Develop Reference

Uncovering Mysterious CustomCommand Functionality

Here's my question, how does one "hack" the CustomCommand in Enterprise Architect's API to figure out what it's capabilities are? Here's what I'm currently using it for, which seems to be an accepted (by the community) and usable function:
repository.CustomCommand("Repository", "ImportRefData", xml);
I want to see what else I can do with it, namely some exporting of said reference data.
Also, while Sparx cannot officially support this functionality since it's undocumented, what are the odds that this command will stay functional with updated versions of EA, do they have a history of breaking illegal code like this?
Thanks,
Alex

The answer is: you can't. The few commands I documented were from postings on the Sparx forum. Eventually they originated from Sparx support itself. I remember having read from someone who knew about one of the commands asking for more info. But Sparx did not unveil more than was known. I tried to find the strings in the EXE but to no avail.
Since the function is there for quite some years and Sparx is very reluctant to substantial changes in the API it will likely not change. So it's save to use the function in future. IIRC Sparx itself recommended the use in certain cases. But only on the forum...

RTMPS protocol c#/vb.net

does anyone has a clue how the RTMPS-Protocoll works? I haven't found any source code, documentation or libraries for vb.net/c# on the web!
I read somewhere that it's only a TCP connection, but is this right?
If yes, how can I use this?
Could you pleas provide me source code, a library or a documentation?
Thanks in advance!
--
coolerfarmer

Check out RTMPdump I used to work with it a while back so I don't know how well it has been maintained in the mean time. However be sure to have a look at the clean-room specification. I used that document as a starting point to implement my own RTMPS protocol, however I wasn't able to ever finish it.
On a personal note, I would recommend using C# or even C++ to implement a client, if you know those languages as well as vb.net

Forward error correction in .NET

Are there any libraries (paid or free, though free is obviously better) that provide forward error correction for .NET applications? I've tried looking through the source code of some of the open source C / C++ libraries, but quite frankly, the math is confusing and my inability to read other peoples' C code with any reasonable level of clarity is a major road block.

If you have free C++ libraries why don't you try to build CLI wrapper around them?

Forward Error Correction is for instance used in media streaming.
A quick google search on "forward error correction" does not reveal much, but you could go another way:
Compile the C/C++ implementation (for instance from the list on Christian Schuler's Forward Error Correction (FEC) Page) of your choice into a DLL, then use P/Invoke to call functions in that DLL.
Another option that might fit you is to use the .NET interface to the Windows Media Services 9 series.
It contains the IWMSPublishingPoint interface that has a EnableFEC property.
--jeroen

Have you looked at the PAR2 format specification? PAR2 files provide raid-like parity for downloaded files (mostly popular on usenet binary groups). Although PAR2 is probably the wrong granularity for you, you should be able to change that once you know how it works.

I found a free library on github (made by antiduh):
https://github.com/antiduh/ErrorCorrection
As it said:
A library to implement Reed-Solomon encoding. Reed Solomon is a method of encoding data with extra error correction information built in, so that errors in received data can be corrected without having to retransmit the data; this technique is also known as Forward Error Correction (FEC).

How to determine subject, object and other words in a Context

Im trying to implement NLP in my project,
I need to Tag the words as Person,Location ,Organix=sation etc..If any body knows the logic please let me know..
Regards,
Stack

The task you want to perform is known as Named Entity Recognition (NER).
The majority of software for doing NER is in Java. For example, the Stanford NER system and the OpenNLP NER system. There are far fewer similar libraries written in C#, however I found SharpNLP through a Google search. I have not used it personally so I have no idea how well it works.

There is a nice web-service by Reuters: http://www.opencalais.com/.
You can access it via an API.
I thought that the demo was impressive http://viewer.opencalais.com/.
I did not pursue it further, as I want to create a German application. Calais is only supporting English.

Lex/Yacc for C#?

Actually, maybe not full-blown Lex/Yacc. I'm implementing a command-interpreter front-end to administer a webapp. I'm looking for something that'll take a grammar definition and turn it into a parser that directly invokes methods on my object. Similar to how ASP.NET MVC can figure out which controller method to invoke, and how to pony up the arguments.
So, if the user types "create foo" at my command-prompt, it should transparently call a method:
private void Create(string id) { /* ... */ }
Oh, and if it could generate help text from (e.g.) attributes on those controller methods, that'd be awesome, too.

I've done a couple of small projects with GPLEX/GPPG, which are pretty straightforward reimplementations of LEX/YACC in C#. I've not used any of the other tools above, so I can't really compare them, but these worked fine.
GPPG can be found here and GPLEX here.
That being said, I agree, a full LEX/YACC solution probably is overkill for your problem. I would suggest generating a set of bindings using IronPython: it interfaces easily with .NET code, non-programmers seem to find the basic syntax fairly usable, and it gives you a lot of flexibility/power if you choose to use it.

I'm not sure Lex/Yacc will be of any help. You'll just need a basic tokenizer and an interpreter which are faster to write by hand. If you're still into parsing route see Irony.
As a sidenote: have you considered PowerShell and its commandlets?

Also look at Antlr, which has C# support.

Still early CTP so can't be used in production apps but you may be interested in Oslo/MGrammar:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/

Jison is getting a lot of traction recently. It is a Bison port to javascript. Because of it's extremely simple nature, I've ported the jison parsing/lexing template to php, and now to C#. It is still very new, but if you get a chance, take a look at it here: https://github.com/robertleeplummerjr/jison/tree/master/ports/csharp/Jison

If you don't fear alpha software and want an alternative to Lex / Yacc for creating your own languages, you might look into Oslo. I would recommend you to sit through session recordings of sessions TL27 and TL31 from last years PDC. TL31 directly addresses the creation of Domain Specific Languages using Oslo.

Coco/R is a compiler generator with a .NET implementation. You could try that out, but I'm not sure if getting such a library to work would be faster than writing your own tokenizer.
http://www.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Projects/Coco/

I would suggest csflex - C# port of flex - most famous unix scanner generator.

I believe that lex/yacc are in one of the SDKs already (i.e. RTM). Either Windows or .NET Framework SDK.

Gardens Point Parser Generator here provides Yacc/Bison functionality for C#. It can be donwloaded here. A usefull example using GPPG is provided here

As Anton said, PowerShell is probably the way to go. If you do want a lex/ yacc implementation then Malcolm Crowe has a good set.
Edit: Direct Link to the Compiler Tools

Just for the record, implementation of lexer and LALR parser in C# for C#:
http://code.google.com/p/naive-language-tools/
It should be similar in use to Lex/Yacc, however those tools (NLT) are not generators! Thus, forget about speed.