Search Results

Search found 7669 results on 307 pages for 'dealing with clients'.

Page 138/307 | < Previous Page | 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145  | Next Page >

• Scoring/analysis of Subjective testing for skills assessment

  - by ChrisBint

  I am lucky in the sense that I have been given the opportunity to be a 'Technical Troubleshooter' for our offshore development team. While I am confident and capable of dealing with most issues, I have come across something that I am not. Based on initial discussions with various team members both on and offshore, a requirement for a 'repeatable, consistent' skills assessment has been identified. In my opinion, the best way to achieve this would be a combination of objective and subjective tests. The former normally being an initial online skills assessment on various subjects, for example General C#, WCF and MVC. The latter being a technical test where the candidate would need to solve various problems and (hopefully) explain the thought processes involved with the solution whilst doing so. Obviously, the first method is consistent, repeatable and extremely accurate. The second is always going to be subjective and based on the approach, the solution (or possibly not) and other factors. The 'scoring' of this is also going to be down to the experience and skills of the assessor and this is where my problem lies; The person that is expected to be the assessor initially (me) has no experience. The people that will ultimately continue this process for other people will never remain the same due to project constraints and internal reasons, this changes the baseline for comparison. I am not aware of any suitable system that can be classed as consistent and repeatable for subjective tests with the 2 factors above, let alone if those did not exist. So anyway, I have to present a plan that will ultimately generate a skills/gap analysis and it is unlikely that I will be able to use an objective method (budget constraints most likely reason). The only option left is the subjective methods and the issues above. Does anyone have any suggestions for an approach that may tick all the boxes?

  Read the article

• Issuing Current Time Increments in StreamInsight (A Practical Example)

  The issuing of a Current Time Increment, Cti, in StreamInsight is very definitely one of the most important concepts to learn if you want your Streams to be responsive. A full discussion of how to issue Ctis is beyond the scope of this article but a very good explanation in addition to Books Online can be found in these three articles by a member of the StreamInsight team at Microsoft, Ciprian Gerea. Time in StreamInsight Series http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/07/23/time-in-streaminsight-i.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/07/30/time-in-streaminsight-ii.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/08/03/time-in-streaminsight-iii.aspx A lot of the problems I see with unresponsive or stuck streams on the MSDN Forums are to do with how Ctis are enqueued or in a lot of cases not enqueued. If you enqueue events and never enqueue a Cti then StreamInsight will be perfectly happy. You, on the other hand, will never see data on the output as you have not told StreamInsight to flush the stream. This article deals with a specific implementation problem I had recently whilst working on a StreamInsight project. I look at some possible options and discuss why they would not work before showing the way I solved the problem. The stream of data I was dealing with on this project was very bursty that is to say when events were flowing they came through very quickly and in large numbers (1000 events/sec), but when the stream calmed down it could be a few seconds between each event. When enqueuing events into the StreamInsight engne it is best practice to do so with a StartTime that is given to you by the system producing the event . StreamInsight processes events and it doesn't matter whether those events are being pushed into the engine by a source system or the events are being read from something like a flat file in a directory somewhere. You can apply the same logic and temporal algebra to both situations. Reading from a file is an excellent example of where the time of the event on the source itself is very important. We could be reading that file a long time after it was written. Being able to read the StartTime from the events allows us to define windows that will hold the correct sets of events. I was able to do this with my stream but this is where my problems started. Below is a very simple script to create a SQL Server table and populate it with sample data that will show exactly the problem I had. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[t] ( [c1] [int] PRIMARY KEY, [c2] [datetime] NULL ) INSERT t VALUES (1,'20100810'),(2,'20100810'),(3,'20100810') Column c2 defines the StartTime of the event on the source and as you can see the values in all 3 rows of data is the same. If we read Ciprian’s articles we know that we can define how Ctis get injected into the stream in 3 different places The Stream Definition The Input Factory The Input Adapter I personally have always been a fan of enqueing Ctis through the factory. Below is code typical of what I would use to do this On the class itself I do some inheriting public class SimpleInputFactory : ITypedInputAdapterFactory<SimpleInputConfig>, ITypedDeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<SimpleInputConfig> And then I implement the following function public AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings DeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<TPayload>(SimpleInputConfig configInfo, EventShape eventShape) { return new AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings( new AdvanceTimeGenerationSettings(configInfo.CtiFrequency, TimeSpan.FromTicks(-1)), AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust); } The configInfo .CtiFrequency property is a value I pass through to define after how many events I want a Cti to be injected and this in turn will flush through the stream of data. I usually pass a value of 1 for this setting. The second parameter determines the CTI timestamp in terms of a delay relative to the events. -1 ticks in the past results in 1 tick in the future, i.e., ahead of the event. The problem with this method though is that if consecutive events have the same StartTime then only one of those events will be enqueued. In this example I use the following to define how I assign the StartTime of my events currEvent.StartTime = (DateTimeOffset)dt.c2; If I go ahead and run my StreamInsight process with this configuration i can see on the output adapter that two events have been removed To see this in a little more depth I can use the StreamInsight Debugger and see what happens internally. What is happening here is that the first event arrives and a Cti is injected with a time of 1 tick after the StartTime of that event (Also the EndTime of the event). The second event arrives and it has a StartTime of before the Cti and even though we specified AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust on the factory we know that a point event can never be adjusted like this and the event is dropped. The same happens for the third event as well (The second and third events get trumped by the Cti). For a more detailed discussion of why this happens look here http://www.sqlis.com/sqlis/post/AdvanceTimePolicy-and-Point-Event-Streams-In-StreamInsight.aspx We end up with a single event being pushed into the output adapter and our result now makes sense. The next way I tried to solve this problem by changing the value of the second parameter to TimeSpan.Zero Here is how my factory code now looks public AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings DeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<TPayload>(SimpleInputConfig configInfo, EventShape eventShape) { return new AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings( new AdvanceTimeGenerationSettings(configInfo.CtiFrequency, TimeSpan.Zero), AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust); } What I am doing here is declaring a policy that says inject a Cti together with every event and stamp it with a StartTime that is equal to the start time of the event itself (TimeSpan.Zero). This method has plus points as well as a downside. The upside is that no events will be lost by having the same StartTime as previous events. The Downside is that because the Cti is declared with the StartTime of the event itself then it does not actually flush that particular event because in the StreamInsight algebra, a Cti commits only those events that occurred strictly before them. To flush the events we need a Cti to be enqueued with a greater StartTime than the events themselves. Here is what happened when I ran this configuration As you can see all we got through was the Cti and none of the events. The debugger output shows the stamps on the Cti and the events themselves. Because the Cti issued has the same timestamp (StartTime) as the events then none of the events get flushed. I was nearly there but not quite. Because my stream was bursty it was possible that the next event would not come along for a few seconds and this was far too long for an event to be enqueued and not be flushed to the output adapter. I needed another solution. Two possible solutions crossed my mind although only one of them made sense when I explored it some more. Where multiple events have the same StartTime I could add 1 tick to the first event, two to the second, three to third etc thereby giving them unique StartTime values. Add a timer to manually inject Ctis The problem with the first implementation is that I would be giving the events a new StartTime. This would cause me the following problems If I want to define windows over the stream then some events may not be captured in the right windows and therefore any calculations on those windows I did would be wrong What would happen if we had 10,000 events with the same StartTime? I would enqueue them with StartTime + n ticks. Along comes a genuine event with a StartTime of the very first event + 1 tick. It is now too far in the past as far as my stream is concerned and it would be dropped. Not what I would want to do at all. I decided then to look at the Timer based solution I created a timer on my input adapter that elapsed every 200ms. private Timer tmr; public SimpleInputAdapter(SimpleInputConfig configInfo) { ctx = new SimpleTimeExtractDataContext(configInfo.ConnectionString); this.configInfo = configInfo; tmr = new Timer(200); tmr.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(t_Elapsed); tmr.Enabled = true; } void t_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e) { ts = DateTime.Now - dtCtiIssued; if (ts.TotalMilliseconds >= 200 && TimerIssuedCti == false) { EnqueueCtiEvent(System.DateTime.Now.AddTicks(-100)); TimerIssuedCti = true; } }   In the t_Elapsed event handler I find out the difference in time between now and when the last event was processed (dtCtiIssued). I then check to see if that is greater than or equal to 200ms and if the last issuing of a Cti was done by the timer or by a genuine event (TimerIssuedCti). If I didn’t do this check then I would enqueue a Cti every time the timer elapsed which is not something I wanted. If the difference between the two times is greater than or equal to 500ms and the last event enqueued was by a real event then I issue a Cti through the timer to flush the event Queue, otherwise I do nothing. When I enqueue the Ctis into my stream in my ProduceEvents method I also set the values of dtCtiIssued and TimerIssuedCti   currEvent = CreateInsertEvent(); currEvent.StartTime = (DateTimeOffset)dt.c2; TimerIssuedCti = false; dtCtiIssued = currEvent.StartTime; If I go ahead and run this configuration I see the following in my output. As we can see the first Cti gets enqueued as before but then another is enqueued by the timer and because this has a later timestamp it flushes the enqueued events through the engine. Conclusion Hopefully this has shown how the enqueuing of Ctis can have a dramatic effect on the responsiveness of your output in StreamInsight. Understanding the temporal nature of the product is for me one of the most important things you can learn. I have attached my solution for the demos. It is all in one project and testing each variation is a simple matter of commenting and un-commenting the parts in the code we have been dealing with here.

  Read the article

• Navigating the Unpredictable Swinging of the Financial Regulation Pendulum

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Written by Guest Blogger: Maureen Clifford, Sr Product Marketing Manager, Oracle The pendulum of the regulatory clock is constantly in motion, albeit often not in any particular rhythm.  Nevertheless, given what many insurers have been through economically, any movement can send shock waves through critical innovation and operational plans.  As pointed out in Deloitte’s 2012 Global Insurance Outlook, the impact of regulatory reform can cause major uncertainty in the area of costs.  As the reality of increasing government regulations settles in, the change that comes along with it creates more challenges in compliance and ultimately on delivering the optimum return on investment.  The result of this changing environment is a proliferation of compliance projects that must be executed with an already constrained set of resources, budget and time. Insurers are confronted by the need to gain visibility into all of their compliance efforts and proactively manage them. Currently that is very difficult to do as these projects often are being managed by groups across the enterprise and they lack a way to coordinate their efforts and drive greater synergies.  With limited visibility and equally limited resources it is no surprise that reporting on project status and determining realistic completion of these projects is only a dream. As a result, compliance deadlines are missed, penalties are incurred, credibility with key stakeholders and the public is jeopardized and returns and competitive advantage go unrealized. Insurers need to ask themselves some key questions: Do I have “one stop” visibility into all of my compliance efforts?  If not, what can I do to change that? What is top priority and how does that impact my already taxed resources? How can I figure out how to best balance my resources to get these compliance projects done as well as keep key innovation and operational efforts on track? How can ensure that I have all the requisite documentation for each compliance project I undertake? Dealing with complying with regulatory efforts is a necessary evil. Don't let the regulatory pendulum sideline your efforts to generate the greatest return on investment for your key stakeholders.

  Read the article

• In what URL segment do you have language? /en/admin/dashboard or /admin/en/dashboard?

  - by Shimmi

  maybe you are thinking that this is another dump question about language in URL, but I hope it is not! I've red many articles on this, but non of them was dealing with "sections of site" (described bellow). I am programming a new application platform in laravel/php and I am still not 100% convinced where to put language slug. There are many places where you can put it - some of them are better some are worse: example.com/en/article en.example.com/article example.com/article?lang=en My personal choice is to put language after the domain - so the first option in above list. But what if you are in some special secion like admin or api? where do you put language then? example.com/en/admin/dashboard example.com/en/api/v1/user/login or example.com/admin/en/dashboard example.com/api/v1/en/user/login (in frontend it is left the same: example.com/en/some-article) what do you preffer? what are cons and pros? One thing is using language in first segments is far more easier to programm than when it have some variants... P.S. whould you recoment using only en, cs or do it in full power with cz-CZ, en-US ? thanks for any thoughts! J.

  Read the article

• Parsing scripts that use curly braces

  - by Keikoku

  To get an idea of what I'm doing, I am writing a python parser that will parse directx .x text files. The problem I have deals with how the files are formatted. Although I'm writing it in python, I'm looking for general algorithms for dealing with this sort of parsing. .x files define data using templates. The format of a template is template_name { [some_data] } The goal I have is to parse the file line-by-line and whenever I come across a template, I will deal with it accordingly. My initial approach was to check if a line contains an opening or closing brace. If it's an open brace, then I will check what the template name is. Now the catch here is that the open brace doesn't have to occur on the same line as the template name. It could just as well be template_name { [some_data] } So if I were to use my "open brace exists" criteria, it won't work for any files that use the latter format. A lot of languages also use curly braces (though I'm not sure when people would be parsing the scripts themselves), so I was wondering if anyone knows how to accurately get the template name (or in some other languages, it could just as well be a function name, though there aren't any keywords to look for)

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for November 21, 2011 -- #1171

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Colin Eberhardt, Sumit Dutta, Morten Nielsen, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Brian Noyes, and Tony Champion. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "PV Basics : Client-side Collections" Tony Champion WP7: "Pushpin Clustering with the Windows Phone 7 Bing Map control" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com: Pushpin Clustering with the Windows Phone 7 Bing Map control Colin Eberhardt is back discussing Pushpins for a BingMaps app on WP7 and provides a utility class that clusters pushpins, allowing you to render 1000s of pins on an app ... all the explanation and all the code Part 22 - Windows Phone 7 - Tile Push Notification Part 22 in Sumit Dutta's WP7 series is about Tile Push Notification... nice tutorial with all the code listed Correctly displaying your current location Morten Nielsen demonstrates formatting the information from the GPS on your WP7 into something intelligible and useful Spiking the Pomodoro Timer Jesse Liberty put up a quick and dirty version of a Pomodoro timer for WP7.1 to explore the technical challenges of the Full Stack Phase 2 he's cranking up 31 Days of Mango | Day #11: Network Jeff Blankenburg's Number 10 in his 31 Days quest of WP7.1 is about the NetworkInformation namespace which gives you all sorts of info on the user's device network connection availability, type, etc. 31 Days of Mango | Day #11: Live Tiles Jeff Blankenburg takes off on Live Tiles for Day 11... big topic for a 1 day post, but he takes off on it... updating and Live Tiles too Working with Prism 4 Part 2: MVVM Basics and Commands Brian Noyes has part 2 of his Prism/MVVM series up at SilverlightShow... very nice tutorial on the basics of getting a view and viewmodel up, and setting up an ICommand to launch an Edit View... plus the code to peruse. PV Basics : Client-side Collections Tony Champion is startig a series on Silverlight 5 and Pivot Viewer... First up is some basics in dealing with the control in SL5 and talking about Client-side Collections... great informative tutorial and all the code Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Product application - is it a product or product variation

  - by jamesnov

  I'm dealing with a lot of vehicle specific products, and I've been trying to determine whether to convert the variants/fit option into individual products. I currently put the vehicle specific items under a product: Product: Widget Hood Deflectors Option1: 07-11 Silverado/Sierra, SKU1 Option2: 09-11 Ram, SKU2 etc. Take a hood/bug deflector for example. They all share the same description, and specifications for the most part. They look very similar, but the shape/appearance could vary significantly depending on the vehicle it is going on. Another example could be a suspension lift kit. Each one is engineered for a specific vehicle application. What would be the product "Widget Super Duper 4 inch lift kit", or "Widget Jeep 07-11 Super Duper 4 inch lift kit"? If I converted the variants to a product, then I have a lot more products (some so called products or product lines have hundreds of applications), when no vehicle is selected, but if I require a vehicle to be selected, then the product results would be basically the same, and specific for that vehicle. The description would also be longer: Product: Widget Silverado/Sierra 07-11 Hood Deflector With the fit as a variants/option, then I have fewer products, but I could have a huge list of options. Product: Widget Hood Deflectors Options: Fit/Vehicle Am I doing things right by having product applications as variants, or am I treating a product line as a product?

  Read the article

• Nice take on Open Source

  - by EmbeddedInsider

  I just revisited the “Micro Framework”- Microsoft’s bootable runtime, essentially an OS that allows managed code to run on small 32bit CPUs, even without Memory Management.  Things are happening http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb267253.aspx Abstract The Microsoft .NET Micro Framework is a bootable runtime module that brings the advantages of .NET programming to devices too resource-constrained to run other Microsoft embedded platforms. The benefits of developing with the .NET Micro Framework include the C# programming language, a managed execution environment, a substantial subset of the .NET libraries, and Visual Studio™ deployment and debugging. In this white paper we explain why the .NET Micro Framework is an ideal choice for embedded development and provide technical details of the platform’s Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and Common Language Runtime (CLR). “Micro Framework” is an interesting product, it is very low cost, like zero. And it is largely community controlled under the Apache License.  A partner network is building, and the application environment is .NET. I have been following this for some time, and the community open source approach seems to be working.  There are new features/packages emerging, for example an F# programming language (ARGH! I am still wresting with VB and C#). Anyway, what I found most interesting was a port to Tron.  Tron is a very popular Japanese open source intuitive.  It is a very real time, very compact kernel, and is, like the Micro Framework, ‘free as beer’.  One limit on MF was it was not real time.  But the merger with Tron may eliminate that problem.  Certainly, if I were dealing with a consumer product with quantities in the millions (like a SmartGrid device, or a toy) I would seriously consider something out of this technology pool.

  Read the article

• Ask the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and Malware

  - by Mysticgeek

  We’ve shared some of our best tips for dealing with malware over the years, and now it’s your turn! Share your favorite tips for protecting against, or getting rid of viruses and other types of malicious software. Unfortunately, if you’re a PC user it’s a given that you have to play defense against various forms of Malware. We’ve written several articles showing how to get rid of viruses and other forms of malware over the years using various strategies. We have some excellent articles explaining how to get rid of Advanced Virus Remover, Antivirus Live, Internet Security 2010, and Security Tool – all of which disguise themselves as legit antivirus apps. Now we turn it over to you to share your favorite tips and tricks for defending against malicious infections. If your computer has been infected, what steps did you take to get rid of it and clean up your machine? Leave a comment below and join in the discussion! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Remove Security Tool and other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareNorton Antivirus 2010 [Review]How To Remove Internet Security 2010 and other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareHow To Remove Antivirus Live and Other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareHow-To Geek Comment Policy TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

  Read the article

• Announcing Sesame Data Browser

  - by Fabrice Marguerie

  At the occasion of MIX10, which is currently taking place in Las Vegas, I'd like to announce Sesame Data Browser.Sesame will be a suite of tools for dealing with data, and Sesame Data Browser will be the first tool from that suite.Today, during the second MIX10 keynote, Microsoft demonstrated how they are pushing hard to get OData adopted. If you don't know about OData, you can visit the just revamped dedicated website: http://odata.org. There you'll find about the OData protocol, which allows you to publish and consume data on the web, the OData SDK (with client libraries for .NET, Java, Javascript, PHP, iPhone, and more), a list of OData producers, and a list of OData consumers.This is where Sesame Data Browser comes into play. It's one of the tools you can use today to consume OData.I'll let you have a look, but be aware that this is just a preview and many additional features are coming soon.Sesame Data Browser is part of a bigger picture than just OData that will take shape over the coming months. Sesame is a project I've been working on for many months now, so what you see now is just a start :-)I hope you'll enjoy what you see. Let me know what you think.

  Read the article

• Elevating Customer Experience through Enterprise Social Networking

  - by john.brunswick

  I am not sure about most people, but I really dislike automated call center routing systems. They are impersonal and convey a sense that the company I am dealing with does not see the value of providing customer service that increases positive perception of their brand. By the time I am connected with a live support representative I am actually more frustrated than before I originally dialed. Each time a company interacts with its customers or prospects there is an opportunity to enhance that relationship. Technical enablers like call center routing systems can be a double edged sword - providing process efficiencies, but removing the human context of some interactions that can build a lot of long term value and create substantial repeat business. Certain web systems, available through "chat with a representative" now links on some web sites, provide a quick and easy way to get in touch with someone and cut down on help desk calls, but miss the opportunity to deliver an even more personal experience to customers and prospects. As more and more users head to the web for self-service and product information, the quality of this interaction becomes critical to supporting a company's brand image and viability. It takes very little effort to go a step further and elevate customer experience, without adding significant cost through social enterprise software technologies. Enterprise Social Networking Social networking technologies have slowly gained footholds in the enterprise, evolving from something that people may have been simply curious about, to tools that have started to provide tangible value in the enterprise. Much like instant messaging, once considered a toy in the enterprise, expertise search, blogs as communications tools, wikis for tacit knowledge sharing are all seeing adoption in a way that is directly applicable to the business and quickly adding value. So where does social networking come in when trying to enhance customer experience?

  Read the article

• Ray Wang: Why engagement matters in an era of customer experience

  - by Michael Snow

  Why engagement matters in an era of customer experience R "Ray" Wang Principal Analyst & CEO, Constellation Research Mobile enterprise, social business, cloud computing, advanced analytics, and unified communications are converging. Armed with the art of the possible, innovators are seeking to apply disruptive consumer technologies to enterprise class uses — call it the consumerization of IT in the enterprise. The likely results include new methods of furthering relationships, crafting longer term engagement, and creating transformational business models. It's part of a shift from transactional systems to engagement systems. These transactional systems have been around since the 1950s. You know them as ERP, finance and accounting systems, or even payroll. These systems are designed for massive computational scale; users find them rigid and techie. Meanwhile, we've moved to new engagement systems such as Facebook and Twitter in the consumer world. The rich usability and intuitive design reflect how users want to work — and now users are coming to expect the same paradigms and designs in their enterprise world. ~~~ Ray is a prolific contributor to his own blog as well as others. For a sneak peak at Ray's thoughts on engagement, take a look at this quick teaser on Avoiding Social Media Fatigue Through Engagement Or perhaps you might agree with Ray on Dealing With The Real Problem In Social Business Adoption – The People! Check out Ray's post on the Harvard Business Review Blog to get his perspective on "How to Engage Your Customers and Employees." For a daily dose of Ray - follow him on Twitter: @rwang0 But MOST IMPORTANTLY.... Don't miss the opportunity to join leading industry analyst, R "Ray" Wang of Constellation Research in the latest webcast of the Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Series as he explains how to apply the 9 C's of Engagement for both your customers and employees.

  Read the article

• .NET Reflector & .NET Reflector Pro 6.1 have been released

  - by Bart Read

  .NET Reflector 6.1 and .NET Reflector Pro 6.1 have been released. You can download them from: http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/index.htm .NET Reflector is a class browser and disassembler for .NET assemblies. .NET Reflector Pro is a Visual Studio debugging extension that allows you to step through third party and framework assemblies, as if they were built from your own source code. This release fixes several problems that were present in the 6.0 release: Support for using a copy of Reflector.cfg stored alongside Reflector.exe has been re-enabled so users upgrading from 5.x releases will not lose their settings. Fixed unhandled exception on exit of Visual Studio when .NET Reflector add-in used in conjunction with TestDriven.NET add-in. Added better support for dealing with framework assemblies, which only contain meta-data, in the "Referenced Assemblies" folder. Fixed problem where attempted decompilation with CppCliLanguage add-in would lead to display of a page on the Red Gate website. Added option to activate .NET Reflector Pro to .NET Reflector menu in Visual Studio after receiving feedback from a number of users that it was hard to figure out how to activate the product. For more details about the products please visit: http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/index.htm

  Read the article

• Entity Framework &amp; Transactions

  - by Sudheer Kumar

  There are many instances we might have to use transactions to maintain data consistency. With Entity Framework, it is a little different conceptually. Case 1 – Transaction b/w multiple SaveChanges(): here if you just use a transaction scope, then Entity Framework (EF) will use distributed transactions instead of local transactions. The reason is that, EF closes and opens the connection when ever required only, which means, it used 2 different connections for different SaveChanges() calls. To resolve this, use the following method. Here we are opening a connection explicitly so as not to span across multipel connections.   using (TransactionScope ts = new TransactionScope()) {     context.Connection.Open();     //Operation1 : context.SaveChanges();     //Operation2 :  context.SaveChanges()     //At the end close the connection     ts.Complete(); } catch (Exception ex) {       //Handle Exception } finally {       if (context.Connection.State == ConnectionState.Open)       {            context.Connection.Close();       } }   Case 2 – Transaction between DB & Non-DB operations: For example, assume that you have a table that keeps track of Emails to be sent. Here you want to update certain details like DataSent once if the mail was successfully sent by the e-mail client. Email eml = GetEmailToSend(); eml.DateSent = DateTime.Now; using (TransactionScope ts = new TransactionScope()) {    //Update DB    context.saveChanges();   //if update is successful, send the email using smtp client   smtpClient.Send();   //if send was successful, then commit   ts.Complete(); }   Here since you are dealing with a single context.SaveChanges(), you just need to use the TransactionScope, just before saving the context only.   Hope this was helpful!

  Read the article

• Tips on debugging collections

  - by Vincent Grondin

  The "Quick Watch" feature of Visual Studio is an awesome tool when debugging your stuff...  I use it all the time and quite often I end up exploring hashtables or lists of all sorts...  One thing I hate is when I have to explore Collections...  Good god did I lose time trying to find the inner member that contains my stuff when exploring collections...  Most collections have the inside member that you can search for and find and explore to see the list of things you wanted to look at.  Something in the likes of this.    I've known a little trick for a while now and I give it to everyone I end up debugging something with so I figured that probably not many people know about this...  Here's the tip...  Send the collection into an ArrayList in the QuickWatch window!  Yes, you heard me right, just type    new ArrayList(yourcollectionhere) in my case:    new ArrayList(this.Controls) in the expresion textbox and here's the result when you hit reevaluate! Pretty neat trick to make your debugging experience less of a pain when dealing with collections...    Happy debugging all !

  Read the article

• links for 2010-05-04

  - by Bob Rhubart

  IdMapper: A Java Application for ID Mapping across Multiple Cross-Referencing Providers H/T to Geertjan for posting a link to this paper on a Netbeans-based project. (tags: java netbeans) Mastering Your Multicore System - Oracle Solaris Video How Sun Studio compilers and tools can simplify these challenges and enable you to fully unlock the potential in multicore architecture. Don Kretsch presents at Tech Days, Brazil, 2009. (tags: oracle sun sunstudio multicore video) Allison Dixon: COLLABORATE: OAUG Staff #c10 ORACLENERD guest blogger Allison Dixon offers a peek behind the curtain and a tip of the hat to the people behind Collaborate 10. (tags: oracle oaug ioug collaborate2010) @myfear: Java EE 5 or 6 - which to choose today Author, software architect, and Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele shares his insight into the choice between Java EE versions. (tags: oracle otn java oracleace glassfish) @blueadept61: Architecture and Agility #entarch In yet another great, succinct post, Oracle ACE Director Mike Van Alst offers more quotable wisdom than I can share here. Read the whole thing. (tags: oracle otn entarch enterprisearchitecture agile) @blueadept61: Governance Causes SOA Projects to Fail? Oracle ACE Director Mike Van Alst's short but thought-provoking post raises issues of language and perception in dealing with the cultural hurdles to SOA Governance. (tags: oracle otn soa soagovernance communication) Anthony Shorten: List of available whitepapers as of 04 May 2010 Anthony Shorten shares a list of whitepapers available from My Oracle Support covering Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products. (tags: oracle otn whitepapers frameworks documentation) @processautomate: SOA Governance is Not a Documentation Exercise Leonardo Consulting SOA specialist Mervin Chiang proposes that simply considering and applying basic SOA governance -- service management -- can go a long way. (tags: otn oracle soa soagovernance) Article: Cloud Computing Capability Reference Model This Cloud Computing Capability Reference Model provides a functional view of the layers in a typical cloud stack to help Enterprise Architects identify the components necessary to implement Cloud solutions. (tags: oracle otn cloud entarch soa virtualization)

  Read the article

• How to negotiate with software vendors who do not follow HL7 standards

  - by Peter Turner

  Take, for instance the "", I'd hope that anyone who has spent any time in dealing with HL7 messages knows that the "" signifies that something should be deleted. "" is not an empty string, it's not a filler etc... But occasionally, one may meet a vendor who persists in sending "" instead of just sending nothing at all. Since, I work for a small business and have an extremely flexible HL7 interface, I can ignore ""'s in received messages. But these things are adding up. Some vendors like to send custom formatted fields with psuedo-components that they leave others to interpret themselves. Some vendors send all their information in note segments and assume you're going to only show users the information they send in a monospace font. Some vendors even have the audacity to send Carriage Return Line Feeds at the end of each line of a file interface. Some vendors absolutely refuse to send decimal numbers and in-so-doing refuse to send any numbers. So, with all this crippling humanity against the simple plastic software man, how does one bend without breaking*? Or better yet, how does one fight back and still make money? *my answer is usually to create an interface for the interface and keep the HL7 processing pure, but I don't think this is the best solution

  Read the article

• How to avoid general names for abstract classes?

  - by djechlin

  In general it's good to avoid words like "handle" or "process" as part of routine names and class names, unless you are dealing with (e.g.) file handles or (e.g.) unix processes. However abstract classes often don't really know what they're going to do with something besides, say, process it. In my current situation I have an "EmailProcessor" that logs into a user's inbox and processes messages from it. It's not really clear to me how to give this a more precise name, although I've noticed the following style matter arises: better to treat derived classes as clients and named the base class by the part of the functionality it implements? Gives it more meaning but will violate is-a. E.g. EmailAcquirer would be a reasonable name since it's acquiring for the derived class, but the derived class won't be acquiring for anyone. Or just really vague name since who knows what the derived classes will do. However "Processor" is still too general since it's doing many relevant operations, like logging in and using IMAP. Any way out of this dilemma? Problem is more evident for abstract methods, in which you can't really answer the question "what does this do?" because the answer is simply "whatever the client wants."

  Read the article

• Code formatter for SSMS

  - by blakmk

    I was searching recently for a code formatter for T-Sql and I came accross this nice little utility that I wanted to share: http://www.wangz.net/cgi-bin/pp/gsqlparser/sqlpp/sqlformat.tpl I've been dealing with a lot of legacy code latley and there is nothing I find more infuriating than unformatted code. This tool seems to work quite well. Just one click and it formats everything nicely. There is also a free web version.                                           This Web Page Created with PageBreeze Free HTML Editor

  Read the article

• Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 2 - For the record

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  At SSW we have always done Agile. Recently we have started doing Scrum and we have nearly completed our first Sprint ever using Scrum. As you probably guessed from my previous post, it looks like it is going to be a “Failed Sprint”, but the Scrum Team (This includes the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner) has learned a huge amount about working in the Scrum Framework. We have been running with a “Proxy Product Owner” for the last two weeks, but a simple mistake occurred either during the “Product Planning Meeting” or the “Sprint Planning Meeting” that could have prevented this Sprint from failing. We has a heated discussion on the vision of someone not in the room which ended with the assertion that the Product Owner would be quizzed again on their vision. This did not happen and we ran with the “Proxy Product Owner’s vision for two weeks. Product Owner vision: Update Component A of Product A to Silverlight Proxy Product Owner vision: Update Product A to Silverlight Do you see the problem? Worse than that, as we had a lot of junior members of the Scrum Team and we are just feeling our way around how Scrum will work at SSW I missed implementing a fundamental rule. That’s right, it was me. It does not matter that I did not know about this rule, its on the site and I should have read it. Would a police officer let you off if you did not know that a red light meant stop? I think not… But, what is this amazing rule I hear you shout.. Its simple, as per our rule I should have sent the following email: “ Dear Proxy Product Owner, For the record, I disagree that the Product Owner wants us to ‘Update Product A to Silverlight’ as I still think that he wants us to ‘Update Component A of Product A to Silverlight’ and not the entire application. Regards Martin” - ‘For the record’ - Rules to being Software Consultants - Dealing with Clients This email should have been copied to the entire Scrum Team, which would have included the Product Owner, who would have nipped this misunderstanding in the bud and we would have had one less impediment. Technorati Tags: SSW,SSW Rules,SSW Standards,Scrum,Product Owner,ScrumMaster,Sprint,Sprint Planning Meeting,Product Planning Meeting

  Read the article

• Copy wrongs and Copyright

  - by Tony Davis

  Recently, a Chinese blog website copied, wholesale and without permission, a Simple-Talk article on troubleshooting locking and blocking. Our initial reaction was exasperation and anger, tempered slightly by the fact that there was, at the top, a clear link to the original, and the book from which it was extracted. On the day the copy was posted, our original article saw a 30K spike in visits, so the site clearly has a substantial following! This made us pause for thought. Indeed, we wondered whether it might not be more profitable, and certainly more enjoyable, to notify the offender of similar content and serve a "put up" notice, rather than the usual DMCA "take down" . The DMCA request, issued to protect our and our authors' assets, is a necessary but tiresome, chore. So often, simple communication and negotiation could have averted the need for it. We are, after all, in the business of presenting knowledge, information and help to the SQL Server Community. If only they had asked! Of course, one's attitude changes according to the motivation behind the copying of content. One of the motivations seems to be pure vanity; they do it to try to enhance their CV, or their company's expertise, by pretending to expertise they don't possess. There is a class of plagiariser, however, that is doing it purely for money, getting advertising revenue by attracting hapless readers to their site. Not content with stealing content, sites can invest in services that provide 'load-testing' for websites that is so realistic that even the search engines can be fooled. Stolen content, fake visitors, swindled advertisers. Zero-tolerance is really the only way of dealing with plagiarism, and action will only be completely effective once Bing, Google, and the other search engines strike out from their listings the rogue sites that refuse to take down plagiarised content. It is, after all in everyone else's interests. Cheers, Tony.

  Read the article

• What is the best strategy for transforming unicode strings into filenames?

  - by David Cowden

  I have a bunch (thousands) of resources in an RDF/XML file. I am writing a certain subset of the resources to files -- one file for each, and I'm using the resource's title property as the file name. However, the titles are every day article, website, and blog post titles, so they contain characters unsafe for a URI (the necessary step for constructing a valid file path). I know of the Jersey UriBuilder but I can't quite get it to work for my needs as I detailed in a different question on SO. Some possibilities I have considered are: Since each resource should also have an associated URL, I could try to use the name of the file on the server. The down side of this is sometimes people don't name their content logically and I think the title of an article better reflects the content that will be in each text file. Construct a white list of valid characters and parse the string myself defining substitutions for unsafe characters. The downside of this is the result could be just as unreadable as the former solution because presumably the content creators went through a similar process when placing the files on their server. Choose a more generic naming scheme, place the title in the text file along with the other attributes, and tell my boss to live with it. So my question here is, what methods work well for dealing with a scenario where you need to construct file names out of strings with potentially unsafe characters? Is there a solution that better fills out my constraints?

  Read the article

• Is there a measure of code rot?

  - by DarenW

  I'm dealing, again, with a messy C++ application, tons of classes with confusing names, objects have pointers into each other and all over, longwinded Boost and STL data types, etc. (Pause and consider your favorite terror of messy legacy code. We probably have it.) The phrase "code rot" oft comes to mind when I work on this project. Is there a quantitative way to measure code rot? I wouldn't expect anything highly meaningful or scientific, since no other measure of code productivity or quality is so fine. I'm not looking for a mere opposite of measures of code quality, but specifically a measure of how many bad things happened after a series of maintenance software "engineers" have had turns hacking at the code. A general measure applying to any language, or many languages, would be great. If there's no such thing, at least for C++, which is a better than average language for creating messes. Maybe something involving a measure of topology of how objects connect during runtime, a count of chunks of commented out code, how mane files a typical variable's usage is scattered over, I don't know... but surely now, a decade into the 21st Century, someone has attempted to define some sort of rot measure. It would be especially interesting to automate a series of svn checkouts, measure the "rottenosity" of each, and plot the decay over time.

  Read the article

• TechEd 2012: Day 3 &ndash; Build Me A Solution

  - by Tim Murphy

  While digesting my lunch it was time to digest some TFS Build information. While much of my time is spent wearing my developer’s hat I am still a jack of all trades and automated builds are an important aspect of any project.  Because of this I was looking forward to finding out what new features are available in the latest release of Team Foundation Server. The first feature that caught my attention is the TFS Admin Client.  After being used to dealing with NAnt in the past it is nice to see a build a configuration GUI that is so flexible and well thought out.  The bonus is that it the tools that are incorporated in Visual Studio 2012 are just as feature rich.  Life is good. Since automated builds are the hub of your development process in a continuous integration shop I was really interested in the process related options. The biggest value add that I noticed was merge gated check-ins.  Merge or batch gated check-ins are an interesting concept.  If the build breaks with all the changes then TFS will run separate builds for each of the check-ins.  This ability to identify the actual offending check-in can save a lot of time and gray hair. The safari of TFS Build that was this session was packed with attractions.  How do you set it up builds, what are the different flavors of builds, how does the system report how the build went?  I would suggest anyone who is responsible for build automation spend some serious time with TFS 2012 and VS2012. del.icio.us Tags: Team Foundation Server 2012,TFS,Build,TechEd,TechEd 2012,Visual Studio 2012

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for November 25, 2011 -- #1174

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Collier, Samidip Basu, Jesse Liberty, Dhananjay Kumar, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #16: Isolated Storage Explorer" Samidip Basu Metro/WinRT/W8: "1360x768x32 Resolution in Windows 8 in VirtualBox" Michael Crump Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up Alex Golesh releases a Silverlight 5-friendly version of his external map manifest file tool: Utility: Extmap Maker v1.1From SilverlightCream.com:31 Days of Mango | Day #17: Using Windows AzureMichael Collier has Jeff Blankenburg's Day 17 and is talking about Azure services for your Phone apps... great discussion on this... good diagrams, code, and entire project to download31 Days of Mango | Day #16: Isolated Storage ExplorerSamidip Basu has Jeff Blankenburg's 31 Days for Day 16, and is discussing ISO, and the Isolated Storage Explorer which helps peruse ISO either in the emulator or on your deviceTest Driven Development–Testing Private ValuesJesse Liberty's got a post up discussing TDD in his latest Full Stack excerpt wherein he and Jon Galloway are building a Pomodoro timer app. He has a solution for dealing with private member variables and is looking for feedbackVideo on How to work with System Tray Progress Indicator in Windows Phone 7Dhananjay Kumar's latest video tutorial is up... covering working with the System Tray Progress Indicator in WP7, as the title says :)1360x768x32 Resolution in Windows 8 in VirtualBoxMichael Crump is using a non-standard resolution with Win8 preview and demosntrates how to make that all work with VirtualBoxMichaelStay in the 'Light!Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCreamJoin me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User GroupTechnorati Tags:Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows PhoneMIX10

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145  | Next Page >