I was at a one time, a Windows-centric developer, purchased tools (mostly Microsoft) and despised open source...fast forward 10 years. My entire tool chain, development environment, IDE and soon operating system (Ubuntu is hard to beat -- it's what Google uses) are all open source, of the GPL variety. I assure you that open source proponents, pundits, evangelists, whatever you want to call us, use more than just Chrome -- unless I misunderstood your remark. :) OSS is the future of everything outside of the bubble known to many as Microsoft. PHP is one example of open source success, which Drupal, WordPress, Joomla (and about 1000 others) are built on. Combined, these CMS frameworks power something to the effect of 30% or more of web sites. Apache still holds like 60% market share in HTTP hosting... I am proud to say, closed source, proprietary software is a receding practice...open source will eventually win out. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or next year or next decade, but mark my words, it's going the way of the dinosaur... p.s-The numbers or stats I provided were ball parked or quickly Googled... Consider Windows developers defect to Linux and open source...but I have yet to meet an open source Linux guy make the reverse decision. :p Regards, Alex

Code Sniffer is what you likely want to search for - PHP has a great one. :) The premise is simple, use a tokenizer, and the write custom rules for what is valid according to convention. No external documents necessary, the CS files act as pre-compile tests. An additional bonus, is the ability to hook this into VCS (ie: Subversion) in pre-phase and stop code from every making it into the repo until it passes convention tests and automated verification. It's more work than I leading on, but well worth the pay off in the end, if quality is important to you. Alex

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh547108.aspx[^] An aggregate root is an entity obtained by composing other entities together. Objects in the aggregate root have no relevance outside, meaning that no use cases exist in which they’re used without being passed from the root object. In implementing a root in vb.net how is this possible? I would require a entity called OrderItems as a property of Order to be publicaly visible in order for the persistence framework to do it's thing??? I assume you just make the property readonly?

I just found some articles that explain how to change the mapping for tables so I imagine columns are just around the corner. :) When I say timestamp I mean a unix timestamp which can easily be converted to date AND/OR time - not sure what MSDN is getting at?!? In the database I wish to store the date "10/10/2013" as 1381381200 but convert to a human friendly date within the PONO. My entity objects are high level abstractions but I still prefer to store the time in a numeric format - how does EF solve/address this type mis-match? This is/was the impetus behind OR/M frameworks ain't it? :) Regards, Alex

Greetings all - I haven't posted here in ages :) I am entirely new to .Net having been working in it for a week at most so please go easy and be detailed as possible :) I have the following PONO:

Public Class WorkOrderEntity

Private intTrackingNumber As Integer
Private intDateReceived As Integer
Private strManufacturer As String

Public Property TrackingNumber() As Integer
    Get
        Return intTrackingNumber
    End Get

    Set(value As Integer)
        intTrackingNumber = value
    End Set
End Property

Public Property DateReceived() As String
    Get
        ' TODO: Convert timestamp to formatted date
        Return intDateReceived
    End Get

    Set(value As String)
        ' TODO: Convert formatted date to timestamp
        intDateReceived = value
    End Set
End Property

End Class

The issue I am faced with is how to store date/time as a timestamp (integer) but provide public properties which format/convert accordingly. I suppose I could provide a an additional getter()/setter() but ideally I wonder if EF has a way of circumventing this "convention"? Additionally - I am also curious as to whether it's possible to map properties to columns which are not labeled correctly? Basically if I were working in a existing database (EF automatically builds my PONO with properties named after table fields) I wish to name the fields something more meaningful; some fields for example might be awkward abbreviations but in the object model I want something more English friendly? I seem to recall being able to do this with Hibernate in java (actually it's PHP port) but never the less does EF support such a feature? Seems obvious that this would be useful in day to day development??? Any ideas? Regards, Alex

I found an eHow article on how to run the application in stealth mode so hopefully that helps :) Cheers, Alex

I'm not sure how that would be done...can you point me to more details or possibly show me some examples? :D

We have a large network of Windows machines, each of which has VNC server to allow remote access by our admin. Problem is, VCN apparently shows itself in the task tray and is closable - which some users have been doing. Our Admin was most comofrtable with VNC (didn't want to use RDP or other) so that is our only option. Is there a way we can run VNC in stealth mode? Even just hiding it form the task tray and processes list when CTLR+ALT+DEL so most users cannot easily disable it? I'm thinking there has to be a small app or osmething that prevents the display of VNC in the task tray, short of changing the source code and recompiling VNC (not practical at all). Cheers, ALex

1. Don't use VPN install SSH and SVNServe on the Windows machine and access the repo using ssh+svn 2. Very feasible. I worked for several companies around the world (one being in Sydney) and I'm in Central Canada

Run a metrics calcuation tool before you write a single line of code. Whenever you generate code automagically using some tool, run it again before and after. Calculate your averages, it's not that hard. Google SLOCCount it's a linux tool that calculates SLOC for many languages, I use t all the time :) Cheers, Alex

TinyMCE is the defacto-standard that most PHP applications default with. It has it's flaws as well, but it's better than FCKEditor, IMHO. Second to that you might consider XStandard Lite (http://www.xstandard.com/[^]) It's an ActiveX/Java component though so I believe your users need to install something. Second to that, many CMS type software are slowly offering/switching to Markdown as an alternative syntax to HTML, might want to check it out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown[^] There was a few editors a while back, but only one turns up right now and it's quite buggy in IE7...still the markup is so trivial anyone can write in it within minutes and it's converted to HTML on the fly, so you don't have to worry about XSS exploits sneaking in. p.s-All web based WYSIWYG editors are crazy buggy, they all hack the hell out of the IWebBrowser2 component and each browser needs work arounds. Have you tried running in FireFox? Typically that browser fares best when it comes to working in WYSIWYG editors. Cheers, Alex

Randor wrote:

Heh, I remember the birth of PHP. I was not doing any Windows development in the mid 90's and was a Unix developer/sys admin. I haven't done any PHP development in over 10 years I would probably be lost in PHP5. The PHP language itself has come a long way.

So you remember it's birth as a series of Perl scripts and being called "Personal Homepage"? :P I started at the time PHP 3 was released... Back then I was learning/tinkering in C and C++ in the 1990's, it was only when I started thinking I'd like to make a career out of software development that I looked for an easy enterance. Web site projects were plenty and didn't require a BSc. so I started learning JS, HTML and ASP. I hated ASP, looked for an open source solution and started with Perl which led me to PHP (thank god). It's annoying to develop in, because of the lack of any standard framework (at least a few hundred available -- with new ones popping up each week) unlike MFC, to provide your application with some structure. When fixing or working on existing applications, it can be like finding a needle in a haystack. One guys interpretaion of MVC and a front controller, actually turns out to be a extremely tightly coupled application bootstrap, front controller, routing, dispatching and more, in one monolithic class over 1000 lines. Lots of bad practice in PHP but there is a small community dedicated developers trying to change that by introducing patterns, OO best practices, architecture and more. Zend framework is a good start, with it's design issues and all. Cheers, Alex

Randor wrote:

guess that it could be said that the MFC Doc/View architecture closely resembles the Model-View-Controller pattern

It could be, but more formally I believe MFC and Doc/View are refered to as MVP, unfortunately neither pattern are what I am looking for. I think I may have to discover my own name as it's one part service locator and one part singleton but removed of functionality in both to meet very specific requirements.

Randor wrote:

Sounds interesting. What language are you working with?

Only the best, most flexible language in the world. :P *cough* PHP *cough* Seriously though, while the language is responsible for some of the most naieve developers and most hackish projects, known to man, like any language if you follow best practices, patterns, etc. It's a real treat to work with. Cheers, Alex

You know that helper macro in MFC (pardon my ignorance but I haven't used MFC in probalby 6-7 years) that is used for creating object at runtime, used in Views, I think it's RUNTIME_CLASS or something??? What is the name of the closest pattern for that implementation, obviously it's not a singleton and it's not quite a factory either, or is it? I am implementing (in another language) a object which does: 1. Prevents direct instantiation by virtue of a private constructor 2. The second object which is used to create the said oibject manages the instances to limit only one per class So I get the benefits of a singleton while still honoring inversion of control or DIP. Without the global introduced using a singleton. Cheers, Alex

Sweet. Interesting read...I love this kind of stuff :)

Hahaha....thats hilarious...I'm changing my signature over at another forum to this statement :D

I have samba installed on a *nix server and two shares setup. I am trying to setup mapped drives under Windows (XP & 7). I can get one to connect but never both, it has to be one or the other. Does anyone know if this is a feature of Windows or something?

I assume you already have the SSH service running under Windows? Can you: 1. Ping the Windows server from where you are 2. Can you telnet the SSH server from the other machine Lastly, under linux Debian there is a option in the SSH config which prohibits login as root. Are you by chance logging into the account using root access? I wonder if this is possibly causing the issue, and by disabling authenticaiton, you by pass this measure... In anycase, you can easily plink into a password protected session, so I wouldn't recommend disabling passwords...all someone has to do is catch your open port and try a password-less login and BAM they now control your system, at least to the extent SSH for Windows lets you. Cheers, Alex

I have heard horror stories of friends using Vista and nothing but complaints, I am buying a power house computer today (Quad core) and I assume I need a 64 bit OS. I plan on dual booting with Ubuntu but need Windows for various tools. What happens if I install Windows 32bit on a 64bit quad core? Is Visat that bad, even for an experienced computer user who can tweak it? Is it stable? Is it just the constant security questions that have hindered user experience?

Do you happen to know of any benchmarks that compare the old style to the new?