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November 2006 - Posts - Ido Samuelson's blog

November 2006 - Posts

Visual Subst

I work a lot with the subst command prompt. I find it easier to manage a 'drive' then a path.

I recently found this very cool application that present a UI for the subst command.

Visual Subst making it easier to manage my virtual drives.

 

 

Quiz

I found this question to be somewhat problematic even for experience developers :-) Let's see how well you know ADO.NET?

Here is a sample DataSet that holds the tables:

 

Here is a code sample that do the following:

adds to the DataSet 4 rows: 2 parent rows and then 2 child rows for the 1st parent.

QuizDataSet ds = new QuizDataSet();

ds.Parent.AddParentRow("Parent A");

ds.Parent.AddParentRow("Parent B");

 

ds.Child.AddChildRow(ds.Parent[0], "Child A");

ds.Child.AddChildRow(ds.Parent[0], "Child B");

The question:

What is the proper way to update the added rows into the database?

Searching enabled application

Although the current Desktop Search comes with a UI the previous one did not. So I started looking for documentation about Search API in Windows Vista and XP.

There is not many documentation about it (I learned some from Sharepoint searching) but what is cool about it is that you use the simple SQL queries againt an OLEDB provider of Indexing Service.

Connection string is : "Provider=Search.CollatorDSO;Extended Properties='Application=Windows"

You can find a text file with the Shell API properties here and read more infor on Catherine Heller bog (Windows Vista Technical Evangelist)

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PIDS - Perimeter Intrusion Detection System

My #1 system is PIDS, Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. PIDS envolve a great amount of hardware support. Radars, Electronic Fences, Video Motion Detection Devices, CACS - Control and Access Card Devices and Systems , PTZ Camers, Video Recorder Devices, Video Matrix Devices, etc. You can just start to imagine the excitment of building such a system.

The current C4 (Command, Control Communications & Computer System) project am dealing today is not only PIDS but also BP (Border protection) which adds to a PIDS very two important concepts:

  1. Target classification and tracking.
  2. Target Fusion.  

This makes the integration of both PIDS and BP very unique and advanced in todays PIDS projects. In BP system it is very common to have a fusion for the tracks(tracks that are near each other fused to one target or devided to 2 targets) while in PIDS project fusion is not part of it unless you have a rader and then the only fusion is on the tracks coming from the radar.

What is new in this specific PIDS is the ability to create a track from other devices such as VMD and Electronic Fence, fuse them together with a track from a radar and create only 1 target with 3 different kind of tracks. This doesn't sound like a big step toward a next generation of PIDS.

HOWEVER,

The next step is building up the Alert mechanism for setting up a threshhold for curtein zones. For example, if you are in an airport and you have an electronic fence very close to a road, usually people touch it, lean on it and this will results in false alarm because there was no intrusion. So now we are able to combine the Electrionc fence and the VMD together and make sure that ONLY if these two had alert an inrusion alarm will be created for the operator. The even more complex scenario is setting up threshhold for a VMD, electronic fence and even Radar and ONLY when the total sum (could be also better algorithm) of all the treshhold values for the tracks is larger then the zone treshhold, an event will raise.

Two weeks ago I displayed it to Eyal from Elfar (an electronic fence company), I still smile when I remember how he reacted when he saw it: "This is taking any PIDS I know two steps ahead...Wow!" I know Eyal a while back when we both worked on the protection for ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games.

An even cooler feature is since any intrusion is based on a target, we can immidiatly point a camera to the exact Geo/UTM position and start tracking it!!!

 

The development for this project is near complete. We had our requirements changing, we had new requirements arriving and we are still before the schedule.

I am greatful to have such a dev team and am sure each one of you guys will success in the future!

Altough the next drop to the client (around January) will mark the end of this project for me, this project continues since client adjustments and "support" will take the place now.

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XNA Part two on channel 9

Frank Savage talk about XNA Deployment to Xbox 360 and debugging features. SO COOL!

preview

Source

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Feature Specifications for Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas"

Have you wonder what is going to be inside “Orcas”. You can now view and monitor the specs!!!

View the specs here 

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LINQ to XSD Preview

After working sometime with LINQ this becomes quite a missing feature. This will make my life way easier working via xml

What is LINQ to XSD?

 

LINQ to XSD provides .NET developers with support for typed XML programming on top of LINQ to XML. While the LINQ to XML programmer operates on generic XML trees, the LINQ to XSD programmer operates on typed XML trees -- instances of .NET types that model the XML types of a specific XML schema (XSD). To get an idea, consider the following C#3.0 fragment for a LINQ to XML query that computes the total over the items in a XML tree for a purchase order:

 

     (from item in purchaseOrder.Elements("Item")

      select (double)item.Element("Price")

           * (int)item.Element("Quantity")

     ).Sum();

 

Using LINQ to XSD, the query is written in a much clearer and type-safe way:

 

     (from item in purchaseOrder.Item

      select item.Price * item.Quantity

     ).Sum();

 

LINQ to XSD can be used whenever you have an XML schema available, or you are willing to infer a schema from the XML data at hand. LINQ to XSD is integrated into Visual Studio; so you just tag an XML schema as an ‘LINQ to XSD schema’, build your project, and the automatically derived object model is then part of your solution -- just as if XML schemas were .NET types.

 

Source

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XNA beta 2 Tutorials

If you still haven't checked about XNA Framework or XNA Game Studio, XNAtutorials.com has published very good tutorials for the new XNA beta2.

Find them all here:

XNAtutorial.com Pack 1 - Installation

XNAtutorial.com Pack 2 - Code Structure

XNAtutorial.com Pack 3 – object orientation

XNAtutorial.com Pack 4 - Using Graphics

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Total Commander Beta 7.0 Beta 2

The #1 file manager new beta 2 has finally released after almost a month since the previous beta.

You should try it out!

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Skype for Windows 3.0.0.137 Beta

I doubt I'll have any "news" to say about Skype just that it now has a new beta version J

Skype Ltd.

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WinSnap 1.1.8

This is my favorite application. All of my blogs images were taken using this very cool app. Now it also has a portable version to run on your memory stick!

WinSnap is a small enhancement utility for taking and editing screenshots. It can easily capture windows of non-rectangular form with the background of your choice, automatically perform simple canvas transformations and coloring effects, add professional smoothing shadows in Photoshop style and more. Also it supports variety of image formats and provides advanced auto-save options.

Latest Changes:

  • First portable version (to run from a USB stick)
  • New interface languages were added (20+ now)
  • Bug with invalid auto-save directory was fixed
  • Some issues with region capture were fixed
  • Many small improvements and core optimization

Screenshot:

http://www.ntwind.com/software/winsnap.html

 

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My Exposé

Expose is a great add-in for Windows Vista. Although it still require more work I find myself using it more and more.

Notice: This still has problems when you changing resolutions or using multiple monitors.

You can download binaries or source code.

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Vista RTM is HOT!

My laptop is even Hotter...and my laps are burning...

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