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• MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.3 Beta 2 has been released

  - by fernando

  MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is the second of two beta releases intended to introduce users to the new features in the release. This release is feature complete it should be stable enough for users to understand the new features and how we expect them to work.  As is the case with all non-GA releases, it should not be used in any production environment.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6. It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The 6.6 version of MySQL Connector/Net brings the following new features:   * Stored routine debugging   * Entity Framework 4.3 Code First support   * Pluggable authentication (now third parties can plug new authentications mechanisms into the driver).   * Full Visual Studio 2012 support: everything from Server Explorer to Intellisense&   the Stored Routine debugger. Stored Procedure Debugging ------------------------------------------- We are very excited to introduce stored procedure debugging into our Visual Studio integration.  It works in a very intuitive manner by simply clicking 'Debug Routine' from Server Explorer. You can debug stored routines, functions&   triggers. These release contains fixes specific of the debugger as well as other fixes specific of other areas of Connector/NET:   * Added feature to define initial values for InOut stored procedure arguments.   * Debugger: Fixed Visual Studio locked connection after debugging a routine.   * Fix for bug Cannot Create an Entity with a Key of Type String (MySQL bug #65289, Oracle bug #14540202).   * Fix for bug "CacheServerProperties can cause 'Packet too large' error". MySQL Bug #66578 Orabug #14593547.   * Fix for handling unnamed parameter in MySQLCommand. This fix allows the mysqlcommand to handle parameters without requiring naming (e.g. INSERT INTO Test (id,name) VALUES (?, ?) ) (MySQL Bug #66060, Oracle bug #14499549).   * Fixed end of line issue when debugging a routine.   * Added validation to avoid overwriting a routine backup file when it hasn't changed.   * Fixed inheritance on Entity Framework Code First scenarios. (MySql bug #63920 and Oracle bug #13582335).   * Fixed "Trying to customize column precision in Code First does not work" (MySql bug #65001, Oracle bug #14469048).   * Fixed bug ASP.NET Membership database fails on MySql database UTF32 (MySQL bug #65144, Oracle bug #14495292).   * Fix for MySqlCommand.LastInsertedId holding only 32 bit values (MySql bug #65452, Oracle bug #14171960).   * Fixed "Decimal type should have digits at right of decimal point", now default is 2, and user's changes in     EDM designer are recognized (MySql bug #65127, Oracle bug #14474342).   * Fix for NullReferenceException when saving an uninitialized row in Entity Framework (MySql bug #66066, Oracle bug #14479715).   * Fix for error when calling RoleProvider.RemoveUserFromRole(): causes an exception due to a wrong table being used (MySql bug #65805, Oracle bug #14405338).   * Fix for "Memory Leak on MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlCommand", too many MemoryStream's instances created (MySql bug #65696, Oracle bug #14468204).   * Added ANTLR attribution notice (Oracle bug #14379162).   * Fix for debugger failing when having a routine with an if-elseif-else.   * Also the programming interface for authentication plugins has been redefined. Some limitations remains, due to the current debugger architecture:   * Some MySQL functions cannot be debugged currently (get_lock, release_lock, begin, commit, rollback, set transaction level)..   * Only one debug session may be active on a given server. The Debugger is feature complete at this point. We look forward to your feedback. Documentation ------------------------------------- You can view current Connector/Net documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net.html You can find our team blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our forums at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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• 5 Ways to Celebrate the Release of Internet Explorer 9

  - by David Wesst

  The day has finally come: Microsoft has released a web browser that is awesome. On Monday night, Microsoft officially introduced the world to the latest edition to its product family: Internet Explorer 9. That makes March 14, 2011 (also known as PI day) the official birthday of Microsoft’s rebirth in the world of web browsing. Just like any big event, you take some time to celebrate. Here are a few things that you can do to celebrate the return of Internet Explorer. 1. Download It If you’re not a big partier, that’s fine. The one thing you can do (and definitely should) is download it and give it a shot. Sure, IE may have disappointed you in the past, but believe me when I say they really put the effort in this time. The absolute least you can do is give it a shot to see how it stands up against your favourite browser. 2. Get yourself an HTML5 Shirt One of the coolest, if not best parts of IE9 being released is that it officially introduces HTML5 as a fully supported platform from Microsoft. IE9 supports a lot of what is already defined in the HTML5 technical spec, which really demonstrates Microsoft’s support of the new standard. Since HTML5 is cool on the web, it means that it is cool to wear it too. Head over to html5shirt.com and get yourself, or your staff, or your whole family, an HTML5 shirt to show the real world that you are ready for the future of the web. 3. HTML5-ify Something Okay, so maybe a shirt isn’t enough for you. Maybe you need start using HTML5 for real. If you have a blog, or a website, or anything out there on the web, celebrate IE9 adding some HTML5 to your site. Whether that is updating old code, adding something new, or just changing your WordPress theme, definitely take a look at what HTML5 can do for you. 4. Help Kill Old IE and Upgrade your Organization See this? This is sad. Upgrading web browsers in an large enterprise or organization is not a trivial task. A lot of companies will use the excuse of not having the resources to upgrade legacy web applications they were built for a specific version of IE and it doesn’t render correctly in legacy browsers. Well, it’s time to stop the excuses. IE9 allows you to define what version of Internet Explorer you would like it to emulate. It takes minimal effort for the developer, and will get rid of the excuses. Show your IT manager or software development team this link and show them how easy it is to make old code render right in the latest and greatest from the IE team. 5. Submit an Entry for DevUnplugged So, you’ve made it to number five eh? Well then, you must be pretty hardcore to make it this far down the list. Fine, let’s take it to the next level and build an HTML5 game. That’s right. A game. Like a video game. HTML5 introduces some amazing new features that can let you build working video games using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Plus, Microsoft is celebrating the launch of IE9 with a contest where you can submit an HTML5 game (or audio application) and have a chance to win a whack of cash and other prizes. Head here for the full scoop and rules for the DevUnplugged. This post also appears at http://david.wes.st

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• Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 is Generally Available

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 We are pleased to announce that Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 is Generally Available as of October 25, 2013 Get smarter, more productive and the best value with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24. Oracle CRM On Demand continues to be the most complete Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CRM solution available. Now, with Release 24, organizations of all types and sizes benefit from actionable insight anywhere, anytime, as well as key enhancements in mobility, embedded social, analytics, integration and extensibility, and ease of use.Next Generation Mobile and Desktop Solutions : Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 offers a complete set of mobile and desktop solutions that improve productivity by enabling reps to access and update information anywhere, anytime. Capabilities include: Oracle CRM On Demand Disconnected Mobile Sales (DMS) – A disconnected native iPad solution, DMS has been further streamlined mobile sales process by adding Structured Product Messaging to record brand specific call objectives, enhancements in HTML5 eDetailing including message response tracking and improvements in administration and configuration such as more field management options for read only fields, role management and enhanced logging. Oracle CRM On Demand Connected Mobile Sales. This add-on mobile service provides a configurable mobile solution on iOS, BlackBerry and now Android devices. You can access data from CRM On Demand in real time with a rich, native user experience, that is comfortable and familiar to current iOS, BlackBerry and Android users. New features also include Single Sign On to enhance security for mobile users.  Oracle CRM On Demand Desktop: This application centralizes essential CRM information in the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment,increasing user adoption and decreasing training costs. Users can manage CRM data while disconnected, then synchronize bi-directionally when they are back on the network. New in Oracle CRM On Demand Desktop Version 3 is the ability to synchronize by Books of Business, and improved Online Lookup. Mobile Browser Support: The following mobile device browsers are now supported: Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Windows 8 Tablets, and Google Android. Leverage the Social Enterprise Engaging customers via social channels is rapidly becoming a significant key to enhanced customer experience as it provides proactive customer service, targeted messaging and greater intimacy throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Listening to customers on the social channels can identify a customers’ sphere of influence and the real value they bring to their organization, or the impact they can have on the opportunity. Servicing the customer’s need is the first step towards loyalty to a brand, integrating with social channels allows us to maximize brand affinity and virally expand customer engagements thus increasing revenue. Oracle CRM On Demand is leveraging the Social Enterprise through its integration with Oracle’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) product suite by providing out-of-the-box integration with Social Engagement and Monitoring (SEM), Social Marketing (SM) and Oracle Social Network (OSN). With Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24, users are able to create a service request from a social post via SEM and have leads entered on a SM lead form automatically entered into Oracle CRM On Demand along with the campaign, streamlining the lead qualification process. Get Smarter with Actionable Insight The difference between making good decisions and great decisions depends heavily upon the quality, structure, and availability of information at hand. Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 expands upon its industry-leading analytics capabilities to provide greater business insight than ever before. New capabilities include flexible permissions on analytics reports folders, allowing for read only access to reports, and additional field and object coverage. Get More Productive with Powerful Tools Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 introduces a new set of powerful capabilities designed to maximize productivity. A significant new feature for customizing Oracle CRM On Demand is a JavaScript API. The JS API allows customers to add new buttons, suppress existing buttons and even change what happens when a user clicks an existing button. Other usability enhancements, such as personalized related information applets, extended case insensitive search provide users with better, more intuitive, experience. Additional privileges for viewing private activities and notes allow administrators to reassign records as needed, and Custom Object management. Workflow has been added to the Order Item object; and now tasks can be assigned to a relative user, such as an Account Owner, allowing more complex business processes to be automated and adhered to. Get the Best Value Oracle CRM On Demand delivers unprecedented value with the broadest set of capabilities from a single-provider solution, the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership, the most on-demand deployment options, the deepest CRM expertise and experience of any CRM provider, and the most secure CRM in the cloud. With Release 24, Oracle CRM On Demand now includes even more enterprise-grade security, integration, and extensibility features, along with enhanced industry editions to save you time and money. New features include: Business Process Administration: A new privilege has been added that allows administrators to override a Business Process Administration rule.This privilege permits users to edit a locked record, or unlock a record, in the event of a material change that needs to be reflected per corporatepolicy. Additionally, the Products Detailed object has been added to Business Process Administration, enabling record locking and logic to be applied. Expanded Integration: Oracle continues to improve Web Services each release, by adding more object coverage enabling customers and partners to easily integrate with CRM On Demand. Bottom Line Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 enables organizations to get smarter, get more productive, and get the best value, period. For more information on Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24, please visit oracle.com/crmondemand

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• Odd company release cycle: Go Distributed Source Control?

  - by MrLane

  sorry about this long post, but I think it is worth it! I have just started with a small .NET shop that operates quite a bit differently to other places that I have worked. Unlike any of my previous positions, the software written here is targetted at multiple customers and not every customer gets the latest release of the software at the same time. As such, there is no "current production version." When a customer does get an update, they also get all of the features added to he software since their last update, which could be a long time ago. The software is highly configurable and features can be turned on and off: so called "feature toggles." Release cycles are very tight here, in fact they are not on a shedule: when a feature is complete the software is deployed to the relevant customer. The team only last year moved from Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server. The problem is they still use TFS as if it were VSS and enforce Checkout locks on a single code branch. Whenever a bug fix gets put out into the field (even for a single customer) they simply build whatever is in TFS, test the bug was fixed and deploy to the customer! (Myself coming from a pharma and medical devices software background this is unbeliveable!). The result is that half baked dev code gets put into production without being even tested. Bugs are always slipping into release builds, but often a customer who just got a build will not see these bugs if they don't use the feature the bug is in. The director knows this is a problem as the company is starting to grow all of a sudden with some big clients coming on board and more smaller ones. I have been asked to look at source control options in order to eliminate deploying of buggy or unfinished code but to not sacrifice the somewhat asyncronous nature of the teams releases. I have used VSS, TFS, SVN and Bazaar in my career, but TFS is where most of my experience has been. Previously most teams I have worked with use a two or three branch solution of Dev-Test-Prod, where for a month developers work directly in Dev and then changes are merged to Test then Prod, or promoted "when its done" rather than on a fixed cycle. Automated builds were used, using either Cruise Control or Team Build. In my previous job Bazaar was used sitting on top of SVN: devs worked in their own small feature branches then pushed their changes to SVN (which was tied into TeamCity). This was nice in that it was easy to isolate changes and share them with other peoples branches. With both of these models there was a central dev and prod (and sometimes test) branch through which code was pushed (and labels were used to mark builds in prod from which releases were made...and these were made into branches for bug fixes to releases and merged back to dev). This doesn't really suit the way of working here, however: there is no order to when various features will be released, they get pushed when they are complete. With this requirement the "continuous integration" approach as I see it breaks down. To get a new feature out with continuous integration it has to be pushed via dev-test-prod and that will capture any unfinished work in dev. I am thinking that to overcome this we should go down a heavily feature branched model with NO dev-test-prod branches, rather the source should exist as a series of feature branches which when development work is complete are locked, tested, fixed, locked, tested and then released. Other feature branches can grab changes from other branches when they need/want, so eventually all changes get absorbed into everyone elses. This fits very much down a pure Bazaar model from what I experienced at my last job. As flexible as this sounds it just seems odd to not have a dev trunk or prod branch somewhere, and I am worried about branches forking never to re-integrate, or small late changes made that never get pulled across to other branches and developers complaining about merge disasters... What are peoples thoughts on this? A second final question: I am somewhat confused about the exact definition of distributed source control: some people seem to suggest it is about just not having a central repository like TFS or SVN, some say it is about being disconnected (SVN is 90% disconnected and TFS has a perfectly functional offline mode) and others say it is about Feature Branching and ease of merging between branches with no parent-child relationship (TFS also has baseless merging!). Perhaps this is a second question!

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• BizTalk Server 2013 beta on Windows 8 (with Visual Studio 2012, SQL Server 2012 &amp; ESB Toolkit 2.2)

  - by Vishal

  Hello BizTalkers, Finally, Microsoft released the beta version of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 and now its called BizTalk Server 2013. I had tried the BTS 2010 R2 CTP version on Windows Azure VM and particularly I was excited about the RESTful services support and ESB fully integrated into BizTalk. Well didn’t get chance to test it much, Azure & VM running cost associated . Anyways, I was waiting for this announcement and I was so much glad that Microsoft finally released the on premise one.  Check what’s new in the BizTalk Server 2013.  Officially Microsoft says that BizTalk Server 2013 “beta” is not supported on Windows 8 but I was curious to try it out. Below is my installation and configuration experience. Virtual Machine configuration: VM Ware Workstation 9.0. Windows 8 Enterprise x64. SQL Server 2012. Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate. BizTalk Server 2013 beta. Windows 8 Machine name: WIN8 Local Administrator account name: Admin First I installed Windows 8 Enterprise on a VM Ware Workstation 9.0 and updated the OS. Even Windows 8 is the new release so luckily didn’t had much updates to perform. Next Installed Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate which was straightforward installation. Next Installed SQL Server 2012. Select New SQL Server stand-alone installation & followed the steps as shown in the screenshot below.   Once the installation is finished, fire up SQL Server Management Studio and try connecting. Initially when the management studio opened up, I thought why did Visual Studio 2010 open when I tried opening SQL Management studio but well, they made the interface alike VS 2010. Cool, I like it. Next is the real deal, download the BizTalk Server 2013 and unzip to particular folder. Double click the Setup.exe and follow the steps in the screenshots. Install Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 beta. I selected all the normal artifacts and also all the artifacts under Additional Software's. So far so good. Next Launch BizTalk Server Configuration and I used Basic configuration as shown in screenshot below. Didn’t expect to see this but “wala”. Successful in the first shot. Still I wasn’t sure & something would have gone wrong so fired up the BizTalk Server Administration Console and that too came up just fine. Still was not able to believe so created a simple messaging application:  message in –> message out and that too worked just fine. Finally I was convinced that BizTalk Server 2013 did work on Windows 8. Next step was to install the ESB Toolkit 2.2 which is now integrated with BizTalk Server and does not come as a separate standalone installation file. Again run the BizTalk Setup.exe from the unzipped folder. Install Microsoft ESB Toolkit. Next, unlike ESB Configuration would  not open up by itself so go to “Windows 8 so called Start” (I could not resist to write this) and open the ESB Toolkit Configuration wizard. Below screenshot display the configurations I used. Also you can find them on MSDN here. Finally after the ESB Configuration, I open Admin Console and checked the 2 ESB application deployed. Cool. This concludes my experience about installation and configuration of BizTalk Server 2013 Beta & ESB Toolkit 2.2 on Windows 8. I will try and keep writing about BizTalk Server 2013 and its use with RESTful Services etc. Thanks, Vishal Mody

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• dynamic? I'll never use that ... or then again, maybe it could ...

  - by adweigert

  So, I don't know about you, but I was highly skeptical of the dynamic keywork when it was announced. I thought to myself, oh great, just another move towards VB compliance. Well after seeing it being used in things like DynamicXml (which I use for this example) I then was working with a MVC controller and wanted to move some things like operation timeout of an action to a configuration file. Thinking big picture, it'd be really nice to have configuration for all my controllers like that. Ugh, I don't want to have to create all those ConfigurationElement objects... So, I started thinking self, use what you know and do something cool ... Well after a bit of zoning out, self came up with use a dynamic object duh! I was thinking of a config like this ...<controllers> <add type="MyApp.Web.Areas.ComputerManagement.Controllers.MyController, MyApp.Web"> <detail timeout="00:00:30" /> </add> </controllers> So, I ended up with a couple configuration classes like this ...blic abstract class DynamicConfigurationElement : ConfigurationElement { protected DynamicConfigurationElement() { this.DynamicObject = new DynamicConfiguration(); } public DynamicConfiguration DynamicObject { get; private set; } protected override bool OnDeserializeUnrecognizedAttribute(string name, string value) { this.DynamicObject.Add(name, value); return true; } protected override bool OnDeserializeUnrecognizedElement(string elementName, XmlReader reader) { this.DynamicObject.Add(elementName, new DynamicXml((XElement)XElement.ReadFrom(reader))); return true; } } public class ControllerConfigurationElement : DynamicConfigurationElement { [ConfigurationProperty("type", Options = ConfigurationPropertyOptions.IsRequired | ConfigurationPropertyOptions.IsKey)] public string TypeName { get { return (string)this["type"]; } } public Type Type { get { return Type.GetType(this.TypeName, true); } } } public class ControllerConfigurationElementCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection { protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement() { return new ControllerConfigurationElement(); } protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element) { return ((ControllerConfigurationElement)element).Type; } } And then had to create the meat of the DynamicConfiguration class which looks like this ...public class DynamicConfiguration : DynamicObject { private Dictionary<string, object> properties = new Dictionary<string, object>(StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase); internal void Add<T>(string name, T value) { this.properties.Add(name, value); } public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) { var propertyName = binder.Name; result = null; if (this.properties.ContainsKey(propertyName)) { result = this.properties[propertyName]; } return true; } } So all being said, I made a base controller class like a good little MVC-itizen ...public abstract class BaseController : Controller { protected BaseController() : base() { var configuration = ManagementConfigurationSection.GetInstance(); var controllerConfiguration = configuration.Controllers.ForType(this.GetType()); if (controllerConfiguration != null) { this.Configuration = controllerConfiguration.DynamicObject; } } public dynamic Configuration { get; private set; } } And used it like this ...public class MyController : BaseController { static readonly string DefaultDetailTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue.ToString(); public MyController() { this.DetailTimeout = TimeSpan.Parse(this.Configuration.Detail.Timeout ?? DefaultDetailTimeout); } public TimeSpan DetailTimeout { get; private set; } } And there I have an actual use for the dynamic keyword ... never thoguht I'd see the day when I first heard of it as I don't do much COM work ... oh dont' forget this little helper extension methods to find the controller configuration by the controller type.public static ControllerConfigurationElement ForType<T>(this ControllerConfigurationElementCollection collection) { Contract.Requires(collection != null); return ForType(collection, typeof(T)); } public static ControllerConfigurationElement ForType(this ControllerConfigurationElementCollection collection, Type type) { Contract.Requires(collection != null); Contract.Requires(type != null); return collection.Cast<ControllerConfigurationElement>().Where(element => element.Type == type).SingleOrDefault(); } Sure, it isn't perfect and I'm sure I can tweak it over time, but I thought it was a pretty cool way to take advantage of the dynamic keyword functionality. Just remember, it only validates you did it right at runtime, which isn't that bad ... is it? And yes, I did make it case-insensitive so my code didn't have to look like my XML objects, tweak it to your liking if you dare to use this creation.

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• Future Of F# At Jazoon 2011

  - by Alois Kraus

  I was at the Jazoon 2011 in Zurich (Switzerland). It was a really cool event and it had many top notch speaker not only from the Microsoft universe. One of the most interesting talks was from Don Syme with the title: F# Today/F# Tomorrow. He did show how to use F# scripting to browse through open databases/, OData Web Services, Sharepoint, …interactively. It looked really easy with the help of F# Type Providers which is the next big language feature in a future F# version. The object returned by a Type Provider is used to access the data like in usual strongly typed object model. No guessing how the property of an object is called. Intellisense will show it just as you expect. There exists a range of Type Providers for various data sources where the schema of the stored data can somehow be dynamically extracted. Lets use e.g. a free database it would be then let data = DbProvider(http://.....); data the object which contains all data from e.g. a chemical database. It has an elements collection which contains an element which has the properties: Name, AtomicMass, Picture, …. You can browse the object returned by the Type Provider with full Intellisense because the returned object is strongly typed which makes this happen. The same can be achieved of course with code generators that use an input the schema of the input data (OData Web Service, database, Sharepoint, JSON serialized data, …) and spit out the necessary strongly typed objects as an assembly. This does work but has the downside that if the schema of your data source is huge you will quickly run against a wall with traditional code generators since the generated “deserialization” assembly could easily become several hundred MB. *** The following part contains guessing how this exactly work by asking Don two questions **** Q: Can I use Type Providers within C#? D: No. Q: F# is after all a library. I can reference the F# assemblies and use the contained Type Providers? D: F# does annotate the generated types in a special way at runtime which is not a static type that C# could use. The F# type providers seem to use a hybrid approach. At compilation time the Type Provider is instantiated with the url of your input data. The obtained schema information is used by the compiler to generate static types as usual but only for a small subset (the top level classes up to certain nesting level would make sense to me). To make this work you need to access the actual data source at compile time which could be a problem if you want to keep the actual url in a config file. Ok so this explains why it does work at all. But in the demo we did see full intellisense support down to the deepest object level. It looks like if you navigate deeper into the object hierarchy the type provider is instantiated in the background and attach to a true static type the properties determined at run time while you were typing. So this type is not really static at all. It is static if you define as a static type that its properties shows up in intellisense. But since this type information is determined while you are typing and it is not used to generate a true static type and you cannot use these “intellistatic” types from C#. Nonetheless this is a very cool language feature. With the plotting libraries you can generate expressive charts from any datasource within seconds to get quickly an overview of any structured data storage. My favorite programming language C# will not get such features in the near future there is hope. If you restrict yourself to OData sources you can use LINQPad to query any OData enabled data source with LINQ with ease. There you can query Stackoverflow with The output is also nicely rendered which makes it a very good tool to explore OData sources today.

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• Windows for IoT, continued

  - by Valter Minute

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products.   *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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• "previousMode": Controling the Pin Action of a TopComponent

  - by Geertjan

  An excellent thing I learned today is that you, as a developer of a NetBeans module or NetBeans Platform application, can control the pin button. Up until today, whenever I had a TopComponent defined to appear in "rightSlidingSide" mode and then I clicked the "pin" button, as shown here... ...the TopComponent would then find itself pinned in the "explorer" mode. Would make more sense if it would be pinned in the "properties" mode, which is the docked mode closest to the "rightSlidingSide" mode. Not being able to control the "pin" button has been a recurring question (including in my own head) over several years. But the NetBeans Team's window system guru Stan Aubrecht informed me today that a "previousMode" attribute exists in the "tc-ref" file of the TopComponent. Since a few releases, that file is generated via the annotations in the TopComponent. However, "previousMode" is currently not one of the attributes exposed by the @TopComponent.Registration annotation. Therefore, what I did was this: Set "rightSlidingSide" in the "mode" attribute of the @TopComponent.Registration. Build the module. Find the "generated-layer.xml" (in the Files window) and move the layer registration of the TopComponent, including its action and menu item for opening the TopComponent, into my own manual layer within the module. Then remove all the TopComponent annotations from the TopComponent, though you can keep @ConvertAsProperties and @Messages. Then add the "previousMode" attribute, as highlighted below, into my own layer file, i.e., within the tags copied from the "generated-layer.xml": <folder name="Modes"> <folder name="rightSlidingSide"> <file name="ComparatorTopComponent.wstcref"> <![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE tc-ref PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Top Component in Mode Properties 2.0//EN" "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/tc-ref2_0.dtd"> <tc-ref version="2.0"> <tc-id id="ComparatorTopComponent"/> <state opened="false"/> <previousMode name="properties" index="0" /> </tc-ref> ]]> </file> </folder> </folder> Now when you run the application and pin the specific TopComponent defined above, i.e., in the above case, named "ComparatorTopComponent", you will find it is pinned into the "properties" mode! That's pretty cool and if you agree, then you're a pretty cool NetBeans Platform developer, and I'd love to find out more about the application/s you're creating on the NetBeans Platform! Meanwhile, I'm going to create an issue for exposing the "previousMode" attribute in the @TopComponent.Registration annotation.

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• How to Draw Lines on the Screen

  - by Geertjan

  I've seen occasional questions on mailing lists about how to use the NetBeans Visual Library to draw lines, e.g., to make graphs or diagrams of various kinds by drawing on the screen. So, rather than drag/drop causing widgets to be added, you'd want widgets to be added on mouse clicks, and you'd want to be able to connect those widgets together somehow. Via the code below, you'll be able to click on the screen, which causes a dot to appear. When you have multiple dots, you can hold down the Ctrl key and connect them together. A guiding line appears to help you position the dots exactly in line with each other. When you go to File | Print, you'll be able to preview and print the diagram you've created. A picture that speaks 1000 words: Here's the code: public final class PlotterTopComponent extends TopComponent { private final Scene scene; private final LayerWidget baseLayer; private final LayerWidget connectionLayer; private final LayerWidget interactionLayer; public PlotterTopComponent() { initComponents(); setName(Bundle.CTL_PlotterTopComponent()); setToolTipText(Bundle.HINT_PlotterTopComponent()); setLayout(new BorderLayout()); this.scene = new Scene(); this.baseLayer = new LayerWidget(scene); this.interactionLayer = new LayerWidget(scene); this.connectionLayer = new LayerWidget(scene); scene.getActions().addAction(new SceneCreateAction()); scene.addChild(baseLayer); scene.addChild(interactionLayer); scene.addChild(connectionLayer); add(scene.createView(), BorderLayout.CENTER); putClientProperty("print.printable", true); } private class SceneCreateAction extends WidgetAction.Adapter { @Override public WidgetAction.State mousePressed(Widget widget, WidgetAction.WidgetMouseEvent event) { if (event.getClickCount() == 1) { if (event.getButton() == MouseEvent.BUTTON1 || event.getButton() == MouseEvent.BUTTON2) { baseLayer.addChild(new BlackDotWidget(scene, widget, event)); repaint(); return WidgetAction.State.CONSUMED; } } return WidgetAction.State.REJECTED; } } private class BlackDotWidget extends ImageWidget { public BlackDotWidget(Scene scene, Widget widget, WidgetAction.WidgetMouseEvent event) { super(scene); setImage(ImageUtilities.loadImage("org/netbeans/plotter/blackdot.gif")); setPreferredLocation(widget.convertLocalToScene(event.getPoint())); getActions().addAction( ActionFactory.createExtendedConnectAction( connectionLayer, new BlackDotConnectProvider())); getActions().addAction( ActionFactory.createAlignWithMoveAction( baseLayer, interactionLayer, ActionFactory.createDefaultAlignWithMoveDecorator())); } } private class BlackDotConnectProvider implements ConnectProvider { @Override public boolean isSourceWidget(Widget source) { return source instanceof BlackDotWidget && source != null ? true : false; } @Override public ConnectorState isTargetWidget(Widget src, Widget trg) { return src != trg && trg instanceof BlackDotWidget ? ConnectorState.ACCEPT : ConnectorState.REJECT; } @Override public boolean hasCustomTargetWidgetResolver(Scene arg0) { return false; } @Override public Widget resolveTargetWidget(Scene arg0, Point arg1) { return null; } @Override public void createConnection(Widget source, Widget target) { ConnectionWidget conn = new ConnectionWidget(scene); conn.setTargetAnchor(AnchorFactory.createCircularAnchor(target, 10)); conn.setSourceAnchor(AnchorFactory.createCircularAnchor(source, 10)); connectionLayer.addChild(conn); } } ... ... ... Note: The code above was written based on the Visual Library tutorials on the NetBeans Platform Learning Trail, in particular via the "ConnectScene" sample in the "test.connect" package, which is part of the very long list of Visual Library samples referred to in the Visual Library tutorials on the NetBeans Platform Learning Trail. The next steps are to add a reconnect action and an action to delete a dot by double-clicking on it. Would be interesting to change the connecting line so that the length of the line were to be shown, i.e., as you draw a line from one dot to another, you'd see a constantly changing number representing the current distance of the connecting line. Also, once lines are connected to form a rectangle, would be cool to be able to write something within that rectangle. Then one could really create diagrams, which would be pretty cool.

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• UPOS RFIDScanner data format

  - by Robert Snyder

  A lot of work that I do currently is based in the OPOS/UPOS world. My company has a device that can read 13.56Mhz tags (RFID), Smart Cards, and Mag Stripe cards. Up until somewhat recently I have only been working with RFID for a very specific scenario. That was to read UltraLight C and Desfire cards. These cards were all setup very specifically so that I could take the data read from those cards and force it into a MSR track2 format. The past couple of weeks, however, I have been working on reading RFID credit cards (since I have a Visa card I've been using mine), and Smart Card credit cards. (The visa card I have has both) In learning how to communicate with SmartCard and reading ISO7816 and EMVCO documents I became a little more familiar with how info is stored. But now I have a question regarding UPOS. The RFID data on my Visa is stored (and read) very similar to how the data is stored and read from the Smart Card on my Visa. Cool. Well in the UPOS spec for SmartCardRW the ReadData method returns a byte array. That's cool, I can just return all that data and then parse it as my heart desires. The RFID though has a LinkedList of Tags. Well this makes sense in terms of my Visa card (reminds me of a question I have in regards to SmartCard, but that is for another question) but what about ULC and Desfire, or for that matter any Mifare card. Pages, Files, Purses don't exactly fit the Tag profile. For instance lets just say I read pages 4-12 on my ULC card. Each page I read is 4 bytes long. Does this mean I have 9 tags in my LinkedList? Is my Tag id the page number? Or then how does that translate to Desfire? I open application 123456 and read file 1 and file 2, Do I have 2 tags? and if so what is my tag id? At least with my Visa I think that I have to use the Tag id (ex 5F24 for my expiration date) and value of {0x15, 0x10, 0x31} Part of me says yes..that makes sense. Another part of me says, "well if that is the case then why doesn't SmartCardRW have Tags?" So that is my question. How do I format my data from those different types of media? or is that the job of my Control Object (the application)? Is so how does it know? The only protocols I have are: // Summary: // Enumerates the available predefined RFID tag protocols the device supports. [Flags] public enum RFIDProtocols { EpcClass0 = 1, RFIDSdt0Plus = 2, EpcClass1 = 4, EpcClass1Gen2 = 8, EpcClass2 = 16, Iso14443A = 4096, Iso14443B = 8192, Iso15693 = 12288, Iso180006B = 16384, Other = 16777216, All = 1073741824, } If I use that well all of my cards that I have are all Iso14443A. I use the ATQA and the SAK to know what type of card I really have. There is no RFID property that lets me specify that. So I'm lost.

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• Code refactoring with Visual Studio 2010 Part-4

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I have been writing few post with code refactoring features in Visual Studio 2010. This post also will be part of series and this post will be last of the series. In this post I am going explain two features 1) Encapsulate Field and 2) Extract Interface. Let’s explore both features in details. Encapsulate Field: This is a nice code refactoring feature provides by Visual Studio 2010. With help of this feature we can create properties from the existing private field of the class. Let’s take a simple example of Customer Class. In that I there are two private field called firstName and lastName. Below is the code for the class. public class Customer { private string firstName; private string lastName; public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } Now lets encapsulate first field firstName with Encapsulate feature. So first select that field and goto refactor menu in Visual Studio 2010 and click on Encapsulate Field. Once you click that a dialog box will appear like following. Now once you click OK a preview dialog box will open as we have selected preview reference changes. I think its a good options to check that option to preview code that is being changed by IDE itself. Dialog will look like following. Once you click apply it create a new property called FirstName. Same way I have done for the lastName and now my customer class code look like following. public class Customer { private string firstName; public string FirstName { get { return firstName; } set { firstName = value; } } private string lastName; public string LastName { get { return lastName; } set { lastName = value; } } public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } So you can see that its very easy to create properties with existing fields and you don’t have to change anything there in code it will change all the stuff itself. Extract Interface: When you are writing software prototype and You don’t know the future implementation of that then its a good practice to use interface there. I am going to explain here that How we can extract interface from the existing code without writing a single line of code with the help of code refactoring feature of Visual Studio 2010. For that I have create a Simple Repository class called CustomerRepository with three methods like following. public class CustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } In above class there are three method Add,Update and Delete where we are going to implement some code for each one. Now I want to create a interface which I can use for my other entities in project. So let’s create a interface from the above class with the help of Visual Studio 2010. So first select class and goto refactor menu and click Extract Interface. It will open up dialog box like following. Here I have selected all the method for interface and Once I click OK then it will create a new file called ICustomerRespository where it has created a interface. Just like following. Here is a code for that interface. using System; namespace CodeRefractoring { interface ICustomerRespository { void Add(); void Delete(); void Update(); } } Now let's see the code for the our class. It will also changed like following to implement the interface. public class CustomerRespository : ICustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } Isn't that great we have created a interface and implemented it without writing a single line of code. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more.. Till that Happy Programming.

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• Adaptive Layout for ADF Faces on Tablets

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  In the 11.1.16 version of Oracle ADF we started adding specific features to the ADF Faces components so they'll work better on iPad tablets. In this entry I'm going to highlight some new capabilities that we have added to the 11.1.2.3 release. (note if you are still on the 11.1.1.* branch - you'll need to wait for 11.1.1.7 to get the features discussed here). The two key additions in the 11.1.2.3 version compared to the 11.1.1.6 features for iPad support include: pagination for tables and adaptive flow layout. The pagination for table is self explanatory, basically since iPad don't support scroll bars, we automatically switch the table component to render with a pagination toolbar that allow you to scroll set of records or directly jump to a specific set. See the image below. The adaptive flow layout takes a bit more explanation. On regular desktops the UI that you usually build for ADF Faces screens is going to use stretch layout - meaning that it stretches to fill the whole area of the browser window. If you resize the browser windoe, the ADF Faces page resizes with it. If your browser window is too small, scroll bars will appear to allow you to scroll to areas that are "hidden". However on an iPad, this is probably not the type of layout you want - you would rather have a flow layout that eliminates scroll bars and instead allows you to scroll down the page. Basically your want the page to be sized based on its content, rather then based on the browser window size. In ADF Faces terminology this can be done with the dimensionsFrom property set to "children". And here comes the tricky part, since in the past(and also today) when you create an ADF Faces page and add a stretchable component to it, the dimensionsFrom property is set to parent by default. This will be true to other layout components you'll add as well. At this point you might be wondering "Does this mean I'll need to go to each of the layout components in my page and modify the dimensionsFrom property value to be children?" ADF Faces to the rescue... To eliminate the need to do this tedious manual changes, we introduced a new web.xml parameter "oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS" You'll basically add the following to your web.xml <context-param>    <description>      This parameter controls the default value for component geometry on the page.      Supported values are:        legacy - component attributes use the default values as specified for the attributes                 in the tag documentation (default value)        auto   - component attributes use the correct default value given the value of their                 parent component. For example, with this setting, the panelStretchLayout                 will use "auto" as the default value for its "dimensionsFrom" attribute                 instead of "parent".    </description>    <param-name>oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS</param-name>    <param-value>auto</param-value>  </context-param> Once you set this parameter, you only need to set the dimensionsFrom attribute for the top level layout component on your page, and the rest of the components will adjust accordingly. One trick that you can use, and that is used in the demo below, is to have the dimensionsFrom property depend on the type of client that access your application. This way you can switch between stretch or flow layout based on the device accessing your application. For example I use the following in my page: <af:panelStretchLayout topHeight="70px" startWidth="0px" endWidth="0px"                                       dimensionsFrom="#{adfFacesContext.agent.capabilities['touchScreen'] eq 'none'  ? 'parent' : 'children' }"> Which results in a flow layout for iPads and a stretch layout for regular browsers. Check out the result in the below demo: &amp;lt;span id=&amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;

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• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 2, More about Search

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search, and especially the applications associated to it. I already mentioned the keyboard shortcuts you can use: Win-C shows the Charms bar (same as swiping from the right bevel towards the center of the screen). Win-Q open the Search fly out with Apps preselected. Win-W open the Search fly out with Settings preselected. Win-F open the Search fly out with Files preselected. Searching in Metro apps In addition to these three search domains, you can also search a Metro app, as long as it supports the Search contract (check this Build video to learn more about the Search contract). These apps show up in the Search flyout as shown here: Notice the list of apps below the Files button? That’s what we are talking about. First of all, the list order changes when you search in some applications. For instance, in the image above, I had used the Store with the Search charm. This is why the store shows up as the first app. I am not 100% what algorithm is used here (sorting according to number of searches is my guess), but try it out and try to figure it out Applications that have never been searched are sorted alphabetically. Does it mean we will see cool app names like ___AAA_MyCoolApp? I certainly hope not!! Pinning You can also pin often used apps to the Search flyout. To pin an app with the mouse, right click on it in the Search flyout and select Pin from the context menu. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to go down to the selected app, and then open the context menu. With the finger, simply tap and hold until you see a semi transparent rectangle indicating that the context menu will be shown, then release. The context menu opens up and you can select Pin. Pin context menu Pinned apps Unpinning, Hiding Using the same technique as for pinning here above, you can also unpin a pinned application. Finally, you can also choose to hide an app from the Search flyout altogether. This is a convenient way to clean up and make it easy to find stuff. Note: At this point, I am not sure how to re-add a hidden app to the Search flyout. If anyone knows, please mention it in the comments, thanks! Reordering You can also reorder pinned apps. To do this, with the finger, tap, hold and pull the app to the side, then pull it vertically to reorder it. You can also reorder with the mouse, simply by clicking on an app and pulling it vertically to the place you want to put it. I don’t think there is a way to do that with the keyboard though. That’s it for now More gestures will follow in a next installment! Have fun with Windows 8   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) is Available Now !

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2). It is now available for download on OTN on ALL platforms. This is the first major release since the launch of Enterprise Manager 12c in October of 2011. This is the first time when Enterprise Manager release is available on all platforms simultaneously. This is primarily a stability release which incorporates many of issues and feedback reported by early adopters. In addition, this release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board. New Capabilities and Features Enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds: Introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle Weblogic Server. The new capabilities include guided set up of PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out and metering and chargeback. Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server environments: Combining in-context multiple domain, patching and configuration file synchronizations. Integrated Hardware-Software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components. The latest management capabilities for business-critical applications include: Business Application Management: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application’s business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on. Enhanced User Experience Reporting: Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context. Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, bulk operations against many events, etc. New and Revised Plug-Ins: Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions. Revised plug-ins contain only bug-fixes and while new plug-ins incorporate both bug fixes as well as new functionality. Plug-In Name Version Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 (revision) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud 12.1.0.4 (new) Installation and Upgrade: All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) ) Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2. Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: User can do fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory). Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade. Documentation: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction Document provides a broad overview of capabilities and highlights"What's New" in EM 12.1.0.2. All updated Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation can be found on OTN Upgrade Guide Please feel free to ask questions related to the new Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) at the Oracle Enterprise Manager Forum . You could also share your feedback at twitter  using hash tag #em12c or at Facebook . Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Documentation Changes in Solaris 11.1

  - by alanc

  One of the first places you can see Solaris 11.1 changes are in the docs, which have now been posted in the Solaris 11.1 Library on docs.oracle.com. I spent a good deal of time reviewing documentation for this release, and thought some would be interesting to blog about, but didn't review all the changes (not by a long shot), and am not going to cover all the changes here, so there's plenty left for you to discover on your own. Just comparing the Solaris 11.1 Library list of docs against the Solaris 11 list will show a lot of reorganization and refactoring of the doc set, especially in the system administration guides. Hopefully the new break down will make it easier to get straight to the sections you need when a task is at hand. Packaging System Unfortunately, the excellent in-depth guide for how to build packages for the new Image Packaging System (IPS) in Solaris 11 wasn't done in time to make the initial Solaris 11 doc set. An interim version was published shortly after release, in PDF form on the OTN IPS page. For Solaris 11.1 it was included in the doc set, as Packaging and Delivering Software With the Image Packaging System in Oracle Solaris 11.1, so should be easier to find, and easier to share links to specific pages the HTML version. Beyond just how to build a package, it includes details on how Solaris is packaged, and how package updates work, which may be useful to all system administrators who deal with Solaris 11 upgrades & installations. The Adding and Updating Oracle Solaris 11.1 Software Packages was also extended, including new sections on Relaxing Version Constraints Specified by Incorporations and Locking Packages to a Specified Version that may be of interest to those who want to keep the Solaris 11 versions of certain packages when they upgrade, such as the couple of packages that had functionality removed by an (unusual for an update release) End of Feature process in the 11.1 release. Also added in this release is a document containing the lists of all the packages in each of the major package groups in Solaris 11.1 (solaris-desktop, solaris-large-server, and solaris-small-server). While you can simply get the contents of those groups from the package repository, either via the web interface or the pkg command line, the documentation puts them in handy tables for easier side-by-side comparison, or viewing the lists before you've installed the system to pick which one you want to initially install. X Window System We've not had good X11 coverage in the online Solaris docs in a while, mostly relying on the man pages, and upstream X.Org docs. In this release, we've integrated some X coverage into the Solaris 11.1 Desktop Adminstrator's Guide, including sections on installing fonts for fontconfig or legacy X11 clients, X server configuration, and setting up remote access via X11 or VNC. Of course we continue to work on improving the docs, including a lot of contributions to the upstream docs all OS'es share (more about that another time). Security One of the things Oracle likes to do for its products is to publish security guides for administrators & developers to know how to build systems that meet their security needs. For Solaris, we started this with Solaris 11, providing a guide for sysadmins to find where the security relevant configuration options were documented. The Solaris 11.1 Security Guidelines extend this to cover new security features, such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Read-Only Zones, as well as adding additional guidelines for existing features, such as how to limit the size of tmpfs filesystems, to avoid users driving the system into swap thrashing situations. For developers, the corresponding document is the Developer's Guide to Oracle Solaris 11 Security, which has been the source for years for documentation of security-relevant Solaris API's such as PAM, GSS-API, and the Solaris Cryptographic Framework. For Solaris 11.1, a new appendix was added to start providing Secure Coding Guidelines for Developers, leveraging the CERT Secure Coding Standards and OWASP guidelines to provide the base recommendations for common programming languages and their standard API's. Solaris specific secure programming guidance was added via links to other documentation in the product doc set. In parallel, we updated the Solaris C Libary Functions security considerations list with details of Solaris 11 enhancements such as FD_CLOEXEC flags, additional *at() functions, and new stdio functions such as asprintf() and getline(). A number of code examples throughout the Solaris 11.1 doc set were updated to follow these recommendations, changing unbounded strcpy() calls to strlcpy(), sprintf() to snprintf(), etc. so that developers following our examples start out with safer code. The Writing Device Drivers guide even had the appendix updated to list which of these utility functions, like snprintf() and strlcpy(), are now available via the Kernel DDI. Little Things Of course all the big new features got documented, and some major efforts were put into refactoring and renovation, but there were also a lot of smaller things that got fixed as well in the nearly a year between the Solaris 11 and 11.1 doc releases - again too many to list here, but a random sampling of the ones I know about & found interesting or useful: The Privileges section of the DTrace Guide now gives users a pointer to find out how to set up DTrace privileges for non-global zones and what limitations are in place there. A new section on Recommended iSCSI Configuration Practices was added to the iSCSI configuration section when it moved into the SAN Configuration and Multipathing administration guide. The Managing System Power Services section contains an expanded explanation of the various tunables for power management in Solaris 11.1. The sample dcmd sources in /usr/demo/mdb were updated to include ::help output, so that developers like myself who follow the examples don't forget to include it (until a helpful code reviewer pointed it out while reviewing the mdb module changes for Xorg 1.12). The README file in that directory was updated to show the correct paths for installing both kernel & userspace modules, including the 64-bit variants.

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• In hindsight, is basing XAML on XML a mistake or a good approach?

  - by romkyns

  XAML is essentially a subset of XML. One of the main benefits of basing XAML on XML is said to be that it can be parsed with existing tools. And it can, to a large degree, although the (syntactically non-trivial) attribute values will stay in text form and require further parsing. There are two major alternatives to describing a GUI in an XML-derived language. One is to do what WinForms did, and describe it in real code. There are numerous problems with this, though it’s not completely advantage-free (a question to compare XAML to this approach). The other major alternative is to design a completely new syntax specifically tailored for the task at hand. This is generally known as a domain-specific language. So, in hindsight, and as a lesson for the future generations, was it a good idea to base XAML on XML, or would it have been better as a custom-designed domain-specific language? If we were designing an even better UI framework, should we pick XML or a custom DSL? Since it’s much easier to think positively about the status quo, especially one that is quite liked by the community, I’ll give some example reasons for why building on top of XML might be considered a mistake. Basing a language off XML has one thing going for it: it’s much easier to parse (the core parser is already available), requires much, much less design work, and alternative parsers are also much easier to write for 3rd party developers. But the resulting language can be unsatisfying in various ways. It is rather verbose. If you change the type of something, you need to change it in the closing tag. It has very poor support for comments; it’s impossible to comment out an attribute. There are limitations placed on the content of attributes by XML. The markup extensions have to be built "on top" of the XML syntax, not integrated deeply and nicely into it. And, my personal favourite, if you set something via an attribute, you use completely different syntax than if you set the exact same thing as a content property. It’s also said that since everyone knows XML, XAML requires less learning. Strictly speaking this is true, but learning the syntax is a tiny fraction of the time spent learning a new UI framework; it’s the framework’s concepts that make the curve steep. Besides, the idiosyncracies of an XML-based language might actually add to the "needs learning" basket. Are these disadvantages outweighted by the ease of parsing? Should the next cool framework continue the tradition, or invest the time to design an awesome DSL that can’t be parsed by existing tools and whose syntax needs to be learned by everyone? P.S. Not everyone confuses XAML and WPF, but some do. XAML is the XML-like thing. WPF is the framework with support for bindings, theming, hardware acceleration and a whole lot of other cool stuff.

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• Fun tips with Analytics

  - by user12620172

  If you read this blog, I am assuming you are at least familiar with the Analytic functions in the ZFSSA. They are basically amazing, very powerful and deep. However, you may not be aware of some great, hidden functions inside the Analytic screen. Once you open a metric, the toolbar looks like this: Now, I’m not going over every tool, as we have done that before, and you can hover your mouse over them and they will tell you what they do. But…. Check this out. Open a metric (CPU Percent Utilization works fine), and click on the “Hour” button, which is the 2nd clock icon. That’s easy, you are now looking at the last hour of data. Now, hold down your ‘Shift’ key, and click it again. Now you are looking at 2 hours of data. Hold down Shift and click it again, and you are looking at 3 hours of data. Are you catching on yet? You can do this with not only the ‘Hour’ button, but also with the ‘Minute’, ‘Day’, ‘Week’, and the ‘Month’ buttons. Very cool. It also works with the ‘Show Minimum’ and ‘Show Maximum’ buttons, allowing you to go to the next iteration of either of those. One last button you can Shift-click is the handy ‘Drill’ button. This button usually drills down on one specific aspect of your metric. If you Shift-click it, it will display a “Rainbow Highlight” of the current metric. This works best if this metric has many ‘Range Average’ items in the left-hand window. Give it a shot. Also, one will sometimes click on a certain second of data in the graph, like this:  In this case, I clicked 4:57 and 21 seconds, and the 'Range Average' on the left went away, and was replaced by the time stamp. It seems at this point to some people that you are now stuck, and can not get back to an average for the whole chart. However, you can actually click on the actual time stamp of "4:57:21" right above the chart. Even though your mouse does not change into the typical browser finger that most links look like, you can click it, and it will change your range back to the full metric. Another trick you may like is to save a certain view or look of a group of graphs. Most of you know you can save a worksheet, but did you know you could Sync them, Pause them, and then Save it? This will save the paused state, allowing you to view it forever the way you see it now.  Heatmaps. Heatmaps are cool, and look like this:  Some metrics use them and some don't. If you have one, and wish to zoom it vertically, try this. Open a heatmap metric like my example above (I believe every metric that deals with latency will show as a heatmap). Select one or two of the ranges on the left. Click the "Change Outlier Elimination" button. Click it again and check out what it does.  Enjoy. Perhaps my next blog entry will be the best Analytic metrics to keep your eyes on, and how you can use the Alerts feature to watch them for you. Steve 

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• using Quick Sequence Diagram Editor for sequence diagrams

  - by Jason S

  Anyone have experience with Quick Sequence Diagram Editor? The combination of instant display + text source code + Java implementation is very attractive to me, but I can't quite figure out how to make the syntax do what I want, and the documentation's not very clear. Here's a contrived example: al:Actor bill:Actor atm:ATM[a] bank:Bank[a] al:atm.give me $10 atm:al has $3=bank.check al's account balance al:atm.what time is it atm:al.it's now atm:al.stop bugging me atm:al.you only have $3 atm:bill.and don't you open your mouth bill:atm.who asked you? bill:atm.give me $20 al:atm.hey, I'm not finished! atm:bill has $765=bank.check bill's account balance atm:yes I'm sure, bill has $765=bank.hmm are you sure? atm:bill.here's $20, now go away atm:great, he's a cool dude=bank.I just gave Bill $20 al:atm.what about my $10? atm:al.read my lips: you only have $3 Here's the result from QSDE in single-threaded mode: and in multi-threaded mode: I guess I'm not clear what starts/ends those vertical bars. I have a situation which is single-threaded, but there's state involved, and all the messages are asynchronous. I guess that means I should use an external object to represent that state and its lifetime. What I want is for one timeline to represent the message sequence al:atm.give me $10 atm:bank.check al's account balance bank:atm.al has $3 atm:al.you only have $3 and another timeline to represent the message sequence bill:atm.give me $20 atm:bank.check bill's account balance bank:atm.bill has $765 atm:bank.hmm are you sure? bank:atm.yes I'm sure, bill has $765 atm:bill.here's $20, now go away atm:bank.I just gave Bill $20 bank:atm.great, he's a cool dude with the other "wisecracks" representing other miscellaneous messages that I don't care about right now. Is there a way to do this with QSDE?

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• How can I programmatically link an UIView or UIImageView with an event like "touch up inside"?

  - by Thanks

  Interface Builder will only allow me to hook up such events for an button. But like in HTML, I just want to haven an blank UIImageView where - as soon as the user taps it - a method is invoked. I hope there is some cool programmatically way of doing that, which I don't know about. UPDATE: In my View Controller that creates the UIImageView I tried to do this: SEL actionSelector = @selector(doSomethingWhenImageIsTouched:); [self.myUIImageView addTarget:nil action:actionSelector forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside]; The compiler gives me a warning, that UIImageView may not respond to addTarget:... what do I have to do so that it works with an UIImageView. I see in the docs that UIImageView does not inherit from UIControl, but addTarget: is part of UIControl. UPDATE: I ended up creating an UIButton after creating the UIImageView. Then I set the frame of that button to the frame of the UIImageView, and alpha to 0.1f. For some reason, it will not work if alpha is 0.0f. And then, I did that cool addTarget: thing...

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• Which itch does a gravatar scratch?

  - by WizardOfOdds

  This is a very serious question: I've seen lots of threads here about gravatars but I couldn't find and answer to this question: what computer identification/authentication (?) problem, if any, are gravatars supposed to solve? Neither the Wikipedia entry nor the official website are very useful. The official website mentions a "globally unique" picture. Unique in what sense? As far as I can see it's only the hash that is unique: two persons can have two pictures looking very similar if not identical. Note that this question is not about which problems do gravatars unarguably cause (like leaking 10% of the stackoverflow.com accounts email addresses like discussed here : "gravatars can leak email adresses" ) but about which authentication (?) problems, if any, are gravatars supposed to solve? Is the goal just to have a cool/funny/cute icon and save bandwith by having it stored on a remote website or is there more to it, like serving a real authentication purpose which I'd be completely missing? Note that I've got nothing against them and find them rather cool, but I'm just having a hard time figuring out what their purpose is and if I should care or not about them in the webapps I'm developping.

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• Design considerations for temporarily transforming a player into an animal in a role playing game

  - by mikedev

  I am working on a role playing game for fun and to practice design patterns. I would like players to be able to transform themselves into different animals. For example, a Druid might be able to shape shift into a cheetah. Right now I'm planning on using the decorator pattern to do this but my question is - how do I make it so that when a druid is in the cheetah form, they can only access skills for the cheetah? In other words, they should not be able to access their normal Druid skills. Using the decorator pattern it appears that even in the cheetah form my druid will be able to access their normal druid skills. class Druid : Character { // many cool druid skills and spells void LightHeal(Character target) { } } abstract class CharacterDecorator : Character { Character DecoratedCharacter; } class CheetahForm : CharacterDecorator { Character DecoratedCharacter; public CheetahForm(Character decoratedCharacter) { DecoratedCharacter= decoratedCharacter; } // many cool cheetah related skills void CheetahRun() { // let player move very fast } } now using the classes Druid myDruid = new Druid(); myDruid.LightHeal(myDruid); // casting light heal here is fine myDruid = new CheetahForm(myDruid); myDruid.LightHeal(myDruid); // casting here should not be allowed Hmmmm...now that I think about it, will myDruid be unable to us the Druid class spells/skills unless the class is down-casted? But even if that's the case, is there a better way to ensure that myDruid at this point is locked out from all Druid related spells/skills until it is cast back to a Druid (since currently it's in CheetahForm)

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• Using T4MVC in real project

  - by artvolk

  T4MVC is cool, but I have a couple of issues integrating it in my project, any help is really appriciated: I've got such warnings for all my actions (I use SnippetsBaseController as base class for all my controller classes: Warning 26 'Snippets.Controllers.ErrorController.Actions' hides inherited member 'Snippets.Controllers.Base.SnippetsBaseController.Actions'. Use the new keyword if hiding was intended. C:\projects_crisp-source_crisp\crisp-snippets\Snippets\T4MVC.cs 481 32 Snippets Is it possible to have strongly typed names of custom Routes, for example, I have route defined like this: routes.MapRoute( "Feed", "feed/", MVC.Snippets.Rss(), new { controller = "Snippets", action = "Rss" } ); Is it possible to replace: <%= Url.RouteUrl("Feed") %> with something like: <%= Url.RouteUrl(MVC.Routes.Feed) %> Having strongly typed links to static files is really cool, but I use <base /> in my pages, so I don't need any URL processing, can I redefine T4MVCHelpers.ProcessVirtualPath without tweaking the T4MVC.tt itself? T4MVC always generate links with uppercased controller and action names, for example: /Snippets/Add instead of /snippets/add. Is it possible to generate them lowercase?

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• Large flags enumerations in C#

  - by LorenVS

  Hey everyone, got a quick question that I can't seem to find anything about... I'm working on a project that requires flag enumerations with a large number of flags (up to 40-ish), and I don't really feel like typing in the exact mask for each enumeration value: public enum MyEnumeration : ulong { Flag1 = 1, Flag2 = 2, Flag3 = 4, Flag4 = 8, Flag5 = 16, // ... Flag16 = 65536, Flag17 = 65536 * 2, Flag18 = 65536 * 4, Flag19 = 65536 * 8, // ... Flag32 = 65536 * 65536, Flag33 = 65536 * 65536 * 2 // right about here I start to get really pissed off } Moreover, I'm also hoping that there is an easy(ier) way for me to control the actual arrangement of bits on different endian machines, since these values will eventually be serialized over a network: public enum MyEnumeration : uint { Flag1 = 1, // BIG: 0x00000001, LITTLE:0x01000000 Flag2 = 2, // BIG: 0x00000002, LITTLE:0x02000000 Flag3 = 4, // BIG: 0x00000004, LITTLE:0x03000000 // ... Flag9 = 256, // BIG: 0x00000010, LITTLE:0x10000000 Flag10 = 512, // BIG: 0x00000011, LITTLE:0x11000000 Flag11 = 1024 // BIG: 0x00000012, LITTLE:0x12000000 } So, I'm kind of wondering if there is some cool way I can set my enumerations up like: public enum MyEnumeration : uint { Flag1 = flag(1), // BOTH: 0x80000000 Flag2 = flag(2), // BOTH: 0x40000000 Flag3 = flag(3), // BOTH: 0x20000000 // ... Flag9 = flag(9), // BOTH: 0x00800000 } What I've Tried: // this won't work because Math.Pow returns double // and because C# requires constants for enum values public enum MyEnumeration : uint { Flag1 = Math.Pow(2, 0), Flag2 = Math.Pow(2, 1) } // this won't work because C# requires constants for enum values public enum MyEnumeration : uint { Flag1 = Masks.MyCustomerBitmaskGeneratingFunction(0) } // this is my best solution so far, but is definitely // quite clunkie public struct EnumWrapper<TEnum> where TEnum { private BitVector32 vector; public bool this[TEnum index] { // returns whether the index-th bit is set in vector } // all sorts of overriding using TEnum as args } Just wondering if anyone has any cool ideas, thanks!

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• Inconsistent behavior working with "Flex on Rails" example.

  - by kmontgom

  I'm experimenting with Flex and Rails right now (Rails is cool). I'm following the examples in the book "Flex on Rails", and I'm getting some puzzling and inconsistent behavior. Heres the Flex MXML: <mx:HTTPService id="index" url="http://localhost:3000/people.xml" resultFormat="e4x" /> <mx:DataGrid dataProvider="{index.lastResult.person}" width="100%" height="100%"> <mx:columns> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="First Name" dataField="first-name"/> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Last Name" dataField="last-name"/> </mx:columns> </mx:DataGrid> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ import mx.controls.Alert; private function main():void { Alert.show( "In main()" ); } ]]> </mx:Script> When I run the app from my IDE (Amythyst beta, also cool), the DataGrid appears, but is not populated. The Alert.show() also triggers. When I go out to a web browser and manually enter the url (http://localhost:3000/people.xml), the Mongrel console shows the request coming through and the browser shows the web response. No exceptions or other error messages occur. Whats the difference? Do I need to alter some OS setting? I'm using Win7 on an x64 machine.

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