Perl

Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp.^[1]

Structurally, Perl is based on the brace-delimited block style of AWK and C, and was widely adopted for its strengths in string processing and lack of the arbitrary limitations of many scripting languages at the time.

Perl was originally named "Pearl", after the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew. Larry Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations; he claims that he considered (and rejected) every three- and four-letter word in the dictionary. He also considered naming it after his wife Gloria. Wall discovered the existing PEARL programming language before Perl's official release and changed the spelling of the name.

The name is normally capitalized (Perl) when referring to the language and uncapitalized (perl) when referring to the interpreter program itself since Unix-like file systems are case-sensitive. Before the release of the first edition of Programming Perl, it was common to refer to the language as perl; Randal L. Schwartz, however, capitalised the language's name in the book to make it stand out better when typeset. The case distinction was subsequently adopted by the community.^[5]

The name is occasionally given as "PERL" (for Practical Extraction and Report Language). Although the expansion has prevailed in many of today's manuals, including the official Perl man page, it is merely a backronym. The name does not officially stand for anything, so spelling it in all caps is incorrect and is considered a shibboleth (label of outsiders) in the Perl community.^[6] Several other expansions have been suggested, including Wall's own humorous Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.^[7] Indeed, Wall claims that the name was intended to inspire many different expansions

Web development

Web development is a broad term for any activities related to developing a web site for the World Wide Web or an intranet. This can include e-commerce business development, web design, web content development, client-side/server-side coding, and web server configuration. However, among web professionals, "web development" usually refers only to the non-design aspects of building web sites, e.g. writing markup and coding. Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, or social network services.

For larger businesses and organizations, web development teams can consist of hundreds of people. Smaller organizations may only require a single permanent or contracting webmaster, or secondary assignment to related job positions such as a graphic designer and/or Information systems technician. Web development may be a collaborative effort between departments rather than the domain of a designated department.

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although several other forms of presenting animation also exist.

Computer animation

A short gif animation

Main article: Computer animation

Like stop motion, computer animation encompasses a variety of techniques, the unifying idea being that the animation is created digitally on a computer.

2D animation

Figures are created and/or edited on the computer using 2D bitmap graphics or created and edited using 2D vector graphics. This includes automated computerized versions of traditional animation techniques such as of tweening, morphing, onion skinning and interpolated rotoscoping.

Examples: Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Jib Jab

• Analog computer animation
• Flash animation
• PowerPoint animation

A completely synthetic, computer-generated scene.

3D animation

Digital models manipulated by an animator. In order to manipulate a mesh, it is given a digital armature (sculpture). This process is called rigging. Various other techniques can be applied, such as mathematical functions (ex. gravity, particle simulations), simulated fur or hair, effects such as fire and water and the use of Motion capture to name but a few.

Examples: The Incredibles, Shrek, Finding Nemo

3D animation Terms

• Cel-shaded animation
• Morph target animation
• Skeletal animation
• Motion capture
• Crowd simulation

ASP.NET Page Templates - Using Inheritance

Introduction

Anyone who has developed commercial websites has run into the problem of creating a template for the site. For most sites a large percentage of the HTML is the same or similar for all pages. The header, navigation, and footer elements of a typical site layout appear on almost every page.

Some developers will put that markup in every page's source file. Anyone who's had to maintain a site put together this way knows how difficult it is to make site-wide changes. You end up depending on massive search and replace operations, which can be difficult to do without creating markup errors that require hand-tuning to repair.

In traditional ASP programming, like many other server-based programming environments, this was typically solved using an include file. The page is divided into logical sections representing the header, left navigation, body, and footer elements. A separate include is created for each of the common elements and the body section is placed in the actual ASP page. The page then includes the appropriate files to build up the look and feel of the page. This is a significant improvement over the previous approach, but still creates a few maintenance problems.

First of all, the individual ASP files must contain the code necessary to include the correct support files. This makes each page's content strongly coupled to the site's template. It also means that when you add a new page to the site, you must remember to setup all the correct includes in the right order.

An additional problem happens when you decide to make a significant look-and-feel change to the site. If you're lucky, you may be able to make all of your changes in the include files. Most of the time, however, the tight coupling between the include files and the ASP pages means that you end up having to edit each and every ASP page as well.

With the introduction of ASP.NET, developers have been giving a powerful new set of tools to help resolve these problems. ASP.NET uses an object-oriented development paradigm. In practical terms this means that every page is a class that derives from System.Web.UI.Page. This class provides a number of services to the web developer including caching, rendering, response and request access, etc.

So the question is: How can we best take advantage of the object-oriented nature of ASP.NET when creating websites? Is there a better way to create templates than using include-files?

Personal Web Site Starter Kit

Introduction

Congratulations! You have created your own Personal Web Site, which includes a home page, resume, and photo album. You can press CTRL+F5 to run your site right now.

You can use the site as-is with some small customizations, such as adding your own content. In addition, you can add pages to the site. The following sections explain how to use the Personal Web Site.

• Creating an Administrative User
• Managing the Personal Web Site
• Working with Photo Albums
• Publishing Your Web Site
• Further Resources

Creating an Administrative User

The first step you must take is to create an administrative user. The administrative user has permission to upload photos and create albums.

To create an administrative user

1. Run the site at least once before proceeding. This ensures the initialization of the Membership and Roles databases.
2. In the Website menu, click ASP.NET Configuration.
3. Click the Security tab.
4. Click Create user.
5. In the Create User box, type a user name, password, and e-mail address for the administrator user. You must also provide a security question and answer that is used to help you recover your password, if necessary.
6. In the Roles box, select both the Administrators and Friends check boxes to make the user into an administrator and a member of the Friends role.
7. Click Create User.
8. Close the Web Site Administration Tool window.

Managing the Personal Web Site

The following sections provide basic information about how to administer the site.

Designating Guest Users as Friends

Visitors to your site can register themselves on your site. You can make registered users into Friends, which gives them permission to view private photo albums.

To give users permission to view private photo albums

1. In the Website menu, click ASP.NET Configuration.
2. Click the Security tab.
3. Under Users, click Manage users.
4. In the user list, click Edit roles for the guest. (If you do not see the user's name, use the search box.)
5. Under Roles, select Friends.
6. Close the Web Administration Tool window.

Working with Photo Albums

The photo album feature allows you to:

• Create albums that act as collections of photos.
• Upload photos individually into an album.
• Bulk upload a collection of photos into an album. This feature is useful for creating an album from a collection of photos, such as your vacation pictures.

To create an album and add photos

1. Login to the site as an administrator.
2. In the menu, click Manage.
3. Under Add New Album, type a name.
4. If you want everyone to be able to see your photos, select Make this album public. If you leave this check box unselected, only users who are registered as friends can view the album.
5. Click Add to create the album.
6. Under Your Albums, click the blank photo for the new album.
7. Under Add Photos, type or select the photo file name, type a caption, and click Insert.
8. Repeat Step 4 for each photo you want to add to the album.

To bulk upload photos into an album

1. Copy your photos to the Upload folder in the Web site.
2. In the menu, click Manage.
3. In the album list, click the photo of the album to use. (Create a new album first, if necessary.)
4. Click Import. All the photos in the Upload folder are added to the album.

Publishing your Site

When you are ready to share your Web site with others, you can copy it to your Web server. You need to know the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) address of your server, and if required, the user name and password you use.

1. In the Website menu, click Copy Web Site. The Copy Web Site tool displays the files from your Web site under Source Web Site.
2. In the Connect to box, click Connect to ....
3. In the Open Web Site dialog box, click the FTP Sites tab.
4. Type the FTP address of your server, and if required, the user name and password that your hosting site has provided. The FTP URL usually has a format like this:

   ftp://ftp.servername/foldername

5. Click Open. The files on the Web server are displayed under Remote Web Site.
   Note: If you have trouble connecting to the server, contact the server administrator.
6. In the Move Files list, click All source files to remote Web site.
7. Click the Copy Web Site button. The files from your Personal Web Site are copied to the server.

Installing Visual Studio 2005 from CD fails. A network installation is requested.

The media that Visual Studio 2005 shipped on may be bad, preventing a successful installation.

To resolve this issue

Visual Studio 2005 setup may be run from a network share as an alternative to running setup from CDs or DVDs. The following procedure illustrates how to prepare Visual Studio 2005 for installation from a network share. The procedure refers to the Visual Studio 2005 CDs, but the steps are the same for DVDs.

1. Create a folder (for example, VS2005) on the server.
2. Create two subfolders, named VS, and MSDN within the top-level folder. For example:
   VS2005\VS
   VS2005\MSDN.
3. Copy the contents of the Visual Studio 2005 CDs into the VS2005\VS folder. Select Yes if prompted to overwrite any existing files.
4. Copy the contents from all the CDs labeled MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2005 to the subfolder named MSDN. Select Yes if prompted to overwrite any existing files.
5. Open Setup.ini in the VS subfolder using a text editor, such as Note:pad.
6. In the [Documentation] section, change the line that starts with "DIR=" as follows:
   [Documentation]
   DIR=..\MSDN
   Save your changes and close the file.
   Note: Completing this step prevents disk-swapping requests during setup and informs the setup program of the correct path to the MSDN Library CDs.
7. In the VS subfolder, open the Setup folder.
8. Open setup.sdb in a text editor, such as Note:pad, and add the following lines to the end of the file:
   [Product Key]
   XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
   Note: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX is the 25 digit product key, entered without dashes, found on the CD packaging.
9. Save your changes and close the file.
   Note: Completing this step enables pre-populating the product key for the user who will install from the network share.
10. Share the VS2005 folder on the network and set the appropriate security settings. The path to Visual Studio 2005 setup from the network looks like \\[servername]\VS2005\VS\setup.exe
    Note: Setup will fail if any path and file name combination exceeds 260 characters. The maximum length of a path in Visual Studio is 221 characters. You should copy files to a path with less than 70 characters. If you create a network share for a network image, the UNC path to the root installation location should contain fewer than 39 characters.
    Note: Setup might fail if the folder names in this path include embedded spaces, for example:
    \\[servername]\VS2005\MSDN\
    \\[servername]\VS2005\Visual Studio\