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How to talk a client out of a Flash website?

- by bunglestink

I have recently been doing a bunch of web side projects through word of mouth recommendations only. Although I am much more a of a programmer than a designer by any means, my design skills are not terrible, and do not hate dealing with UI like many programmers. As a result, I find myself lured into a bunch of side projects where aside from a minimal back end for content administration, most of the programming is on front end interfaces (read javascript/css). By far the biggest frustration I have had is convincing clients that they do not want Flash. Aside the fact that I really do not enjoy Flash "development", there are many practical reasons why Flash is not desirable (lack of compatibility across devices, decreased client accessibility, plug-in requirements, increased development time, etc.). Instead of just flat out telling the clients "I will not build you a flash website", I would much rather use tactics to convince/explain to them that this is not what they actually want, ie: meet their requirements any better than standard html/css/js and distract users from their content. What kind of first hand experience do others have with this? How do you explain to someone that javascript/css/AJAX is usually a better option for most websites? Why do people want to use Flash so bad to begin with? This question pertains to clients who do not have any technical reasons for wanting flash, but just want it because they think it makes pretty websites.

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Data migration - dangerous or essential?

- by MRalwasser

The software development department of my company is facing with the problem that data migrations are considered as potentially dangerous, especially for my managers. The background is that our customers are using a large amount of data with poor quality. The reasons for this is only partially related to our software quality, but rather to the history of the data: Most of them have been migrated from predecessor systems, some bugs caused (mostly business) inconsistencies in the data records or misentries by accident on the customer's side (which our software allowed by error). The most important counter-arguments from my managers are that faulty data may turn into even worse data, the data troubles may awake some managers at the customer and some processes on the customer's side may not work anymore because their processes somewhat adapted to our system. Personally, I consider data migrations as an integral part of the software development and that data migration can been seen to data what refactoring is to code. I think that data migration is an essential for creating software that evolves. Without it, we would have to create painful software which somewhat works around a bad data structure. I am asking you: What are your thoughts to data migration, especially for the real life cases and not only from a developer's perspecticve? Do you have any arguments against my managers opinions? How does your company deal with data migrations and the difficulties caused by them? Any other interesting thoughts which belongs to this topics?

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Page Inspector and Visual Studio 2012

- by nikolaosk

In this post I will be looking into a new feature that has been added to theVS 2012 IDE. I am talking about Page Inspector that gives developers a very good/handy way to identify layout issues and to find out which part of server side code is responsible for that HTML snippet of code.If you are interested in reading other posts about VS 2012 and .Net 4.5 please have a look here and here.This tool is integrated into the VS 2012 IDE.We can launch it in different ways. 1) We will create a new ASP.Net MVC application (an Internet application). I will not add any code.2) In the Solution Explorer I choose my project and right-click. From the available options select View in Page InspectorHave a look at the picture below. 3) We can launch Page Inspector from the Standard Toolbar. Please have a look at the picture below. 4) Let's view our application with Page Inspector. First I inspect the About link-menu.I can see very quickly the HTML that is rendering for that link to appear. I also see the server side code (the actual view, _Layout.cshtml) that is responsible for that link. This is something developers always craved for. We can also see the CSS styles that are used to style this link (About).Have a look at the picture below Obviously there are similar tools that I have been using in the past when I wanted to change a part of the HTML or see what piece of CSS code affects my layout. I used Firebug when viewing my web applications in the Firefox browser. Internet Explorer and Chrome have also great similar tools that help web developers to identify issues with a site's appearance/issues.Please bear in mind that Page Inspector works with all forms of the ASP.Net stack e.g Web Forms,Web Pages.Hope it helps!!!!!

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How to use the unit of work and repository patterns in a service oriented enviroment

- by A. Karimi

I've created an application framework using the unit of work and repository patterns for it's data layer. Data consumer layers such as presentation depend on the data layer design. For example a CRUD abstract form has a dependency to a repository (IRepository). This architecture works like a charm in client/server environments (Ex. a WPF application and a SQL Server). But I'm looking for a good pattern to change or reuse this architecture for a service oriented environment. Of course I have some ideas: Idea 1: The "Adapter" design pattern Keep the current architecture and create a new unit of work and repository implementation which can work with a service instead of the ORM. Data layer consumers are loosely coupled to the data layer so it's possible but the problem is about the unit of work; I have to create a context which tracks the objects state at the client side and sends the changes to the server side on calling the "Commit" (Something that I think the RIA has done for Silverlight). Here the diagram: ----------- CLIENT----------- | ------------------ SERVER ---------------------- [ UI ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] ---> [ Web Services ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] -> [DB] Idea 2: Add another layer Add another layer (let say "local services" or "data provider"), then put it between the data layer (unit of work and repository) and the data consumer layers (like UI). Then I have to rewrite the consumer classes (CRUD and other classes which are dependent to IRepository) to depend on another interface. And the diagram: ----------------- CLIENT ------------------ | ------------------- SERVER --------------------- [ UI ] -> [ Local Services/Data Provider ] ---> [ Web Services ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] -> [DB] Please note that I have the local services layer on the current architecture but it doesn't expose the data layer functionality. In another word the UI layer can communicate with both of the data and local services layers whereas the local services layer also uses the data layer. | | | | | | | | ---> | Local Services | ---> | | | UI | | | | Data | | | | | | | ----------------------------> | |

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Internet Explorer 9 Preview 2 link + webcasts for developers

- by Eric Nelson

At Web Directions last week in London (10th and 11th June 2010) I promised several folks I would put up a blog post to more information on IE 9.0. True to my word (albeit a little later than I had hoped), here is what I was thinking of: Install First up, Install Preview 2 and try out the demos I was showing at the conference. Remember that IE9 Preview installs side by side with IE8/7 etc. It is not a beta nor is it intended to be a full browser. It is a … preview :-) Including good old SVG-oids :-) Learn And then check out the following webcasts which were recorded in March this year at MIX: In-Depth Look At Internet Explorer 9 Presenter: Ted Johnson & John Hrvatin VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL28 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV High Performance Best Practices For Web Sites Presenter: Jason Weber VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL29 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV HTML5: Cross Browser Best Practices Presenter: Tony Ross VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL27 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV Internet Explorer Developer Tools Presenter: Jon Seitel VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/FT51 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV SVG: The Past, Present And Future of Vector Graphics For The Web Presenter: Patrick Dengler, Doug Schepers VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX30 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV Day 2 Keynote containing IE9 Presenter: Dean Hachamovitch VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV

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Are there good resources for leading documentation for an existing software product having none?

- by Ben Rose

Hello. I'm a software developer at a technology company. I have been tasked with leading the documentation effort for the product I work on, both internal to developers as well as spilling over into facilitating the business side of requirements documentation. This internal product has been around for at least 6 years. One challenge is that this software application has no form of documentation other than some small, outdated pieces here and there. There are comments in the code, but they are technical and do not convey any over-arching behavior (even on technical side). As a consequence of having little to no documentation, this product is often unnecessarily complex under the covers adding to the challenge. We are very limited on time that will be given to us to work on documentation. Another thing about me is that I've displayed some ability in writing/communication around the office, but I'm not coming from any sort of documentation or formal writing background (beyond my academic career). Please share your advise or recommend resources, book/website/forum/whatever, for helping me come up with a plan with milestones, best practices, task delegation, templates, buy-in, etc. I'm hoping for a resource targeting or giving special mention of introducing good documentation on existing projects where there previously was none. I would be very grateful for your responses. Ben

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Running ASP.Net MVC3 Alongside ASP.Net WebForms in the Same Project

- by Sam Abraham

I previously blogged on running ASP.Net MVC in an ASP.Net WebForms project. My reference at the time was a freely-available PDF document by Scott Guthrie which covered the setup process in good detail. As I am preparing references to share with our audience at my upcoming talk at the Deerfield Beach Coders Café on March 1st (http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=514), I found a nice blog post by Scott Hanselman on running both ASP.Net 4.0 WebForms along with ASP.Net MVC 3.0 in the same project. You can access this article here. Moreover, Scott later followed-up with a blog showing how to leverage NuGet to automate the setup of ASP.Net MVC3 in an existing ASP.Net WebForms project. One frequent question that usually comes up when discussing this side-by-side setup is the loss of the convenient Visual Studio Solution Explorer context menu which enable us to easily create controllers and views with a few mouse clicks. A good suggestion brought up in the comments section of Scott’s article presented a good work-around to this problem: Manually add the MVC Visual Studio Project Type GUID in your .sln solution file ({E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401}) which then brings back the MVC-specific context menu functionality in solution explorer of the hybrid project. (Thank James Raden!)

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Spotlight on mkyong

- by MarkH

Occasionally, I'd like to share a blog I've discovered or that someone has passed along to me. Criteria are few, but in a nutshell, it must be: Java-related. (Doh!) Interesting. A good blog is exciting to read at some level, whether due to perspective, eye-catching writing, or technical insight. It doesn't have to read like a Stephen King novel, but it should grab you somehow. Technically deep or technically broad. A site that dives deeply, quickly is a great reference for particular topics/tasks. On the other hand, one that covers a lot of ground at a high-but-still-technical level can be a handy site to visit occasionally as well. Both are what I consider "bookmarkable", but for different reasons. Drumroll, please... With that in mind, this Blog Spotlight is cast upon mkyong.com, a site I stumbled across that offers a little bit of everything for various Java dev audiences. The title indicates the site is for "Java web development tutorials", and indeed it does have these: JSF, Spring, Struts, Hibernate, JAX-WS, JAX-RS, and numerous other topics are addressed to varying degrees. The site isn't devoted exclusively to server-side tutorials, though. Recent posts include mobile development topics, and the links at the bottom of the page connect you to reference pages and other useful sites. I've poked around through a couple of the tutorials and, while they won't take you from "zero to hero", they do seem to provide a nice overview of the subject at hand. They also offer an occasional explanatory comment that is missing from far too many texts, sites, and doc pages. It's not a perfect site, but I like it. The Bottom Line mkyong.com offers a nice "summary site" of server-side tutorials, mobile dev posts, and reference links. Check it out! All the best,Mark

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ASP.NET: Building tree picker dialog using jQuery UI and TreeView control

- by DigiMortal

Selecting things from dialogs and data represented as trees are very common things we see in business applications. In this posting I will show you how to use ASP.NET TreeView control and jQuery UI dialog component to build picker dialog that hosts tree data. Source code You can find working example with source code from my examples repository in GitHub. Please feel free to give me feedback about my examples. Source code repository GitHub Building dialog box As I don’t like to invent wheels then I will use jQuery UI to solve the question related to dialogs. If you are not sure how to include jQuery UI to your page then take a look at source code - GitHub also allows you to browse files without downloading them. I add some jQuery based JavaScript to my page head to get dialog and button work. <script type="text/javascript"> $(function () { $("#dialog-form").dialog({ autoOpen: false, modal: true }); $("#pick-node") .button() .click(function () { $("#dialog-form").dialog("open"); return false; }); }); </script> Here is the mark-up of our form’s main content area. <div id="dialog-form" title="Select node"> <asp:TreeView ID="TreeView1" runat="server" ShowLines="True" ClientIDMode="Static" HoverNodeStyle-CssClass="SelectedNode"> <Nodes> <asp:TreeNode Text="Root" Value="Root"> <asp:TreeNode Text="Child1" Value="Child1"> <asp:TreeNode Text="Child1.1" Value="Child1.1" /> <asp:TreeNode Text="Child1.2" Value="Child1.2" /> </asp:TreeNode> <asp:TreeNode Text="Child2" Value="Child2"> <asp:TreeNode Text="Child2.1" Value="Child2.1" /> <asp:TreeNode Text="Child2.2" Value="Child2.2" /> </asp:TreeNode> </asp:TreeNode> </Nodes> </asp:TreeView>   </div> <button id="pick-node">Pick user</button> Notice that our mark-up is very compact for what we will achieve. If you are going to use it in some real-world application then this mark-up gets even shorter – I am sure that in most cases the data you display in TreeView comes from database or some domain specific data source. Hacking TreeView TreeView needs some little hacking to make it work as client-side component. Be warned that if you need more than I show you here you need to write a lot of JavaScript code. For more advanced scenarios I suggest you to use some jQuery based tree component. This example works for you if you need something done quickly. Number one problem is getting over the postbacks because in our scenario postbacks only screw up things. Also we need to find a way how to let our client-side code to know that something was selected from TreeView. We solve these to problems at same time: let’s move to JavaScript links. We have to make sure that when user clicks the node then information is sent to some JavaScript function. Also we have to make sure that this function returns something that is not processed by browser. My function is here. <script type="text/javascript"> function $("#dialog-form").dialog("close"); alert("You selected: " + value + " - " + text); return undefined; } </script> Notice that this function returns undefined. You get the better idea why I did so if you look at server-side code that corrects NavigateUrl properties of TreeView nodes. protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e) { base.OnPreRender(e); if (IsPostBack) return; SetSelectNodeUrls(TreeView1.Nodes); } private void SetSelectNodeUrls(TreeNodeCollection nodes) { foreach (TreeNode node in nodes) { node.NavigateUrl = "javascript:selectNode('" + node.Value + "','" + node.Text + "');"; SetSelectNodeUrls(node.ChildNodes); } } Now we have TreeView that renders nodes the way that postback doesn’t happen anymore. Instead of postback our callback function is used and provided with selected values. In this function we are free to use node text and value as we like. Result I applied some more bells and whistles and sample data to source code to make my sample more informative. So, here is my final dialog box. Seems very basic but it is not hard to make it look more professional using style sheets. Conclusion jQuery components and ASP.NET controls have both their strong sides and weaknesses. In this posting I showed you how you can quickly produce good results when combining jQuery and ASP.NET controls without pushing to the limits. We used simple hack to get over the postback issue of TreeView control and we made it work as client-side component that is initialized in server. You can find many other good combinations that make your UI more user-friendly and easier to use.

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How to develop Online Shopping Portal Application using PHP ?

- by Sarang

I do not know PHP & I have to develop a Shopping Portal with following Definition : Scenario: Online Shopping Portal XYZ.com wants to create an online shopping portal for managing its registered customers and their shopping. The customers need to register themselves first before they do shopping using the shopping portal. However, everyone, whether registered or not, can view the various products along with the prices listed in the portal. The registered customers, after logging in, are allowed to place order for one or more products from the products listed in the portal. Once the order is placed, the customer gets a reference order number and the order status should be “order in process”. The customers can track their order using the given reference number. The management of XYZ.com should be able to modify the order status of a particular reference order number to “shipped” once the products are shipped to the shipping address entered by the customer at the time of placing the order. The Functionalities required are : Create the interface for the XYZ.com shopping portal using HTML/XHTML and CSS. Implement the client side validations using JavaScript. Create the tables using MySQL. Implement the functionality using the server side scripting language, PHP. Integrate all the above tasks and make the XYZ.com shopping portal functional. How do I develop this application with following proper steps of development ?

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Early Z culling - Ogre

- by teodron

This question is concerned with how one can enable this "pixel filter" to work within an Ogre based app. Simply put, one can write two passes, the first without writing any colour values to the frame buffer lighting off colour_write off shading flat The second pass is the one that employs heavy pixel shader computations, hence it would be really nice to get rid of those hidden surface patches and not process them pixel-wise. This approach works, except for one thing: objects with alpha, such as billboard trees suffer in a peculiar way - from one side, they seem to capture the sky/background within their alpha region and ignore other trees/houses behind them, while viewed from the other side, they exhibit the desired behavior. To tackle the issue, I thought I could write a custom vertex shader in the first pass and offset the projected Z component of the vertex a little further away from its actual position, so that in the second pass there is a need to recompute correctly the pixels of the objects closest to the camera. This doesn't work at all, all surfaces are processed in the pixel shader and there is no performance gain. So, if anyone has done a similar trick with Ogre and alpha objects, kindly please help.

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MVVM Light V4b1 for Windows 8 Consumer Preview (with installer)

- by Laurent Bugnion

I just pushed the following to Codeplex: A new MVVM Light project template for Windows 8 Consumer Preview. This template appears in the File, New Project dialog and allows you to create a Metro style app already wired with MVVM Light. An updated Windows 8 installer for MVVM Light. Preconditions: This installs MVVM Light for Windows 8 only. You can install it side-by-side with the standard MVVM Light for Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone. Where do I get it? You can download the MSI from: http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/releases/view/85317 What does it do? The installer installs the Windows 8 version of the MVVM Light DLLs, as well as a new project template for an MVVM Light Metro style app, and code snippets. What is missing? Since Windows 8 Developer Preview, I worked on porting the DispatcherHelper class, and it works now. However the EventToCommand behavior is still not available on Windows 8 (because behaviors are not supported on Windows 8 for the moment). Known issues Some testers reported issues with the code snippets installation. Code snippets should appear when you type “mvvm” in your C# code, there is a list of mvvm-prefixed snippets (such as mvvminpc, etc). If you do not see these snippets, please stay tuned, I am working on fixing this issue. Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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Custom Session Management using HashTable

- by kaleidoscope

ASP.NET session state lets you associate a server-side string or object dictionary containing state data with a particular HTTP client session. A session is defined as a series of requests issued by the same client within a certain period of time, and is managed by associating a session ID with each unique client. The ID is supplied by the client on each request, either in a cookie or as a special fragment of the request URL. The session data is stored on the server side in one of the supported session state stores, which include in-process memory, SQL Server™ database, and the ASP.NET State Server service. The latter two modes enable session state to be shared among multiple Web servers on a Web farm and do not require server affinity. Implement Custom session Handler you need to follow following process : 1. Create class library which will inherit from SessionStateStoreProviderBase abstract Class. 2. Implement all abstract Method in your base class. 3.Change Mode of session to “Custom” in web.config file and provide Provider as your Namespace with classname. <sessionState mode=”Custom” customProvider=”Namespace.classname”> <Providers> <add name=”Name” type=”Namespace.classname”> </sessionstate> For more Details Please refer following links : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163730.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.sessionstate.sessionstatestoreproviderbase.aspx - Chandraprakash, S Technorati Tags: Chandraprakash,Session state Managment

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Problems with icons and shutting down Ubuntu 12.04

- by Anders

I recently upgraded from 11-10 to 12.04 as a dual boot (Windows 7) and am having problems with shutting down. I installed from a CD that I burned from the iso file, and to get it to boot from the CD, I needed to install the special help program from Windows that would then recognize the CD as the system booted.The installation gave me my own user account as well as a guest account. For the User account there is no "gear" icon (in the upper RH side) from which to access the shut down menu. Interestingly the icons for the Home folder, the Ubuntu One folder, and the System Settings folder are missing, although there are blank places shows these names if the mouse cursor is positioned over these areas. They will even launch with the press of a key - but no icons are visible. For the Guest account, all of these icons are visible and usable. The problem that occurs in shutting down is that I need to leave the User account, move to the Guest account (so that I can access the top right "gear" icon that has the shut down menu item) and press the shut down button. The problem here is that when the shut own menu appears and I press the confirmation that I wish to shut down the computer, the page blanks (as one might hope in the process of closing down), and then pops up with the log in menu, giving the option of logging in as a User or as a Guest. So the questions are: 1) how do you reinstate the far right top icon from which you can access the shut down drop down menu in the User account page. 2) how do you get the icons to display properly on the Left hand side (Home, Ubuntu One, System Settings, and Workspace Switcher) 3) how do you get the system to turn of when you press the shut down button! Boy oh boy! Thanks a bunch for any help!

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Grub loading unknown file system grub rescue

- by Ashish Kumar

I am new to Linux. I had Windows 7 installed in my laptop. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 9.0 from a free CD I got. I choose the option "Install side by side with Windows 7 loader (something like that..)". Everything went fine & I installed Ubuntu. When I restarted, I could easily boot from both Windows 7 & Ubuntu. But later when I booted from Windows 7, I did a disk management by right clicking "my Computer" & choosing the option "Manage". Actually I deleted a drive & added that empty volume in another drive. Now when I start my system it shows the following error: Grub loading Unknown file system grub rescue> I have no clue what to do now. Please help me at urgent. Any solution in layman's language is greatly appreciated. P.S. I want all my files on both Windows 7 & Ubuntu.

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In a 2D platform game, how to ensure the player moves smoothly over sloping ground?

- by Kovsa

See image: http://i41.tinypic.com/huis13.jpg I'm developing a physics engine for a 2D platform game. I'm using the separating axis theorem for collision detection. The ground surface is constructed from oriented bounding boxes, with the player as an axis aligned bounding box. (Specifically, I'm using the algorithm from the book "Realtime Collision Detection" which performs swept collision detection for OBBs using SAT). I'm using a fairly small (close to zero) restitution coefficient in the collision response, to ensure that the dynamic objects don't penetrate the environment. The engine mostly works fine, it's just that I'm concerned about some edge cases that could possibly occur. For example, in the diagram, A, B and C are the ground surface. The player is heading left along B towards A. It seems to me that due to inaccuracy, the player box could be slightly below the box B as it continues up and left. When it reaches A, therefore, the bottom left corner of the player might then collide with the right side of A, which would be undesirable (as the intention is for the player to move smoothly over the top of A). It seems like a similar problem could happen when the player is on top of box C, moving left towards B - the most extreme point of B could collide with the left side of the player, instead of the player's bottom left corner sliding up and left above B. Box2D seems to handle this problem by storing connectivity information for its edge shapes, but I'm not really sure how it uses this information to solve the problem, and after looking at the code I don't really grasp what it's doing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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how to install 13.04 on a partitioned hardrive

- by Denny

First, not a computer literate person, not even a novice- so please use small words. I recently made the switch to ubuntu, it came preloaded on my new laptop that I order from a big tech dot com site. The version on it is 12.04 (i think) and 64bit. This system has a lot that I like but it is quirky for me to say the least. Apparently I have held broken packages and have no way of knowing how to find them. I discovered this when trying to download (from software center) VLC so that I could watch some movies I had on an external hard-drive. Unmet dependencies error and held broken package errors abound while trying to fix the problem. Ive scoured this site and other and followed almost all the suggestions to a T but still I am unable to fix anything. My computer is partitioned (but I don't even know how to get to the otherside so to speak). I would like to know; can I put the newer 13.04 OS on one side of the partition and then delete the older version on the other side? or, can I install 13.04 over the existing 12.04? What would I need to do this? An obstacle that I have is this, I am currently serving in Afghanistan so going someplace to buy something or running down to a computer store for service support is out of the question. I very much appreciate your help, cause right now this computer is nothing more than a word processor, which would be fine if all i wanted was a word processor. Thanks in advance.

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Looking for 2D Cross platform suggestions based on requirements specified

- by MannyG

I am an intermediate developer with minor experience on enterprise mobile applications for iphone, android and blackberry looking to build my first ever mobile game. I did a google search for some game dev forums and this popped up so I thought I would try posting here as I lack luck elsewhere. If you have ever heard of the game for the iphone and android platform entitled avatar fight then you will have an idea of the graphic capabilities I require. Basically the battles which are automated one sprite attacking another doing cool animations but all in 2d. My buddy and I have two motivations, one is to jump into mobile Dev as my experience is limited as is his so we would like some trending knowledge (html5 would be nice to learn) . The other is to make some money on the side, don't expect much but polishing the game and putting our all will hopefully reward us a bit. We have looked into corona engine, however a lot of people are saying it is limited in the graphics department, we are open to learning new languages like lua, c++, python etc. Others we have looked at include phonegap, rhomobile, unity, and the list goes on. I really have no idea what the pros and cons of these are but for a basic battle sequence and some mini games we want to chose the right one. Some more things that we will be doing include things like card games, side scrolling flying object based games, maybe fishing stuff. We want to start small with these minigames and work our way up to the idea we would like to implement in the future. We only want to work in 2D. So with these requirements please help me chose a platform to work on (cross platform is what we are ideally leaning towards). Please feel free to throw in some pieces of advice you may have for newbie game developers like myself too. Thank you for reading!

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what is the Web development process efficiency judgment criteria

- by Ahmed safan

I'm working as a web developer and I want to be able to determine if I'm efficient. Does this include the how long it take to accomplish tasks such as: Server side code for the site logic with one language or multiple php,asp,asp.net. Client side code like javascript with jquery for ajax, menus and other interactivity Page layout, html, css (color, fonts (but I have no artistic sense!)) The needs of the site and how it will work (planning) How can i judge how long it will take to complete a website? The site has CMS for adding and editing news, products, articles on the experience of the company. Also, they can edit team work, add Recreational Activities and a logo gallery with compressed psd download, and send messages to cpanel and to email. You are starting from scratch except JQuery and PHPmailer. How can I estimate how long the job will take, and how can I calculate the required time to finish any new projects? I'm so sorry for many scattered questions, but I'm in my first experiment and I want to take benefits from the great experience of those who have it.

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How to reduce the fan noise and how to increase battery life?

- by mehdi

I have a brand new Sony Vaio S series laptop.(VPCSA2DGX) It came factory installed with Windows 7 professional Edition 64bit. Runs Intel core i5, 500 GB HDD , 4GB Ram. First I installed ubuntu 11.10 64 bit along side Windows to dual boot. Later,since the problem did not solve, I installed ubuntu 12.04 64bit along side Windows to dual boot. However the problem keeps annoying me. Problem: When running ubuntu 11.10/12.04, the battery lasts only about 1.5 hours. The Fan runs loud and continuously. And there is a lot of heat generated. System monitor shows less than 5% CPU used. My laptop enjoys hybrid graphic and I tried turning off ADM graphic card and keep Intel graphic card on. However I can not get the Fan noise or heat to go away and consequently the battery drain continues. BTW, in windows, the laptop gives 4-5 hours of battery power, Fan is silent and there is no heat problem. Any ideas on how to reduce the fan noise and how to increase battery life in ubuntu 11.10/12.04?

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Unable to boot Windows after installing Ubuntu 12.04 - error: invalid efi file path

- by user113350

I have a Laptop (ASUS X310A, I installed Ubuntu 12.04 to be side by side with Windows 7 but I seem to have gotten a problem with booting Windows 7. I used the Boot Repair twice with no results. Boot-Repair info: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1417623/ The error I get when starting Windows 7 from GRUB is: error: invalid efi file path In Boot Manager or Menu, I have 3 options now: 2x for Ubuntu (maybe cause I did boot-repair twice) 1x Windows boot manager (If I boot this it opens "ASUS Preload Wizard", it gives me the option to re-install windows losing all previous data -) When I was making the partition before installing Ubuntu, I made the new partition by making sda4 smaller and adding ext4 mounted: "\" and adding a swap area. Installed it and it didn't work, nothing worked. So i booted Ubuntu from the USB again and deleted the partitions I made and decided to make sda3 smaller and making the partitions but this time it gave me the option that I could mount sda3 on "\windows" or "\dos" I ignored it and didn't choose neither because the I know that it doesn't need to be mounted and proceeded to create what is now sda7 (ext4) and sda8 (swap area). It still didn't work so I booted from USB and did the first boot-repair, so I was able to boot Ubuntu now but not windows, but when I did it through my USB I was not able to update boot-repair, so i decided to redo the boot-repair from Ubuntu running on the Hardisk (fully updated) and it still didn't work. In GRUB this is what i see (when booting using Ubuntu as first option in Boot Menu): Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-29-generic Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-29-generic (recovery mode) Windows UEFI loader Windows Boot UEFI bootx64.efi.bkp Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda3) Windows Recovery Environment (loader) (on /dev/sda5) I tried all the ones starting with "Windows" they all don't work Please help, Many Thanks

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Question about separating game core engine from game graphics engine...

- by Conrad Clark

Suppose I have a SquareObject class, which implements IDrawable, an interface which contains the method void Draw(). I want to separate drawing logic itself from the game core engine. My main idea is to create a static class which is responsible to dispatch actions to the graphic engine. public static class DrawDispatcher<T> { private static Action<T> DrawAction = new Action<T>((ObjectToDraw)=>{}); public static void SetDrawAction(Action<T> action) { DrawAction = action; } public static void Dispatch(this T Obj) { DrawAction(Obj); } } public static class Extensions { public static void DispatchDraw<T>(this object Obj) { DrawDispatcher<T>.DispatchDraw((T)Obj); } } Then, on the core side: public class SquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } And on the graphics side: public static class SquareRender{ //stuff here public static void Initialize(){ DrawDispatcher<SquareObject>.SetDrawAction((Square)=>{//my square rendering logic}); } } Do this "pattern" follow best practices? And a plus, I could easily change the render scheme of each object by changing the DispatchDraw parameter, as in: public class SuperSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } public class RedSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<RedSquareObject>(); } #endregion } RedSquareObject would have its own render method, but SuperSquareObject would render as a normal SquareObject I'm just asking because i do not want to reinvent the wheel, and there may be a design pattern similar (and better) to this that I may be not acknowledged of. Thanks in advance!

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How does one rein in the complexities of web development ?

- by Rahul

I have been a server-side programmer for most of my career and have only recently started spending more time on web development. I am amazed at the number of things I need to master in order to write a decent web application. Just to list down a few tools/technologies I need to learn, Server side programming language (Java/JSP, ASP, PHP, Ruby or something else) A decent web framework (for any medium to big size application). HTML & CSS Javascript Javascript library (JQuery/ExtJS etc. primarily for AJAX). Good to know even if not necessary. At least a basic knowledge of web design - layouts, colors, fonts etc. A good understanding of web security. A good understanding of Performance/scalability issues. Testing, browser compatibility issues etc. The list goes on. So, my question to seasoned web developers is - How do you guys manage to learn and keep yourself updated on so many things? While developing a web application, how do you handle the complexities involved in these areas and yet manage to write an application that is well designed, user friendly, secure, performant and scalable. As a web developer, does one have to be a jack of all trades or should one specialize in one or two areas and leave the rest to other members of the team ?

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Why is a small fixed vocabulary seen as an advantage to RESTful services?

- by Matt Esch

So, a RESTful service has a fixed set of verbs in its vocabulary. A RESTful web service takes these from the HTTP methods. There are some supposed advantages to defining a fixed vocabulary, but I don't really grasp the point. Maybe someone can explain it. Why is a fixed vocabulary as outlined by REST better than dynamically defining a vocabulary for each state? For example, object oriented programming is a popular paradigm. RPC is described to define fixed interfaces, but I don't know why people assume that RPC is limited by these contraints. We could dynamically specify the interface just as a RESTful service dynamically describes its content structure. REST is supposed to be advantageous in that it can grow without extending the vocabulary. RESTful services grow dynamically by adding more resources. What's so wrong about extending a service by dynamically specifying a per-object vocabulary? Why don't we just use the methods that are defined on our objects as the vocabulary and have our services describe to the client what these methods are and whether or not they have side effects? Essentially I get the feeling that the description of a server side resource structure is equivalent to the definition of a vocabulary, but we are then forced to use the limited vocabulary in which to interact with these resources. Does a fixed vocabulary really decouple the concerns of the client from the concerns of the server? I surely have to be concerned with some configuration of the server, this is normally resource location in RESTful services. To complain at the use of a dynamic vocabulary seems unfair because we have to dynamically reason how to understand this configuration in some way anyway. A RESTful service describes the transitions you are able to make by identifying object structure through hypermedia. I just don't understand what makes a fixed vocabulary any better than any self-describing dynamic vocabulary, which could easily work very well in an RPC-like service. Is this just a poor reasoning for the limiting vocabulary of the HTTP protocol?

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Google search question, front page not showing...

- by Catelyn

I know this is probably a dumb question but I hope someone can give me some insight; I was ranked on Google first page of search results for "funny st patricks day shirts" but I was third from the bottom and not familiar enough with SEO, so I signed up for "Attracta" to rank higher. Big mistake. Since using Attracta, I've lost the first page and I'm now on the fourth page in that search. What I noticed is that Google is now just showing a sub-page or side page, (a link from my front page, to a page which has only a few designs in it) this is not where I would want customers to land first... but my front page is not showing in that search anymore. Obviously, the title of this side page is not geared toward that search result, so I know that's why I have the pr drop. Why is my front page not ranking over that page, though? Why is it apparently gone from that search, or so far back no one will ever find it? I need to know how to fix this quick if anyone has any advice at all for me. It's the busiest season for my website and the people who were stealing design ideas from me are all ranked higher than my site now. (I can prove this, lol) So, I'm very frustrated by that. I would be very grateful to have any advice at all as to what I can do to fix this. THANKS in advance for any advice you can offer. Catelyn

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