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• James Atkinson - New Blog Home

  - by jatkinson

  I'm migrating my blog that is currently hosted over at vbCity.com (which is an outstanding developer community!) to a new home at geekswithblogs.net. I truly appreciate the comradery of Serge B, Ged Mead, and the other team members at the "City". What you can expect to find here (my interests): Most .NET programming topics General computing Language examples in C#, VB.NET, and Boo WCF WPF Mathematical / GPS solutions F# (in progress... if you can say that much) Obsessed with code performance (speed) Some photography My background: Kansas State University Grad (Agriculture Technology Management) From Richmond, VA Self taught programmer (started with C# in VS2002) NOT a professional programmer (enables free thinking?!)  I'm no Jeff Atwood or Beth Massi, but you should expect to see some interesting stuff to follow.

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• SSAS Multithreaded sync with Windows 2008 R2

  - by ACALVETT

  We have been happily running some of our systems on WIndows 2003 and have had an upgrade to W2K8 R2 on the list for quite some time. The upgrade has now completed and we can start taking advantage of some of the new features which is the reason for this post. For a long time we have used the sample Robocopy script from the SQLCat team to synchronize some of our larger SSAS databases. If your wondering what i mean by large, around 5 TB with a good few thousand partitions. The script works like a dream...(read more)

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• What should be tested in Javascript?

  - by Nathan Hoad

  At work, we've just started on a heavily Javascript based application (actually using Coffeescript, but still), of which I've been implementing an automated test system using JsTestDriver and fabric. We've never written something with this much Javascript, so up until now we've never done any Javascript testing. I'm unsure what exactly we should be testing in our unit tests. We've written JQuery plugins for various things, so it's quite obvious that they should be verified for correctness as much as possible with JsTestDriver, but everyone else in my team seems to think that we should be testing the page level Javascript as well. I don't think we should be testing page level Javascript as unit tests, but instead using a system like Selenium to verify everything works as expected. My main reasoning for this is that at the moment, page level Javascript tests are guaranteed to fail through JsTestDriver, because they're trying to access elements on the DOM that can't possibly exist. So, what should be unit tested in Javascript?

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• iOS App Ideas for a graduation project

  - by kramer

  I'm a CS student (BSc. degree) and it's my senior year so I'll need to do a mandatory graduation project. A friend and I just realized we are about to miss the project proposal submission deadline so we went out there researching... One of the professors (our future-project-supervisor) recommended us to team up and submit a single project with strong roots, as our only chance to fit-in this semester's quota. (we were already pretty late to consult him and most supervisors are almost at their full-quota). Anyway, his research area mainly focuses on image processing, virtual reality, computer vision/graphics so he went ahead and recommended us to find some project ideas that would work as an iPhone app. Thing is, we have no development experience on Macs but have plenty of Java, C#, C and Ruby experience... I am looking for interesting iPhone app ideas that would be appropriate as a graduation project. Go ahead and fire away your ideas and comments, they are much appreciated.

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• This Week In Geek History: The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Compact Discs, and Whirlwind Foreshadows Operating Systems

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Every week we look at fascinating facts and trivia from the history of Geekdom. This week we’re taking a look at The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Compact Discs, and Whirlwind, the first computer to foreshadow modern operating systems. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Disposable Sleeves for Your In-Ear Monitors Macs Don’t Make You Creative! So Why Do Artists Really Love Apple? MacX DVD Ripper Pro is Free for How-To Geek Readers (Time Limited!) HTG Explains: What’s a Solid State Drive and What Do I Need to Know? How to Get Amazing Color from Photos in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Bring the Grid to Your Desktop with the TRON Legacy Theme for Windows 7 The Dark Knight and Team Fortress 2 Mashup Movie Trailer [Video] Dirt Cheap DSLR Viewfinder Improves Outdoor DSLR LCD Visibility Lakeside Sunset in the Mountains [Wallpaper] Taskbar Meters Turn Your Taskbar into a System Resource Monitor Create Shortcuts for Your Favorite or Most Used Folders in Ubuntu

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• SQL SERVER – PAGEIOLATCH_DT, PAGEIOLATCH_EX, PAGEIOLATCH_KP, PAGEIOLATCH_SH, PAGEIOLATCH_UP – Wait Type – Day 9 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  It is very easy to say that you replace your hardware as that is not up to the mark. In reality, it is very difficult to implement. It is really hard to convince an infrastructure team to change any hardware because they are not performing at their best. I had a nightmare related to this issue in a deal with an infrastructure team as I suggested that they replace their faulty hardware. This is because they were initially not accepting the fact that it is the fault of their hardware. But it is really easy to say “Trust me, I am correct”, while it is equally important that you put some logical reasoning along with this statement. PAGEIOLATCH_XX is such a kind of those wait stats that we would directly like to blame on the underlying subsystem. Of course, most of the time, it is correct – the underlying subsystem is usually the problem. From Book On-Line: PAGEIOLATCH_DT Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is in an I/O request. The latch request is in Destroy mode. Long waits may indicate problems with the disk subsystem. PAGEIOLATCH_EX Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is in an I/O request. The latch request is in Exclusive mode. Long waits may indicate problems with the disk subsystem. PAGEIOLATCH_KP Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is in an I/O request. The latch request is in Keep mode. Long waits may indicate problems with the disk subsystem. PAGEIOLATCH_SH Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is in an I/O request. The latch request is in Shared mode. Long waits may indicate problems with the disk subsystem. PAGEIOLATCH_UP Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is in an I/O request. The latch request is in Update mode. Long waits may indicate problems with the disk subsystem. PAGEIOLATCH_XX Explanation: Simply put, this particular wait type occurs when any of the tasks is waiting for data from the disk to move to the buffer cache. ReducingPAGEIOLATCH_XX wait: Just like any other wait type, this is again a very challenging and interesting subject to resolve. Here are a few things you can experiment on: Improve your IO subsystem speed (read the first paragraph of this article, if you have not read it, I repeat that it is easy to say a step like this than to actually implement or do it). This type of wait stats can also happen due to memory pressure or any other memory issues. Putting aside the issue of a faulty IO subsystem, this wait type warrants proper analysis of the memory counters. If due to any reasons, the memory is not optimal and unable to receive the IO data. This situation can create this kind of wait type. Proper placing of files is very important. We should check file system for the proper placement of files – LDF and MDF on separate drive, TempDB on separate drive, hot spot tables on separate filegroup (and on separate disk), etc. Check the File Statistics and see if there is higher IO Read and IO Write Stall SQL SERVER – Get File Statistics Using fn_virtualfilestats. It is very possible that there are no proper indexes on the system and there are lots of table scans and heap scans. Creating proper index can reduce the IO bandwidth considerably. If SQL Server can use appropriate cover index instead of clustered index, it can significantly reduce lots of CPU, Memory and IO (considering cover index has much lesser columns than cluster table and all other it depends conditions). You can refer to the two articles’ links below previously written by me that talk about how to optimize indexes. Create Missing Indexes Drop Unused Indexes Updating statistics can help the Query Optimizer to render optimal plan, which can only be either directly or indirectly. I have seen that updating statistics with full scan (again, if your database is huge and you cannot do this – never mind!) can provide optimal information to SQL Server optimizer leading to efficient plan. Checking Memory Related Perfmon Counters SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Pending (Consistent higher value than 0-2) SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Outstanding (Consistent higher value, Benchmark) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Buffer Hit Cache Ratio (Higher is better, greater than 90% for usually smooth running system) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Page Life Expectancy (Consistent lower value than 300 seconds) Memory: Available Mbytes (Information only) Memory: Page Faults/sec (Benchmark only) Memory: Pages/sec (Benchmark only) Checking Disk Related Perfmon Counters Average Disk sec/Read (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk sec/Write (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk Read/Write Queue Length (Consistent higher value than benchmark is not good) Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All of the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• How do Programmers in the east see programmers in the west?

  - by Jon Hopkins

  The other half of this question: How do programmers in the west see the programmers in the east? I think it's just as interesting and important to see how programmers in the east view programmers in the west. The eastern part of the world (India/China/Philippines ) is often seen as mainly providing outsourcing services to the western world (USA and Europe). Do you have the experience of working as part of an offshore team? If yes, how was it? Do you hold any generalized ideas or opinions about the programmers from the West (e.g. Are they cooperative, do they deliver on time or do they do quality work?)

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• Hotmail — avoid sign up confirmation / lost password being marked as spam

  - by Xerxes Cameron

  When sending legit large volume Emails from our IP (e.g. for sign up confirmation or Lost password) it gets marked as Junk in Hotmail. In the past, there was the Sender ID SPF Record Submission Form, where you could put yourself on the radar of Microsoft. See this old discussion. However, as of April 2012 this has been abandoned. Any hints what to do now? What is a good way to contact the Hotmail team?

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• The “AfterDark” reception is back!

  - by rituchhibber

  This year, the OPN Exchange “AfterDark” Reception is moving to new heights! Join us on the 5th floor of the Metreon building in San Francisco for this exclusive ‘VIP’ event. The reception will be held from 7:30 p.m. – 10 p.m. on Sunday, September 30th. Enjoy the smooth sounds of Macy Gray over a cocktail, as you network the night away and watch the 2012 live Music Festival performances from above! Best of all, this event is exclusive and free to all Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange attendees! So come mix and mingle with us as we kick-off Oracle OpenWorld 2012 with great conversation and music! See You After Dark! The OPN Communications Team

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• PASS Precon Countdown… See some of you Monday, and others on Tuesday Night

  - by drsql

  As I finish up the plans for Monday’s database design precon, I am getting pretty excited for the day. This is the third time I have done this precon, and where the base slides are very similar, I have a few new twists in mind. One of my big ideas for my Database Design Workshop precon has always been to give people to do some design. So I am even now trying to go through and whittle down the slides and make sure that we have the time for design. If you are attending, be prepared to be a team player....(read more)

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• Creating Rich Interactions Using Blend 4: Transition Effects, Fluid Layout and Layout States (Silver

  In this episode, Kenny Young of the Expression Blend team demonstrates how to make some compelling interactions using Expression Blend 4 for Silverlight 4. He demonstrates some great examples using the FluidMoveBehavior, FluidLayout, LayoutStates, Transition Effects, and sample data. Kenny then dives in and creates several of these interactions from scratch, showing exactly how easy it is to use Blend 4 to create rich Silverlight experiences. Relevant links: John's Blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• My MSDN magazine articles are live

  - by Daniel Moth

  Five years ago I wrote my first MSDN magazine article, and 21 months later I wrote my second MSDN Magazine article (during the VS 2010 Beta). By my calculation, that makes it two and a half years without having written anything for my favorite developer magazine! So, I came back with a vengeance, and in this month's April issue of the MSDN magazine you can find two articles from yours truly - enjoy: A Code-Based Introduction to C++ AMP Introduction to Tiling in C++ AMP For more on C++ AMP, please remember that I blog about it on our team blog, and we take questions in our MSDN forum. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• How do you successfully hire out a few programmers to make it cost effective?

  - by Chris

  Many of us know this situation well: we're a one-man (woman) development team, we need some extra help to keep up with all the tasks, the budget is small and we decide to get some help. But hiring someone is difficult. Either the person is inexperienced and I end up becoming their full-time teacher in the hopes they will produce work they way I want, or the person is skilled but for whatever reason doesn't hand over code within budget that I can just plug in and use without reworking it myself. Any thoughts/ideas?

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• SQL SERVER – List of Article on Expressor Data Integration Platform

  - by pinaldave

  The ability to transform data into meaningful and actionable information is the most important information in current business world. In this fast growing and changing business needs effective data integration is single most important thing in making proper decision making. I have been following expressor software since November 2010, when I met expressor team in Seattle. Here are my posts on their innovative data integration platform and expressor Studio, a free desktop ETL tool: 4 Tips for ETL Software IDE Developers Introduction to Adaptive ETL Tool – How adaptive is your ETL? Sharing your ETL Resources Across Applications with Ease expressor Studio Includes Powerful Scripting Capabilities expressor 3.2 Release Review 5 Tips for Improving Your Data with expressor Studio As I had mentioned in some of my blog posts on them, I encourage you to download and test-drive their Studio product – it’s free. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SSIS

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• Workaround for datadude deployment bug - NullReferenceException

  - by jamiet

  I have come across a bug in Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects (aka datadude aka DPro aka Visual Studio Database Development Tools aka Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals aka Juneau aka SQL Server Data Tools) that other people may encounter so, for the purposes of googling, I'm writing this blog post about it. Through my own googling I discovered that a Connect bug had already been raised about it (VS2010 Database project deploy - “SqlDeployTask” task failed unexpectedly, NullReferenceException), and coincidentally enough it was raised by my former colleague Tom Hunter (whom I have mentioned here before as the superhuman Tom Hunter) although it has not (at this time) received a reply from Microsoft. Tom provided a repro, namely that this syntactically valid function definition: CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Function1]()RETURNS TABLEASRETURN (    WITH cte AS (    SELECT 1 AS [c1]    FROM [$(Database3)].[dbo].[Table1]   )   SELECT 1 AS [c1]   FROM cte) would produce this nasty unhelpful error upon deployment: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.TSqlTasks.targets(120,5): Error MSB4018: The "SqlDeployTask" task failed unexpectedly.System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Sql.SchemaModel.SqlModelComparerBase.VariableSubstitution(SqlScriptProperty propertyValue, IDictionary`2 variables, Boolean& isChanged)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Sql.SchemaModel.SqlModelComparerBase.ArePropertiesEqual(IModelElement source, IModelElement target, ModelPropertyClass propertyClass, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareProperties(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithoutCompareName(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithSameType(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean ignoreComparingName, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, Boolean compareFromRootElement, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition& changes)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareChildren(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareParentElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes, Boolean isComposing)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithoutCompareName(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithSameType(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean ignoreComparingName, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, Boolean compareFromRootElement, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition& changes)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareChildren(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareParentElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes, Boolean isComposing)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithoutCompareName(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithSameType(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean ignoreComparingName, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, Boolean compareFromRootElement, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition& changes)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareAllElementsForOneType(ModelElementClass type, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean compareOrphanedElements)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareStore(ModelStore source, ModelStore target, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.CompareModels()   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.PrepareBuildPlan()   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.Execute(Boolean executeDeployment)   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.Execute()   at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Tasks.DBDeployTask.Execute()   at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskExecutionHost.Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.ITaskExecutionHost.Execute()   at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskBuilder.ExecuteInstantiatedTask(ITaskExecutionHost taskExecutionHost, TaskLoggingContext taskLoggingContext, TaskHost taskHost, ItemBucket bucket, TaskExecutionMode howToExecuteTask, Boolean& taskResult)   Done executing task "SqlDeployTask" -- FAILED.  Done building target "DspDeploy" in project "Lloyds.UKTax.DB.UKtax.dbproj" -- FAILED. Done executing task "CallTarget" -- FAILED.Done building target "DBDeploy" in project It turns out there are a certain set of circumstances that need to be met for this error to occur: The object being deployed is an inline function  (may also exist for multistatement and scalar functions - I haven't tested that) That object includes SQLCMD variable references The object has already been deployed successfully Just to reiterate that last bullet point, the error does not occur when you deploy the function for the first time, only on the subsequent deployment.   Luckily I have a direct line into a guy on the development team so I fired off an email on Friday evening and today (Monday) I received a reply back telling me that there is a simple fix, one simply has to remove the parentheses that wrap the SQL statement. So, in the case of Tom's repro, the function definition simpy has to be changed to: CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Function1]()RETURNS TABLEASRETURN --(    WITH cte AS (    SELECT 1 AS [c1]    FROM [$(Database3)].[dbo].[Table1]   )   SELECT 1 AS [c1]   FROM cte--) I have commented out the offending parentheses rather than removing them just to emphasize the point. Thereafter the function will deploy fine. I tested this out on my own project this morning and can confirm that this fix does indeed work.   I have been told that the bug CAN be reproduced in the Release Candidate (RC) 0 build of SQL Server Data Tools in SQL Server 2010 so am hoping that a fix makes it in for the Release-To-Manufacturing (RTM) build. Hope this helps @jamiet

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• How do Programmers in the East see programmers in the West?

  - by Jon Hopkins

  The other half of this question: How do programmers in the west see the programmers in the east? I think it's just as interesting and important to see how programmers in the east view programmers in the west. The eastern part of the world (India/China/Philippines ) is often seen as mainly providing outsourcing services to the western world (USA and Europe). Do you have the experience of working as part of an offshore team? If yes, how was it? Do you hold any generalized ideas or opinions about the programmers from the West (e.g. Are they cooperative, do they deliver on time or do they do quality work?)

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• Visual Studio 2010 released!

  Visual Studio 2010 releases to the word today. Get the full story from Soma's blog post (inc. links for buy, try etc). Our team is very proud of what we have contributed to this release and you can learn more about it through our content on the Parallel Computing MSDN home. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog. ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Preview of MSDN Library Changes

  The MSDN team has been working some potential changes to the online MSDN Library designed to help streamline the navigation experience and make it easier to find the .NET Framework information you need. To solicit feedback on the proposed changes while they are still in development, theyve posted a preview version of some proposed changes to a new MSDN Library Preview site which you can check out.  Theyve also created a survey that leads you through the ideas and asks for your opinions...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Die “AfterDark Reception” ist wieder da!

  - by A&C Redaktion

  In diesem Jahr erreicht die OPN Exchange “AfterDark” Reception neue Höhen! Denn diesmal findet der exklusive VIP-Event im 5. Stock des Metreon Building in San Francisco statt. Und zwar am Sonntag, 30. September, von 19.30 bis 22 Uhr. Genießen Sie in tollem Ambiente und bei einem Cocktail den sanften Sound von Macy Gray, während Sie den Tag beim Networking ausklingen lassen - mit Blick auf das 2012 live Music Festival. Und das Beste ist: Als Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange Teilnehmer können Sie exklusiv und kostenlos dabei sein! Begleiten Sie uns, wenn wir die Oracle OpenWorld 2012 mit guten Gesprächen und toller Musik beginnen. Wir sehen uns - nach Sonnenuntergang! Ihr OPN Communications Team

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• Guest Post: Christian Finn: Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success?

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Print 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Since we have a number of new members of the WebCenter Evangelist team - I thought it would be appropriate to close the week with the newest hire and leader of the global WebCenter Evangelists, Christian Finn, who has just joined the Red team after many years with the small technology company up in Redmond, WA. He gave an intro to himself in an earlier post this morning but his post below is a great example of how customer engagement takes on a life of its own in our global online connected and social digital ecosystem. Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success? What if I told you that your brand could advertise so successfully, you wouldn’t have to pay for the ads? A recent campaign by Ford Motor Company for the Ford Focus featuring Doug the spokespuppet (I am not making this up) did just that—and it raises some interesting issues for marketers and social media alike in the brave new world of customer engagement that is the Social Web. Allow me to elaborate. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week—“Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay” tells the story of Ford’s recently concluded online campaign for the 2012 Ford Focus. (Ford, by the way, under the leadership of people such as Scott Monty, has been a pioneer of effective social campaigns.) The centerpiece of the campaign was the aforementioned Doug, who appeared as a character on Facebook in videos and via chat. (If you are not familiar with Doug, you can see him in action here, and read the WSJ story here.) You may be thinking puppet ads are a sign of Internet Bubble 2.0 and want to stop now, but bear with me. The Journal reported that Ford spent about $95M on its overall Ford Focus campaign, with TV accounting for over $60M of that spend. The Internet buy for the campaign was just over $10M, which included ad buys to drive traffic to Facebook for people to meet and ‘Like’ Doug and some amount on Facebook ads, too, to promote Doug and by extension, the Ford Focus. So far, a fairly straightforward consumer marketing story in the Internet Era. Yet here’s the curious thing: once Doug reached 10,000 fans on Facebook, Ford stopped paying for Facebook ads. Doug had gone viral with people sharing his videos with one another; once critical mass was reached there was no need to buy more ads on Facebook. Doug went on to be Liked by over 43,000 people, and 61% of his fans said they would be more likely to consider buying a Focus. According to the article, Ford says Focus sales are up this year—and increasing sales is every marketer’s goal. And so in effect, Ford found its Facebook campaign so successful that it could stop paying for it, instead letting its target consumers communicate its messages for fun—and for free. Not only did they get a 3X increase in fans beyond their paid campaign, they had thousands of customers sharing their messages in video form for months. Since free advertising is the Holy Grail of marketing both old and new-- and it appears social networks have an advantage in generating that buzz—it seems reasonable to ask: what would happen to brands’ advertising strategies—and the media they use to engage customers, if this success were repeated at scale? It seems logical to conclude that, at least initially, more ad dollars would be spent with social networks like Facebook as brands attempt to replicate Ford’s success. Certainly Facebook ad revenues are on the rise—eMarketer expects Facebook’s ad revenues to quintuple by 2012 compared with 2009 levels, to nearly 2.9B. That’s bad news for TV and the already battered print media and good news for Facebook. But perhaps not so over the longer run. With TV buys, you have to keep paying to generate impressions. If Doug the spokespuppet is any guide, however, that may not be true for social media campaigns. After an initial outlay, if a social campaign takes off, the audience will generate more impressions on its own. Thus a social medium like Facebook could be the victim of its own success when it comes to ad revenue. It may be there is an inherent limiting factor in the ad spend they can capture, as exemplified by Ford’s experience with Dough and the Focus. And brands may spend much less overall on advertising, with as good or better results, than they ever have in the past. How will these trends evolve? Can brands create social campaigns that repeat Ford’s formula for the Focus with effective results? Can social networks find ways to capture more spend and overcome their potential tendency to make further spend unnecessary? And will consumers become tired and insulated from social campaigns, much as they have to traditional advertising channels? These are the questions CMOs and Facebook execs alike will be asking themselves in the brave new world of customer engagement. As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

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• Project Dashboards

  - by EightyEight

  I'm attempting to create a dashboard so that people not intimately involved with the project can get an indication of project's health. I'm struggling with determining what to put on said dashboard. I think it needs to be brief to be useful, yet complete. The project I'm working on depends on both 3rd party contractors, external hardware and of course my team's effort. Are there any suggestions or guidelines on how to encapsulate it all in a relatively easy manner? Mods, I believe this question falls squarely between development methodologies and business concerns as outlined in the faq. Thank you!

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• TFS 2010 and the missing Area & Iterations (stale data) Issue

  - by andresv

  The symptom is this: you change some area or iteration in a TFS Project, but the change is not reflected (or updated) in VS or any other TFS Client. Well, it happens that TFS now has some clever caching mechanisms that need to be updated when you make a change like this, and those changes are propagated by some scheduled jobs TFS is continuously running in the Application Tier.  So, you you get this behavior, please check (and possibly restart) the "Visual Studio Team Foundation Background Job Agent" service. In my case, this service was logging a very odd "Object Reference Not Set" into the Windows Event Log, and a simple restart fixed it. Hope this is fixed by RTM...   (we are using the RC version). And by the way, if the job agent is broken there are some other things that stops working like email notifications. Best regards, Andrés G Vettori, CTO, VMBC  

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• Are there any famous one-man-army programmers?

  - by DFectuoso

  Lately I have been learning of more and more programmers who think that if they were working alone, they would be faster and would deliver more quality. Usually that feeling is attached to a feeling that they do the best programming in their team and at the end of the day the idea is quite plausible. If they ARE doing the best programming, and worked alone (and more maybe) the final result would be a better piece of software. I know this idea would only work if you were passionate enough to work 24/7, on a deadline, with great discipline. So after considering the idea and trying to learn a little more, I wonder if there are famous one-man-army programmers that have delivered any (useful) software in the past?

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• What Functional features are worth a little OOP confusion for the benefits they bring?

  - by bonomo

  After learning functional programming in Haskell and F#, the OOP paradigm seems ass-backwards with classes, interfaces, objects. Which aspects of FP can I bring to work that my co-workers can understand? Are any FP styles worth talking to my boss about retraining my team so that we can use them? Possible aspects of FP: Immutability Partial Application and Currying First Class Functions (function pointers / Functional Objects / Strategy Pattern) Lazy Evaluation (and Monads) Pure Functions (no side effects) Expressions (vs. Statements - each line of code produces a value instead of, or in addition to causing side effects) Recursion Pattern Matching Is it a free-for-all where we can do whatever the programming language supports to the limit that language supports it? Or is there a better guideline?

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• Chris Brook-Carter at the Oracle Retail Week Awards VIP Reception

  - by user801960

  The Oracle VIP Reception at the Oracle Retail Week Awards last week saw retail luminaries from around the UK and Europe gather to have a drink and celebrate the successes of retail in the last year. Guests included Lord Harris of Peckham, Tesco's Philip Clarke, Vanessa Gold from Ann Summers, former Retail Week editor Tim Danaher, Richard Pennycook from Morrisons and Ian Cheshire from Kingfisher Group. The new Retail Week editor-in-chief, Chris Brook-Carter, attended and took the time to speak to the guests about the value of the Oracle Retail Week Awards to the industry and to thank Oracle for its dedication to supporting the industry. Chris said: "I'd like to say a real heartfelt thanks to our partner this evening: Oracle. I had the privilege of being at the judging day and I got to meet Sarah and the team and I was struck by not only the passion that they have for the whole awards system and everything that means in terms of rewarding excellence within the retail industry but also their commitment to retail in general, and it's that sort of relationship that marks out retail as such a fantastic sector to be involved in." Chris's speech can be watched in full below:

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