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)

public class DefinitionListPartDriver : ContentPartDriver<DefinitionListPart> {

    ...

    protected override DriverResult Display(
        DefinitionListPart part,
        string displayType,
        dynamic shapeHelper) {

        return ContentShape("Parts_DefinititionList",
            () => shapeHelper.Parts_DefinitionList(
                        ContentPart: part,
                        DefinitionList: part.Entries));
    }

    ...

}

You may have seen the mistake already, but just in case your not sure here is my placement.info file:

<Placement>
    <Place Parts_DefinitionList_Edit="Content:11"/>
    <Place Parts_DefinitionList="Content:11"/>
</Placement>

Yep, when I dispatched the shape it had an extra it in Definition… oh well, remember to check that first next time.

A List Apart’s Responsive Design Article

Key points I took away from this article are; the plethora of screen resolutions and orientations on the web is an advantage not a disadvantage. Mobile continues to rise in both business and the social web. Media queries are a neat implementation for modern browsers (IE9, Chrome, Safari 3+, Firefox 3.5+) with a practicable JavaScript backup for non compliant browsers.

CloudFour’s CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold Blog Post

This is quite a pragmatic stance on using Media Queries for the mobile platform as a direct response the aforementioned article from A List Apart. Key points for me were performance, specifically speed are very important for Mobile. The common use case for a mobile website is to find something quickly, waiting for large images and style sheets affects this performance. There are now low-power smartphones without the CPU power, resizing images in-browser does not work. There is a good response on Quirksmode.

Smashing Magazine’s Guidelines for Responsive Web Design Article

Kayla Knight goes into depth into the techniques and technologies that front end web developers have at their hands. There is a lot to take in in this article, and some great examples of responsive web design out in the wild. Further examples and discussion can be found on Adactio.

Windows Team Blog’s Targeting mobile optimized CSS at Windows Phone 7 Post

This was the article that kicked me off on my research spree this afternoon. I was seriously disappointed by Windows Phone 7′s 19/400 score on HTML5 test so I didn’t hold out much hope for support for CSS3 and Media Queries this article didn’t do much to reassure me. Microsoft advise going down the route of conditional HTML comments to import the correct style sheet for the platform you require.

Conclusion

Not being a “Front End” developer, I may never have to put any of this into practice however now I know more than when I started I can follow along when the design team talks about responsive design. If you know of any other resources or articles, please post them in the comments for me to read. If I find them useful I will update this post.

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.

In large databases this can be laborious, I found a script that will collect this information and present it as a table. I have adapted it a little so that I can see the total size of the table and sort by each column to drill down to the problem tables.

SET NOCOUNT ON
CREATE TABLE #spaceused (
  name nvarchar(120),
  ROWS CHAR(11),
  reserved VARCHAR(18),
  DATA VARCHAR(18),
  index_size VARCHAR(18),
  unused VARCHAR(18)
)
 
DECLARE TablesFromSysObjects CURSOR FOR
  SELECT name
  FROM sysobjects WHERE TYPE='U'
  ORDER BY name ASC
 
OPEN TablesFromSysObjects
DECLARE @TABLE VARCHAR(128)
 
FETCH NEXT FROM TablesFromSysObjects INTO @TABLE
 
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
  INSERT INTO #spaceused EXEC sp_spaceused @TABLE
  FETCH NEXT FROM TablesFromSysObjects INTO @TABLE
END
 
CLOSE TablesFromSysObjects
DEALLOCATE TablesFromSysObjects 
 
SELECT	name AS TableName,
		ROWS AS ROWS,
		CAST(LEFT(reserved, LEN(reserved) - 3) AS INT) AS Reserved,
		CAST(LEFT(DATA, LEN(DATA) - 3) AS INT) AS DATA,
		CAST(LEFT(index_size, LEN(index_size) - 3) AS INT) AS IndexSize,
		CAST(LEFT(unused, LEN(unused) - 3) AS INT) AS Unused,
		(CAST(LEFT(reserved, LEN(reserved) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(DATA, LEN(DATA) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(index_size, LEN(index_size) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(unused, LEN(unused) - 3) AS INT)) AS Total
FROM #spaceused
ORDER BY Total DESC
DROP TABLE #spaceused

Cleaning up the Schema

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

SELECT Quality, COUNT(*) AS COUNT
FROM [OSOpenData].[dbo].[CodePointOpenCombined]
GROUP BY Quality
ORDER BY Quality

For my purposes I want to use the coordinate data stored in the Eastings and Northings columns, which makes postcodes with no data useless to me, I can remove these with the following SQL script:

DELETE FROM [CodePointOpenCombined]
WHERE [Quality] = 90

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:

1. Right Click the Database select “Tasks” – “Import Data”.
2. In the Data Source step change the drop down to “Flat File Source”.
3. Select the combined file we created above (you may have to change the filter).
4. Check the Columns page if Quotation Marks (“) appear in some of the columns change the Text qualifier field on the General Page to a “.
5. On the Advanced page click Suggest Types.
6. Set the number of rows to 1000 (the maximum), then click OK.
7. Go through each column and update the name and DataType to match those we discovered in the previous post.
8. Check the correct database and table are selected on the next two steps.
9. Click Next then Next again, then check over the data type mappings.
10. Click Next then ensure Run immediately is checked then click finish.
11. All being well, all of the data will be imported successfully.

If there are problems importing the data you can go back and make changes to the configuration, typically the issue is incorrect data types (too small) or incorrect text delimiters.

You may be asking why we went to tall that trouble, and time, only to let the Import Data Wizard suggest the data types. The reason I wrote the script was the wizard is limited to checking the first 1,000 lines; even if you set the value to 2,000,000 it will default down to 1000 after you move your focus away.

The result being if your data is naturally sorted on a specific column as some of the Ordinance Survey data appears to be the import will fail. Running the schema scanner allows you to scan through all of the data so that you can modify the suggested data types to match the maximum values.

In this post I am going to look at Code-Point Open, a list of all UK postcodes with their corresponding spatial positions. Unlike many other OS OpenData downloads the ZIP file does not contain the User Guide or the Schema Data, this can be found on the website, I spent a good 10 minutes searching for this data.

The term for what we are doing in this post is Extract-Transform -Load (ETL), a process in which we take data in one format and covert it for use in another format. Generally ETL is used to take a flat file format and load it for use in a relational database, although technically any format or database could be used. SQL Server offers two built-in mechanisms to perform ETL; the “Import Export Wizard” and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). The “Import Export Wizard” actually creates a SSIS package in the background and is available to all versions of SQL Server, SSIS  is not available in SQL Express.

Before we create a table in a SQL Server Database we need to know something about the data we are importing, the documentation for Code-Point Open tells us the data contains the following fields:

Postcode, Quality, Unused1, Unused2, Unused3, Unused4, Unused5, Unused6, Unused7, Unused8, Eastings, Northings, CountryCode, RegionalHealthAuthority, HealthAuthority, AdminCounty, AdminDistrict, AdminWard, Unused10

A number of the fields are not used, the fields and the dummy data held within them will be weeded out at a later date, we know the fields but we don’t know the format of the data it contains, it could be numeric, strings, decimals, telephone numbers? I created a PowerShell script which scans through all of these files to work out what type of field it is and the range of data held within it, be warned it will take a few hours to run!

# Schema Scanner v1.0
# ©2010 Richard Slater
 
# Create an empty hash table
$columns = @{}
 
# Loop through every file that matches this pattern
foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem -Path "D:\OSOpenData\Code-Point Open\data\ze.csv")
{
	Write-Host "Processing $file"
 
	# PowerShell Import-Csv cmdlet is pretty powerful, but if there is no header row you must feed it in
	$PostCodeData = Import-Csv $file -Header "Postcode","Quality","Unused1","Unused2","Unused3","Unused4","Unused5","Unused6","Unused7","Unused8","Eastings","Northings","CountryCode","RegionalHealthAuthority","HealthAuthority","AdminCounty","AdminDistrict","AdminWard","Unused10"
 
	# Go through each row in the file
	foreach($row in $PostCodeData)
    {
		# Go through each column in the row
		foreach ($attr in (Get-Member -InputObject $PostCodeData[0] -MemberType NoteProperty))
		{
			$key = $attr.Name
 
			# Ignore unused columns
			if ($key.StartsWith("Unused"))
				{ continue }
 
			# Construct an object to store the meta data, store it in the hash table to retreive next loop
			$column = New-Object PSObject
			if (!$columns.ContainsKey($key))
			{
				$column | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name StringLength -Value 0
				$column | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MaxValue -Value ([System.Int32]::MinValue)
				$column | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MinValue -Value ([System.Int32]::MaxValue)
				$columns.Add($key, $column)
			}
			else
				{ $column = $columns.Get_Item($key) }
 
			$isInt = $false
			$value = 0;
 
			# Work out if this is an integer type
			if ([System.Int32]::TryParse($row.($key), [ref] $value))
            	{ $isInt = $true }
 
			if (!$isInt)
            {
				# it is not an integer how many characters is the string
            	if (($row.($key)).Length -gt $column.StringLength)
                	{ $column.StringLength = ($row.($key)).Length }
 
				continue
            }
 
			# it is an integer start working out the maximum and minimum values
			if ( $value -gt $column.MaxValue ) { $column.MaxValue = $value }
			if ( $value -lt $column.MinValue ) { $column.MinValue = $value }
 
			$columns.Set_Item($key, $column)
		}
	}
}
 
# Print a report of all of the fields
foreach ($field in $columns.Keys)
{
	$stringLength = $columns[$field].StringLength
	$numericMax = $columns[$field].MaxValue
	$numericMin = $columns[$field].MinValue
 
	if ($stringLength -gt 0)
	{
		Write-Host "$field (String) : Length =" $columns[$field].StringLength
	}
	elseif (($numericMax -gt ([System.Int32]::MinValue)) -and ($numericMin -lt ([System.Int32]::MaxValue)))
	{
		Write-Host "$field (Numeric) : MaxValue =" $numericMax ", MinValue =" $numericMin
	}
	else
	{
		Write-Host "$field (Empty)"
	}
}

The output from the script should give you enough information to construct a nice tight schema to import the data:

AdminWard (String) : Length = 2
AdminDistrict (String) : Length = 2
AdminCounty (Numeric) : MinValue = 0 , MaxValue = 47
Quality (Numeric) :  MinValue = 10 , MaxValue = 90
RegionalHealthAuthority (String) : Length = 3
Postcode (String) : Length = 7
Eastings (Numeric) : MinValue = 0 , MaxValue = 655448
Northings (Numeric) : MinValue = 0 , MaxValue = 1213660
CountryCode (Numeric) : = 64 ,  MaxValue   = 220
HealthAuthority (String) : Length = 3

In a future post I am going to take it to the next stage; create a table and complete the import with the Import Export Wizard. I would also like to improve the performance of the schema scanner by converting the code into C#.

SchemaScanner

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:

GameObject.Find(“TargetObject”).GetComponent<SmoothAlpha>().MakeVisible();

I have named the script SmoothAlpha only by my convention no actual smoothing or damping of the alpha value, it is simply a linear reduction of the materials alpha value.

There are many improvements that could be made to the script, some of which I may well do over the coming weeks:

• Should include a delegate call back to signal when the fade is complete.
• Should include methods to instantly make an object (in)visible.
• Should support changing the alpha of child GameObjects in unison with the parent.

In have included the full script below the cut.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
 
public class SmoothAlpha : MonoBehaviour {
  protected Color origionalColor;
  protected Color transparantColor;
  protected float stage;
 
  private bool m_isVisible = true;
  private bool m_isTransitioning = false;
 
  public float speed = 1;
 
  public bool isVisible
  {
    get { return m_isVisible; }
  }
 
  // Use this for initialization
  void Start ()
  {
    origionalColor = transform.renderer.material.color;
    transparantColor = new Color(origionalColor.r, origionalColor.g, origionalColor.b, Color.clear.a);
  }
 
  // Update is called once per frame
  void Update ()
  {
    if (!m_isTransitioning)
      return;
 
    stage += Time.deltaTime * speed;
 
    if (m_isVisible)
    {
      transform.renderer.material.color = Color.Lerp(origionalColor, transparantColor, stage);
      if (transform.renderer.material.color == transparantColor)
      {
        m_isTransitioning = false;
        m_isVisible = false;
      }
    }
    else
    {
      transform.renderer.material.color = Color.Lerp(transparantColor, origionalColor, stage);
      if (transform.renderer.material.color == origionalColor)
      {
        m_isTransitioning = false;
        m_isVisible = true;
      }
    }
  }
 
  public void MakeInvisible()
  {
    if (m_isTransitioning)
      return;
 
    if (!m_isVisible)
      return;
 
    stage = 0F;
 
    m_isTransitioning = true;
  }
 
  public void MakeVisible()
  {
    if (m_isTransitioning)
      return;
 
    if (m_isVisible)
      return;
 
    stage = 0F;
 
    m_isTransitioning = true;
  }
}

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.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Some of the rockets go a bit crazy some time and fire off into the distance at low speeds which is quite peculiar when it is towards the camera.

Source Code

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.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

For those who don’t know what I mean by accessibility modifiers, those are the keywords you put before blocks of code that define how that code can be accessed, this is all enforced by the compiler giving you nice compiler error messages if you violate these rules. To provide an example the following auto-properties are all have the accessibility modifier “public”:

[Column] public string Name { get; set; }
[Column] public string Description { get; set; }
[Column] public decimal Price { get; set; }
[Column] public string Category { get; set; }

CodeRush gives you a handy way to change the User interface by clicking the icon to the left of the code block, you then get a set of actions you can perform upon the that block of code.

As with most everything in CodeRush you can access this functionality from the keyboard anywhere within the scope of that code block by pressing Alt + Up or Alt + Down to cycle through the five possibilities:

• public
• internal
• protected internal
• protected
• private

This means that if you need to change access modifiers, either to tighten up or relax the access points into your code you can do it by pressing a hand full of keys (between two and six to be exact), much faster than navigating to the top of the method highlighting and replacing the keyword.

My second hint is something that I have been using quite regularly, lets take the above example again:

[Column] public string Name { get; set; }
[Column] public string Description { get; set; }
[Column] public decimal Price { get; set; }
[Column] public string Category { get; set; }

I want to change all four fields to “be internal”, I could go in and change each one manually or better still use the above keyboard shortcuts (Alt + Down, Down, Alt + Down, etc.) the faster alternative would be to hold down the Alt key then select from the first character of the first “public” to the last character of the last “public” keyword.

While holding down Alt traditional selection behaviour is not followed and only the “public” keywords are selected on all four lines:

You can then type your new visibility modifier overwriting the selected components of all four lines in one fell swoop:

[Column] internal string Name { get; set; }
[Column] internal string Description { get; set; }
[Column] internal decimal Price { get; set; }
[Column] internal string Category { get; set; }

I think that is neat!