punctuated with the fact that all of this code is available as open source. Not only is Microsoft really delving into this design element of things, they're getting involved in the right ways. One of the last points I'll bring up about Silverlight 4 is the ability to have HD video on a monitor, and an entirely different activity being done on the other monitor, effectively making Silverlight the only RIA framework that supports multi-monitor support. Overall, Silverlight is continuing to impress – providing superior capabilities tit-for-tat with the competition. Windows 7 Phone The Windows 7 Phone has 3 primary buttons (yes, more than the iPhone, don't let your mind explode!!). Start, Search, and Back control all of the needed functionality of the phone. At the same time, of course, there is the multi-touch, touch, and other interactive abilities of the interface. The intent, once start is pressed is to have all the information that a phone owner wants displayed immediately. Avoiding the scrolling through pages of apps or rolling a ball to get through multitudes of other non-interactive phone interfaces. The Windows 7 Phone simply has the data right in front of you, basically a phone dashboard. From there it is easy to dive into the interactive areas of the phone. Each area of the interface of the phone is broken into hubs. These hubs include applications, data, and other things based on a relative basis. This basis being determined by the user. These applications interact on many other levels, and form a kind of relationship between each other adding more and more meta-data to the phone user, their interactions between the applications, and of course the social element of their interactions on the phone. This makes this phone a practical must have for a marketer involved in social media. The level of wired together interaction is massive, and of course, if you've seen Office Outlook 2010 you know that the power that is pulled into the phone by being tied to Outlook is massive. Joe Belfiore also showed several UI & specifically UX elements of the phone interface that allows paging to be instinctual by simple clipped items, flipping page to page, and other excellent user experience advances for phone devices. Belfiore's also showed how his people hub had a massive list of people, with pictures, all from various different social networks and other associated relations. The rendering, speed, and viewing of these people's, their pictures, their social network information, and other characteristics was smooth and in some situations unbelievably rendered. This demo showed some of the great power of the beta phone, which isn't even as powerful as the planned end device. Joe finished up by jumping into the music, videos, and other media with the Zune Component of the Windows 7 Mobile Phone. This was all good stuff, but I'll get to what really sold me on the media element in a moment. When Joe was done, Scott Guthrie stepped back up to walk through building a Windows 7 Mobile Phone. This is were I have to give serious props. He built this application, in Visual Studio 2010, in front of 2000+ people. That was cool, but what really was amazing that he build the application in about 2 minutes. The IDE, side by side design that is standard in Visual Studio is light years ahead of x-Code or any of the iPhone IDEs. The Windows 7 Mobile System, if it can get market penetration, poses a technologically superior development and phone platform over anything on the market right now. The biggest problem with the phone, is it just isn't available yet. I personally can't wait for a chance to build some apps for the new Windows Phone. Netflix, I May Start Up an Account Again! When I get my Windows 7 Phone device, I am absolutely getting a Netflix account again. The Vertigo crew, as I wrote on Twitter "#MIX10 Props @seesharp on @netflix demo", displayed an application on the phone for Netflix that actually ran HD Video of Rescue Me (with Dennis Leary). The video played back smooth as it would on a dedicated computer, I was instantly sold. So this didn't actually sell me on the phone, because I'm already sold, but it did sell me whole heartedly on the media capabilities of the pending phone. Anyway, I try not to do this but I may double post today. Lunch is over and I'm off to another session very near and dear to the heart of my occupation, Analytics Tracking. Stay tuned and I should have that post up by the end of the day. Original Post – Check out my other blog for even more technical ramblings and reads.

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Using Sitecore RenderingContext Parameters as MVC controller action arguments

- by Kyle Burns

I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to share one area where Sitecore could have really made things shine from the "it just works" perspective. A couple days ago I was asked by a colleague about the usage of the "Parameters" field that is defined on Sitecore's Controller Rendering data template. Based on the standard way that Sitecore handles a field named Parameters, I was able to deduce that the field expected key/value pairs separated by the "&" character, but beyond that I wasn't sure and didn't see anything from a documentation perspective to guide me, so it was time to dig and find out where the data in the field was made available. My first thought was that it would be really nice if Sitecore handled the parameters in this field consistently with the way that ASP.NET MVC handles the various parameter collections on the HttpRequest object and automatically maps them to parameters of the action method executing. Being the hopeful sort, I configured a name/value pair on one of my renderings, added a parameter with matching name to the controller action and fired up the bugger to see... that the parameter was not populated. Having established that the field's value was not going to be presented to me the way that I had hoped it would, the next assumption that I would work on was that Sitecore would handle this field similar to how they handle other similar data and would plug it into some ambient object that I could reference from within the controller method. After a considerable amount of guessing, testing, and cracking code open with Redgate's Reflector (a must-have companion to Sitecore documentation), I found that the most direct way to access the parameter was through the ambient RenderingContext object using code similar to: string myArgument = string.Empty; var rc = Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null) { var parms = rc.Rendering.Parameters; myArgument = parms["myArgument"]; } At this point, we know how this field is used out of the box from Sitecore and can provide information from Sitecore's Content Editor that will be available when the controller action is executing, but it feels a little dirty. In order to properly test the action method I would have to do a lot of setup work and possible use an isolation framework such as Pex and Moles to get at a value that my action method is dependent upon. Notice I said that my method is dependent upon the value but in order to meet that dependency I've accepted another dependency upon Sitecore's RenderingContext. I'm a big believer in, when possible, ensuring that any piece of code explicitly advertises dependencies using the method signature, so I found myself still wanting this to work the same as if the parameters were in the request route, querystring, or form by being able to add a myArgument parameter to the action method and have this parameter populated by the framework. Lucky for us, the ASP.NET MVC framework is extremely flexible and provides some easy to grok and use extensibility points. ASP.NET MVC is able to provide information from the request as input parameters to controller actions because it uses objects which implement an interface called IValueProvider and have been registered to service the application. The most basic statement of responsibility for an IValueProvider implementation is "I know about some data which is indexed by key. If you hand me the key for a piece of data that I know about I give you that data". When preparing to invoke a controller action, the framework queries registered IValueProvider implementations with the name of each method argument to see if the ValueProvider can supply a value for the parameter. (the rest of this post will assume you're working along and make a lot more sense if you do) Let's pull Sitecore out of the equation for a second to simplify things and create an extremely simple IValueProvider implementation. For this example, I first create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project in Visual Studio, selecting "Internet Application" and otherwise taking defaults (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far in the post either already knows how to do this or will need to take a quick run through one of the many available basic MVC tutorials such as the MVC Music Store). Once the new project is created, go to the Index action of HomeController. This action sets a Message property on the ViewBag to "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!" and invokes the View, which has been coded to display the Message. For our example, we will remove the hard coded message from this controller (although we'll leave it just as hard coded somewhere else - this is sample code). For the first step in our exercise, add a string parameter to the Index action method called welcomeMessage and use the value of this argument to set the ViewBag.Message property. The updated Index action should look like: public ActionResult Index(string welcomeMessage) { ViewBag.Message = welcomeMessage; return View(); } This represents the entirety of the change that you will make to either the controller or view. If you run the application now, the home page will display and no message will be presented to the user because no value was supplied to the Action method. Let's now write a ValueProvider to ensure this parameter gets populated. We'll start by creating a new class called StaticValueProvider. When the class is created, we'll update the using statements to ensure that they include the following: using System.Collections.Specialized; using System.Globalization; using System.Web.Mvc; With the appropriate using statements in place, we'll update the StaticValueProvider class to implement the IValueProvider interface. The System.Web.Mvc library already contains a pretty flexible dictionary-like implementation called NameValueCollectionValueProvider, so we'll just wrap that and let it do most of the real work for us. The completed class looks like: public class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider { private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider; public StaticValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext) { var parameters = new NameValueCollection(); parameters.Add("welcomeMessage", "Hello from the value provider!"); _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(parameters, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); } public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix) { return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix); } public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key) { return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key); } } Notice that the only entry in the collection matches the name of the argument to our HomeController's Index action. This is the important "secret sauce" that will make things work. We've got our new value provider now, but that's not quite enough to be finished. Mvc obtains IValueProvider instances using factories that are registered when the application starts up. These factories extend the abstract ValueProviderFactory class by initializing and returning the appropriate implementation of IValueProvider from the GetValueProvider method. While I wouldn't do so in production code, for the sake of this example, I'm going to add the following class definition within the StaticValueProvider.cs source file: public class StaticValueProviderFactory : ValueProviderFactory { public override IValueProvider GetValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext) { return new StaticValueProvider(controllerContext); } } Now that we have a factory, we can register it by adding the following line to the end of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs: ValueProviderFactories.Factories.Add(new StaticValueProviderFactory()); If you've done everything right to this point, you should be able to run the application and be presented with the home page reading "Hello from the value provider!". Now that you have the basics of the IValueProvider down, you have everything you need to enhance your Sitecore MVC implementation by adding an IValueProvider that exposes values from the ambient RenderingContext's Parameters property. I'll provide the code for the IValueProvider implementation (which should look VERY familiar) and you can use the work we've already done as a reference to create and register the factory: public class RenderingContextValueProvider : IValueProvider { private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider = null; public RenderingContextValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); var rc = RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null && rc.Rendering != null) { foreach(var parameter in rc.Rendering.Parameters) { collection.Add(parameter.Key, parameter.Value); } } _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(collection, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); } public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix) { return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix); } public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key) { return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key); } } In this post I've discussed the MVC IValueProvider used to map data to controller action method arguments and how this can be integrated into your Sitecore 6.6 MVC solution.

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Top 10 Browser Productivity Tips

- by Renso

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/renso/archive/2013/10/14/top-10-browser-productivity-tips.aspxYou don’t have to be a geek to be a productive browser user. The tips below have been selected by actions users take most of the time to navigate a web-site but use long-standing keyboard or mouse actions to get them done, when there are keyboard short-cuts you can use instead. Since you hands are already on the keyboard it is almost always faster to sue a keyboard shortcut to get something done that you usually used the mouse for. For example right-clicking on something to copy it and then doing to same for pasting something is very time consuming, keyboard shortcuts have been created that simplify the task. All it takes are a few memory brain cells to remember them. Here are the tips, in no particular order: Tip 1 Hold down the spacebar on your keyboard to page to the end of your web page rather than using your mouse. This is really a slow way of doing it. If you want to page one page at a time, hit the spacebar once, and again to page again. But if you want to page all the way to the end of the web page simply hit Ctrl+End (that is hold down the Ctrl key and hit the End button on your keyboard). To get to the top of your web page, simply hit Ctrl + Home to go all the way to the top of your web page. Tip 2 Where are my downloads? Some folks run downloads again-and-again because they do not know where the last one went and they do not see the popup, or browser note on their web page in the footer, etc. Simply hit Ctrl+J. Works in most browsers. Tip 3 Selecting a US state from a drop down box. Don’t use the mouse, takes just way too long to scroll. When you tab to the drop down box or click on it with your mouse, simply hit the first character of the state and it will be selected. For Texas for example hit the letter “T” twice on your keyboard to get to it. The same concept can be applied to any drop down box that is alphabetical or numerically sorted. Tip 4 Fixing spelling errors. All modern-day browsers support this now. You see the red wavy lines underscoring a word, yes it is a spelling error. How do you fix it? Don’t overtype it or try and fix it manually, fist right-click on it and a list of suggestions comes up. If it does not show up, like my name “Renso” and you know how to spell your name as in this example, look further down the list of options (the little window popup that appears when you right click) and you should see an option to “Add to Dictionary”. Be warned, when you add it, it only adds it to the browser you’re using’s dictionary. If you use Google Chrome, Firefox and IE, each one will have their own list. Tip 5 So you have trouble seeing the text on the screen. Or you are looking at a photo, for example in Facebook. You want to zoom in to read better or zoom into a photo a bit more. Hit Ctrl++ (hold down Ctrl key and hit the plus key – actually it’s the equal key but it is easier to remember that it is plus for bigger). Hit the minus to zoom out. Now you can’t remember what the original size was since you were so excited to hit it 20 times, or was that 21… Simply hit Ctrl+0 (that is zero) and it will reset it to the default. Tip 6 So you closed a couple of tabs in your browser. Suddenly you remember something you wanted to double-check something on one of the tabs, you cannot remember the URL ad the tab is gone forever, or is it? Simply hit Ctrl+Shift+t and it will bring back your tabs one by one each time you click the T. This has also been a great way for me to quickly close some tabs because I don’t want my boss to see I’m shopping and then hitting Ctrl+Shift+t to quickly get it back and complete my check-put and purchase. Or, for parents, when you walk into your daughter’s room and you see she quickly clicks and closes a window/tab in here browser. Not to worry my little darling, daddy will Ctrl+Shift+t and see what boys on Facebook you were talking too… Tip 7 The web browser is frozen on your PC/Laptop/Whatever, in this example it may be your Internet Explorer browser. I don’t mention Firefox or Chrome here because it probably never happens in their world. You cannot close it, it won’t respond to anything you have done s far except for the next step you are about to take, which is throw your two-day old coffee on your keyboard. This happens especially on sites that want to force you to complete a purchase order. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard on any version of windows, select TASK MANAGER. In the First Tab, which is the Process Tab, look for the item in question. In this example you should see Internet Explorer. Right-click it and select “End Task”. It will force the thread out of memory and terminate that process. You can of course do this with any program running under your account. Tip 8 This is a personal favorite of mine. To select words in the paragraph without using the mouse. You don’t want to select one character at a time like when you use the Ctrl+arrows as it can be very slow if you want to select a lot of text. You also want to select whole words. Simply use the Ctrl+Shift_arrow (right or left depending which direction you want to go. Tip 9 I was a bit reluctant to add this one, but being in the professional services industry still come across many-a-folk that simply can’t copy-and-paste them-all text or images that reside on them screens, y’all. Ctrl+c to copy and Ctrl+v to paste it. Works a lot faster than using the mouse. You may be asking: “Well why in the devil did they not use Ctrl+p for paste…. because that is for printing. This is of course not limited to the browser world, it applies to almost any piece of software running on PC or Mac. Go try it on an image on your browser, right-click it and select copy. Open a word document and Ctrl+v to paste the image in there. Please consider copyright laws. Tip 10 Getting rid of annoying ads. Now this only works when you load a web page, meaning when you get back to the same page later you will have to do this again and you will need to learn a tool to do it, WELL WORTH IT. For example, I use GrooveShark to listen to music but I don’t like the ads they show. Install a tool like Firebug for Firefox or use the Ctrl+Shift+I on Chrome to bring up the developer toolbar. Shows at the bottom of the page. With Firefox, once you have installed Firebug as an add-on, a yellow bug should appear on the top right-hand-side of your browser, click on it to display the developer toolbar. You will need to learn how to use it, but once you know how to select an item/section on the window (usually just right-click the add you don’t want to see and select “Inspect Element”, the developer toolbar will appear (if not already there)) and then simply hit delete and it will remove the add from the screen. If you don’t know HTML you may need to play with it a bit, but once you understand how it works can open up a whole new world for you on how web pages actually work. If you can think of any others that have saved you a ton of time please let me know so I can add them to a top 99 list.

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Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

- by George Clingerman

Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything. Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around. All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

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Kubuntu 12.04 - Touchpad and keyboard stopped working at random

- by StepTNT

As in the title, I've got this problem with my Kubuntu 12.04. At first I've thought that the whole system was hung, but it happened again 5 minutes ago and, while the keyboard and the touchpad stopped working, the music was still playing, so I guess that's just an "input" problem, because the system was still working! Any solution? Is there some data that you need to know about my setup? EDIT: Added my lshw outout description: Notebook product: N53SV () vendor: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. version: 1.0 serial: B2N0AS17695408A width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.6 dmi-2.6 vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=notebook family=N uuid=8083F2DA-A43E-E081-3F3F-BCAEC55F8AA1 *-core description: Motherboard product: N53SV vendor: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. physical id: 0 version: 1.0 serial: BSN12345678901234567 slot: MIDDLE *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: American Megatrends Inc. physical id: 0 version: N53SV.214 date: 08/10/2011 size: 64KiB capacity: 2496KiB capabilities: pci upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb smartbattery biosbootspecification *-cpu description: CPU product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M. slot: CPU 1 size: 800MHz capacity: 4GHz width: 64 bits clock: 100MHz capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=1 threads=2 *-cache description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1-Cache size: 32KiB capacity: 32KiB capabilities: internal write-back instruction *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 40 slot: System board or motherboard size: 10GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0,8 ns) product: 99U5428-040.A00LF vendor: Kingston physical id: 0 serial: 103C28C3 slot: ChannelA-DIMM0 size: 4GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0,8 ns) product: HMT325S6BFR8C-H9 vendor: Hynix/Hyundai physical id: 1 serial: 58383D1F slot: ChannelA-DIMM1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:2 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0,8 ns) product: HMT325S6BFR8C-H9 vendor: Hynix/Hyundai physical id: 2 serial: 58183D19 slot: ChannelB-DIMM0 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:3 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0,8 ns) product: HMT325S6BFR8C-H9 vendor: Hynix/Hyundai physical id: 3 serial: 58183C8F slot: ChannelB-DIMM1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-pci description: Host bridge product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: driver=agpgart-intel resources: irq:0 *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1 bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm msi pciexpress normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:d000(size=4096) memory:db000000-dc0fffff ioport:c0000000(size=301989888) *-generic UNCLAIMED description: Unassigned class product: Illegal Vendor ID vendor: Illegal Vendor ID physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: ff width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: bus_master vga_palette cap_list configuration: latency=255 maxlatency=255 mingnt=255 resources: memory:db000000-dbffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:d000(size=128) memory:dc000000-dc07ffff *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 09 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=i915 latency=0 resources: irq:47 memory:dc400000-dc7fffff memory:b0000000-bfffffff ioport:e000(size=64) *-communication description: Communication controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 16 bus info: pci@0000:00:16.0 version: 04 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=mei latency=0 resources: irq:48 memory:df00b000-df00b00f *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1a bus info: pci@0000:00:1a.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:df008000-df0083ff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:49 memory:df000000-df003fff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:41 ioport:c000(size=4096) memory:de600000-deffffff ioport:d4200000(size=10485760) *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.1 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:42 ioport:b000(size=4096) memory:ddc00000-de5fffff ioport:d3700000(size=10485760) *-network description: Wireless interface product: AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 01 serial: 48:5d:60:f2:2c:fd width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.2.0-24-generic firmware=N/A ip=192.168.1.6 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:17 memory:ddc00000-ddc0ffff *-pci:3 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.3 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:43 ioport:a000(size=4096) memory:dd200000-ddbfffff ioport:d2c00000(size=10485760) *-usb description: USB controller product: FL1000G USB 3.0 Host Controller vendor: Fresco Logic physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress xhci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=xhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:19 memory:dd200000-dd20ffff *-pci:4 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 6 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.5 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.5 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:44 ioport:9000(size=4096) memory:dc800000-dd1fffff ioport:d2100000(size=10485760) *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:05:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 06 serial: bc:ae:c5:5f:8a:a1 size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=half firmware=rtl_nic/rtl8168e-2.fw latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:46 ioport:9000(size=256) memory:d2104000-d2104fff memory:d2100000-d2103fff *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:df007000-df0073ff *-isa description: ISA bridge product: HM65 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-storage description: SATA controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 logical name: scsi0 logical name: scsi2 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi pm ahci_1.0 bus_master cap_list emulated configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:45 ioport:e0b0(size=8) ioport:e0a0(size=4) ioport:e090(size=8) ioport:e080(size=4) ioport:e060(size=32) memory:df006000-df0067ff *-disk description: ATA Disk product: ST9750420AS vendor: Seagate physical id: 0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: 0002 serial: 5WS0A7QR size: 698GiB (750GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=e0c5913d *-volume:0 description: Windows FAT volume vendor: MSDOS5.0 physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 version: FAT32 serial: 4ce5-3acb size: 3004MiB capacity: 3004MiB capabilities: primary fat initialized configuration: FATs=2 filesystem=fat *-volume:1 description: EXT4 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 logical name: / version: 1.0 serial: c198cc2a-d86a-4460-a4d5-3fc0b21e439c size: 28GiB capacity: 28GiB capabilities: primary journaled extended_attributes large_files huge_files dir_nlink recover extents ext4 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2012-03-15 16:53:54 filesystem=ext4 lastmountpoint=/ modified=2012-05-02 18:52:04 mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1,data=ordered mounted=2012-05-09 19:06:01 state=mounted *-volume:2 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,3 logical name: /dev/sda3 version: 3.1 serial: 4c1cdebc-ec09-2947-a3b5-c1f9f1cddc1c size: 152GiB capacity: 152GiB capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2011-02-22 16:02:47 filesystem=ntfs label=OS state=clean *-volume:3 description: Extended partition physical id: 4 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,4 logical name: /dev/sda4 size: 514GiB capacity: 514GiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume:0 description: Linux swap / Solaris partition physical id: 5 logical name: /dev/sda5 capacity: 10GiB capabilities: nofs *-logicalvolume:1 description: HPFS/NTFS partition physical id: 6 logical name: /dev/sda6 capacity: 504GiB *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: BD-MLT UJ240AS vendor: MATSHITA physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom logical name: /dev/cdrw logical name: /dev/dvd logical name: /dev/dvdrw logical name: /dev/sr0 version: 1.00 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:df005000-df0050ff ioport:e040(size=32)

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Three ways to upload/post/convert iMovie to YouTube

- by user44251

For Mac users, iMovie is probably a convenient tool for making, editing their own home movies so as to upload to YouTube for sharing with more people. However, uploading iMovie files to YouTube can't be always a smooth run, I did notice many people complaining about it. This article is delivered for guiding those who are haunted by the nightmare by providing three common ways to upload iMovie files to YouTube. YouTube and iMovie YouTube is the most popular video sharing website for users to upload, share and view videos. It empowers anyone with an Internet connection the ability to upload video clips and share them with friends, family and the world. Users are invited to leave comments, pick favourites, send messages to each other and watch videos sorted into subjects and channels. YouTube accepts videos uploaded in most container formats, including WMV (Windows Media Video), 3GP (Cell Phones), AVI (Windows), MOV (Mac), MP4 (iPod/PSP), FLV (Adobe Flash), MKV (H.264). These include video codecs such as MP4, MPEG and WMV. iMovie is a common video editing software application comes with every Mac for users to edit their own home movies. It imports video footage to the Mac using either the Firewire interface on most MiniDV format digital video cameras, the USB port, or by importing the files from a hard drive where users can edit the video clips, add titles, and add music. Since 1999, eight versions of iMovie have been released by Apple, each with its own functions and characteristic, and each of them deal with videos in a way more or less different. But the most common formats handled with iMovie if specialty discarded as far as to my research are MOV, DV, HDV, MPEG-4. Three ways for successful upload iMovie files to YouTube Solution one and solution two suitable for those who are 100 certainty with their iMovie files which are fully compatible with YouTube. For smooth uploading, you are required to get a YouTube account first. Solution 1: Directly upload iMovie to YouTube Step 1: Launch iMovie, select the project you want to upload in YouTube. Step 2: Go to the file menu, click Share, select Export Movie Step 3: Specify the output file name and directory and then type the video type and video size. Solution 2: Post iMovie to YouTube straightly Step 1: Launch iMovie, choose the project you want to post in YouTube Step 2: From the Share menu, choose YouTube Step 3: In the pop-up YouTube windows, specify the name of your YouTube account, the password, choose the Category and fill in the description and tags of the project. Tick Make this movie more private on the bottom of the window, if possible, to limit those who can view the project. Click Next, and then click Publish. iMovie will automatically export and upload the movie to YouTube. Step 4: Click Tell a Friend to email friends and your family about your film. You are also allowed to copy the URL from Tell a Friend window and paste it into an email you created in your favourite email application if you like. Anyone you send to email to will be able to follow the URL directly to your movie. Note: Videos uploaded to YouTube are limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 2GB. Solution 3: Upload to iMovie after conversion If neither of the above mentioned method works, there is still a third way to turn to. Sometimes, your iMovie files may not be recognized by YouTube due to the versions of iMovie (settings and functions may varies among versions), video itself (video format difference because of file extension, resolution, video size and length), compatibility (videos that are completely incompatible with YouTube). In this circumstance, the best and reliable method is to convert your iMovie files to YouTube accepted files, iMovie to YouTube converter will be inevitably the ideal choice. iMovie to YouTube converter is an elaborately designed tool for convert iMovie files to YouTube workable WMV, 3GP, AVI, MOV, MP4, FLV, MKV for smooth uploading with hard-to-believe conversion speed and second to none output quality. It can also convert between almost all popular popular file formats like AVI, WMV, MPG, MOV, VOB, DV, MP4, FLV, 3GP, RM, ASF, SWF, MP3, AAC, AC3, AIFF, AMR, WAV, WMA etc so as to put on various portable devices, import to video editing software or play on vast amount video players. iMovie to YouTube converter can also served as an excellent video editing tool to meet your specific program requirements. For example, you can cut your video files to a certain length, or split your video files to smaller ones and select the proper resolution suitable for demands of YouTube by Clip or Settings separately. Crop allows you to cut off unwanted black edges from your videos. Besides, you can also have a good command of the whole process or snapshot your favourite pictures from the preview window. More can be expected if you have a try.

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Three ways to upload/post/convert iMovie to YouTube [closed]

- by alexyu2010

For Mac users, iMovie is probably a convenient tool for making, editing their own home movies so as to upload to YouTube for sharing with more people. However, uploading iMovie files to YouTube can't be always a smooth run, I did notice many people complaining about it. This article is delivered for guiding those who are haunted by the nightmare by providing three common ways to upload iMovie files to YouTube. YouTube and iMovie YouTube is the most popular video sharing website for users to upload, share and view videos. It empowers anyone with an Internet connection the ability to upload video clips and share them with friends, family and the world. Users are invited to leave comments, pick favourites, send messages to each other and watch videos sorted into subjects and channels. YouTube accepts videos uploaded in most container formats, including WMV (Windows Media Video), 3GP (Cell Phones), AVI (Windows), MOV (Mac), MP4 (iPod/PSP), FLV (Adobe Flash), MKV (H.264). These include video codecs such as MP4, MPEG and WMV. iMovie is a common video editing software application comes with every Mac for users to edit their own home movies. It imports video footage to the Mac using either the Firewire interface on most MiniDV format digital video cameras, the USB port, or by importing the files from a hard drive where users can edit the video clips, add titles, and add music. Since 1999, eight versions of iMovie have been released by Apple, each with its own functions and characteristic, and each of them deal with videos in a way more or less different. But the most common formats handled with iMovie if specialty discarded as far as to my research are MOV, DV, HDV, MPEG-4. Three ways for successful upload iMovie files to YouTube Solution one and solution two suitable for those who are 100 certainty with their iMovie files which are fully compatible with YouTube. For smooth uploading, you are required to get a YouTube account first. Solution 1: Directly upload iMovie to YouTube Step 1: Launch iMovie, select the project you want to upload in YouTube. Step 2: Go to the file menu, click Share, select Export Movie Step 3: Specify the output file name and directory and then type the video type and video size. Solution 2: Post iMovie to YouTube straightly Step 1: Launch iMovie, choose the project you want to post in YouTube Step 2: From the Share menu, choose YouTube Step 3: In the pop-up YouTube windows, specify the name of your YouTube account, the password, choose the Category and fill in the description and tags of the project. Tick Make this movie more private on the bottom of the window, if possible, to limit those who can view the project. Click Next, and then click Publish. iMovie will automatically export and upload the movie to YouTube. Step 4: Click Tell a Friend to email friends and your family about your film. You are also allowed to copy the URL from Tell a Friend window and paste it into an email you created in your favourite email application if you like. Anyone you send to email to will be able to follow the URL directly to your movie. Note: Videos uploaded to YouTube are limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 2GB. Solution 3: Upload to iMovie after conversion If neither of the above mentioned method works, there is still a third way to turn to. Sometimes, your iMovie files may not be recognized by YouTube due to the versions of iMovie (settings and functions may varies among versions), video itself (video format difference because of file extension, resolution, video size and length), compatibility (videos that are completely incompatible with YouTube). In this circumstance, the best and reliable method is to convert your iMovie files to YouTube accepted files, iMovie to YouTube converter will be inevitably the ideal choice. iMovie to YouTube converter is an elaborately designed tool for convert iMovie files to YouTube workable WMV, 3GP, AVI, MOV, MP4, FLV, MKV for smooth uploading with hard-to-believe conversion speed and second to none output quality. It can also convert between almost all popular popular file formats like AVI, WMV, MPG, MOV, VOB, DV, MP4, FLV, 3GP, RM, ASF, SWF, MP3, AAC, AC3, AIFF, AMR, WAV, WMA etc so as to put on various portable devices, import to video editing software or play on vast amount video players. iMovie to YouTube converter can also served as an excellent video editing tool to meet your specific program requirements. For example, you can cut your video files to a certain length, or split your video files to smaller ones and select the proper resolution suitable for demands of YouTube by Clip or Settings separately. Crop allows you to cut off unwanted black edges from your videos. Besides, you can also have a good command of the whole process or snapshot your favourite pictures from the preview window. More can be expected if you have a try.

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CSC folder data access AND roaming profiles issues (Vista with Server 2003, then 2008)

- by Alex Jones

I'm a junior sysadmin for an IT contractor that helps small, local government agencies, like little towns and the like. One of our clients, a public library with ~ 50 staff users, was recently migrated from Server 2003 Standard to Server 2008 R2 Standard in a very short timeframe; our senior employee, the only network engineer, had suddenly put in his two weeks notice, so management pushed him to do this project before quitting. A bit hasty on management's part? Perhaps. Could we do anything about that? Nope. Do I have to fix this all by myself? Pretty much. The network is set up like this: a) 50ish staff workstations, all running Vista Business SP2. All staff use MS Outlook, which uses RPC-over-HTTPS ("Outlook Anywhere") for cached Exchange access to an offsite location. b) One new (virtualized) Server 2008 R2 Standard instance, running atop a Server 2008 R2 host via Hyper-V. The VM is the domain's DC, and also the site's one and only file server. Let's call that VM "NEWBOX". c) One old physical Server 2003 Standard server, running the same roles. Let's call it "OLDBOX". It's still on the network and accessible, but it's been demoted, and its shares have been disabled. No data has been deleted. c) Gigabit Ethernet everywhere. The organization's only has one domain, and it did not change during the migration. d) Most users were set up for a combo of redirected folders + offline files, but some older employees who had been with the organization a long time are still on roaming profiles. To sum up: the servers in question handle user accounts and files, nothing else (eg, no TS, no mail, no IIS, etc.) I have two major problems I'm hoping you can help me with: 1) Even though all domain users have had their redirected folders moved to the new server, and loggin in to their workstations and testing confirms that the Documents/Music/Whatever folders point to the new paths, it appears some users (not laptops or anything either!) had been working offline from OLDBOX for a long time, and nobody realized it. Here's the ugly implication: a bunch of their data now lives only in their CSC folders, because they can't access the share on OLDBOX and sync with it finally. How do I get this data out of those CSC folders, and onto NEWBOX? 2) What's the best way to migrate roaming profile users to non-roaming ones, without losing vital data like documents, any lingering PSTs, etc? Things I've thought about trying: For problem 1: a) Reenable the documents share on OLDBOX, force an Offline Files sync for ALL domain users, then copy OLDBOX's share's data to the equivalent share on NEWBOX. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: How do I safely force a domain-wide Offline Files sync? Could I lose data by reenabling the share on OLDBOX and forcing the sync? Afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? b) Determine which users have unsynced changes to OLDBOX (again, how?), search each user's CSC folder domain-wide via workstation admin shares, and grab the unsynched data. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: How can I detect which users have unsynched changes with a script? How can I search each user's CSC folder, when the ownership and permissions set for CSC folders are so restrictive? Again, afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? c) Manually visit each workstation, copy the contents of the CSC folder, and manually copy that data onto NEWBOX. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: Again, how do I 'break into' the CSC folder and get to its data? As an experiment, I took one workstation's HD offsite, imaged it for safety, and then tried the following with one of our shop PCs, after attaching the drive: grant myself full control of the folder (failed), grant myself ownership of the folder (failed), run chkdsk on the whole drive to make sure nothing's messed up (all OK), try to take full control of the entire drive (failed), try to take ownership of the entire drive (failed) MS KB articles and Googling around suggests there's a utility called CSCCMD that's meant for this exact scenario...but it looks like it's available for XP, not Vista, no? Again, afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? For problem 2: a) Figure out which users are on roaming profiles, and where their profiles 'live' on the server. Create new folders for them in the redirected folders repository, migrate existing data, and disable the roaming. With this: Finding out who's roaming isn't hard. But what's the best way to disable the roaming itself? In AD Users and Computers, or on each user's workstation? Doing it centrally on the server seems more efficient; that said, all of the KB research I've done turns up articles on how to go from local to roaming, not the other way around, so I don't have good documentation on this. In closing: we have good backups of NEWBOX and OLDBOX, but not of the workstations themselves, so anything drastic on the client side would need imaging and testing for safety. Thanks for reading along this far! Hopefully you can help me dig us out of this mess.

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Asp.net mvc, view with multiple updatable parts - how?

- by DerDres

I have started doing asp.net mvc programming and like it more everyday. Most of the examples I have seen use separate views for viewing and editing details of a specific entity. E.g. - table of music albums linking to separate 'detail' and 'update' views [Action] | Title | Artist detail, update | Uuuh Baby | Barry White detail, update | Mr Mojo | Barry White With mvc how can I achieve a design where the R and the U (CRUD) are represented in a single view, and furthermore where the user can edit separate parts of the view, thus limiting the amount of data the user can edit before saving? Example mockup - editing album detials: I have achieved such a design with ajax calls, but Im curious how to do this without ajax. Parts of my own take on this can be seen below. I use a flag (enum EditCode) indicating which part of the view, if any, that has to render a form. Is such a design in accordance with the framework, could it be done more elegantly? AlbumController public class AlbumController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { var albumDetails = from ManageVM in state.AlbumState.ToList() select ManageVM.Value.Detail; return View(albumDetails); } public ActionResult Manage(int albumId, EditCode editCode) { (state.AlbumState[albumId] as ManageVM).EditCode = (EditCode)editCode; ViewData["albumId"] = albumId; return View(state.AlbumState[albumId]); } [HttpGet] public ActionResult Edit(int albumId, EditCode editCode) { return RedirectToAction("Manage", new { albumId = albumId, editCode = editCode }); } // edit album details [HttpPost] public ActionResult EditDetail(int albumId, Detail details) { (state.AlbumState[albumId] as ManageVM).Detail = details; return RedirectToAction("Manage", new { albumId = albumId, editCode = EditCode.NoEdit });// zero being standard } // edit album thought [HttpPost] public ActionResult EditThoughts(int albumId, List<Thought> thoughts) { (state.AlbumState[albumId] as ManageVM).Thoughts = thoughts; return RedirectToAction("Manage", new { albumId = albumId, editCode = EditCode.NoEdit });// zero being standard } Flag - EditCode public enum EditCode { NoEdit, Details, Genres, Thoughts } Mangae view <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<MvcApplication1.Controllers.ManageVM>" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Manage </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>Manage</h2> <% if(Model.EditCode == MvcApplication1.Controllers.EditCode.Details) {%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_EditDetails", Model.Detail); %> <% }else{%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_ShowDetails", Model.Detail); %> <% } %> <hr /> <% if(Model.EditCode == MvcApplication1.Controllers.EditCode.Thoughts) {%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_EditThoughts", Model.Thoughts); %> <% }else{%> <% Html.RenderPartial("_ShowThoughts", Model.Thoughts); %> <% } %>

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search a collection for a specific keyword

- by icelated

What i want to do is search a hashset with a keyword.. I have 3 classes... main() Library Item(CD, DVD,Book classes) In library i am trying to do my search of the items in the hashsets.. In Item class is where i have the getKeywords function.. here is the Items class... import java.io.PrintStream; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.*; class Item { private String title; private String [] keywords; public String toString() { String line1 = "title: " + title + "\n" + "keywords: " + Arrays.toString(keywords); return line1; } public void print() { System.out.println(toString()); } public Item() { } public Item(String theTitle, String... theKeyword) { this.title = theTitle; this.keywords = theKeyword; } public String getTitle() { return title; } public String [] getKeywords() { return keywords; } } class CD extends Item { private String artist; private String [] members; // private String [] keywords; private int number; public CD(String theTitle, String theBand, int Snumber, String... keywords) { super(theTitle, keywords); this.artist = theBand; this.number = Snumber; // this.keywords = keywords; } public void addband(String... member) { this.members = member; } public String getArtist() { return artist; } public String [] getMembers() { return members; } // public String [] getKeywords() // { // return keywords; //} public String toString() { return "-Music-" + "\n" + "band: " + artist + "\n" + "# songs: " + number + "\n" + "members: " + Arrays.toString(members) + "\n" + super.toString() // + "keywords: " + Arrays.toString(keywords) + "\n" + "\n" ; } public void print() { System.out.println(toString()); } } class DVD extends Item { private String director; private String [] cast; private int scenes; // private String [] keywords; public DVD(String theTitle, String theDirector, int nScenes, String... keywords) { super(theTitle, keywords); this.director = theDirector; this.scenes = nScenes; // this.keywords = keywords; } public void addmoviecast(String... members) { this.cast = members; } public String [] getCast() { return cast; } public String getDirector() { return director; } // public String [] getKeywords() // { // return keywords; // } public String toString() { return "-Movie-" + "\n" + "director: " + director + "\n" + "# scenes: " + scenes + "\n" + "cast: " + Arrays.toString(cast) + "\n" + super.toString() // + "keywords: " + Arrays.toString(keywords) + "\n" + "\n" ; } public void print() { System.out.println(toString()); } } class Book extends Item { private String author; private int pages; public Book(String theTitle, String theAuthor, int nPages, String... keywords) { super(theTitle, keywords); this.author = theAuthor; this.pages = nPages; // this.keywords = keywords; } public String getAuthor() { return author; } //public String [] getKeywords() // { // return keywords; //} public void print() { System.out.println(toString()); } public String toString() { return "-Book-" + "\n" + "Author: " + author + "\n" + "# pages " + pages + "\n" + super.toString() // + "keywords: " + Arrays.toString(keywords) + "\n" + "\n" ; } } I hope i didnt confuse you? I need help with the itemsForKeyword(String keyword) function.. the first keyword being passed in is "science fiction" and i want to search the keywords in the sets and return the matches.. What am i doing so wrong? Thank you

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Android: Use XML Layout for List Cell rather than Java Code Layout (Widgets)

- by Stephen Finucane

Hi, I'm in the process of making a music app and I'm currently working on the library functionality. I'm having some problems, however, in working with a list view (In particular, the cells). I'm trying to move from a simple textview layout in each cell that's created within java to one that uses an XML file for layout (Hence keeping the Java file mostly semantic) This is my original code for the cell layout: public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { String id = null; TextView tv = new TextView(mContext.getApplicationContext()); if (convertView == null) { music_column_index = musiccursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Audio.Media.TITLE); musiccursor.moveToPosition(position); id = musiccursor.getString(music_column_index); music_column_index = musiccursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Audio.Media.DISPLAY_NAME); musiccursor.moveToPosition(position); id += "\n" + musiccursor.getString(music_column_index); music_column_index = musiccursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Audio.Albums.ALBUM); musiccursor.moveToPosition(position); id += "\n" + musiccursor.getString(music_column_index); tv.setText(id); } else tv = (TextView) convertView; return tv; } And my new version: public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { View cellLayout = findViewById(R.id.albums_list_cell); ImageView album_art = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.album_cover); TextView album_title = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.album_title); TextView artist_title = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.artist_title); if (convertView == null) { music_column_index = musiccursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Audio.Albums.ALBUM); musiccursor.moveToPosition(position); album_title.setText(musiccursor.getString(music_column_index)); //music_column_index = musiccursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Audio.Media.DISPLAY_NAME); //musiccursor.moveToPosition(position); music_column_index = musiccursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Audio.Media.TITLE); musiccursor.moveToPosition(position); artist_title.setText(musiccursor.getString(music_column_index)); } else{ cellLayout = (TextView) convertView; } return cellLayout; } The initialisation (done in the on create file): musiclist = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.PhoneMusicList); musiclist.setAdapter(new MusicAdapter(this)); musiclist.setOnItemClickListener(musicgridlistener); And the respective XML files: (main) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent"> <ListView android:id="@+id/PhoneMusicList" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" /> <TextView android:id="@android:id/empty" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="0dip" android:layout_weight="1.0" android:text="@string/no_list_data" /> </LinearLayout> (albums_list_cell) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@+id/albums_list_cell" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <ImageView android:id="@+id/album_cover" android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" android:layout_alignParentTop="true" android:layout_width="50dip" android:layout_height="50dip" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/album_title" android:layout_toRightOf="@+id/album_cover" android:layout_alignParentTop="true" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/artist_title" android:layout_toRightOf="@+id/album_cover" android:layout_below="@+id/album_title" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="15dip" /> </RelativeLayout> In theory (based on the tiny bit of Android I've done so far) this should work..it doesn't though. Logcat gives me a null pointer exception at line 96 of the faulty code, which is the album_title.setText line. It could be a problem with my casting but Google tells me this is ok :D Thanks for any help and let me know if you need more info!

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Call an member function implementing the {{#linkTo ...}} helper from javascript code

- by gonvaled

I am trying to replace this navigation menu: <nav> {{#linkTo "nodes" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-cloud icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.nodes}} {{grayOut "(temporal)"}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "services" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-phone icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.services}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "agents" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-headphones icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.agents}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "extensions" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-random icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.extensions}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "voiceMenus" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-sitemap icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.voicemenus}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "queues" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-tasks icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.queues}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "contacts" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-user icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.contacts}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "accounts" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-building icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.accounts}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "locators" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-phone-sign icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.locators}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "phonelocations" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-globe icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.phonelocations}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "billing" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-euro icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.billing}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "profile" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-cogs icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.profile}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "audio" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-music icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.audio}}{{/linkTo}} {{#linkTo "editor" }}<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-puzzle-piece icon-2x"></i>  {{t generic.node_editor}}{{/linkTo}} </nav> With a more dynamic version. What I am trying to do is to reproduce the html inside Ember.View.render, but I would like to reuse as much Ember functionality as possible. Specifically, I would like to reuse the {{#linkTo ...}} helper, with two goals: Reuse existing html rendering implemented in the {{#linkTo ...}} helper Get the same routing support that using the {{#linkTo ...}} in a template provides. How can I call this helper from within javascript code? This is my first (incomplete) attempt. The template: {{view SettingsApp.NavigationView}} And the view: var trans = Ember.I18n.t; var MAIN_MENU = [ { 'linkTo' : 'nodes', 'i-class' : 'icon-cloud', 'txt' : trans('generic.nodes') }, { 'linkTo' : 'services', 'i-class' : 'icon-phone', 'txt' : trans('generic.services') }, ]; function getNavIcon (data) { var linkTo = data.linkTo, i_class = data['i-class'], txt = data.txt; var html = '<i class="icon-fixed-width icon-2x ' + i_class + '"></i>  ' + txt; return html; } SettingsApp.NavigationView = Ember.View.extend({ menu : MAIN_MENU, render: function(buffer) { for (var i=0, l=this.menu.length; i<l; i++) { var data = this.menu[i]; // TODO: call the ember function implementing the {{#linkTo ...}} helper buffer.push(getNavIcon(data)); } return buffer; } });

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ListBoxFor not populating with selected items

- by user576838

I've see this question asked a couple of other times, and I followed this after I tried things on my own with the MS music store demo to no avail, but I still can't get this to work. I've also noticed when I look at my MultiSelectList object in the viewmodel, it has the correct items in the selected items property, but if I expand the results view, it doesn't have any listboxitem with the selected value. What am I missing here? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! Thanks in advance. model: public class Article { public int ArticleID { get; set; } public DateTime? DatePurchased { get; set; } public DateTime? LastWorn { get; set; } public string ThumbnailImg { get; set; } public string LargeImg { get; set; } public virtual List<Outfit> Outfits { get; set; } public virtual List<Tag> Tags { get; set; } } viewmodel: public class ArticleViewModel { public int ArticleID { get; set; } public List<Tag> Tags { get; set; } public MultiSelectList mslTags { get; set; } public virtual Article Article { get; set; } public ArticleViewModel(int ArticleID) { using (ctContext db = new ctContext()) { this.Article = db.Articles.Find(ArticleID); this.Tags = db.Tags.ToList(); this.mslTags = new MultiSelectList(this.Tags, "TagID", "Name", this.Article.Tags); } } } controller: public ActionResult Index() { ArticleIndexViewModel vm = new ArticleIndexViewModel(db); return View(vm); } view: @model ClosetTracker.ArticleViewModel @using (Html.BeginForm()) { <img id="bigImg" src="@Model.Article.ThumbnailImg" alt="img" /> @Html.HiddenFor(m => m.ArticleID); @Html.LabelFor(m => m.Article.Tags) @* @Html.ListBoxFor(m => m.Article.Tags, Model.Tags.Select(t => new SelectListItem { Text = t.Name, Value = t.TagID.ToString() }), new { Multiple = "multiple" }) *@ @Html.ListBoxFor(m => m.Article.Tags, Model.mslTags); @Html.LabelFor(m => m.Article.LastWorn) @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.Article.LastWorn, new { @class = "datepicker" }) @Html.LabelFor(m => m.Article.DatePurchased) @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.Article.DatePurchased, new { @class = "datepicker" }) <p> <input type="submit" value="Save" /> </p> } EDITED Ok, I changed around the constructor of the MultiSelectList to have a list of TagID in the selected value arg instead of a list of Tag objects. This shows the correct tags as selected in the results view when I watch the mslTags object in debug mode. However, it still isn't rendering correctly to the page. public class ArticleViewModel { public int ArticleID { get; set; } public List<Tag> Tags { get; set; } public MultiSelectList mslTags { get; set; } public virtual Article Article { get; set; } public ArticleViewModel(int ArticleID) { using (ctContext db = new ctContext()) { this.Article = db.Articles.Find(ArticleID); this.Tags = db.Tags.ToList(); this.mslTags = new MultiSelectList(this.Tags, "TagID", "Name", this.Article.Tags.Select(t => t.TagID).ToList()); } } }

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Jquery Close/Open Multiple Toggles

- by Pedro

Hi, I have the toggle in my menu Working successfully for the two links that I have within it. Because the top link once toggled covers the other link, there is no problem. But since the link beneath it leaves the top link exposed, a user could click that and now have two toggled items open and pretty much stacked on top of each other. Is there a way for me to check if the other toggled item is open and if so, close it? Thanks! <div class="parents-toggle"> <a href="#" id="customize-toggle">Customize</a><br/> <div class="menu-toggle hidden" id="customize-menu"> <div class="menu-toggle-one"> <h3>Background</h3> <ul> <li><a href="#">Dark Wood</a></li> <li><a href="#">Wallpaper</a></li> <li><a href="#">Bricks</a></li> <li><a href="#">Planks</a></li> <li><a href="#">Default</a></li> </ul> </div> <div class="menu-toggle-two"> <h3>Layout</h3> <ul> <li><a href="#">Grid</a></li> <li><a href="#">List</a></li> <li><a href="#">Full</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div> <a href="/submit/">Submit video</a><br/> <div class="parents-toggle"> <a href="#" id="channels-toggle">Channels</a> <div class="menu-toggle hidden" id="channels-menu"> <div class="menu-toggle-one"> <ul> <li><a href="#">Automotive</a></li> <li><a href="#">Comedy</a></li> <li><a href="#">Movies</a></li> <li><a href="#">Weather</a></li> </ul> </div> <div class="menu-toggle-two"> <ul> <li><a href="#">Business</a></li> <li><a href="#">Commercials</a></li> <li><a href="#">Music</a></li> <li><a href="#">Technology</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div> </div> <script> $("#customize-toggle").click(function () { $("#customize-menu").toggle(); }); $("#channels-toggle").click(function () { $("#channels-menu").toggle(); }); </script>

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How to play audio in Java Application

- by user577829

I'm making a java application and I need to play audio. I'm playing mainly small sound files of my cannon firing (its a cannon shooting game) and the projectiles exploding, though I plan on having looping background music. I have found two different methods to accomplish this, but both don't work how I want. The first method is literally a method: public void playSoundFile(File file) {//http://java.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/java-l/sound-in-an-application-90681 try { //get an AudioInputStream AudioInputStream ais = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(file); //get the AudioFormat for the AudioInputStream AudioFormat audioformat = ais.getFormat(); System.out.println("Format: " + audioformat.toString()); System.out.println("Encoding: " + audioformat.getEncoding()); System.out.println("SampleRate:" + audioformat.getSampleRate()); System.out.println("SampleSizeInBits: " + audioformat.getSampleSizeInBits()); System.out.println("Channels: " + audioformat.getChannels()); System.out.println("FrameSize: " + audioformat.getFrameSize()); System.out.println("FrameRate: " + audioformat.getFrameRate()); System.out.println("BigEndian: " + audioformat.isBigEndian()); //ULAW format to PCM format conversion if ((audioformat.getEncoding() == AudioFormat.Encoding.ULAW) || (audioformat.getEncoding() == AudioFormat.Encoding.ALAW)) { AudioFormat newformat = new AudioFormat(AudioFormat.Encoding.PCM_SIGNED, audioformat.getSampleRate(), audioformat.getSampleSizeInBits() * 2, audioformat.getChannels(), audioformat.getFrameSize() * 2, audioformat.getFrameRate(), true); ais = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(newformat, ais); audioformat = newformat; } //checking for a supported output line DataLine.Info datalineinfo = new DataLine.Info(SourceDataLine.class, audioformat); if (!AudioSystem.isLineSupported(datalineinfo)) { //System.out.println("Line matching " + datalineinfo + " is not supported."); } else { //System.out.println("Line matching " + datalineinfo + " is supported."); //opening the sound output line SourceDataLine sourcedataline = (SourceDataLine) AudioSystem.getLine(datalineinfo); sourcedataline.open(audioformat); sourcedataline.start(); //Copy data from the input stream to the output data line int framesizeinbytes = audioformat.getFrameSize(); int bufferlengthinframes = sourcedataline.getBufferSize() / 8; int bufferlengthinbytes = bufferlengthinframes * framesizeinbytes; byte[] sounddata = new byte[bufferlengthinbytes]; int numberofbytesread = 0; while ((numberofbytesread = ais.read(sounddata)) != -1) { int numberofbytesremaining = numberofbytesread; sourcedataline.write(sounddata, 0, numberofbytesread); } } } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } The problem with this is that my entire program stops until the sound file is finished, or at least nearly finished. The second method is this: File file = new File("Launch1.wav"); AudioClip clip; try { clip = JApplet.newAudioClip(file.toURL()); clip.play(); } catch (Exception e) { e.getMessage(); } The problem I have here is that every time the sound file ends early or doesn't play at all depending on where I place the code. Is their any way to play sound without the above mentioned problems? Am I doing something wrong? Any help is greatly appreciated.

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What version-control system is most trivial to set up and use for toy projects?

- by Norman Ramsey

I teach the third required intro course in a CS department. One of my homework assignments asks students to speed up code they have written for a previous assignment. Factor-of-ten speedups are routine; factors of 100 or 1000 are not unheard of. (For a factor of 1000 speedup you have to have made rookie mistakes with malloc().) Programs are improved by a sequence is small changes. I ask students to record and describe each change and the resulting improvement. While you're improving a program it is also possible to break it. Wouldn't it be nice to back out? You can see where I'm going with this: my students would benefit enormously from version control. But there are some caveats: Our computing environment is locked down. Anything that depends on a central repository is suspect. Our students are incredibly overloaded. Not just classes but jobs, sports, music, you name it. For them to use a new tool it has to be incredibly easy and have obvious benefits. Our students do most work in pairs. Getting bits back and forth between accounts is problematic. Could this problem also be solved by distributed version control? Complexity is the enemy. I know setting up a CVS repository is too baffling---I myself still have trouble because I only do it once a year. I'm told SVN is even harder. Here are my comments on existing systems: I think central version control (CVS or SVN) is ruled out because our students don't have the administrative privileges needed to make a repository that they can share with one other student. (We are stuck with Unix file permissions.) Also, setup on CVS or SVN is too hard. darcs is way easy to set up, but it's not obvious how you share things. darcs send (to send patches by email) seems promising but it's not clear how to set it up. The introductory documentation for git is not for beginners. Like CVS setup, it's something I myself have trouble with. I'm soliciting suggestions for what source-control to use with beginning students. I suspect we can find resources to put a thin veneer over an existing system and to simplify existing documentation. We probably don't have resources to write new documentation. So, what's really easy to setup, commit, revert, and share changes with a partner but does not have to be easy to merge or to work at scale? A key constraint is that programming pairs have to be able to share work with each other and only each other, and pairs change every week. Our infrastructure is Linux, Solaris, and Windows with a netapp filer. I doubt my IT staff wants to create a Unix group for each pair of students. Is there an easier solution I've overlooked? (Thanks for the accepted answer, which beats the others on account of its excellent reference to Git Magic as well as the helpful comments.)

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Using JavaScript, how do I write the same text to multiple HTML elements, or how do I write text to all HTML elements of the same class?

- by myfavoritenoisemaker

I am writing this program to take a root music note and populate tables with various scales from that root note. So, many of the tables cells will have the exact same value in them. I realize I can call my "useScale" function for every single that I need to write text to but since there will be repeats, it seemed like there should be a way to run my function once and apply the results to multiple but it did not work to use the document.getElementsByClassName("").innerHTML, I had been using "ById" which worked fine but each ID must be unique so, I can't write to multiple elements. Here's my code, I'd love some suggestions. many thanks Root Note <input type="text" name="defineRootNote" id="rootNoteCapture" size="2"/> <button onclick="findScale()">Submit</button> <table id="majorTriad"> <th>Major Triad</th> <tr><td>1st</td><td class="root"> </td></tr> <tr><td>3rd</td><td class="3rd"> </td></tr> <tr><td>5th</td><td class="5th"> </td></tr> </table> <table id="minorTriad"> <th>Minor Triad</th> <tr><td>1st</td><td class="root"> </td></tr> <tr><td>3 Flat</td><td class="3Flat"> </td></tr> <tr><td>5th</td><td class="5th"> </td></tr> </table> <script type="text/javascript"> function findScale(rootNote){ var rootNote = document.getElementById("rootNoteCapture").value; rootNote = rootNote.toUpperCase(); var scaleCheck = ["A", "A#", "AB", "B", "BB", "C", "C#", "D", "D#", "DB", "E", "EB", "F", "F#", "G", "G#", "GB"]; if (scaleCheck.indexOf(rootNote) == -1) { document.getElementById("root").innerHTML = "Invalid Entry"; } else { switch(rootNote){ case "AB": rootNote = "G#"; break; case "BB": rootNote = "A#"; break; case "DB": rootNote = "C#"; break; case "EB": rootNote = "D#"; break; case "GB": rootNote = "F#"; break; rootNote = rootNote; } document.getElementsByClassName("root").innerHTML = rootNote; document.getElementsByClassName("3rd").innerHTML = useScale(rootNote, 4); document.getElementsByClassName("5th").innerHTML = useScale(rootNote, 7); document.getElementsByClassName("3Flat").innerHTML = useScale(rootNote, 3); } } function useScale(startPoint, offset){ var scale = ["A", "A#", "B", "C", "C#", "D", "D#", "E", "F", "F#", "G", "G#"]; var returnNote = null; var scalePoint = scale.indexOf(startPoint); for (var i = 0; i < offset; ){ i = i + 1; //console.log(i); //console.log(scalePoint); scalePoint ++; if (scalePoint > 11) {scalePoint = 0;} } returnNote = scale[scalePoint]; return returnNote; } </script>

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Dynamic JSON Parsing in .NET with JsonValue

- by Rick Strahl

So System.Json has been around for a while in Silverlight, but it's relatively new for the desktop .NET framework and now moving into the lime-light with the pending release of ASP.NET Web API which is bringing a ton of attention to server side JSON usage. The JsonValue, JsonObject and JsonArray objects are going to be pretty useful for Web API applications as they allow you dynamically create and parse JSON values without explicit .NET types to serialize from or into. But even more so I think JsonValue et al. are going to be very useful when consuming JSON APIs from various services. Yes I know C# is strongly typed, why in the world would you want to use dynamic values? So many times I've needed to retrieve a small morsel of information from a large service JSON response and rather than having to map the entire type structure of what that service returns, JsonValue actually allows me to cherry pick and only work with the values I'm interested in, without having to explicitly create everything up front. With JavaScriptSerializer or DataContractJsonSerializer you always need to have a strong type to de-serialize JSON data into. Wouldn't it be nice if no explicit type was required and you could just parse the JSON directly using a very easy to use object syntax? That's exactly what JsonValue, JsonObject and JsonArray accomplish using a JSON parser and some sweet use of dynamic sauce to make it easy to access in code. Creating JSON on the fly with JsonValue Let's start with creating JSON on the fly. It's super easy to create a dynamic object structure. JsonValue uses the dynamic keyword extensively to make it intuitive to create object structures and turn them into JSON via dynamic object syntax. Here's an example of creating a music album structure with child songs using JsonValue:[TestMethod] public void JsonValueOutputTest() { // strong type instance var jsonObject = new JsonObject(); // dynamic expando instance you can add properties to dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; album.Artist = "AC/DC"; album.YearReleased = 1977; album.Songs = new JsonArray() as dynamic; dynamic song = new JsonObject(); song.SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; song.SongLength = "4:11"; album.Songs.Add(song); song = new JsonObject(); song.SongName = "Love at First Feel"; song.SongLength = "3:10"; album.Songs.Add(song); Console.WriteLine(album.ToString()); } This produces proper JSON just as you would expect: {"AlbumName":"Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap","Artist":"AC\/DC","YearReleased":1977,"Songs":[{"SongName":"Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap","SongLength":"4:11"},{"SongName":"Love at First Feel","SongLength":"3:10"}]} The important thing about this code is that there's no explicitly type that is used for holding the values to serialize to JSON. I am essentially creating this value structure on the fly by adding properties and then serialize it to JSON. This means this code can be entirely driven at runtime without compile time restraints of structure for the JSON output. Here I use JsonObject() to create a new object and immediately cast it to dynamic. JsonObject() is kind of similar in behavior to ExpandoObject in that it allows you to add properties by simply assigning to them. Internally, JsonValue/JsonObject these values are stored in pseudo collections of key value pairs that are exposed as properties through the DynamicObject functionality in .NET. The syntax gets a little tedious only if you need to create child objects or arrays that have to be explicitly defined first. Other than that the syntax looks like normal object access sytnax. Always remember though these values are dynamic - which means no Intellisense and no compiler type checking. It's up to you to ensure that the values you create are accessed consistently and without typos in your code. Note that you can also access the JsonValue instance directly and get access to the underlying type. This means you can assign properties by string, which can be useful for fully data driven JSON generation from other structures. Below you can see both styles of access next to each other:// strong type instance var jsonObject = new JsonObject(); // you can explicitly add values here jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // expando style instance you can just 'use' properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; JsonValue internally stores properties keys and values in collections and you can iterate over them at runtime. You can also manipulate the collections if you need to to get the object structure to look exactly like you want. Again, if you've used ExpandoObject before JsonObject/Value are very similar in the behavior of the structure. Reading JSON strings into JsonValue The JsonValue structure supports importing JSON via the Parse() and Load() methods which can read JSON data from a string or various streams respectively. Essentially JsonValue includes the core JSON parsing to turn a JSON string into a collection of JsonValue objects that can be then referenced using familiar dynamic object syntax. Here's a simple example:[TestMethod] public void JsonValueParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"{""Name"":""Rick"",""Company"":""West Wind"",""Entered"":""2012-03-16T00:03:33.245-10:00""}"; dynamic json = JsonValue.Parse(jsonString); // values require casting string name = json.Name; string company = json.Company; DateTime entered = json.Entered; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(company, "West Wind"); } The JSON string represents an object with three properties which is parsed into a JsonValue object and cast to dynamic. Once cast to dynamic I can then go ahead and access the object using familiar object syntax. Note that the actual values - json.Name, json.Company, json.Entered - are actually of type JsonPrimitive and I have to assign them to their appropriate types first before I can do type comparisons. The dynamic properties will automatically cast to the right type expected as long as the compiler can resolve the type of the assignment or usage. The AreEqual() method oesn't as it expects two object instances and comparing json.Company to "West Wind" is comparing two different types (JsonPrimitive to String) which fails. So the intermediary assignment is required to make the test pass. The JSON structure can be much more complex than this simple example. Here's another example of an array of albums serialized to JSON and then parsed through with JsonValue():[TestMethod] public void JsonArrayParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"[ { ""Id"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""AlbumName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""Artist"": ""AC/DC"", ""YearReleased"": 1977, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kTaH-uZBL._AA115_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008BXJ4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=westwindtechn-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00008BXJ4"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""SongLength"": ""4:11"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Love at First Feel"", ""SongLength"": ""3:10"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Big Balls"", ""SongLength"": ""2:38"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""67280fb8"", ""AlbumName"": ""Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace"", ""Artist"": ""Foo Fighters"", ""YearReleased"": 2007, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41mtlesQPVL._SL500_AA280_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UFAURI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=westwindtechn-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000UFAURI"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""67280fb8"", ""SongName"": ""The Pretender"", ""SongLength"": ""4:29"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""67280fb8"", ""SongName"": ""Let it Die"", ""SongLength"": ""4:05"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""67280fb8"", ""SongName"": ""Erase/Replay"", ""SongLength"": ""4:13"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""7b919432"", ""AlbumName"": ""End of the Silence"", ""Artist"": ""Henry Rollins Band"", ""YearReleased"": 1992, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2800521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FO3rb1tuL._SL160_AA160_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/End-Silence-Rollins-Band/dp/B0000040OX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1302232195&sr=8-5"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Low Self Opinion"", ""SongLength"": ""5:24"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Grip"", ""SongLength"": ""4:51"" } ] } ]"; dynamic albums = JsonValue.Parse(jsonString); foreach (dynamic album in albums) { Console.WriteLine(album.AlbumName + " (" + album.YearReleased.ToString() + ")"); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { Console.WriteLine("\t" + song.SongName ); } } Console.WriteLine(albums[0].AlbumName); Console.WriteLine(albums[0].Songs[1].SongName);} It's pretty sweet how easy it becomes to parse even complex JSON and then just run through the object using object syntax, yet without an explicit type in the mix. In fact it looks and feels a lot like if you were using JavaScript to parse through this data, doesn't it? And that's the point…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET Web Api JSON Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Remotely Schedule and Stream Recorded TV in Windows 7 Media Center

- by DigitalGeekery

Have you ever been away from home and suddenly realized you forgot to record your favorite program? Now Windows 7 Media Center, users can schedule recordings remotely from their phones or mobile devices with Remote Potato. How it Works Remote Potato installs server software on the host computer running Windows 7 Media Center. Once the software is installed, we’ll need to do some port forwarding on the router and setup an optional dynamic DNS address. When setup is completed, we will access the application through a web based interface. Silverlight is required for Streaming recorded TV, but scheduling recordings can be done through an HTML interface. Installing Remote Potato Download and install Remote Potato on the Media Center PC. (See download link below) If you plan to stream any Recorded TV, you’ll also want to install the streaming pack located on the same page. It isn’t required to stream all shows, only shows that require the AC3 audio codec. Click Yes to allow Remote Potato to add rules to the Windows Firewall for remote access. You’ll likely need to accept a few UAC prompts. When notified that the rules were added, click OK. Remote Potato will then prompt you to allow administrator privileges to reserve a URL for it’s web server. Click Yes. Remote Potato server will start. Click on the configuration button at the right to to reveal the settings tabs. One the General tab, you’ll have the option to run Remote Potato on startup and minimized in the System Tray. If you’re running Media Center on a dedicated HTPC, you’ll probably want to enable both startup options. Forwarding Ports on Your Router You’ll need to forward a couple ports on your router. By default, these will be ports 9080 and 9081. In this example we’re using a Linksys WRT54GL router, however, the steps for port forwarding will vary from router to router. On the Linksys configuration page, click on the Applications & Gaming Tab, and then the Port Range Forward tab. Under Application, type in a name of your choosing. In both the Start and End boxes, type the port number 9080. Enter the local IP address of your Media Center computer in the IP address column. Click the check box under Enable. Repeat the process on the next line, but this time use port 9081. When finished, click the Save Settings button. Note: It’s highly recommended that you configure the home computer running Media Center & Remote Potato with a static IP address. Find your IP Address You’ll need to find the IP address assigned to your router from your ISP. There are many ways to do this but a quick and easy way is to visit a site like checkip.dyndns.org (link available below) The current external IP address of your router will be displayed in the browser. Dynamic DNS This is an optional step, but it’s highly recommended. Many routers, such as the Linksys WRT54GL we are using, support Dynamic DNS (DDNS). What Dynamic DNS allows you to do is affiliate your home router’s external IP address to a domain name. Every time your home router is assigned a a new IP address by your ISP, the domain name is updated to point to your new IP address. Remote Potato’s user interface is accessed over the Internet is by connecting to your router’s IP address followed by a colon and the port number. (Ex: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:9080) Instead of constantly having to look up and remember an IP address, you can use DDNS along with a 3rd party provider like DynDNS.com, to sign up for a free domain name and configure it to be updated each time your router is assigned a new IP address. Go to the DynDNS.com website (See link at the end of the article) and sign up for a free Domain name. You’ll need to register and confirm by email. Once you’ve signed in and selected your domain name click Activate Services. You’ll get a confirmation message that your domain name has been activated. On the Linksys WRT54GL click on the Setup tab an then DDNS. Select DynDNS.org, or TZO.com if you prefer to use their service, from the drop down list. With DynDNS, you’ll need to fill in your username and password you signed up with at the DynDNS website and the hostname you chose. Note: You can connect over your local network with the IP Address of the computer running Remote Potato followed by a colon and the port number. Ex: 192.168.1.2:9080 Logging in Remote Potato and Recording a Show Once you connect, you’ll see the start page. To view the TV listings, click on TV Guide. You’ll then see your guide listings. There are a few ways to navigate the listings. At the top left, you can click on any of the preset time buttons to jump to the listings at that time of the day. Click on the arrows to the right and left of the day and date at the top center to proceed to the previous or next day. Or, jump to a specific day with the date and date buttons at the top right. To setup a recording, click on a program. You can choose to record the individual show or the entire series by clicking on Record Show or Record Series. Remote Potato on Mobile Devices Perhaps the coolest feature of Remote Potato is the ability to schedule recording from your phone or mobile device. Note: For any devices or computers without Silverlight, you will be prompted to view the HTML page. Select Browse Listings. Select your program to record. In the Program Details, select Record Show to record the single episode or Record Series to record all instances of the series. You will then see a red dot on the program listing to indicate that the show is scheduled for recording. Streaming Recorded TV Click on Recorded TV from the home screen to access your previously recorded TV programs. Click on the selection you wish to stream. Click on Play. If you receive this error message, you’ll need to install the streaming pack for Remote Potato. This is found on the same download page as installation files. (See link below) The Begin from slider allows you to start playback from the start (by default) or a different time of the program by moving the slider. The Quality (bitrate) setting allows you to choose the quality of the playback. We found the video quality on the Normal setting to be pretty lousy, and Low was just pointless. High was the best overall viewing experience as it provided smooth quality video playback. We experienced significant stuttering during playback using the Ultra High setting. Click Start when you are ready to begin. When playback begins you’ll see a slider at the top right. Move the slider left or right to increase or decrease the size of the video. There’s also a button to switch to full screen. Media Center users who travel frequently or are always on the go will likely find Remote Potato to be a blessing. Since being released earlier this year, updates for Remote Potato have come fast and furious. The latest beta release includes support for streaming music and photos. If you like those nice network TV logos, check out our article on adding TV channel logos to Windows Media Center. Downloads and Links Download Remote Potato and Streaming Pack Find your IP address Sign Up for a Domain Name at DynDNS.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Schedule Updates for Windows Media CenterUsing Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Add a Sleep Timer to Windows 7 Media CenterStartup Customizations for Media Center in Windows 7Enable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media Player 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos

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Solution: Testing Web Services with MSTest on Team Build

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Guess what. About 20 minutes after I fixed the build, Allan broke it again! Update: 4th March 2010 – After having huge problems getting this working I read Billy Wang’s post which showed me the light. The problem here is that even though the test passes locally it will not during an Automated Build. When you send your tests to the build server it does not understand that you want to spin up the web site and run tests against that! When you run the test in Visual Studio it spins up the web site anyway, but would you expect your test to pass if you told the website not to spin up? Of course not. So, when you send the code to the build server you need to tell it what to spin up. First, the best way to get the parameters you need is to right click on the method you want to test and select “Create Unit Test”. This will detect wither you are running in IIS or ASP.NET Development Server or None, and create the relevant tags. Figure: Right clicking on “SaveDefaultProjectFile” will produce a context menu with “Create Unit tests…” on it. If you use this option it will AutoDetect most of the Attributes that are required. /// <summary> ///A test for SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.Services.IProfileService.SaveDefaultProjectFile ///</summary> // TODO: Ensure that the UrlToTest attribute specifies a URL to an ASP.NET page (for example, // http://.../Default.aspx). This is necessary for the unit test to be executed on the web server, // whether you are testing a page, web service, or a WCF service. [TestMethod()] [HostType("ASP.NET")] [AspNetDevelopmentServerHost("D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web", "/")] [UrlToTest("http://localhost:3100/")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] public void SaveDefaultProjectFileTest() { IProfileService target = new ProfileService(); // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value string strComputerName = string.Empty; // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value bool expected = false; // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value bool actual; actual = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile(strComputerName); Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual); Assert.Inconclusive("Verify the correctness of this test method."); } Figure: Auto created code that shows the attributes required to run correctly in IIS or in this case ASP.NET Development Server If you are a purist and don’t like creating unit tests like this then you just need to add the three attributes manually. HostType – This attribute specified what host to use. Its an extensibility point, so you could write your own. Or you could just use “ASP.NET”. UrlToTest – This specifies the start URL. For most tests it does not matter which page you call, as long as it is a valid page otherwise your test may not run on the server, but may pass anyway. AspNetDevelopmentServerHost – This is a nasty one, it is only used if you are using ASP.NET Development Host and is unnecessary if you are using IIS. This sets the host settings and the first value MUST be the physical path to the root of your web application. OK, so all that was rubbish and I could not get anything working using the MSDN documentation. Google provided very little help until I ran into Billy Wang’s post and I heard that heavenly music that all developers hear when understanding dawns that what they have been doing up until now is just plain stupid. I am sure that the above will work when I am doing Web Unit Tests, but there is a much easier way when doing web services. You need to add the AspNetDevelopmentServer attribute to your code. This will tell MSTest to spin up an ASP.NET Development server to host the service. Specify the path to the web application you want to use. [AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", "D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] [TestMethod] public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True() { ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient(); bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav"); Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue); } Figure: This AspNetDevelopmentServer will make sure that the specified web application is launched. Now we can run the test and have it pass, but if the dynamically assigned ASP.NET Development server port changes what happens to the details in your app.config that was generated when creating a reference to the web service? Well, it would be wrong and the test would fail. This is where Billy’s helper method comes in. Once you have created an instance of your service call, and it has loaded the config, but before you make any calls to it you need to go in and dynamically set the Endpoint address to the same address as your dynamically hosted Web Application. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; using System.Reflection; using System.ServiceModel.Description; using System.ServiceModel; namespace SSW.SQLDeploy.Test { class WcfWebServiceHelper { public static bool TryUrlRedirection(object client, TestContext context, string identifier) { bool result = true; try { PropertyInfo property = client.GetType().GetProperty("Endpoint"); string webServer = context.Properties[string.Format("AspNetDevelopmentServer.{0}", identifier)].ToString(); Uri webServerUri = new Uri(webServer); ServiceEndpoint endpoint = (ServiceEndpoint)property.GetValue(client, null); EndpointAddressBuilder builder = new EndpointAddressBuilder(endpoint.Address); builder.Uri = new Uri(endpoint.Address.Uri.OriginalString.Replace(endpoint.Address.Uri.Authority, webServerUri.Authority)); endpoint.Address = builder.ToEndpointAddress(); } catch (Exception e) { context.WriteLine(e.Message); result = false; } return result; } } } Figure: This fixes a problem with the URL in your web.config not being the same as the dynamically hosted ASP.NET Development server port. We can now add a call to this method after we created the Proxy object and change the Endpoint for the Service to the correct one. This process is wrapped in an assert as if it fails there is no point in continuing. [AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] [TestMethod] public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True() { ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient(); Assert.IsTrue(WcfWebServiceHelper.TryUrlRedirection(target, TestContext, "WebApp1")); bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav"); Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue); } Figure: Editing the Endpoint from the app.config on the fly to match the dynamically hosted ASP.NET Development Server URL and port is now easy. As you can imagine AspNetDevelopmentServer poses some problems of you have multiple developers. What are the chances of everyone using the same location to store the source? What about if you are using a build server, how do you tell MSTest where to look for the files? To the rescue is a property called" “%PathToWebRoot%” which is always right on the build server. It will always point to your build drop folder for your solutions web sites. Which will be “\\tfs.ssw.com.au\BuildDrop\[BuildName]\Debug\_PrecompiledWeb\” or whatever your build drop location is. So lets change the code above to add this. [AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", "%PathToWebRoot%\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] [TestMethod] public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True() { ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient(); Assert.IsTrue(WcfWebServiceHelper.TryUrlRedirection(target, TestContext, "WebApp1")); bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav"); Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue); } Figure: Adding %PathToWebRoot% to the AspNetDevelopmentServer path makes it work everywhere. Now we have another problem… this will ONLY run on the build server and will fail locally as %PathToWebRoot%’s default value is “C:\Users\[profile]\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects”. Well this sucks… How do we get the test to run on any build server and any developer laptop. Open “Tools | Options | Test Tools | Test Execution” in Visual Studio and you will see a field called “Web application root directory”. This is where you override that default above. Figure: You can override the default website location for tests. In my case I would put in “D:\Workspaces\SSW\SSW\SqlDeploy\DEV\Main” and all the developers working with this branch would put in the folder that they have mapped. Can you see a problem? What is I create a “$/SSW/SqlDeploy/DEV/34567” branch from Main and I want to run tests in there. Well… I would have to change the value above. This is not ideal, but as you can put your projects anywhere on a computer, it has to be done. Conclusion Although this looks convoluted and complicated there are real problems being solved here that mean that you have a test ANYWHERE solution. Any build server, any Developer workstation. Resources: http://billwg.blogspot.com/2009/06/testing-wcf-web-services.html http://tough-to-find.blogspot.com/2008/04/testing-asmx-web-services-in-visual.html http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms243399(VS.100).aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/dscruggs/archive/2008/09/29/web-tests-unit-tests-the-asp-net-development-server-and-code-coverage.aspx http://www.5z5.com/News/?543f8bc8b36b174f Technorati Tags: VS2010,MSTest,Team Build 2010,Team Build,Visual Studio,Visual Studio 2010,Visual Studio ALM,Team Test,Team Test 2010

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