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• Game Review: Monument Valley

  Once again, it was a tweet that caught my attention... and the official description on the Play Store sounds good, too. "In Monument Valley you will manipulate impossible architecture and guide a silent princess through a stunningly beautiful world. Monument Valley is a surreal exploration through fantastical architecture and impossible geometry. Guide the silent princess Ida through mysterious monuments, uncovering hidden paths, unfolding optical illusions and outsmarting the enigmatic Crow People." So, let's check it out. What an interesting puzzle game Once again, I left some review on the Play Store: "Beautiful but short distraction Woohoo, what a great story behind the game. Using optical illusions and impossible geometries in this fantastic adventure of the silent princess just puts all the pieces perfectly together. Walking the amazing paths in the various levels and solving the riddles gives some decent hours of distraction but in the end you might have the urge to do more..." I can't remember exactly when and who tweeted about the game but honestly it caught my attention based on the simplicity of the design and the aspect that it seems to be an isometric design. The game relies heavily on optical illusions in order to guide to the silent princess Ida through her illusory adventure of impossible architecture and forgiveness. The game is set like a clockwork and you are turning, flipping and switching elements on the paths between the doors. Unfortunately, there aren't many levels and the game play lasted only some hours. Maybe there are more astonishing looking realms and interesting gimmicks in future versions. Play Store: Monument Valley Also, check out the latest game updates on the official web site of ustwo BTW, the game is also available on the Apple App Store and on Amazon Store for the Kindle Fire.

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• 2D Game Help In XNA

  - by user22715

  I'm making a game in XNA called The Adventure Of The Very Hairy Princess Fairy. The game is a "Sidescroller/Platformer" like mario but there is a problem. How do I attack a wepon the the player texture and add animations so it looks like the player is holding the gun and It's not a floating image in front of the player? The player can kill with things like chainsaws playing as a very hairy princess fairy.

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• Simple (I hope) Excel question about

  - by Princess

  I am doing a directory for my neighborhood. We had most of the information from a previous directory. The information was entered: A1 name, B1 address and C1 phone number; B1 name, B2 address, C2 phone number etc. The publisher wants the information in a different format A1 name, A2 address, A3 phone number, A4 blank; A5 name, A6 address, A7 phone number, A8 blank etc... Is there an easy (or heck - a not so easy) way to have Excel change the format of the information without me having to hand type 1300 households information? I will also need to reformat the information a second time into a crisscross. The format for that one is: A1 Street name, A2 Address Number, B2 Resident Name and C2 Phone number.

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• Is the Forcefield Really On or Not? [Star Wars Parody Video]

  - by Asian Angel

  What do you get when you mix two not so smart troopers, a very observant princess, and spotty forcefield service? Lots of trouble! Watch as these two troopers use their own brand of reverse psychology, spur-of-the-moment sound effects, and more to try and convince the princess that the forcefield is still on! TROOPERS – Forcefield [via Geeks are Sexy] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions Add a “Textmate Style” Lightweight Text Editor with Dropbox Syncing to Chrome and Iron Is the Forcefield Really On or Not? [Star Wars Parody Video] Google Updates Picasa Web Albums; Emphasis on Sharing and Showcasing Uwall.tv Turns YouTube into a Video Jukebox Early Morning Sunrise at the Beach Wallpaper Data Networks Visualized via Light Paintings [Video]

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• Why does my DataTemplate break the WPF designer?

  - by PRINCESS FLUFF

  Why does the DataTemplate line break the WPF designer in Visual Studio 2008? The program compiles and runs properly. The DataTemplate is applied as it should. However the entire DataTemplate block of code is underlined in red, and when I simply "build" the program without running, I get the error "Type reference cannot find public type named 'Character'" How come it can't find it in the designer yet the program applies the template properly? <UserControl x:Class="WPF_Tests.Tests.TwoCollecViews.TwoViews" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:DetailsPane="clr-namespace:WPF_Tests.Tests.DetailsPane" > <UserControl.Resources> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type DetailsPane:Character}"> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Name}"></TextBlock> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Characters}" /> </Grid> </UserControl> EDIT: I am being told that this may be a bug in Visual Studio 2008, as it worked correctly in 2010. You can download the code here: http://www.mediafire.com/?z1myytvwm4n - The Test/TwoCollec xaml file's designer will break with this code.

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• Custom DataType in DataTemplate breaks WPF designer

  - by PRINCESS FLUFF

  Why does the DataTemplate line break the WPF designer in Visual Studio 2008? The program compiles and runs properly. The DataTemplate is applied as it should. However the entire DataTemplate block of code is underlined in red, and when I simply "build" the program without running, I get the error "Type reference cannot find public type named 'Character'" How come it can't find it in the designer yet the program applies the template properly? <UserControl x:Class="WPF_Tests.Tests.TwoCollecViews.TwoViews" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:DetailsPane="clr-namespace:WPF_Tests.Tests.DetailsPane" > <UserControl.Resources> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type DetailsPane:Character}"> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Name}"></TextBlock> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Characters}" /> </Grid> </UserControl> EDIT: I am being told that this may be a bug in Visual Studio 2008, as it worked correctly in 2010. You can download the code here: http://www.mediafire.com/?z1myytvwm4n - The Test/TwoCollec xaml file's designer will break with this code.

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• Newbie queston: Cannot load http://localhost/phptest:8080/

  - by Princess Innah

  Hi guys, I decided to learn HTML so I installed apache on windows vista. Everything seems to work fine; when I go to http://localhost:8080 the sample webpage installed by apache shows. Apache is configured at port 8080. So far so good. Since my DocumentRoot is c:\pub, I made another folder inside, e.g., c:\pub\test. What I'm trying to figure out is why the page at http://localhost/test:8080 cannot load? It has index.html and apache is working fine. Any ideas?

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• Why "Tailoring" Your Resume Is Bad

  - by Mike C

  I was just writing a response to a comment on my "Sell Yourself!" presentation ( http://sqlblog.com/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2010/12/05/sell-yourself-presentation.aspx#comments ), and it started getting a little lengthy so I decided to turn it into a blog post. The "Sell Yourself!" post got a couple of very good comments on the blog, and quite a few more comments offline. I think I'll start this one with a great exchange from the movie "The Princess Bride": Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE....(read more)

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• Announcing the Winnipeg Code Camp!

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Alright, the event website will be up this weekend, but I wanted to get the word out sooner than later. For the third year, we’re holding the Winnipeg Code Camp! When: Saturday, February 26th Where: Red River College, Princess Street Campus Cost: FREE!!! Continental Breakfast and Hot Lunch Provided! We’re going to have four rooms worth of sessions going on like last year, so lots of great sessions and great content. To register for the event (we need to know numbers for ordering the food), please do so here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1180632303 If you’re interested in speaking at the Code Camp, please contact me at darcy.lussier at gmail.com. Note that we have only 20 slots for the day, so contact me sooner than later! D

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• Licensing Theme Music from other games

  - by HS01

  As part of my game, I thought it would be fun to make a hidden level that pays tribute to Mario Bros (one of the earliest games I ever played). It would be themed in that way with 8-bit graphics and question mark blocks and completing the level would say "Thank you but the princess is in another castle" or such. For the sound track, I'm thinking of just overlaying the standard mario theme music by playing it on a virtual keyboard using a different instrument/timing or something. My question is, am I legally safe? I'm not using anyone else's actual music, I'm just playing the same tune in a different way myself. Do I have to get licensing for this?

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• i want to get id through passing values in sql server 2008?

  - by jaykanth

  id Ptypefield Value 1 1 D 2 1 E 3 1 F 4 1 G 5 1 H 6 2 FL 7 2 IF 8 2 VVS1 9 2 VVS2 10 2 VS1 11 2 VS2 12 3 0.50 13 3 1.00 14 3 1.50 15 3 2.00 16 4 Marquise 17 4 Round 18 4 Pear 19 4 Radiant 20 4 Princess this table i want to get id no i give value like D and F my ans is 1 and 3 please write a query

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• My Upcoming Talk at South Florida&rsquo;s ITPalooza 2012 - NuGet for Open Source and Enterprise Environments

  - by Sam Abraham

  I am very excited to be speaking at IT Palooza next week. As this event’s audience will span professionals working in different facets of Information Technology, I chose to speak on NuGet, an essential tool for any Microsoft Stack developer, as the topic can be of value to managers, architects, IT personnel, as well as developers. For more information on ITPalooza, please visit: http://itpalooza.e2mktg.com/ To register please visit: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=627   Below are the abstract and speaker bio: Leveraging NuGet for Open Source and Enterprise Environments NuGet is an open source package management system for .NET and Visual Studio that makes it easy to add, update, or remove external libraries in a .Net Project. In this session, we will be covering how NuGet makes open source libraries easily discoverable and usable. We will then move to demonstrate "NuGet for the Enterprise" as we setup a local library repository and configure NuGet to ensure external library versioning is consistent among project developers. Speakers: Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5, 4.0 and Silverlight 4) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) striving to leverage proven technology solutions to produce cost-effective, quality software that meets customer needs, timelines and budgets. He is currently a member of the Software Engineering Team at SISCO, the leader in maritime security solutions with customers including Princess, Carnival, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as well as the US Coast Guard. A strong believer in learning through sharing and the value of community fellowship, Sam has been actively involved in the local community as leader of the West Palm Beach Developers' Group, volunteer board member at the International Association for All IT Architects South Florida Chapter (IASA), and former volunteer at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

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• E3 Booth Babes Display a Painful Lack of Video Game Knowledge [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you thought a prerequisite for manning a booth at an electronics expo was a passing knowledge of the electronics and games you were promoting, you were wrong. In the above video Chloe Dykstra puts a set of “booth babes” from the E3 2011 conference to the test by asking them simple questions about video games both new and old. If you’re a gaming fan and you can watch this video without laughing out loud you’ve got an iron will (or you’re shaking your head in disbelief that someone could work a gaming convention and not know the answers to these questions). We won’t lie, we were shaking our head when the one model admitted that she’d worked at GameStop for a year and still didn’t know any of the answers. What questions would you put on list? How about “Finish this sentence: ‘Your Princess is in another…’”, “Dimension?”. 5HP: Booth Babe Edition – E3 2011 [YouTube via Kotaku] How To Encrypt Your Cloud-Based Drive with BoxcryptorHTG Explains: Photography with Film-Based CamerasHow to Clean Your Dirty Smartphone (Without Breaking Something)

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• Robots &amp; Pencils Bring iOS Dev Camp/Dev School to Winnipeg

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  My buddy Paul Thorsteinson from Robots and Pencils has come up with an elaborate way to collect his Mac power adaptor that I keep forgetting to mail to him – he’s coming to town with Jonathan Rasmusson to run an iPhone Dev Camp and two-day Dev School here in Winnipeg! From the email he sent me: We are going to be bringing our successful iOS dev school out to the 'Peg in October as well has hosting a dev camp on the Friday night (comparable to a .net user group type deal).  If you know any peeps in Manitoba who are interested in these, please pass along!  .Net developers are welcome to come and heckle as well ;) Winnipeg iPhone Dev Camp October 26th Marlborough Hotel, 5:30pm Cost: $10 http://ios-dev-camp-winnipeg-eorg.eventbrite.com/ ^for devs of any level interested in meeting other devs hearing talks of all levels.  Food and networking Winnipeg iPhone Dev School October 27th, 28th, Marlborough Hotel Cost: $899 + GST http://academy.robotsandpencils.com/training ^For devs looking to get their feet wet in iOS dev Paul has spoken at Prairie Dev Con before and is vastly knowledgeable in mobile development. You can see his work in Spy vs Spy, Catch the Princess, World Explorer for Minecraft, Deco Windshield (yes they run their entire business on their iPad), Anthm, Own This World and too many other apps. If you’re into iOS development, looking to get in, or wanting to improve your skills, consider these great professional development opportunities! D

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• Set attribute to all child elements via xsl:choose

  - by Camal

  Hi, assuming I got following XML file : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <MyCarShop> <Car gender="Boy"> <Door>Lamborghini</Door> <Key>Skull</Key> </Car> <Car gender="Girl"> <Door>Normal</Door> <Key>Princess</Key> </Car> </MyCarShop> I want to perform a transformation so the xml looks like this : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <MyCarShop> <Car gender="Boy"> <Door color="blue">Lamborghini</Door> <Key color="blue">Skull</Key> </Car> <Car gender="Girl"> <Door color="red">Normal</Door> <Key color="red">Princess</Key> </Car> </MyCarShop> So I want to add a color attribut to each subelement of Car depending on the gender information. I came up with this XSLT but it doesnt work : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl" > <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/> <!--<xsl:template match="@* | node()"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template>--> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:element name="MyCarShop"> <xsl:attribute name="version">1.0</xsl:attribute> <xsl:apply-templates/> </xsl:element> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="Car"> <xsl:element name="Car"> <xsl:apply-templates/> </xsl:element> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="Door"> <xsl:element name="Door"> <xsl:attribute name="ViewSideIndicator"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="gender = 'Boy' ">Front</xsl:when> <xsl:when test="gender = 'Girl ">Front</xsl:when> </xsl:choose> </xsl:attribute> </xsl:element> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="Key"> <xsl:element name="Key"> <xsl:apply-templates/> </xsl:element> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> Does anybody know what might be wrong ? Thanks again!

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• What are the common programming mistakes in Python?

  - by Paul McGuire

  I was about to tag the recent question in which the OP accidentally shadowed the builtin operator module with his own local operator.py with the "common-mistakes" tag, and I saw that there are a number of interesting questions posted asking for common mistakes to avoid in Java, Ruby, Scala, Clojure, .Net, jQuery, Haskell, SQL, ColdFusion, and so on, but I didn't see any for Python. For the benefit of Python beginners, can we enumerate the common mistakes that we have all committed at one time or another, in the hopes of maybe steering a newbie or two clear of them? (In homage to "The Princess Bride", I call these the Classic Blunders.) If possible, a little supporting explanation on what the problem is, and the generally accepted resolution/workaround, so that the beginning Pythoner doesn't read your answer and say "ok, that's a mistake, how do I fix it?"

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• Convert row to column using sql server 2008?

  - by jaykanth

  Table name is Looupvalue id Ptypefield Value 1 1 D 2 1 E 3 1 F 4 1 G 5 1 H 6 2 FL 7 2 IF 8 2 VVS1 9 2 VVS2 10 2 VS1 11 2 VS2 12 3 0.50 13 3 1.00 14 3 1.50 15 3 2.00 16 4 Marquise 17 4 Round 18 4 Pear 19 4 Radiant 20 4 Princess Lookupvalue table value convert roow to column depends on ptypefield Like id 1 id 2 id 3 id 4 1 D 6 fl 12 0.50 16 Marquise 2 E 7 If 13 1 17 Round.... 3 F 8 vvs2 14 1.5 4 G 9 vvs2 15 2 5 H 10 vs1 11 vs2 Thanks

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• Do We Indeed Have a Future? George Takei on Star Wars.

  - by Bil Simser

  George Takei (rhymes with Okay), probably best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek, has always had deep concerns for the present and the future. Whether on Earth or among the stars, he has the welfare of humanity very much at heart. I was digging through my old copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a great publication on monster and films that I grew up with, and came across this. This was his reaction to STAR WARS from issue 139 of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was written June 6, 1977. It is reprinted here without permission but I hope since the message is still valid to this day and has never been reprinted anywhere, nobody will mind me sharing it. STAR WARS is the most pre-posterously diverting galactic escape and at the same time the most hideously credible portent of the future yet.While I thrilled to the exploits that reminded me of the heroics of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, Burt Lancaster as the Crimson Pirate and Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, I was at the same time aghast at the phantasmagoric violence technology can place at our disposal. STAR WARS raised in my mind the question - do we indeed have a future?It seems to me what George Lucas has done is to masterfully guide us on a journey through space and time and bring us back face to face with today's reality. STAR WARS is more than science fiction, I think it is science fictitious reality.Just yesterday, June 7, 1977, I read that the United States will embark on the production of a neutron bomb - a bomb that will kill people on a gigantic scale but will not destroy buildings. A few days before that, I read that the Pentagon is fearful that the Soviets may have developed a warhead that could neutralize ours that have a capacity for that irrational concept overkill to the nth power. Already, it seems we have the technology to realize the awesome special effects simulations that we saw in the film.The political scene of STAR WARS is that of government by force and power, of revolutions based on some unfathomable grievance, survival through a combination of cunning and luck and success by the harnessing of technology -  a picture not very much at variance from the political headlines that we read today.And most of all, look at the people; both the heroes in the film and the reaction of the audience. First, the heroes; Luke Skywalker is a pretty but easily led youth. Without any real philosophy to guide him, he easily falls under the influence of a mystical old man believed previously to be an eccentric hermit. Recognize a 1960's hippie or a 1970's moonie? Han Solo has a philosophy coupled with courage and skill. His philosophy is money. His proficiency comes for a price - the highest. Solo is a thoroughly avaricious mercenary. And the Princess, a decisive, strong, self-confident and chilly woman. The audience cheered when she wielded a gun. In all three, I missed qualities that could be called humane - love, kindness, yes, I missed sensuality. I also missed a sense of ideals and faith. In this regard the machines seemed more human. They demonstrated real affection for each other and an occasional poutiness. They exhibited a sense of fidelity and constancy. The machines were humanized and the humans conversely seemed mechanical.As a member of the audience, I was swept up by the sheer romantic escapsim of it all. The deering-dos, the rope swing escape across the pit, the ray gun battles and especially the swash buckle with the ray swords. Great fun!But I just hope that we weren't too intoxicated by the escapism to be able to focus on the recognizable. I hope the beauty of the effects didn't narcotize our sensitivity to violence. I hope the people see through the fantastically well done futuristic mirrors to the disquieting reflection of our own society. I hope they enjoy STAR WARS without being "purely entertained".

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• jQuery dropdown is really jumpy

  - by Matthew Westrik

  Hi, I'm making a dropdown menu with jquery (some of the code is borrowed from a tutorial by someone, although I forget who...). When I use the dropdown, it slides up and down really fast, and I can't figure it out. What do you think? HTML <div id="nav"> <ul class="topnav"> <li><a class="selected" href="#" title="home">home</a></li> <li><a href="events/" title="events calendar">events</a></li> <li><a href="photos/" title="photo gallery">photos</a></li> <li><a href="staff/" title="faculty">staff</a> <ul class="subnav"> <li><a href="#">Luke</a></li> <li><a href="#">Darth Vader</a></li> <li><a href="#">Princess Leia</a></li> <li><a href="#">Jabba the Hutt</a></li> </ul> </li> <li><a href="contact/" title="contact">contact</a></li> jQuery $(document).ready(function(){ $("ul.subnav").parent() .hover(function() { $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav").slideDown('fast').show(); //Drop down the subnav on hover... $(this).parent() .hover(function() { }, function(){ $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav").slideUp('slow'); }); $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav") .hover(function() { }, function(){ $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav").slideUp('slow'); }); }).hover(function() { $(this).addClass("subhover"); }, function(){ $(this).removeClass("subhover"); });

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• Introducing… SharePress!

  - by Bil Simser

  For those that follow me I’ve been away from blogging and twittering for a couple of months. This is the reason. For the last few months I’ve been working with a cross-functional team putting together a new product from the people that run WordPress, the free premiere blogging platform. The result is a new product we call SharePress, a highly extensible blogging and content management platform with the usability of WordPress and the power of SharePoint combined into a single product. SharePress gives you SharePoint sites that are SEO-friendly delivered with a Web 2.0 ease of use, leveraging all of the existing abilities of SharePoint and WordPress that we know today. The Reason Back in December I was approached by the WordPress team about building a new platform that took advantage of the power of SharePoint but the ease of WordPress. I’m no stranger to WordPress and it’s 5 minute no-holds-barred install (I’ve always wanted SharePoint to do this!) and I run my personal blog on WordPress as does my better half, Princess Jenn. There’s always been a pitch by so-called Web 2.0 applications to deliver the power of SharePoint but the ease of [insert product here] over the past year or so. I checked each and every one of them out, but they fell woefully short when it came to SharePoint’s document management, versioning, and customization. They try, but it’s never been up to par in my books. On the flipside, SharePoint has always been tops in collaboration in the Enterprise but it’s painful to develop web parts, UI customization can be tricky, and there’s just no user community for something as simple as themes and designs. The Product Enter SharePress. Is it SharePoint? Is it WordPress? It’s both, and neither. Everything you like about both products are there but this is a bold new product that is positioned to bring SharePoint to the masses while maintaining the fidelity of an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. SharePress delivers on all fronts including: The ability to leverage any WordPress/Joomla/Drupal/DotNetNuke themes and skins inside of SharePoint Run any WordPress/Drupal/Joomla/DotNetNuke/SharePoint plug-in/module/web part/feature works out of the box with SharePress SEO-friendly URLs and pages Permalinks for all content All the features of SharePoint Server 2010 (including InfoPath, Excel, and Access services) included in the price Small deployment footprint. You decide how much to deploy and where. Independent Database Abstraction Layer (iDal) that allows you to deploy to SQL Server 2005/2008, MySQL, and PostgreSQL Portable Rendering Engine Layer (PREL) so you host .NET or PHP on Apache or IIS (version 7 or higher). The install feature is built around WordPress and it’s famous 5-minute install (actually, it’s never taken me more than 1 minute). SharePress installs with two screens after the files are uploaded to your server (which can be done entirely using FTP): After you enter two fields of information click “Install SharePress” and you’ll be done: No mess, no fuss, no complicated dependencies, and no server access required! How simpler could this be? The Technology WordPress plug-ins and themes working with SharePoint? Of course! The answer is IronPython which has now reached a maturity level capable of doing on the fly code language conversions. SharePress is a brand new product not built on top of any previous platform but leverages all the power of each of those applications through a patent pending technique called SharePress Multi-plAtfoRm Technology (SMART). SMART will convert PHP code on the fly into Python (using SWIG as an intermediate processor) which is then compiled to MSIL and then delivered back as an ASP.NET MVC application (output is C# or VB.NET, but you can build your own SMART converter to output a different language). Sound complicated? It is, but it’s all behind the scenes and you don’t have to worry about a thing. This image illustrates the technology stack and process: So users can load up out of the box PHP themes and plug-ins from the WordPress/Joomla/Drupal community into the SMART converter and output MSIL that is used by the SharePress engine and rendered on the fly to the end user. Supported PHP versions are 4.xx and 5.xx with version 6 support to come when it’s released. Similarly you can take any .NET application, DotNetNuke Module, SharePoint Web Part or event handler and feed it into the converter to output the same. Everything is reverse compiled into MSIL so it becomes technology agnostic. No source code access is needed and the SMART converter can handle obfuscated .NET assemblies that were built with .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5, and 4.0. With this technology you can also with the flip of a switch have the output create PHP pages for you. This allows you to run SharePress on Unix based systems running PHP and MySQL, allowing you to deliver your SharePoint like experience to your users with a $0 infrastructure footprint. Here’s SharePress with the default WordPress post imported then a stock SharePoint collaboration site was imported. The site was then applied with the default Kubrick theme from WordPress. The Features Deploy any of the freely available 100,000 WordPress/Joomla/Drupal themes instantly to your runtime SharePress environment and preview or activate them right from your browser. Built-in Web 2.0 jQuery Enabled End User and Administrator Web Interface. Never have to remote into a server again! Run any SharePoint Web Part or Event Handler directly without modification or access to source code in SharePress. Use any WordPress/Joomla/Drupal plug-in directly in SharePress, no local admin or access to server. Just upload and activate. Upload and Activate any SharePoint Solution Package to any site remotely. No rebuilding. Changes made to sites require no compiling or rebuilding and are published immediately. Password Protected Content. You can give passwords to individual posts, articles, pages, documents, forms, and list items. A powerful polymorphic Captcha system backs the security interface and vendors can easily tie into smart card readers, fingerprint readers, and retina scanners for authorization and identification. OpenID, Windows Live, and Windows Authentication are supported out of the box. Infinitely customizable and extensible. You can leverage plug-ins from the open source community to do practically anything, all configured and uploaded via the browser. Additionally the developer API (available soon) allows you to build extensions in .NET, PHP, and Python with little effort. Easy Importing. We have importers for Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, and SharePoint so you can populate your site quickly and easily with full metadata modeling and creation. Banner Management. It’s easy to setup banners for your web site complete with impression numbers, special URLs, and more. Menu Manager. The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus as you want, each one can be associated to specific audiences or roles and then be styled across multiple contexts including the same menu delivered as a fly out, rollover, drop down, and just about any navigation you can think of. Collaborative ShareBook. Our exclusive book feature allows you to setup a “book” and then authorize individuals to contribute content. Permalinks. All content in SharePress has a permanent or “perma link” associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links. Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support. Deliver SharePress the way *you* want from the platform *you* decide. Database Independence. We know people wanted to run on any database platform so SharePress is built on top of a database abstraction layer that allows you to run on SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL. Other databases can be supported by writing a supporting database script consisting of fourteen function calls. The script can be written in Perl, Python, AWK, PowerShell, Unix Shell scripts, VBA, or simple DOS batch files. The Team SharePress is the work of a lot of people in both the WordPress and SharePoint community. I worked with a lot of SharePoint MVPs to create this new product as we really wanted to deliver the most compatible and feature rich system in a product that we would be proud of. Many thanks go out to Eli Bleeker, Todd Robillard, Scot Larson, Daniel Hillier, Shane Fox, Box Peran, Amanda English, and Bill Murray for doing the heavy lifting and all of their expertise and innovative thinking to get this product out. Licensing and Pricing SharePress is still in the final stages for pricing but we’re looking at a price point somewhere between $99-$100 to make it affordable for everyone. We plan to announce final pricing sometime in the next few weeks. There are no additional charges for Enterprise versions or additional features. Everything you see is what’s available and it’s just a matter of lighting up your site with whatever feature you want to enable. The product will not be open source but source code licenses will be available to ISVs who are interested in interfacing with the API at a low level. Cost will be $25,000 USD per developer and gives you complete access to the source code to the SharePress Foundation System and the .NET 4.0 Framework source code. Conclusion We hope you enjoy the launch of SharePress as the new premium blogging and content management platform for both Intranets and the Internet. We think we’ve build the best of breed solutions here and made it easy for anyone to get started with a minimal of infrastructure but allow the scalability of SharePress to shine through in the Enterprise 2.0 world. We encourage your feedback so please leave comments as to what you’re looking for in this system as we’re always evolving it to make it a better product for everyone.

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• NINE Questions with Michelle Juett

  - by NINEQuestions

  Michelle Juett is one of the more interesting people I know, even though we’ve never met face to face. She’s part artist, part techie and all cool. We “met” via my good buddy George Clingerman and have plotting to take over the world, errr… I mean “collaborating” ever since. If you happen to live in the Seattle area, you can catch her and her work at Sakura Con on April 2-4, 2010 and various other gamer and art cons throughout the year. You can also find her on Twitter as @Shelldragon. Now that you know a little bit, I’ll let her tell you the rest of the story in these NINE Questions: 1. Where are you from? I was born in Clearwater, Florida. I like to tell people I'm from the Bermuda Triangle, it just makes explaining myself so much easier. My family moved to Washington when I was 5 and I've been in the Pacific Northwest ever since. We like to QQ about the rain but we really love the green trees and clean water. 2. What do you do? I fight evil by moonlight and win love by daylight.. or something like that.  I’ve been in quality assurance for games during the day since January 2008 and an artist for life. I currently work in QA for a really awesome game company in Bellevue.  At home, I work on personal digital art, making game assets as well as other random freelance projects as they pop up. 3. How did you get to where you are now? I'm still not where I want to be but I'm getting closer. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to work hard and never settle for the minimum required. I tend to overwork myself but I've never regretted it. You can want something really bad but if you aren't willing to work for it, then you can't expect it to just happen. I've always drawn and had an unhealthy love for video games that I was told I’d grow out of.  I knew I would not ‘grow out’ of games and that real adults make them and I could too. After I graduated, in searching for jobs, I discovered game testing. I figured this would be a good way to get my foot in the door and start networking. I’ve worked with consoles, websites and now, PC games.  I stuck with my journey, although it has been a rocky one, daylighting as a tester and moonlighting as an artist. I'm still on that journey but I wouldn't have it any other way. Test has given me a perspective that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain any other way. It gives an unconditional respect for other hard working testers and an insight into creative problem solving. 4. So video game testing probably sounds WAY cooler than the reality. What's it like? What's a given day for you? Game testers don't get a lot of respect because of their stigmas and the fact most people don't actually know what we do.  People hear about the opening and closing disc trays all day. Many places do treat their testers like numbers. It all depends on where you work and how awesome your company is. I've had to deal with a lot of bad work situations to get to a really good one. QA exists to ensure the game is as flawless and enjoyable as it can be by the time it has to leave the nest and go out into the world. This includes everything obvious: “can I beat the level and save the princess?” to the more obscure: ‘What happens when I lose internet connection while trying to save right before falling into a pit to my death while holding the jump key then my cat pulls out my memory card and hides it in her litter box?” On the dev side, for developers, testers can be very scary people. Especially when the test team is not in house and you can’t see each other’s faces.  I've seen both sides. We don't mean to hurt your feelings. We really DO love you and want your game to be the best it can be! It can be some serious tough love. 5. You are also an accomplished artist. Got any major projects right now you'd like to talk about? LOL, I don't know if I’d say I'm an accomplished artist just yet. I’m still a long way from where I want to be. I figure that’s what makes you grow though: the desire to never stop improving. I like QA but I want to be a full time artist. I was lucky enough to register for a table at Sakura Con in the 11 second window that the tables sold out. As such, I’ll be selling my wares in the Artist Alley April 2-4th. Part of preparing for this is actually making the art to be sold there. Anime is a fun pass time but I don’t draw a whole lot of it so I’m making up for lost time. As I seem to enjoy burying myself in work, I’m an art lead for a secret project that’s so secret I might be killed tonight for even mentioning it. I also take on various freelance projects and do what I can to help out indie games. I discovered the XNA community a year and a half ago and developed a love for Indies when I was writing a weekly newsletter on XBLA news. I’m a little late to the party but I find myself in a unique position where I am an artist and also have technical skills in games. While not programmer myself, I have a lot of game sense and experience. I hope to make some awesome happen. Lastly, I have an ongoing web comic Shell’s Angels) that tends to get neglected when I get busy. I still love drawing comics and keep a little book with me to sketch down ideas as they pop into my head. I may pick it back up again as a larger project sometime in the future. 6. Can you talk about any of the other freelance projects you're doing or are you sworn to secrecy on those too? We wouldn't want a team of game developer ninjas to take you out or anything. All my projects are currently 2d. I have personal projects such as the ongoing comic as well as a graphic novel I've been picking at here and there. My main focus until April is Sakura Con, Sakura Con, Sakura Con.  I see it as a great way to get exposure and convention experience. I found out I love conventions a couple years ago and I want to get more involved in them. 7. As an artist, what is your weapon of choice? What do you use to get most of your stuff done? I am a Photoshop Hero and I have the hoodie to prove it. (http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pah090011.html) I've dabbled in other paint programs but I always gravitate back to Photoshop. She is my one true love. I'd like to learn programs like Flash or Anime Studio when I get a bit more time because of their animation abilities. I've worked on frame by frame animation forever but I would love to learn 2d rigging. Still, nothing can compare to a simple sketchpad and a pencil. I always have one on me in case I come across or think of something interesting and can't get to a computer. If the Courier ever comes to exist it will be an ideal weapon for me. 8. You did some videos too, depicting the art creation process. What was the motivation behind those? The creative process is just as important as the final product, if not more so.  I've always loved watching speed paint videos and wanted to try it out myself. Turns out it's a lot of work and time but it's definitely fun to go back and rewatch them. Art isn't always the end result and is more often the process itself. 9. Got any interesting tattoos? Designed any for yourself or other people? Not yet, but not for lack of desire. I've toiled over what and where for years. Last year, I finally decided the back of my shoulders would be the place. Like anything permanent, I want it to have meaning. I thought of somehow incorporating games but I couldn't find something I felt would stand the test of time even with all the classic sprite games. I'm very picky so we'll see if I can get something solid decided. Come see me at Sakura Con April 2 -4!!!

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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