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Man designs smart tool to build video games Bret Victor

| Saturday, March 10, 2012
The presenter created a simple stage with a controllable character, a turtle and a small alcove. The alcove is one block big (same size as character). He wanted to be able to tweak the "bounce" physics after jumping on a turtle to get into this alcove perfectly. Instead of tweaking the variables randomly until it worked, he implemented a "rewind" feature in conjunction with an "onion layer" affect.

He would control the character, jump on the turtle forward toward the alcove... missing it...
He'd rewind and show this "onion layer" of ghost images of where his trajectory was. As he changed the "bounce" value from jumping on the turtle, the onion layer, in real time would change and show what would happen "in the future." As a result he can fine tune his platform jump.

Read more: Youtube
Read more: Bret Victor
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Windows Credentials Editor (WCE)

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What is WCE?
------------

Windows Credentials Editor (WCE) v1.3beta allows you to

NTLM authentication:

* List logon sessions and add, change, list and delete associated credentials (e.g.: LM/NT hashes)
* Perform pass-the-hash on Windows natively
* Obtain NT/LM hashes from memory (from interactive logons, services, remote desktop connections, etc.) which can be used to authenticate to other systems. WCE can perform this task without injecting code, just by reading and decrypting information stored in
Windows internal memory structures. It also has the capability to automatically switch to code injection when the aforementioned method cannot be performed

Kerberos authentication:

* Dump Kerberos tickets (including the TGT) stored in Windows machines
* Reuse/Load those tickets on another Windows machines, to authenticate to other systems and services
* Reuse/Load those tickets on *Unix machines, to authenticate to other systems and services

Digest Authentication:

* Obtain cleartext passwords entered by the user when logging into a Windows system, and stored by the Windows Digest Authentication security package

Supported Platforms
-------------------
Windows Credentials Editor supports Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 7 and 2008.

Read more: Amplia security
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Qute: Cross-Platform Eye Candy Text Editor With Mood-Based Themes

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Different text editors offer you different types of options for performing both simple and complex text editing tasks. Simple tasks can be performing using the default Windows Notepad, while for the complex tasks, you can use Notepad++, an open source text editor massively reviewed on the AddictiveTips. Qute is another open source multiplatform text editor available for PC, Mac and Linux with Markdown and TeX support. It allows users to preview text paragraph wise, and lets them switch between editing and viewing modes. If your work requires you to work with text for long hours, Qute offers its users different themes to make looking at a single file for hours more appealing. You can quickly switch themes, as well as font effects. Keep reading to find out more about Qute.

Read more: Addictive tips
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More Microsoft SQL Server 2012 downloads

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Data Quality Services Performance Best Practices Guide

This guide focuses on a set of best practices for optimizing performance of Data Quality Services (DQS).

Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server

Download the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server, a Type 4 JDBC driver that provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interfaces (APIs) available in Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 and 6.

Test Lab Guide: Configure SharePoint Server 2010 as a Single Server with Microsoft SQL Server

Learn how to configure a single-server SharePoint Server 2010 test lab.

Microsoft® SQL Server® StreamInsight 2.0

Microsoft StreamInsight is Microsoft’s Complex Event Processing technology to help businesses create event-driven applications and derive better insights by correlating event streams from multiple sources with near-zero latency.

Microsoft ®SQL Server® 2012 FileStream Driver - Windows Logo Certification

Catalog file for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 FileStream Driver that is certified for Windows Server 2008 R2. It meets Microsoft standards for compatibility and recommended practices with the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems.

Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Semantic Language Statistics

The Semantic Language Statistics Database is a required component for the Statistical Semantic Search feature in Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Semantic Language Statistics.

Read more: Bink.nu
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Android-маркета больше нет

| Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Сегодня Google анонсировал сервис, расширяющий и дополняющий Андроид-маркет — Google Play.

Как говорится в официальном блоге, Google Play является естественным результатом развития маркета. В скором будущем будут запущены сервисы для продажи разнообразного цифрового контента — Play Books, Play Music и Play Movies.

Сейчас с адреса market.android.com идёт 301-й редирект на play.google.com/store

Read more: Habrahabr.ru
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Metro apps – a lot of icons are available out of the box !

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In Metro apps, the Metro design is everywhere and that’s pretty cool ! When you start an application, you want and need it to be compliant with this theme and one main part of it are icons. What you may not know is that there is already a lot of icons available for you out of the box in any Metro app.

Let’s discover them !

I don’t get the picture…
When I first looked for the icons, I first searched for pictures. I found none of them. So I digged a little more on the sample and I found out that icons where here as a Font.

This is in fact a really good idea for several reasons :

Fonts are vectorial.
You can choose the colors of the icons just by changing a parameters.
No need to add a lot of images files to your project
It’s really easy to use/code !
Also, the font name is not the same in an HTML5 project than in an XAML one :

an HTML5 app will use “Segoe UI Command” as Font family but “Segoe UI Symbol” as local name a XAML app will use Segoe UI Symbol
Which icons are available ? Each icon is represented by it’s hexadecimal value. These values are the same in both langages.

XAML
My first idea was to create a XAML app which will list them all and display them in a GridView.
It’s pretty easy to do, here is the C# which creates the list :

//create a list of my custom class CharAvailable
List<CharAvailable> characters = new List<CharAvailable>();
 
//we will not cycle trough all the font values
var starter = 0xE10F - 200;
var ender = starter + 1000;
 
//Create the character list
for (int i = starter; i < ender; i++)
{
    characters.Add(new CharAvailable() {
                      Value = string.Format("0x{0:X} :   ", i),
                     CharToDisplay = (char)i });
}
 
//Set it as datacontext
DataContext = characters;

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What’s changed for app developers since //build/ (part 2)

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As promised, I’m back to tell you about more of the important work that we’ve done since //build/. In part 1 of this post, I covered DirectX and XAML integration, improvements to the Blend designers, CSS independent animations, and more. But I’m sure you’re eager to dig into more of what’s new, so let’s jump right in.

Tile and toast notifications

Tiles and toasts are key parts of our Metro style design principles. They allow you to see important info at a glance, even when your app isn’t running. We received a lot of feedback from you about the tile and toast notifications development experience – a large portion of that feedback was centered on creating and updating tiles. In response to this we improved the tile experience in 3 ways:

  1. We introduced polling APIs to update tiles. You can use the new periodic tile notification API to tell Windows to poll your cloud service for tile content specific to your app. This is the easiest way to keep your app’s tile alive with activity using content from the web. The JavaScript snippet here shows how to start polling for your app’s tile: 

// update the tile with a poll URL
var polledUri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://www.fabrikam.com/tile.xml");
var recurrence = Windows.UI.Notifications.PeriodicUpdateRecurrence.halfHour;
var tileUpdater = Windows.UI.Notifications.TileUpdateManager.createTileUpdaterForApplication();
tileUpdater.startPeriodicUpdate(polledUri, recurrence);

The content returned from your web service must conform to the tile XML schema. Note that tile badges can also be updated via polling.

For more info on updating your tile check out these links on the Dev Center: 
Adding polling tiles
Push and periodic notifications client-side sample
Choosing a notification delivery method

  1. We made it easier to create beautiful tile and toast content.
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Building a good app settings experience in XAML

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So you’ve started to kick the tires of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and now you are building an app.  You’ve read all the UX design guidelines and started looking at some great apps on the store.   Perhaps you’ve also viewed the online documentation and some samples?  And you’ve likely read about the contract implementations and other charms items like custom settings. 

What is Settings?
When I refer to Settings here I’m referring to that consistent experience in Metro style apps when the user invokes the charms bar and chooses settings.  By default every application will respond to that Settings charm.  If you do nothing you will get the default experience that you may have seen:

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The text items underneath your app title are referred to as commands.  Each application will always get the Permissions command.  When the user clicks this they will get some “about” information on your app (name, version, publisher) as well as the permissions the app has requested.  As an app developer, you have to do nothing to get this experience.  In addition to that the Settings pane shows some OS-level options like volume, Wi-Fi, brightness, etc. that the user can manipulate.  But you, my fellow app developer, can also implement custom settings options in your app.

The custom SettingsCommand
The first thing you have to do to customize your experience is implement a custom SettingsCommand.  These are implemented by first listening to when the SettingsPane will request if there are any additional commands for the current view.  Settings can be global if you have something like a “master” page setup in your XAML application, but can also be specific to a currently viewed XAML page.  It is not an either/or but a both.  I’ll leave the exercise up to you and your app on when you need which (or both).

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[Full-disclosure] %windir%\temp\sso\ssoexec.dll (or: how trustworthy is Microsoft's build process)

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Hi @ll,

the system image "\Setup\WIM\setup.wim" on the "POSReady 2009 eval CD",
available from the Microsoft Download Center under
contains the following registry entries:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\SSOExec]
"Asynchronous"=dword:00000001
"Impersonate"=dword:00000001
"Logoff"="SSOReset"
"Unlock"="SSOExec"
"Lock"="SSOReset"
"DLLName"="%windir%\\temp\\sso\\ssoexec.dll"

The directory "%windir%\temp" in the system image is but empty.

The presence of these registry entries is evidence that (one of) the system(s) used to build and capture the POSReady 2009 evaluation system image were infested with malware, and that either the infestation was not detected at all (bad) or the infestation was detected, but incompletely (or accidentially, when "%windir%\temp" was cleared) "removed" and a compromised system used to build the system image (worse).

JFTR: MSFT initiated their "trustworthy computing" about 10 years ago!

To complete the picture: the ACLs on the directory "%windir%\temp" in systems installed from this image/CD allow unprivileged users to create a subdirectory "sso" in "%windir%\temp" and then the "ssoexec.dll", allowing them to have their code run under every (other) user account used to log on afterwards, resulting in a privilege escalation.

Read more: Full-disclosure
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Windows 8 Development Tutorial – Part 1 – First Steps

| Sunday, March 4, 2012
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Now that both Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta have been released, it’s a fantastic time posting about Windows 8 programming, especially about the new Metro style based applications.

For the sake of rapid-start, I’ll save the writing about what Metro Style application is, but I’ll give you a link in case that you’ve missed that:

Installing Windows 8 Customer Preview

Before we begin, I highly recommend you to install Windows 8 and learn about the new Metro UI language, since it’s totally different than what we are used to in current versions of windows.

Lets create a clean install of the Windows 8 Consumer on our Tablet, Laptop or Desktop PC, then we will install Visual Studio 11 Beta.

If you already have Windows 8 installed, skip this section.

There are several ways installing Windows 8 on our machine, and I think that the easiest and fastest is using a USB stick.

1. First go and download the full Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO file from Microsoft.

2. Get a USB stick big enough to contain the 3.3GB (x64) or 2.5GB (x86) ISO file and use the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool to make your USB stick bootable with Windows 8 installation.

3. Create a bootable USB device using the tool and the Windows 8 ISO file.

Read more: Essential WPF
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Windows 8 JavaScript–Splash Screen

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When creating an Win 8 Metro App you define splash screen with a single image, what if you want to do more… For example show some animations, load your resources before the application loads and more.

In this post I’ll show you how to create custom Splash Screen and control the load event so you know when the loading is over and your user can start using the application.

In my demo I’ll display some canvas animation and a timer (from 10s) until going to the main page.

Read more: Shai Raiten
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Local Workspaces in Visual Studio 11

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Visual Studio 11 adds local workspaces to the source control feature set. This is a fantastic addition! Previously, if a developer wanted to work offline, they were blocked by read-only flags due to server side workspaces. Now, one is able to differentiate their workspaces between a local workspace and server workspace. Local workspaces gives the ability for a developer to disconnect from the TFS server, make changes to their code, and have Visual Studio track those changes automatically. They will also be able to save these changes! Whereas, server workspaces work just like workspaces in Visual Studio 2010.

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Unit Testing in Visual Studio 11

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There are some great features of Unit Testing in Visual Studio 11. I am excited to see how the new version of Visual Studio brings new features and abilities, improving upon some things that were difficult in 2010.

Creating Unit Tests

First things first, you’ll want to know how to create and run a unit test! In Visual Studio 11, you have the ability to plug in MSTest, NUnit, and xUnit without extra hassle. You will also be able to build and run these test cases with a build definition (on a build server). In this first video, I make a simple test case and run it using the Unit Test Explorer.

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Working Windows 8 Consumer Preview SDK, symbol package links

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I was running around looking for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview symbol package and landed on this page on MSDN. Unfortunately, the links point to internal URLs. Here are the corrected links for us non-softies:

Windows Symbol Packages
Standalone Windows SDK for Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Read more: With Windows
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Public Key Cryptography: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

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    Diffie-Hellman key exchange was one of the earliest practical implementations of key exchange within the field of cryptography. It relies on the discrete logarithm problem. This test clip will be part of the final chapter of Gambling with Secrets!

Read more: Youtube
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Visual Studio 11 Beta - Unit Testing Plugins List

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One of the things I’m really proud of in the new Visual Studio 11 developer experience is the investment we made in developer and unit testing. We first started talking about this back at the //BUILD/ conference, and since then have spent a lot of time working with community partners to get them ready for the Beta release today.

I’m very happy, therefore, to be able to highlight the frameworks & test runners that have shipped support for VS11 Beta. (More to come, see below.)

.NET

Visual Studio Managed Unit Testing Framework (aka MS-Test)

Built-in to VS11

xUnit.net

NUnit
Information: http://nunit.org/

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GCC 4.6.3 Released

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From: Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>
To: gcc-announce at gcc dot gnu dot org, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 16:26:08 +0100
Subject: GCC 4.6.3 Released
Reply-to: Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>

The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.6.3 has been released.

GCC 4.6.3 is a bug-fix release containing fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 4.6.2, with over 70 bugs fixed since previous release.  This release is available from the FTP servers listed at:

Please do not contact me directly regarding questions or comments about this release.  Instead, use the resources available from http://gcc.gnu.org.

Read more: GCC mailing list
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Walkthrough: Hosting an ActiveX Control in WPF

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Updated: August 2010

To enable improved interaction with browsers, you can use Microsoft ActiveX controls in your WPF-based application. This walkthrough demonstrates how you can host the Microsoft Windows Media Player as a control on a WPF page.

Tasks illustrated in this walkthrough include:

  • Creating the project.
  • Creating the ActiveX control.
  • Hosting the ActiveX control on a WPF Page.
  • When you have completed this walkthrough, you will understand how to use Microsoft ActiveX controls in your WPF-based application.
Prerequisites

You need the following components to complete this walkthrough:
  • Microsoft Windows Media Player installed on the computer where Visual Studio is installed.
  • Visual Studio 2010.

Creating the Project

  1. To create and set up the project
  2. Create a WPF Application project named HostingAxInWpf.
  3. Add a Windows Forms Control Library project to the solution, and name the project WmpAxLib.
  4. In the WmpAxLib project, add a reference to the Windows Media Player assembly, which is named wmp.dll.
  5. Open the Toolbox.
  6. Right-click in the Toolbox, and then click Choose Items.
  7. Click the COM Components tab, select the Windows Media Player control, and then click OK.
  8. The Windows Media Player control is added to the Toolbox.
  9. In Solution Explorer, right-click the UserControl1 file, and then click Rename.
  10. Change the name to WmpAxControl.vb or WmpAxControl.cs, depending on the language.
  11. If you are prompted to rename all references, click Yes.

Creating the ActiveX Control

Microsoft Visual Studio automatically generates an AxHost wrapper class for a Microsoft ActiveX control when the control is added to a design surface. The following procedure creates a managed assembly named AxInterop.WMPLib.dll.

To create the ActiveX control

  1. Open WmpAxControl.vb or WmpAxControl.cs in the Windows Forms Designer.
  2. From the Toolbox, add the Windows Media Player control to the design surface.
  3. In the Properties window, set the value of the Windows Media Player control's Dock property to Fill.
  4. Build the WmpAxLib control library project.

Hosting the ActiveX Control on a WPF Page

  1. To host the ActiveX control
  2. In the HostingAxInWpf project, add a reference to the generated ActiveX interoperability assembly.
  3. This assembly is named AxInterop.WMPLib.dll and was added to the Debug folder of the WmpAxLib project when you imported the Windows Media Player control.
  4. Add a reference to the WindowsFormsIntegration assembly, which is named WindowsFormsIntegration.dll.
  5. Add a reference to the Windows Forms assembly, which is named System.Windows.Forms.dll.
  6. Open MainWindow.xaml in the WPF Designer.
  7. Name the Grid element grid1.

<Grid Name="grid1">
</Grid>

  1. In Design view or XAML view, select the Window element.
  2. In the Properties window, click the Events tab.
  3. Double-click the Loaded event.
  4. Insert the following code to handle the Loaded event.
This code creates an instance of the WindowsFormsHost control and adds an instance of the AxWindowsMediaPlayer control as its child.

private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 
{
    // Create the interop host control.
    System.Windows.Forms.Integration.WindowsFormsHost host =
        new System.Windows.Forms.Integration.WindowsFormsHost();

    // Create the ActiveX control.
    AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer axWmp = new AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer();

    // Assign the ActiveX control as the host control's child.
    host.Child = axWmp;

    // Add the interop host control to the Grid
    // control's collection of child controls.
    this.grid1.Children.Add(host);

    // Play a .wav file with the ActiveX control.
    axWmp.URL = @"C:\Windows\Media\tada.wav";
}

Read more: MSDN
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