"The Essential Binary Repository Management Cheat Sheet" (Think "You've got bin's in my source VCS... No, you've got source in my bin VCS")

DZone - Binary Repository Management

The Essential Binary Repository Management Cheat Sheet

Software development produces both source code and binary artifacts, and both kinds of artifact need to be handled differently. This Refcard assumes basic familiarity with source repository management, and is intended to help you design and configure a binary repository, optimize it for various workflows, and fit it smoothly into your software development lifecycle.

From the PDF

CONTENTS INCLUDE:
❱ Repository Requirements
❱ Repository Design
❱ Hosting & Management
❱ Security & Maintenance
❱ Binary Releases
❱ Popular Repository Managers... and More!

Software development produces two distinct kinds of artifacts: (1) source code, and (2) binary artifacts. This Refcard assumes basic familiarity with source repository management, and is intended to help you design and configure a binary repository, optimize it for various workflows, and fit it smoothly into your software development lifecycle.

I liked the broad, cross platform nature of this refcard.  While for .Net Dev's, Nuget is pretty much the real go to for this, what I thought interesting was that two of the three products mentioned at the end provide Nuget support i.e. Nuget is as much an api as Nuget.org is a repository. Remember, you don't have to use Nuget.org if you don't want too. Nuget makes it very very easy to use other repositories...

Bye bye Kona code name... Hello "Prism for Windows Runtime"

Brian Noyes Blog - Kona is Dead, Long Live Prism!

If you have read my blog, seen me speak at conferences or user groups, or read some of my articles lately you might know I have been working with the Microsoft patterns & practices team on guidance for Windows Store Business apps. This guidance has been code named “Kona” up until recently, and I’ve posted and written articles on that in various places.

As the team was getting the guidance ready for release, they decided to rename it to “Prism for Windows Runtime”. The names have not all been updated on the Codeplex site or in the downloads yet, but the code has been refactored to the final namespaces and project names that it will ship with.

Specifically the guidance is called “Prism for Windows Runtime”, and it is guidance on building loosely coupled, maintainable, testable applications based on the MVVM pattern for WinRT, especially Line of Business or Business to Consumer applications.

The guidance contains:

...

If you want to learn more, be sure to check out my article series here, and keep an eye out for my Pluralsight Course that will be out in a month or so titled “Building Windows Store Business apps with Prism”.

Prism for Windows RT (fka Kona) - Prism for Windows Store apps Drop April 10, 2013

I'm happy about this name change... And glad to see Prism, even in a Windows Runtime world, continue to get some attention. Also, as Brian notes, the "Kona" code name is still there on the project. These things can take a bit to change

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Windows 8 + Kona + Steve = Itinerary Hunter
Kona, Kona, Kona! [Think P&P dev guidance for composite application WinStore Apps {Yes, like Prism, but not}]

14 Minute cartooned video guide to to building your own Azure IaaS Pop-up Lab

Plankytronixx - Cartoon and Demo: Build the World’s Simplest Pop-Up Lab in Windows Azure Using IaaS Features

I thought this would be interesting since WIndows Azure VMs and Virtual Networks were released as a Generally Available (GA) service With the diagrams live-drawn in “cartoony” format, this video shows how to build a really simple lab consisting of 2 IIS web servers connected to a load balancer with traffic balanced over port 80.

It incorporates a series of click-by-click screen videos to show how to create the VMs, install IIS, connect the endpoints up to the load balancer, shut the servers down and delete them off the Azure Hypervisor hosts to stop $charges. Then to reboot the saved disks and reconfigure the load balancer to pop the lab back up again.

Cool, low stress, walk though for creating your own quick and dirty pop-up lab...

Just about everything you ever wanted to know about SQL Server Date and Time Data Types...

CodeProject - Date and Time Data Types and Functions - SQL Server (2000, 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012)

Introduction

It would be better, if we know the different functions available with SQL Server for date and time. So that we can make use of functions properly in different scenarios. In this article we will go through all the available date and time data types and functions with sample codes. This article will list down the available date and time data types and functions for SQL Server version from 2000 and above.  If you want more info on any items then click on the 'read more details' of that section and that link will take you to MSDN site.  

Table Of Contents 

• Introduction
• Background
• Date and Time Data Types - Quick Reference
• Date and Time Data Types - In Detail
  • time
  • date
  • smalldatetime
  • datetime
  • datetime2
  • datetimeoffset
• Date and Time Functions - Quick Reference.
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server 2000 and 2005
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server 2012
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server
• Date and Time Functions - In Detail
  • GETDATE
  • CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
  • GETUTCDATE
  • SYSDATETIME
  • SYSDATETIMEOFFSET
  • SYSUTCDATETIME
  • DATENAME
  • DATEPART
  • DAY
  • MONTH
  • YEAR
  • DATEADD
  • DATEDIFF
  • ISDATE
  • EOMONTH
  • SWITCHOFFSET
  • TODATETIMEOFFSET
  • DATEFROMPARTS
  • DATETIME2FROMPARTS
  • DATETIMEFROMPARTS
  • DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS
  • SMALLDATETIMEFROMPARTS
  • TIMEFROMPARTS
  • @@DATEFIRST
  • SET DATEFIRST
  • SET DATEFORMAT
• Functions that can affect the output of date functions
  • @@LANGUAGE
  • SET LANGUAGE
  • sp_helplanguage
• Functions that helps to convert date and time values to and from string literals and other date and time formats.
• Interesting Date and Time Questions
• References
• Summary

Background

The main objective of this article is to give a common place for all date and time data types and functions for all SQL Server versions so that we don't need to jump from one page to another. This article will help you to understand the different functions available with different versions of SQL Server with simple examples (All examples are self descriptive). At the same time this article can be used as a quick reference too. 

...

..."

We're talking 21 pages of Date Time Data Type text... yeah, wow. I love the comparison across versions matrixes.

TFS/Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 CTP 1 is available (think "Batch of Bug Fixes" release)

Microsoft Downloads - Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 CTP 1

This is a community technology preview (CTP) for Visual Studio 2012 Update 3.

Version:2012
Date published:4/15/2013

Language: English

VS2012.3 CTP TFS Express ENU.iso, 483.0 MB
VS2012.3 CTP TFS Server ENU.iso, 1.1 GB
VS2012.3 CTP.exe, 1.3 MB

Visual Studio 2012 Update is providing continuous value to customers, adding new capabilities year-round to features in the main product release. These releases will be aligned with the core software development trends in the market, ensuring developers and development teams always have access to the best solution for building modern applications.
This is a community technology preview (CTP) for Visual Studio 2012 Update 3. These cumulative updates to Visual Studio 2012 include a variety of bug fixes and capability improvements. More details can be found here.

Statement of Support:
PLEASE NOTE: This Technology Preview has not been subject to final validation and is not meant to be run on production workstations or servers. Due to a limitation in this preview, Internet access is required during installation, even when installing with the /layout option. Please ensure Internet access is available before installing this update. Since installation of Visual Studio CTPs and installation of Team Foundation Server CTPs work differently, please read the recommended upgrade approach for each product carefully.

For Visual Studio: The recommended approach for upgrading Visual Studio on test workstations is installing the latest Visual Studio Update CTP on top of an RTM release or a previous CTP build of that Update. Visual Studio CTPs can be upgraded to a different build.

For Team Foundation Server: Do not install a Team Foundation Server Update CTP on a production server, as it will put the server in an unsupported state. Unlike with Visual Studio CTPs, installing a Team Foundation Server CTP fully replaces the current release on the server with the CTP. Team Foundation Server CTPs cannot be upgraded to future CTPs or releases nor “downgraded” to a previous release.

...

Description of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 CTP 1

As has already been noted, VS2012.3 is looking like a bug fixed release. Kudo's to the team for keeping up the cadence...

A view into the creation of NASA'a spaceappschallenge.org site

open.NASA - Creating spaceappschallenge.org

It’s 4:39am and I’m staring at a blank screen.

“Well, that’s just great,” I say to myself before making a quick edit and switching over to my command line prompt.

$ git add . && git commit -m "Please let it work this time"
$ fab deploy development

I refresh my browser and see an image of the blue marble with 75 colorful icons and a slowly moving International Space Station sliding across the screen. Success. Issue ticket closed.

That’s been the story of my life, and the lives of the rest of the team behind spaceappschallenge.org, over the past few weeks as we prepared the site to go live, first as a soft launch on March 3rd, and later as a full rollout last week. We’ve spent a lot of time on the site and are really proud of the result.

...

• Methodology



• Backend



• Frontend





• SASS



• Leaflet, OpenStreetMaps, & Mapquest Open Maps



• Isotope



• Wysihtml5



• Typekit



• Disqus



• Hackpad



• Cloudflare



• Google Apps

While I don't use any of that tech, I still thought this post interesting. And that opening segment had me chuckling. You can just feel Sean's pain and joy of a final working site success...

The final final definitive (for now) answer for Windows 8 and ClickOnce

RobinDotNet's Blog - Windows 8 and ClickOnce : the definitive answer revisited

Since I posted the article titled Windows 8 and Click Once: the definitive answer, it became clear that it was not actually the definitive answer.

I got a ping on twitter from Phil Haack from Github telling me that this did not fix their Smart Screen filter problem.

After talking to him, and seeing his build and signing commands, I discovered they recently changed their signing certificate. For those of you who remember the early days of ClickOnce (2005) when you changed the signing certificate and everybody had to uninstall and reinstall the application, this seemed too likely an indicator to ignore.

...

Knowing this, it makes sense that my test application didn’t get stopped even though it was a brand new application. I signed it with my company’s signing certificate, which has been in use for several months.

Which leads me to another issue I noticed when talking to Phil. I noticed that rather than using PostBuild or BeforePublish commands, he was using AfterCompile commands to sign his executable. I asked him about it.

PostBuild, BeforePublish, and AfterCompile, oh my!

Apparently when Phil signs his executable using PostBuild or BeforePublish commands, when the user installs it, he gets the dreaded “exe has a different computed hash than specified in the manifest” error. He found that using AfterCompile instead fixed the problem.

...

If you are, or are planning on using ClickOnce in a Windows 8 world, this is some great information. This will save you days of frustration...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
ClickOnce, Windows 8 and SmartScreen (If you're using ClickOnce, planning on Windows 8 [Desktop] and don't have a CA cert, read this...)

Taking Facial Detection to the next level (and fulfilling my monthly cat post requirement) - Kittydar (Kitty Radar Cat Detector)

i-programmer - Kitty Radar Cat Detector

The Kittydar cat radar detector, written in JavaScript, is now available on Github. Kittydar, short for kitty radar, performs the vital task of identifying the locations of all the cats in an image you present to it.

According to the project's ReadMe on Github, the way Kittydar works  is that it first chops the image up into many "windows" to test for the presence of a cat head. Within each window a gradient is computed and a Histogram of Oriented Gradients or HOG is then used as the raw feature in a learning system.

The system is based on a neural network that has, according to the researcher Heather Arthur who created KittyDar, been pre-trained with thousands of photos of cat heads and their histograms, as well as thousands of non-cats. The neural network data is included in Kittydar in JSON format and is used to perform the classification.

...

http://harthur.github.io/kittydar/

harthur / kittydar

How it works

Kittydar first chops the image up into many "windows" to test for the presence of a cat head. For each window, kittydar first extracts more tractable data from the image's data. Namely, it computes the Histogram of Orient Gradients descriptor of the image, using the hog-descriptor library. This data describes the directions of the edges in the image (where the image changes from light to dark and vice versa) and what strength they are. This data is a vector of numbers that is then fed into a neural network which gives a number from 0 to 1 on how likely the histogram data represents a cat.

The neural network (the JSON of which is located in this repo) has been pre-trained with thousands of photos of cat heads and their histograms, as well as thousands of non-cats. See the repo for the node training scripts.

Limitations

Kittydar will miss cats sometimes, and sometimes classify non-cats as cats. It's best at detecting upright cats that are facing forward, but it can handle a small tilt or turn in the head.

Kittydar isn't fast. It'll take a few seconds to find the cats in one image.

There's lots of room for improvement, so fork and send requests.

Propers

• This informative research paper: Cat Head Detection - How to Effectively Exploit Shape and Texture Features by Weiwei Zhang, Jian Sun, and Xiaoou Tang.

• This off the hook dataset of cat images annotated with the locations of the cat's ears, eyes, and mouth.

• @gdeglin for the name.

Come on! You KNOW that's cool!