Programming

Since starting to make the move towards utilizing NHibernate in most of my projects I have been a little frustrated by the need to make properties virtual. This is by no means a criticism of NHibernate just the tooling, specifically Visual Studio 2010 and CodeRush. Whilst CodeRush has templates for everything the virtual keyword dosn’t seem to get a look in, fortunately it’s not hard to add support. Thanks to Rory Becker’s article on Creating Virtual Methods I had everything I needed to create the template. Auto-properties are actually significantly less complex than methods as they are composed of little more than the type, property name and the { get; set; } block. Templates are easy enough to create from the DevExpress Options Menu (DevExpress Menu -> Options) you jump to the templates page quickly with the search in the top left hand corner. I prefer to organize my custom templates into their own folder, then I can easily import and export these between machines via drop box. 1) Right click your preferred folder and select “New Template” inter “u?Type?” and press enter/OK. 2) Set the Context - I copied the context of my template from a?Type? and removed the InStruct directive, as virtual is not valid in structures, the Use: field should read something like this: ...

I spent far too long trying to fix a error while developing an Orchard Module. To explain further Orchard CMS derives a lot of its flexibility by representing content in highly abstracted terms called shapes, these shapes are dispatched by the module that wishes to output content then rendered at the end. In between these shapes can be manipulated by themes or modules to change how the information is displayed. It takes a while to get your head around it, but its a great system… until you make a mistake! Modules define where shapes are placed through a file called placement.info your module dispatches shapes through it’s Driver (a class inherited from ContentPartDriver) ...

Responsive Design is a term that seems to have risen up around me over the course of the last year. Up to this point I have been largely unaware of what it meant other than had a good deal to do with designing markup and CSS for the mobile platform. Today I thought I would spend a couple of hours researching the topic, I have included some of the best articles and post I could find. ...

Databases are a pain in the neck to look after, poorly designed models and processes that don’t remove temporary data can cause a database to grow in size. A database that is allowed to grow large beyond its requirements becomes a burden on the nightly backup, takes longer to restore in the event of a recovery scenario and slows down the development process by preventing developers from testing things out on “live” data. More often than not I have found that the problem lies with log or analytic tables sometimes this information is liberally logged (which it should be) and then totally ignored without a thought for trimming the data on a regular basis. SQL Server Management Studio provides a way of looking at the storage usage of tables individually from the properties context menu item of the table. ...

If you look through the schema of the table we imported in Part 2 there are a number of unused fields and some of the data appears to be missing. Cleaning up the Schema You can go right ahead and remove the fields that start with “Unused” as far as I can tell the full version of Code-Point uses these fields. Remove the nullable attributes from all of the fields, this will prevent us from doing something silly at a later date, and will avoid Object Relational Mappers such as Entity Framework from creating nullable data types. Many of the fields contain codes not data itself but codes that describe other data, so lets prepend code on the end of those fields for the time being. Cleaning up the Data The quality column in Code-Point Open describes the source and reliability of the data, it ranges from the most accurate 10 through to no data 90, when building a system around this data you need to decide at what data is important to your use case. The following query will give you an idea of the quality of the dataset as a whole, I have annotated it based upon the OS Code-Point documentation. ...

All of the data is in different files; SSIS is capable of extracting data from multiple files however for the purposes of this article I am going to stick to the Import Export Wizard. To combine all of the files into one (big) file a quick switch to the command prompt is required: type data\*.csv > .\CodePointOpenCombined.csv Because none of the data files have headers this works fine, if they did have headers some work would be needed to strip those out. Create a new database in SQL Server then follow these steps: ...

In April 2010 the Ordinance Survey released certain parts of their data under special licence which allows for commercial use without cost. All the types of data made available are outside the scope of this post although I hope that the techniques described could be applied to any data set not limited to Ordinance Survey data. In this post I am going to look at Code-Point Open, a list of all UK postcodes with their corresponding spatial positions. ...

Several days into my late Unity3d project I realised that the was a bulk of code designed solely to make an object invisible by fading it out of the scene. The code was not complex although because of the way it was all in one class it appeared complex. After doing some research into the best way to go about making this change, realised it was both convenient and logical to extract the code into a separate script and attaching that to the object that I wished to apply the effect to. This meant that instead of nested if-statements for state management in a script attached to the Main Camera I was able to make declarative statements: ...

It is about 3 weeks on since I started learning Unity3d, and today Makemedia delivered the product we were working on using it. I have thoroughly enjoyed the process and the experience, there is still much to learn however I am much more confident experimenting with Unity3d to see what I can come up with. As I am not going out to see the fireworks tonight, I put together a 3d scene to demonstrate some of Unity Basics particle effects in the form of a personal fireworks display. Move around in the scene using W, A, S, D or the Arrow Keys you can move your head by moving the mouse. ...

I am starting a project next week using Unity3D, I have known about this for a while and have poked around a bit to try and figure out how to do various things. I have been really impressed as to how fast you can get something done with what is basically a free product. There are some superb videos on Unity3d Student which have been invaluable. I think I have got my head around the controls, UI, paradigms and scripting, although not all in one scene. As evidence of my work I have made three balls bounce around the screen, something akin to a carpenter making a door stop perhaps, but I am sure I will learn. ...