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• XNA Notes 007

  - by George Clingerman

  Every week I keep wondering if there’s going to be enough activity in the community to keep doing these notes on a weekly basis and every week I’m reminded of just how awesome and active the XNA community is. There’s engines being made, tutorials being created, games being crafted. There’s information being shared, questions being answered and then there’s another whole community around the Xbox LIVE Indie Games themselves. It’s really incredibly to just watch all that’s going on and I’m glad I’m playing a small part in all of this. So here’s what I noticed happening in the XNA community last week. If there’s things I’m missing, always feel free to let me know. I love learning about new corners of the XNA community that I wasn’t aware of or just have been missing! XNA Developers: Uditha Bandara held an XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://uditha.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities-event-update/ Binary Tweed gives his talks about Indie City and gives his opinion on the false promise of digital distribution http://www.develop-online.net/news/37053/OPINION-The-false-promise-of-digital-distribution Kris Steele posts his Trivia or Die postmortem http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=246 @MadNinjaSkills (James Johnston) posts his feelings on testing for XBLIG http://www.ezmuze.co.uk/101 Simon (@DDReaper) posts hints and tips for XNA developers to help get the size of their projects down http://twitter.com/#!/DDReaper/status/38279440924545024 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/17/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing.aspx Michael B. McLaughlin proving why he should be an XNA MVP posts the list of commonly used value types in XNA games http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/17/list-of-commonly-used-value-types-in-xna-games.aspx http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/38166541354811392 Paul Powell (@ITSligoPaul) posts about a common sprite batch as a game service http://itspaulsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-common-sprite-batch-as-game-service.html @SigilXNA (John Defenbaugh) posts his new level editor video for the sequel to Opac’s Journey http://twitter.com/SigilXNA/statuses/36548174373982209 http://twitter.com/#!/SigilXNA/status/36548174373982209 http://youtu.be/QHbmxB_2AW8 @jwatte updates kW Animation for XNA 4.0 http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-animation @DSebJ posts Blender to SunBurn http://twitter.com/#!/DSebJ/status/36564920224976896 http://dsebj.evolvingsoftware.com/?p=187 Ads and WP7 Games - @mechaghost shares his revenue data for his ad based games http://www.occasionalgamer.com/2011/02/09/ads-and-wp7-games/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Steven Hurdle posts day 100 of his quest to find a fantastic XBLIG purchase every day http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/02/17/day-100-radiangames-ballistic/ Xbox 360 Indie Game Buying Guide - 12 games for $60 including several Xbox LIVE Indie games! (although if the XNA community was asked we could have recommended 60 games for $60...) http://www.indiegamemag.com/xbox360-indie-games-buying-guide/ The best selling Xbox LIVE Indie games of 2010 http://www.1up.com/news/xbox-live-most-popular-games I’d buy that for a dollar! - the California Literary Review points out a few gems on the XBLIG marketplace (and other places) where you can game on the cheap. http://calitreview.com/14125 Armless Octopus Episode 39 - The Indie Gem Octocast http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/17/armless-octocast-episode-39-the-indie-gem-octocast/ Ska Studios posts a plethora of updates http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/11/good-morning-gato-49/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/14/vampire-smile-valentines/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/16/the-dishwasher-vs-finds-a-home/ Kotaku posts about the Xbox LIVE Indie Game that makes you go Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew http://kotaku.com/#!5760632/the-game-that-makes-you-go-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew GameMarx continues to be active and doing a ton for the XBLIG community reviews and Top 5 indie games of the week 2/4-2/10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/22/ep-9-february-11-2010.aspx a new podcast Xbox Indie New Releases http://twitter.com/#!/gamemarx/status/36888849107910656 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/13/a-new-podcast-xbox-indie-new-releases.aspx @MasterBlud uploads Indocalypse XBLIG Collections #2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzCZSv075mc&feature=youtu.be&a http://twitter.com/#!/MasterBlud/status/37100029697064960 Just Press Start interviews Michael Hicks from MichaelArts, 18 year old creator of Honor in Vengeance http://justpressstart.net/?p=465 Achievement Locked interviews Kris Steele of FunInfused Games http://xboxindies.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/interview-fun-infused-games/ XNA Game Development: XNA -UK launches their XAP test service to help the XNA community http://xna-uk.net/blogs/news/archive/2011/02/18/xna-uk-xap-test-service-now-live.aspx Transmute shows off a video of the standard character editor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqH6gErG948&feature=youtu.be Microsoft Tech Student introduces their first tech student of the month.  Meet Daniel Van Tassel from the University of Utah and learn how he created an Xbox LIVE Indie Game using XNA Studio http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techstudent/archive/2010/12/22/introducing-our-first-tech-student-of-the-month-daniel-van-tassel.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 3 - Animation (transforms) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 4 - Animation (frame based) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-4-Animation-frame-based.aspx @suhinini tweets about an XNA Sprite Font generation tool http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/36841370131890176 http://www.nubik.com/SpriteFont/ XNATouch 1.5 is out and in it’s words is faster, simpler, more reliable and has the XNA 4.0 API http://monogame.codeplex.com/releases/view/60815 IndieCity is hosting marketing workshops for Indie Developers (UK and US) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/75197/457654.aspx#457654 New York Students - Learn XNA and Silverlight for Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72753/456964.aspx#456964 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/learn-to-build-your-own-games-for-xbox-360-and-windows-phone-7.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/build-a-game-in-48-hours-win-a-kinect-or-windows-phone-7.aspx Extra Credits: Videogame Music http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2019-Videogame-Music Steve Pavlina posts an article with useful information for all XNA/XBLIG developers http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/02/completion-vs-perfection/

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• New MySQL Cluster 7.3 Previews: Foreign Keys, NoSQL Node.js API and Auto-Tuned Clusters

  - by Mat Keep

  At this weeks MySQL Connect conference, Oracle previewed an exciting new wave of developments for MySQL Cluster, further extending its simplicity and flexibility by expanding the range of use-cases, adding new NoSQL options, and automating configuration. What’s new: Development Release 1: MySQL Cluster 7.3 with Foreign Keys Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer In this blog, I'll introduce you to the features being previewed. Review the blogs listed below for more detail on each of the specific features discussed. Save the date!: A live webinar is scheduled for Thursday 25th October at 0900 Pacific Time / 1600UTC where we will discuss each of these enhancements in more detail. Registration will be open soon and published to the MySQL webinars page MySQL Cluster 7.3: Development Release 1 The first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Milestone Release (DMR) previews Foreign Keys, bringing powerful new functionality to MySQL Cluster while eliminating development complexity. Foreign Key support has been one of the most requested enhancements to MySQL Cluster – enabling users to simplify their data models and application logic – while extending the range of use-cases for both custom projects requiring referential integrity and packaged applications, such as eCommerce, CRM, CMS, etc. Implementation The Foreign Key functionality is implemented directly within the MySQL Cluster data nodes, allowing any client API accessing the cluster to benefit from them – whether they are SQL or one of the NoSQL interfaces (Memcached, C++, Java, JPA, HTTP/REST or the new Node.js API - discussed later.) The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL In addition, the MySQL Cluster implementation supports the online adding and dropping of Foreign Keys, ensuring the Cluster continues to serve both read and write requests during the operation.  This represents a further enhancement to MySQL Cluster's support for on0line schema changes, ie adding and dropping indexes, adding columns, etc.  Read this blog for a demonstration of using Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster.  Getting Started with MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR1: Users can download either the source or binary and evaluate the MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR with Foreign Keys now! (Select the Development Release tab). MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Node.js is hot! In a little over 3 years, it has become one of the most popular environments for developing next generation web, cloud, mobile and social applications. Bringing JavaScript from the browser to the server, the design goal of Node.js is to build new real-time applications supporting millions of client connections, serviced by a single CPU core. Making it simple to further extend the flexibility and power of Node.js to the database layer, we are previewing the Node.js Javascript API for MySQL Cluster as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/. Select the following build: MySQL-Cluster-NoSQL-Connector-for-Node-js Alternatively, you can clone the project at the MySQL GitHub page.  Implemented as a module for the V8 engine, the new API provides Node.js with a native, asynchronous JavaScript interface that can be used to both query and receive results sets directly from MySQL Cluster, without transformations to SQL. Figure 1: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js enables end-to-end JavaScript development Rather than just presenting a simple interface to the database, the Node.js module integrates the MySQL Cluster native API library directly within the web application itself, enabling developers to seamlessly couple their high performance, distributed applications with a high performance, distributed, persistence layer delivering 99.999% availability. The new Node.js API joins a rich array of NoSQL interfaces available for MySQL Cluster. Whichever API is chosen for an application, SQL and NoSQL can be used concurrently across the same data set, providing the ultimate in developer flexibility.  Get started with MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js tutorial MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer Compatible with both MySQL Cluster 7.2 and 7.3, the Auto-Installer makes it simple for DevOps teams to quickly configure and provision highly optimized MySQL Cluster deployments – whether on-premise or in the cloud. Implemented with a standard HTML GUI and Python-based web server back-end, the Auto-Installer intelligently configures MySQL Cluster based on application requirements and auto-discovered hardware resources Figure 2: Automated Tuning and Configuration of MySQL Cluster Developed by the same engineering team responsible for the MySQL Cluster database, the installer provides standardized configurations that make it simple, quick and easy to build stable and high performance clustered environments. The auto-installer is previewed as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/, by selecting the MySQL-Cluster-Auto-Installer build. You can read more about getting started with the MySQL Cluster auto-installer here. Watch the YouTube video for a demonstration of using the MySQL Cluster auto-installer Getting Started with MySQL Cluster If you are new to MySQL Cluster, the Getting Started guide will walk you through installing an evaluation cluster on a singe host (these guides reflect MySQL Cluster 7.2, but apply equally well to 7.3 and the Early Access previews). Or use the new MySQL Cluster Auto-Installer! Download the Guide to Scaling Web Databases with MySQL Cluster (to learn more about its architecture, design and ideal use-cases). Post any questions to the MySQL Cluster forum where our Engineering team and the MySQL Cluster community will attempt to assist you. Post any bugs you find to the MySQL bug tracking system (select MySQL Cluster from the Category drop-down menu) And if you have any feedback, please post them to the Comments section here or in the blogs referenced in this article. Summary MySQL Cluster 7.2 is the GA, production-ready release of MySQL Cluster. The first Development Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 and the Early Access previews give you the opportunity to preview and evaluate future developments in the MySQL Cluster database, and we are very excited to be able to share that with you. Let us know how you get along with MySQL Cluster 7.3, and other features that you want to see in future releases, by using the comments of this blog.

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• Upgrading Windows 8 boot to VHD to Windows 8.1&ndash;Step by step guide

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/10/19/upgrading-windows-8-boot-to-vhd-to-windows-8.1ndashstep-by.aspxBoot to VHD – dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8 became easy When Windows 8 arrived, quite a few people decided that they would still dual boot their machines, and instead of mucking about with resizing disk partitions to free up space for Windows 8 they decided to use the boot from VHD feature to create a huge hard disc image into which Windows 8 could be installed.  Scott Hanselman wrote this installation guide, while I myself used the installation guide from Ed Bott of ZD net fame. Boot to VHD is a great solution, it achieves a dual boot, can be backed up easily and had virtually no effect on the original Windows 7 partition. As a developer who has dual booted Windows operating systems for years, hacking boot.ini files, the boot to VHD was a much easier solution. Upgrade to Windows 8.1 – ah, you can’t do that on a virtual disk installation (boot to VHD) Last week the final version of Windows 8.1 arrived, and I went into the Windows Store to upgrade.  Luckily I’m on a fast download service, and use an SSD, because once the upgrade was downloaded and prepared Windows informed that This PC can’t run Windows 8.1, and provided the reason, You can’t install Windows on a virtual drive.  You can see an image of the message and discussion that sparked my search for a solution in this Microsoft Technet forum post. I was determined not to have to resize partitions yet again and fiddle with VHD to disk utilities and back again, and in the end I did succeed in upgrading to a Windows 8.1 boot to VHD partition.  It takes quite a bit of effort though … tldr; Simple steps of how you upgrade Boot into Windows 7 – make a copy of your Windows 8 VHD, to become Windows 8.1 Enable Hyper-V in your Windows 8 (the original boot to VHD partition) Create a new virtual machine, attaching the copy of your Windows 8 VHD Start the virtual machine, upgrade it via the Windows Store to Windows 8.1 Shutdown the virtual machine Boot into Windows 7 – use the bcedit tool to create a new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD option (pointing at the copy) Boot into the new Windows 8.1 option Reactivate Windows 8.1 (it will have become deactivated by running under Hyper-V) Remove the original Windows 8 VHD, and in Windows 7 use bcedit to remove it from the boot menu Things you’ll need A system that can run Hyper-V under Windows 8 (Intel i5, i7 class CPU) Enough space to have your original Windows 8 boot to VHD and a copy at the same time An ISO or DVD for Windows 8 to create a bootable Windows 8 partition Step by step guide Boot to your base o/s, the real one, Windows 7. Make a copy of the Windows 8 VHD file that you use to boot Windows 8 (via boot from VHD) – I copied it from a folder on C: called VHD-Win8 to VHD-Win8.1 on my N: drive. Reboot your system into Windows 8, and enable Hyper-V if not already present (this may require reboot) Use the Hyper-V manager , create a new Hyper-V machine, using half your system memory, and use the option to attach an existing VHD on the main IDE controller – this will be the new copy you made in Step 2. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and you’ll probably discover it cannot boot as there is no boot record If this is the case, go to Hyper-V manager, edit the Settings for the virtual machine to attach an ISO of a Windows 8 DVD to the second IDE controller. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and it should now attempt a fresh installation of Windows 8.  You should select Advanced Options and choose Repair - this will make VHD bootable When the setup reboots your virtual machine, turn off the virtual machine, and remove the ISO of the Windows 8 DVD from the virtual machine settings. Start virtual machine, use Connect to view it.  You will see the devices to be re-discovered (including your quad CPU becoming single CPU).  Eventually you should see the Windows Login screen. You may notice that your desktop background (Win+D) will have turned black as your Windows installation has become deactivate due to the hardware changes between your real PC and Hyper-V. Fortunately becoming deactivated, does not stop you using the Windows Store, where you can select the update to Windows 8.1. You can now watch the progress joy of the Windows 8 update; downloading, preparing to update, checking compatibility, gathering info, preparing to restart, and finally, confirm restart - remember that you are restarting your virtual machine sitting on the copy of the VHD, not the Windows 8 boot to VHD you are currently using to run Hyper-V (confused yet?) After the reboot you get the real upgrade messages; setting up x%, xx%, (quite slow) After a while, Getting ready Applying PC Settings x%, xx% (really slow) Updating your system (fast) Setting up a few more things x%, (quite slow) Getting ready, again Accept license terms Express settings Confirmed previous password Next, I had to set up a Microsoft account – which is possibly now required, and not optional Using the Microsoft account required a 2 factor authorization, via text message, a 7 digit code for me Finalising settings Blank screen, HI .. We're setting up things for you (similar to original Windows 8 install) 'You can get new apps from the Store', below which is ’Installing your apps’ - I had Windows Media Center which is counts as an app from the Store ‘Taking care of a few things’, below which is ‘Installing your apps’ ‘Taking care of a few things’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Getting your apps ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Almost ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ … finally, we get the Windows 8.1 start menu, and a quick Win+D to check the desktop confirmed all the application icons I expected, pinned items on the taskbar, and one app moaning about a missing drive At this point the upgrade is complete – you can shutdown the virtual machine Reboot from the original Windows 8 and return to Windows 7 to configure booting to the Windows 8.1 copy of the VHD In an administrator command prompt do following use the bcdedit tool (from an MSDN blog about configuring VHD to boot in Windows 7) Type bcedit to list the current boot options, so you can copy the GUID (complete with brackets/braces) for the original Windows 8 boot to VHD Create a new menu option, copy of the Windows 8 option; bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "Windows 8.1" Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Set autodetection of the HAL (may already be set); bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on Reboot from Windows 7 and select the new option 'Windows 8.1' on the boot menu, and you’ll have some messages to look at, as your hardware is redetected (as you are back from 1 CPU to 4 CPUs) ‘Getting devices ready, blank then %xx, with occasional blank screen, for the graphics driver, (fast-ish) Getting Ready message (fast) You will have to suffer one final reboots, choose 'Windows 8.1' and you can now login to a lovely Windows 8.1 start screen running on non virtualized hardware via boot to VHD After checking everything is running fine, you can now choose to Activate Windows, which for me was a toll free phone call to the automated system where you type in lots of numbers to be given a whole bunch of new activation codes. Once you’re happy with your new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD, and no longer need the Windows 8 boot to VHD, feel free to delete the old one.  I do believe once you upgrade, you are no longer licensed to use it anyway. There, that was simple wasn’t it? Looking at the huge list of steps it took to perform this upgrade, you may wonder whether I think this is worth it.  Well, I think it is worth booting to VHD.  It makes backups a snap (go to Windows 7, copy the VHD, you backed up the o/s) and helps with disk management – want to move the o/s, you can move the VHD and repoint the boot menu to the new location. The downside is that Microsoft has complete neglected to support boot to VHD as an upgradable option.  Quite a poor decision in my opinion, and if you read twitter and the forums quite a few people agree with that view.  It’s a shame this got missed in the work on creating the upgrade packages for Windows 8.1.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3: Razor’s @: and <text> syntax

  - by ScottGu

  This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss two useful syntactical features of the new Razor view-engine – the @: and <text> syntax support. Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing Razor blog post.  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. For example, the Razor snippet below can be used to iterate a list of products: When run, it generates output like:   One of the techniques that Razor uses to implicitly identify when a code block ends is to look for tag/element content to denote the beginning of a content region.  For example, in the code snippet above Razor automatically treated the inner <li></li> block within our foreach loop as an HTML content block because it saw the opening <li> tag sequence and knew that it couldn’t be valid C#.  This particular technique – using tags to identify content blocks within code – is one of the key ingredients that makes Razor so clean and productive with scenarios involving HTML creation. Using @: to explicitly indicate the start of content Not all content container blocks start with a tag element tag, though, and there are scenarios where the Razor parser can’t implicitly detect a content block. Razor addresses this by enabling you to explicitly indicate the beginning of a line of content by using the @: character sequence within a code block.  The @: sequence indicates that the line of content that follows should be treated as a content block: As a more practical example, the below snippet demonstrates how we could output a “(Out of Stock!)” message next to our product name if the product is out of stock: Because I am not wrapping the (Out of Stock!) message in an HTML tag element, Razor can’t implicitly determine that the content within the @if block is the start of a content block.  We are using the @: character sequence to explicitly indicate that this line within our code block should be treated as content. Using Code Nuggets within @: content blocks In addition to outputting static content, you can also have code nuggets embedded within a content block that is initiated using a @: character sequence.  For example, we have two @: sequences in the code snippet below: Notice how within the second @: sequence we are emitting the number of units left within the content block (e.g. - “(Only 3 left!”). We are doing this by embedding a @p.UnitsInStock code nugget within the line of content. Multiple Lines of Content Razor makes it easy to have multiple lines of content wrapped in an HTML element.  For example, below the inner content of our @if container is wrapped in an HTML <p> element – which will cause Razor to treat it as content: For scenarios where the multiple lines of content are not wrapped by an outer HTML element, you can use multiple @: sequences: Alternatively, Razor also allows you to use a <text> element to explicitly identify content: The <text> tag is an element that is treated specially by Razor. It causes Razor to interpret the inner contents of the <text> block as content, and to not render the containing <text> tag element (meaning only the inner contents of the <text> element will be rendered – the tag itself will not).  This makes it convenient when you want to render multi-line content blocks that are not wrapped by an HTML element.  The <text> element can also optionally be used to denote single-lines of content, if you prefer it to the more concise @: sequence: The above code will render the same output as the @: version we looked at earlier.  Razor will automatically omit the <text> wrapping element from the output and just render the content within it.  Summary Razor enables a clean and concise templating syntax that enables a very fluid coding workflow.  Razor’s smart detection of <tag> elements to identify the beginning of content regions is one of the reasons that the Razor approach works so well with HTML generation scenarios, and it enables you to avoid having to explicitly mark the beginning/ending of content regions in about 95% of if/else and foreach scenarios. Razor’s @: and <text> syntax can then be used for scenarios where you want to avoid using an HTML element within a code container block, and need to more explicitly denote a content region. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Michael Crump&rsquo;s notes for 70-563 PRO &ndash; Designing and Developing Windows Applications usi

  - by mbcrump

  TIME TO GO PRO! This is my notes for 70-563 PRO – Designing and Developing Windows Applications using .NET Framework 3.5 I created it using several resources (various certification web sites, msdn, official ms 70-548 book). The reason that I created this review is because a) I am taking the exam. b) MS did not create a book for this exam. Use the(MS 70-548)book. c) To make sure I am familiar with each before the exam. I hope that it provides a good start for your own notes. I hope that someone finds this useful. At least, it will give you a starting point of what to expect to know on the PRO exam. Also, for those wondering, the PRO exam does contains very little code. It is basically all theory. 1. Validation Controls – How to prevent users from entering invalid data on forms. (MaskedTextBox control and RegEx) 2. ServiceController – used to start and control the behavior of existing services. 3. User Feedback (know winforms Status Bar, Tool Tips, Color, Error Provider, Context-Sensitive and Accessibility) 4. Specific (derived) exceptions must be handled before general (base class) exceptions. By moving the exception handling for the base type Exception to after exception handling of ArgumentNullException, all ArgumentNullException thrown by the Helper method will be caught and logged correctly. 5. A heartbeat method is a method exposed by a Web service that allows external applications to check on the status of the service. 6. New users must master key tasks quickly. Giving these tasks context and appropriate detail will help. However, advanced users will demand quicker paths. Shortcuts, accelerators, or toolbar buttons will speed things along for the advanced user. 7. MSBuild uses project files to instruct the build engine what to build and how to build it. MSBuild project files are XML files that adhere to the MSBuild XML schema. The MSBuild project files contain complete file, build action, and dependency information for each individual projects. 8. Evaluating whether or not to fix a bug involves a triage process. You must identify the bug's impact, set the priority, categorize it, and assign a developer. Many times the person doing the triage work will assign the bug to a developer for further investigation. In fact, the workflow for the bug work item inside of Team System supports this step. Developers are often asked to assess the impact of a given bug. This assessment helps the person doing the triage make a decision on how to proceed. When assessing the impact of a bug, you should consider time and resources to fix it, bug risk, and impacts of the bug. 9. In large projects it is generally impossible and unfeasible to fix all bugs because of the impact on schedule and budget. 10. Code reviews should be conducted by a technical lead or a technical peer. 11. Testing Applications 12. WCF Services – application state 13. SQL Server 2005 / 2008 Express Edition – reliable storage of data / Microsoft SQL Server 3.5 Compact Database– used for client computers to retrieve and save data from a shared location. 14. SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition – used for minimum possible memory and can synchronize data with a corporate SQL Server 2008 Database. Supports offline user and minimum dependency on external components. 15. MDI and SDI Forms (specifically IsMDIContainer) 16. GUID – in the case of data warehousing, it is important to define unique keys. 17. Encrypting / Security Data 18. Understanding of Isolated Storage/Proper location to store items 19. LINQ to SQL 20. Multithreaded access 21. ADO.NET Entity Framework model 22. Marshal.ReleaseComObject 23. Common User Interface Layout (ComboBox, ListBox, Listview, MaskedTextBox, TextBox, RichTextBox, SplitContainer, TableLayoutPanel, TabControl) 24. DataSets Class - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.dataset%28VS.71%29.aspx 25. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) 26. SystemIcons.Shield (Vista UAC) 27. Leverging stored procedures to perform data manipulation for a database schema that can change. 28. DataContext 29. Microsoft Windows Installer Packages, ClickOnce(bootstrapping features), XCopy. 30. Client Application Services – will authenticate users by using the same data source as a ASP.NET web application. 31. SQL Server 2008 Caching 32. StringBuilder 33. Accessibility Guidelines for Windows Applications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228004.aspx 34. Logging erros 35. Testing performance related issues. 36. Role Based Security, GenericIdentity and GenericPrincipal 37. System.Net.CookieContainer will store session data for webapps (see isolated storage for winforms) 38. .NET CLR Profiler tool will identify objects that cause performance issues. 39. ADO.NET Synchronization (SyncGroup) 40. Globalization - CultureInfo 41. IDisposable Interface- reports on several questions relating to this. 42. Adding timestamps to determine whether data has changed or not. 43. Converting applications to .NET Framework 3.5 44. MicrosoftReportViewer 45. Composite Controls 46. Windows Vista KNOWN folders. 47. Microsoft Sync Framework 48. TypeConverter -Provides a unified way of converting types of values to other types, as well as for accessing standard values and sub properties. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.typeconverter.aspx 49. Concurrency control mechanisms The main categories of concurrency control mechanisms are: Optimistic - Delay the checking of whether a transaction meets the isolation rules (e.g., serializability and recoverability) until its end, without blocking any of its (read, write) operations, and then abort a transaction, if the desired rules are violated. Pessimistic - Block operations of a transaction, if they may cause violation of the rules. Semi-optimistic - Block operations in some situations, and do not block in other situations, while delaying rules checking to transaction's end, as done with optimistic. 50. AutoResetEvent 51. Microsoft Messaging Queue (MSMQ) 4.0 52. Bulk imports 53. KeyDown event of controls 54. WPF UI components 55. UI process layer 56. GAC (installing, removing and queuing) 57. Use a local database cache to reduce the network bandwidth used by applications. 58. Sound can easily be annoying and distracting to users, so use it judiciously. Always give users the option to turn sound off. Because a user might have sound off, never convey important information through sound alone.

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• Adopting DBVCS

  - by Wes McClure

  Identify early adopters Pick a small project with a small(ish) team.  This can be a legacy application or a green-field application. Strive to find a team of early adopters that will be eager to try something new. Get the team on board! Research Research the tool(s) that you want to use.  Some tools provide all of the features you would need while some only provide a slice of the pie.  DBVCS requires the ability to manage a set of change scripts that update a database from one version to the next.  Ideally a tool can track database versions and automatically apply updates.  The change script generation process can be manual, but having diff tools available to automatically generate it can really reduce the overhead to adoption.  Finally, an automated tool to generate a script file per database object is an added bonus as your version control system can quickly identify what was changed in a commit (add/del/modify), just like with code changes. Don’t settle on just one tool, identify several.  Then work with the team to evaluate the tools.  Have the team do some tests of the following scenarios with each tool: Baseline an existing database: can the migration tool work with legacy databases?  Caution: most migration platforms do not support baselines or have poor support, especially the fad of fluent APIs. Add/drop tables Add/drop procedures/functions/views Alter tables (rename columns, add columns, remove columns) Massage data – migrations sometimes involve changing data types that cannot be implicitly casted and require you to decide how the data is explicitly cast to the new type.  This is a requirement for a migrations platform.  Think about a case where you might want to combine fields, or move a field from one table to another, you wouldn’t want to lose the data. Run the tool via the command line.  If you cannot automate the tool in Continuous Integration what is the point? Create a copy of a database on demand. Backup/restore databases locally. Let the team give feedback and decide together, what tool they would like to try out. My recommendation at this point would be to include TSqlMigrations and RoundHouse as SQL based migration platforms.  In general I would recommend staying away from the fluent platforms as they often lack baseline capabilities and add overhead to learn a new API when SQL is already a very well known DSL.  Code migrations often get messy with procedures/views/functions as these have to be created with SQL and aren’t cross platform anyways.  IMO stick to SQL based migrations. Reconciling Production If your project is a legacy application, you will need to reconcile the current state of production with your development databases.  Find changes in production and bring them down to development, even if they are old and need to be removed.  Once complete, produce a baseline of either dev or prod as they are now in sync.  Commit this to your VCS of choice. Add whatever schema changes tracking mechanism your tool requires to your development database.  This often requires adding a table to track the schema version of that database.  Your tool should support doing this for you.  You can add this table to production when you do your next release. Script out any changes currently in dev.  Remove production artifacts that you brought down during reconciliation.  Add change scripts for any outstanding changes in dev since the last production release.  Commit these to your repository.   Say No to Shared Dev DBs Simply put, you wouldn’t dream of sharing a code checkout, why would you share a development database?  If you have a shared dev database, back it up, distribute the backups and take the shared version offline (including the dev db server once all projects are using DB VCS).  Doing DB VCS with a shared database is bound to cause problems as people won’t be able to easily script out their own changes from those that others are working on.   First prod release Copy prod to your beta/testing environment.  Add the schema changes table (or mechanism) and do a test run of your changes.  If successful you can schedule this to be run on production.   Evaluation After your first release, evaluate the pain points of the process.  Try to find tools or modifications to existing tools to help fix them.  Don’t leave stones unturned, iteratively evolve your tools and practices to make the process as seamless as possible.  This is why I suggest open source alternatives.  Nothing is set in stone, a good example was adding transactional support to TSqlMigrations.  We ran into situations where an update would break a database, so I added a feature to do transactional updates and rollback on errors!  Another good example is generating change scripts.  We have been manually making these for months now.  I found an open source project called Open DB Diff and integrated this with TSqlMigrations.  These were things we just accepted at the time when we began adopting our tool set.  Once we became comfortable with the base functionality, it was time to start automating more of the process.  Just like anything else with development, never be afraid to try to find tools to make your job easier!   Enjoy -Wes

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• Lessons from a SAN Failure

  - by Bill Graziano

  At 1:10AM Sunday morning the main SAN at one of my clients suffered a “partial” failure.  Partial means that the SAN was still online and functioning but the LUNs attached to our two main SQL Servers “failed”.  Failed means that SQL Server wouldn’t start and the MDF and LDF files mostly showed a zero file size.  But they were online and responding and most other LUNs were available.  I’m not sure how SANs know to fail at 1AM on a Saturday night but they seem to.  From a personal standpoint this worked out poorly: I was out with friends and after more than a few drinks.  From a work standpoint this was about the best time to fail you could imagine.  Everything was running well before Monday morning.  But it was a long, long Sunday.  I started tipsy, got tired and ended up hung over later in the day. Note to self: Try not to go out drinking right before the SAN fails. This caught us at an interesting time.  We’re in the process of migrating to an entirely new set of servers so some things were partially moved.  This made it difficult to follow our procedures as cleanly as we’d like.  The benefit was that we had much better documentation of everything on the server.  I would encourage everyone to really think through the process of implementing your DR plan and document as much as possible.  Following a checklist is much easier than trying to remember at night under pressure in a hurry after a few drinks. I had a series of estimates on how long things would take.  They were accurate for any single server failure.  They weren’t accurate for a SAN failure that took two servers down.  This wasn’t bad but we should have communicated better. Don’t forget how many things are outside the database.  Logins, linked servers, DTS packages (yikes!), jobs, service broker, DTC (especially DTC), database triggers and any objects in the master database are all things you need backed up.  We’d done a decent job on this and didn’t find significant problems here.  That said this still took a lot of time.  There were many annoyances as a result of this.  Small settings like a login’s default database had a big impact on whether an application could run.  This is probably the single biggest area of concern when looking to recreate a server.  I’d encourage everyone to go through every single node of SSMS and look for user created objects or settings outside the database. Script out your logins with the proper SID and already encrypted passwords and keep it updated.  This makes life so much easier.  I used an approach based on KB246133 that worked well.  I’ll get my scripts posted over the next few days. The disaster can cause your DR process to fail in unexpected ways.  We have a job that scripts out all logins and role memberships and writes it to a file.  This runs on the DR server and pulls from the production server.  Upon opening the file I found that the contents were a “server not found” error.  Fortunately we had other copies and didn’t need to try and restore the master database.  This now runs on the production server and pushes the script to the DR site.  Soon we’ll get it pushed to our version control software. One of the biggest challenges is keeping your DR resources up to date.  Any server change (new linked server, new SQL Server Agent job, etc.) means that your DR plan (and scripts) is out of date.  It helps to automate the generation of these resources if possible. Take time now to test your database restore process.  We test ours quarterly.  If you have a large database I’d also encourage you to invest in a compressed backup solution.  Restoring backups was the single larger consumer of time during our recovery. And yes, there’s a database mirroring solution planned in our new architecture. I didn’t have much involvement in things outside SQL Server but this caused many, many things to change in our environment.  Many applications today aren’t just executables or web sites.  They are a combination of those plus network infrastructure, reports, network ports, IP addresses, DTS and SSIS packages, batch systems and many other things.  These all needed a little bit of attention to make sure they were functioning properly. Profiler turned out to be a handy tool.  I started a trace for failed logins and kept that running.  That let me fix a number of problems before people were able to report them.  I also ran traces to capture exceptions.  This helped identify problems with linked servers. Overall the thing that gave me the most problem was linked servers.  In order for a linked server to function properly you need to be pointed to the right server, have the proper login information, have the network routes available and have MSDTC configured properly.  We have a lot of linked servers and this created many failure points.  Some of the older linked servers used IP addresses and not DNS names.  This meant we had to go in and touch all those linked servers when the servers moved.

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• Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It – book review

  - by DigiMortal

      How do our users see the products we are writing for them and how happy they are with our work? Are they able to get their work done without fighting with cool features and crashes or are they just switching off resistance part of their brain to survive our software? Yeah, the overall picture of software usability landscape is not very nice. Okay, it is not even nice. But, fortunately, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David S. Platt explains everything. Why Software Sucks… is book for software users but I consider it as a-must reading also for developers and specially for their managers whose politics often kills all usability topics as soon as they may appear. For managers usability is soft topic that can be manipulated the way it is best in current state of project. Although developers are not UI designers and usability experts they are still very often forced to deal with these topics and this is how usability problems start (of course, also designers are able to produce designs that are stupid and too hard to use for users, but this blog here is about development). I found this book to be very interesting and funny reading. It is not humor book but it explains you all so you remember later very well what you just read. It took me about three evenings to go through this book and I am still enjoying what I found and how author explains our weird young working field to end users. I suggest this book to all developers – while you are demanding your management to hire or outsource usability expert you are at least causing less pain to end users. So, go and buy this book, just like I did. And… they thanks to mr. Platt :) There is one book more I suggest you to read if you are interested in usability - Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Editorial review from Amazon Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out. As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s expose is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer’s face. But Dave hasn’t written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn’t. Table of contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Chapter 1: Who’re You Calling a Dummy? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Control versus Ease of Use I Don’t Care How Your Program Works A Bad Feature and a Good One Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy Testing on Live Animals Where We Are and What You Can Do Chapter 2: Tangled in the Web Where We Came From How It Works Why It Still Sucks Today Client-Centered Design versus Server-Centered Design Where’s My Eye Opener? It’s Obvious—Not! Splash, Flash, and Animation Testing on Live Animals What You Can Do about It Chapter 3: Keep Me Safe The Way It Was Why It Sucks Today What Programmers Need to Know, but Don’t A Human Operation Budgeting for Hassles Users Are Lazy Social Engineering Last Word on Security What You Can Do Chapter 4: Who the Heck Are You? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Incompatible Requirements OK, So Now What? Chapter 5: Who’re You Looking At? Yes, They Know You Why It Sucks More Than Ever Today Users Don’t Know Where the Risks Are What They Know First Milk You with Cookies? Privacy Policy Nonsense Covering Your Tracks The Google Conundrum Solution Chapter 6: Ten Thousand Geeks, Crazed on Jolt Cola See Them in Their Native Habitat All These Geeks Who Speaks, and When, and about What Selling It The Next Generation of Geeks—Passing It On Chapter 7: Who Are These Crazy Bastards Anyway? Homo Logicus Testosterone Poisoning Control and Contentment Making Models Geeks and Jocks Jargon Brains and Constraints Seven Habits of Geeks Chapter 8: Microsoft: Can’t Live With ’Em and Can’t Live Without ’Em They Run the World Me and Them Where We Came From Why It Sucks Today Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t We Love to Hate Them Plus ça Change Growing-Up Pains What You Can Do about It The Last Word Chapter 9: Doing Something About It 1. Buy 2. Tell 3. Ridicule 4. Trust 5. Organize Epilogue About the Author

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• Review of Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7

  - by mbcrump

  I recently acquired a Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 device from AT&T and wanted to share what I thought of it as an end-user. Before I get started, here are several of my write-ups for the Windows Phone 7. You may want to check out the second article titled: Hands-on WP7 Review of Prototype Hardware. From start to finish with the final version of Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone 7 Hands-on : Windows Phone 7 Review on Prototype Hardware. Deploying your Windows Phone 7 Application to the actual hardware. Profile your Windows Phone 7 Application for Free Submitting a Windows Phone 7 Application to the Market. Samsung Focus i917 Phone Size: Perfect! I have been carrying around a Dell Streak (Android) and it is about half the size. It is really nice to have a phone that fits in your pocket without a lot of extra bulk. I bought a case for the Focus and it is still a perfect size.  The phone just feels right. Screen: It has a beautiful Super AMOLED 480x800 screen. I only wish it supported a higher resolution. The colors are beautiful especially in an Xbox Live Game.   3G: I use AT&T and I've had spotty reception. This really can't be blamed on the phone as much as the actual carrier. Battery: I've had excellent battery life compared to my iPhone and Android devices. I usually use my phone throughout the day on and off and still have a charge at the end of the day.  Camera/Video: I'm still looking for the option to send the video to YouTube or the Image to Twitter. The images look good, but the phone needs a forward facing camera. I like the iPhone/Android (Dell Streak) camera better. Built-in Speaker: Sounds great. It’s not a wimpy speaker that you cannot hear.  CPU: Very smooth transitioning from one screen to another. The prototype Windows Phone 7 that I had, was no where near as smooth. (It was also running a slower processor though). OS: I actually like the OS but a few things could be better. CONS: Copy and Paste (Supposed to come in the next update) We need more apps (Pandora missing was a big one for me and Slacker’s advertisement sucks!). As time passes, and more developers get on board then this will be fixed. The browser needs some major work. I have tried to make cross-platform (WP7, Android, iPhone and iPad) web apps and the browser that ships with WP7 just can’t handle it.  Apps need to be organized better. Instead of throw them all on one screen, it would help to allow the user to create categories. PROS: Hands down the best gaming experience on a phone. I have all three major phones (iphone, android and wp7). Nothing compares to the gaming experience on the WP7. The phone just works. I’ve had a LOT of glitches with my Android device. I’ve had maybe 2 with my WP7 device. Exchange and Office support are great. Nice integration with Twitter/Facebook and social media. Easy to navigate and find the information you need on one screen. Let’s look at a few pictures and we will wrap up with my final thoughts on the phone. WP7 Home Screen. Back of the phone is as stylish. It is hard to see due to the shadow but it is a very thin phone. What’s included? Manuals Ear buds Data Cable plus Power Adapter Phone Click a picture to enlarge So, what are my final thoughts on the Phone/OS? I love the Samsung Focus and would recommend it to anyone looking for a WP7 device. Like any first generation product, you need to give it a little while to mature. Right now the phone is missing several features that we are all used to using. That doesn’t mean a year from now it will be in the same situation. (I sure hope we won’t). If you are looking to get into mobile development, I believe WP7 is the easiest platform to develop from. This is especially true if you have a background in Silverlight or WPF.    Subscribe to my feed

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• IIS 7.5 + Windows Server 2008 R2 + ASP.NET 4.0 HTTP 500 Error?

  - by Dave

  Hi, I'm having an issue I cannot track down and I have looked through the forums and not found anything that sheds any light. I have a fresh install of a Server 2008 R2 Web that I am trying to load an application I created and tested on a Windows 7 machine running IIS 7.5 using ASP.NET 4.0. Everything works fine on the dev machine. But when I used the Web Deployment tool to move it to the server, I now get a HTTP 500 error without a lot of information: Module AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification BeginRequest Handler StaticFile Error Code 0x80070002 Requested URL http://192.168.1.83:80/ Physical Path C:\JustStreamIt Logon Method Not yet determined Logon User Not yet determined Failed Request Tracing Log Directory C:\inetpub\logs\FailedReqLogFiles And in my trace file I get: view trace Warning -SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_DESCRIPTION ErrorDescription An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. view trace Warning -MODULE_SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_STATUS ModuleName AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification 1 HttpStatus 500 HttpReason Internal Server Error HttpSubStatus 0 ErrorCode 2147942402 ConfigExceptionInfo Notification BEGIN_REQUEST ErrorCode The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002) And I get the following in the Application Log: Log Name: Application Source: Microsoft-Windows-IIS-W3SVC-WP Date: 5/28/2010 2:08:10 PM Event ID: 2299 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: win-ltfkdo1dnfp Description: An application has reported as being unhealthy. The worker process will now request a recycle. Reason given: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. . The data is the error. Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-IIS-W3SVC-WP" Guid="{670080D9-742A-4187-8D16-41143D1290BD}" EventSourceName="W3SVC-WP" /> <EventID Qualifiers="49152">2299</EventID> <Version>0</Version> <Level>2</Level> <Task>0</Task> <Opcode>0</Opcode> <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2010-05-28T21:08:10.000000000Z" /> <EventRecordID>1663</EventRecordID> <Correlation /> <Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" /> <Channel>Application</Channel> <Computer>win-ltfkdo1dnfp</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data Name="Reason">An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. </Data> <Binary>02000780</Binary> </EventData> </Event> Anyone have a suggestion about where I should start looking?

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• Learn About Oracle’s Strategy for a Simple, Modern User Experience at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Applications User Experience

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience If you’re interested in what the best possible user experience looks like, you’ll want to hear what Oracle’s Applications User Experience team is planning for OpenWorld 2012, Sept. 30-Oct. 4 in San Francisco. This year, we will talk Fusion, Fusion, Fusion. We were among the first to show Oracle Fusion Applications in the last couple of years, and we’ll be showing it again this year so you can see what Oracle is planning for the next generation of enterprise applications. Attend our sessions to learn more about the user experience strategy in which Oracle is investing. Simplicity is the driving force behind the demos that we are unveiling now, which you can see at OpenWorld. We want to create opportunities for productivity and efficiency, and deliver enterprise data across devices to help you do your work in the way best suited to your job and needs, said Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Oracle Applications User Experience. You can see the new look for Fusion Applications at a general session led by Ashley at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3. You’ll also have the chance to learn more about tailoring in Oracle Fusion Applications, and gain a new understanding of the investment in the user experience behind Fusion Applications at our sessions (see session information below). Inside the Oracle Applications User Experience team’s on-site lab at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. Head to the demogrounds to see new demos from the Applications User Experience team, including the new look for Fusion Applications and what we’re building for mobile platforms. Take a spin on our eye tracker, a very cool tool that we use to research the usability of a particular design. Visit the Usable Apps OpenWorld page to find out where our demopods will be located. We are also recruiting participants for our on-site lab, in which we gather feedback on new user experience designs, and taking reservations for a charter bus that will bring you to Oracle headquarters for a lab tour Thursday, Oct. 4, or Friday, Oct. 5. Tours leave at 10 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. You’ll see more of our newest designs at the lab tour, and some of our research tools in action. Can’t participate in a customer feedback session or take a lab tour this time around? Visit Usable Apps to participate or book a tour another time. For more information on any OpenWorld sessions, check the content catalog – also available at www.oracle.com/openworld. For information on Applications User Experience (Apps UX) sessions and activities, go to the Usable Apps OpenWorld page. APPS UX OPENWORLD SESSIONS Oracle’s Roadmap to a Simple, Modern User Experience Presenter: Jeremy Ashley, Vice President Applications User Experience, Oracle; with Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Consulting; Basheer Khan, Innowave; and Edward Roske, InterRelSession ID: CON9467Date: Wednesday, Oct. 3 Time: 3:30 - 4:30 p.m.Location: Moscone West - 3002/3004 Jeremy Ashley Oracle Fusion Applications: Transforming Insight into Action Presenters: Killian Evers and Kristin Desmond, OracleSession ID: CON8718Date: Thursday, Oct. 4Time: 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.Location: Moscone West - 2008 “FRIENDS OF UX” OPENWORLD SESSIONS Sessions by the Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OUAB) members: Advances in Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance Manager  Presenters: Koen Delaure, KPMG Advisory NV, and Oracle Usability Advisory Board member; Russell Stohr, Oracle Session ID: CON9389Date: Tuesday, Oct. 2Time: 1:15 - 2:15 p.m.Location: Palace Hotel - Concert Optimize Oracle E-Busines Suite Procure-to-Pay: Cut Inefficiences/Fraud with Oracle GRC Apps Presenters: Koen Delaure, KPMG Advisory NV, and Solveig Wagner, Seadrill Management AS, both Oracle Usability Advisory Board members; and Swarnali Bag, OracleSession ID: CON9401Date: Monday, Oct. 1Time: 12:15 - 1:15 p.m.Location: Intercontinental - Sutter Showcase of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Mobility Presenters: Jon Wells, Westmoreland Coal Co., Oracle Usability Advisory Board member; Rob Mills and Liz Davson, Town of Oakville; Keith Sholes and Louise Farner, Oracle Session ID: CON9123Date: Tuesday, Oct. 2Time: 1:15 - 2:15 p.m.Location: InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B Sessions by the Fusion User Experience Adovcates (FXA) Usability and Features of Oracle Fusion Applications, Built upon Oracle Fusion Middleware Presenters: Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Consulting and Oracle Usability Advisory Board member; John King, King Training ResourcesSession ID: UGF10371Date: Sunday, Sept. 30Time: 11 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. Location: Moscone West – 2010 Ten Things to Love About Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management  Presenter: Floyd Teter, EiS TechnologiesSession ID: CON6021Date: Tuesday, Oct. 2Time: 10:15 - 11:15 a.m.Location: Moscone West – 2003

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• Tricks and Optimizations for you Sitecore website

  - by amaniar

  When working with Sitecore there are some optimizations/configurations I usually repeat in order to make my app production ready. Following is a small list I have compiled from experience, Sitecore documentation, communicating with Sitecore Engineers etc. This is not supposed to be technically complete and might not be fit for all environments.   Simple configurations that can make a difference: 1) Configure Sitecore Caches. This is the most straight forward and sure way of increasing the performance of your website. Data and item cache sizes (/databases/database/ [id=web] ) should be configured as needed. You may start with a smaller number and tune them as needed. <cacheSizes hint="setting"> <data>300MB</data> <items>300MB</items> <paths>5MB</paths> <standardValues>5MB</standardValues> </cacheSizes> Tune the html, registry etc cache sizes for your website.   <cacheSizes> <sites> <website> <html>300MB</html> <registry>1MB</registry> <viewState>10MB</viewState> <xsl>5MB</xsl> </website> </sites> </cacheSizes> Tune the prefetch cache settings under the App_Config/Prefetch/ folder. Sample /App_Config/Prefetch/Web.Config: <configuration> <cacheSize>300MB</cacheSize> <!--preload items that use this template--> <template desc="mytemplate">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</template> <!--preload this item--> <item desc="myitem">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX }</item> <!--preload children of this item--> <children desc="childitems">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</children> </configuration> Break your page into sublayouts so you may cache most of them. Read the caching configuration reference: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/sc62keywords/cache_configuration_reference_a4.pdf   2) Disable Analytics for the Shell Site <site name="shell" virtualFolder="/sitecore/shell" physicalFolder="/sitecore/shell" rootPath="/sitecore/content" startItem="/home" language="en" database="core" domain="sitecore" loginPage="/sitecore/login" content="master" contentStartItem="/Home" enableWorkflow="true" enableAnalytics="false" xmlControlPage="/sitecore/shell/default.aspx" browserTitle="Sitecore" htmlCacheSize="2MB" registryCacheSize="3MB" viewStateCacheSize="200KB" xslCacheSize="5MB" />   3) Increase the Check Interval for the MemoryMonitorHook so it doesn’t run every 5 seconds (default). <hook type="Sitecore.Diagnostics.MemoryMonitorHook, Sitecore.Kernel"> <param desc="Threshold">800MB</param> <param desc="Check interval">00:05:00</param> <param desc="Minimum time between log entries">00:01:00</param> <ClearCaches>false</ClearCaches> <GarbageCollect>false</GarbageCollect> <AdjustLoadFactor>false</AdjustLoadFactor> </hook>   4) Set Analytics.PeformLookup (Sitecore.Analytics.config) to false if your environment doesn’t have access to the internet or you don’t intend to use reverse DNS lookup. <setting name="Analytics.PerformLookup" value="false" />   5) Set the value of the “Media.MediaLinkPrefix” setting to “-/media”: <setting name="Media.MediaLinkPrefix" value="-/media" /> Add the following line to the customHandlers section: <customHandlers> <handler trigger="-/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/api/" handler="sitecore_api.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/xaml/" handler="sitecore_xaml.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/icon/" handler="sitecore_icon.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/feed/" handler="sitecore_feed.ashx" /> </customHandlers> Link: http://squad.jpkeisala.com/2011/10/sitecore-media-library-performance-optimization-checklist/   6) Performance counters should be disabled in production if not being monitored <setting name="Counters.Enabled" value="false" />   7) Disable Item/Memory/Timing threshold warnings. Due to the nature of this component, it brings no value in production. <!--<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.StartMeasurements, Sitecore.Kernel" />--> <!--<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.StopMeasurements, Sitecore.Kernel"> <TimingThreshold desc="Milliseconds">1000</TimingThreshold> <ItemThreshold desc="Item count">1000</ItemThreshold> <MemoryThreshold desc="KB">10000</MemoryThreshold> </processor>—>   8) The ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections setting is a hidden setting in the web.config file, which by default is true. Setting it to false will improve client performance for authoring environments. <setting name="ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections" value="false" />   9) Add a machineKey section to your Web.Config file when using a web farm. Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649308.aspx   10) If you get errors in the log files similar to: WARN Could not create an instance of the counter 'XXX.XXX' (category: 'Sitecore.System') Exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException Message: Access to the registry key 'Global' is denied. Make sure the ApplicationPool user is a member of the system “Performance Monitor Users” group on the server.   11) Disable WebDAV configurations on the CD Server if not being used. More: http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2011/04/disable-webdav-in-sitecore.html   12) Change Log4Net settings to only log Errors on content delivery environments to avoid unnecessary logging. <root> <priority value="ERROR" /> <appender-ref ref="LogFileAppender" /> </root>   13) Disable Analytics for any content item that doesn’t add value. For example a page that redirects to another page.   14) When using Web User Controls avoid registering them on the page the asp.net way: <%@ Register Src="~/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" TagName="MyControl" TagPrefix="uc2" %> Use Sublayout web control instead – This way Sitecore caching could be leveraged <sc:Sublayout ID="ID" Path="/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" Cacheable="true" runat="server" />   15) Avoid querying for all children recursively when all items are direct children. Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectItems("/sitecore/content/Home//*"); //Use: Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem("/sitecore/content/Home");   16) On IIS — you enable static & dynamic content compression on CM and CD More: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754668%28WS.10%29.aspx   17) Enable HTTP Keep-alive and content expiration in IIS.   18) Use GUID’s when accessing items and fields instead of names or paths. Its faster and wont break your code when things get moved or renamed. Context.Database.GetItem("{324DFD16-BD4F-4853-8FF1-D663F6422DFF}") Context.Item.Fields["{89D38A8F-394E-45B0-826B-1A826CF4046D}"]; //is better than Context.Database.GetItem("/Home/MyItem") Context.Item.Fields["FieldName"]   Hope this helps.

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• HR According to Batman

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Any idea who that guy is running alongside the Caped Crusader? That’s Nightwing, but you may know him as Robin…well, the first Robin anyway. There were actually like 5 Robin’s according to Wikipedia: Dick Grayson, the original, who’s parents were circus performers killed by a gangster. Jason Todd, who was caught trying to steal tires off of the Batmobile. Tim Drake, who saw Dick’s parents die and figured out who Batman and Robin were. and a few others that get into recent time travel/altered reality storylines. What does this have to do with HR? Well, it somewhat ties in with an article by Alex Papadimoulis from 2008. In the article he talks about the “Cravath System”. The Craveth system was developed by a law firm called Cravath, Swaine & Moore back in the 19th century. In a nutshell, they believed in hiring the best and brightest straight out of school. These aspiring lawyers would then begin a fight for survival in the firm, with the strong surviving. In what’s termed the “Up and Out” rule, employees needed to be promoted within 3 years or leave the company. They should achieve partner within 7 – 8 years and no later than 10 after initially coming on board (read all about the system on Wikipedia here). Back to Alex’s article, he quotes from a book published in 1947 about the lawfirm: Under the “Cravath system” of taking a substantial number of men annually and keeping a current constantly moving up in the office, and its philosophy of tenure, men are constantly leaving… it is often difficult to keep the best men long enough to determine whether they shall be made partners, for Cravath-trained men are always in demand, usually at premium salaries. And so we see a pattern forming here: 1. Hire a whole whack of smart college graduates 2. Put them to work 3. The ones that stick around should move up the ladder. The ones that don’t stick around served the company well and left to expound the quality of the Cravath firm. Those that didn’t fall into either of those categories were just let go. There’s some interesting undercurrents to these ideas. If you stick around, you better keep your feet moving! I was at a Microsoft shindig a few months back, and was talking to a Microsoft employee. He shared that at MS you have 5 years to achieve a “senior” position within the company. Once you hit that mark, you can stay there for the rest of your career (he told about a guy who’s a “senior” developer and has been for the last 20+ years working on audio drivers for Windows), but you *must* hit that mark within the timeframe. What we see with Microsoft is Cravath’s system in action, whether intentional or not: bring in smart young people and see which ones stick. You need to give people something to work towards. Saying “You must reach this level or else!” is one way to look at it. The other way is to see achieving a higher rank in the organization as something for ambitious employees to reach towards. It’s important for an organization to always have the next generation of executives waiting in the wings, and unless you’re encouraging that early on you may find yourself in a position of needing to fill positions that nobody has been working towards. Now, you might suggest that this isn’t that big of a deal because you could just hire someone from outside the organization, but the Cravath system holds to the tenet of promoting internally; develop your own talent, since your business is the best place for the future leadership to learn teh business from. It’s OK for people to quit. Alex’s article really drives this point home, but its worth noting here also: its OK for your people to quit. In fact its inevitable…and more inevitable that it’ll be good people that leave. Some will stay and work towards the internal awards of promotion, but a number will get experience, serve the organization well, and then move on to something else. This should be expected and treated as a natural business occurrence. The idea of an alumni of an organization begins to come into play here: “That guy used to work for <insert company here>”. There’s a benefit in that: those best and brightest will be drawn to your organization and your reputation will permeate your market through former staff that are sought after because of how well you nurtured them. The Batman Hook All of this brings us back to Batman and his HR practice: when Dick decided he’d had enough of the Robin schtick, he quit and became his own…but he was always associated with Batman and people understood where his training had come from. To the Dark Knight’s credit, he continued training partners under the Robin brand. Luckily he didn’t have to worry about firing any of them (the ship sort of sails when you reveal a secret identity), although there was that unfortunate “quitting” of the second Robin when the Joker blew him up…but regardless, we see the Cravath system at work: bring in talent, expect great things, and be ok with whatever they decide for their careers. It’s an interesting way to approach HR, and luckily for us our business isn’t as dangerous or over-the-top as the caped crusader’s.

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• And the Winners of Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards in Data Integration are…

  - by Irem Radzik

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} At OpenWorld, we announced the winners of Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2012. Raymond James and Morrison Supermarkets were selected for the data integration category for their innovative use of Oracle’s data integration products and the great results they have achieved. In this blog I would like to briefly introduce you to these award winning projects. Raymond James is a diversified financial services company, which provides financial planning, wealth management, investment banking, and asset management. They are using Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator to feed their operational data store (ODS), which supports application services across the enterprise. A major requirement for their project was low data latency, as key decisions are made based on the data in the ODS. They were able to fulfill this requirement due to the Oracle Data Integrator’s integrated solution with Oracle GoldenGate. Oracle GoldenGate captures changed data from different systems including Oracle Database, HP NonStop and Microsoft SQL Server into a single data store on SQL Server 2008. Oracle Data Integrator provides data transformations for the ODS. Leveraging ODI’s integration with GoldenGate, Raymond James now sees a 9 second median latency (from source commit to ODS target commit). The ODS solution delivers high quality, accurate data for consuming applications such as Raymond James’ next generation client and portfolio management systems as well as real-time operational reporting. It enables timely information for making better decisions. There are more benefits Raymond James achieved with this implementation of Oracle’s data integration solution. The software developers and architects of this solution, Tim Garrod and Ryan Fonnett, have told us during their presentation at OpenWorld that they also reduced application complexity significantly while improving developer productivity through trusted operational services. They were able to utilize CDC to generate alerts for business users, and for applications (for example for cache hydration mechanisms). One cool innovation example among many in this project is that using ODI's flexible architecture, Tim and Ryan could build 24/7 self-healing processes. And these processes have hardly failed. Integration processes fixes the errors itself. Pretty amazing; and a great solution for environments that need such reliability and availability. (You can see Tim and Ryan’s photo with the Innovation Award above.) The other winner of this year in the data integration category, Morrison Supermarkets, is the UK’s 4th largest grocery retailer. The company has been migrating all their legacy applications on to a new-world application set based on Oracle and consolidating all BI on to a single Oracle platform. The company recently implemented Oracle Exadata as the data warehouse engine and uses Oracle Business Intelligence EE. Their goal with deploying GoldenGate and ODI was to provide BI data to the enterprise in a way that it also supports operational decision making requirements from a wide range of Oracle based ERP applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail Suite. They use GoldenGate’s log-based change data capture capabilities and Oracle Data Integrator to populate the Oracle Retail Data Model. The electronic point of sale (EPOS) integration solution they built processes over 80 million transactions/day at busy periods in near real time (15 mins). It provides valuable insight to Retail and Commercial teams for both intra-day and historical trend analysis. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, the right data integration platform can transform the business. Here is another example: The point-of-sale integration enabled the grocery chain to optimize its stock management, leading to another award: Morrisons won the Grocer 33 award in 2012 - beating all other major UK supermarkets in product availability. Congratulations, Morrisons,on another award! Celebrating the innovation and the success of our customers with Oracle’s data integration products was definitely a highlight of Oracle OpenWorld for me. I look forward to hearing more from Raymond James, Morrisons, and the other customers that presented their data integration projects at OpenWorld, on how they are creating more value for their organizations.

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• NET Math Libraries

  - by JoshReuben

  NET Mathematical Libraries   .NET Builder for Matlab The MathWorks Inc. - http://www.mathworks.com/products/netbuilder/ MATLAB Builder NE generates MATLAB based .NET and COM components royalty-free deployment creates the components by encrypting MATLAB functions and generating either a .NET or COM wrapper around them. .NET/Link for Mathematica www.wolfram.com a product that 2-way integrates Mathematica and Microsoft's .NET platform call .NET from Mathematica - use arbitrary .NET types directly from the Mathematica language. use and control the Mathematica kernel from a .NET program. turns Mathematica into a scripting shell to leverage the computational services of Mathematica. write custom front ends for Mathematica or use Mathematica as a computational engine for another program comes with full source code. Leverages MathLink - a Wolfram Research's protocol for sending data and commands back and forth between Mathematica and other programs. .NET/Link abstracts the low-level details of the MathLink C API. Extreme Optimization http://www.extremeoptimization.com/ a collection of general-purpose mathematical and statistical classes built for the.NET framework. It combines a math library, a vector and matrix library, and a statistics library in one package. download the trial of version 4.0 to try it out. Multi-core ready - Full support for Task Parallel Library features including cancellation. Broad base of algorithms covering a wide range of numerical techniques, including: linear algebra (BLAS and LAPACK routines), numerical analysis (integration and differentiation), equation solvers. Mathematics leverages parallelism using .NET 4.0's Task Parallel Library. Basic math: Complex numbers, 'special functions' like Gamma and Bessel functions, numerical differentiation. Solving equations: Solve equations in one variable, or solve systems of linear or nonlinear equations. Curve fitting: Linear and nonlinear curve fitting, cubic splines, polynomials, orthogonal polynomials. Optimization: find the minimum or maximum of a function in one or more variables, linear programming and mixed integer programming. Numerical integration: Compute integrals over finite or infinite intervals, over 2D and higher dimensional regions. Integrate systems of ordinary differential equations (ODE's). Fast Fourier Transforms: 1D and 2D FFT's using managed or fast native code (32 and 64 bit) BigInteger, BigRational, and BigFloat: Perform operations with arbitrary precision. Vector and Matrix Library Real and complex vectors and matrices. Single and double precision for elements. Structured matrix types: including triangular, symmetrical and band matrices. Sparse matrices. Matrix factorizations: LU decomposition, QR decomposition, singular value decomposition, Cholesky decomposition, eigenvalue decomposition. Portability and performance: Calculations can be done in 100% managed code, or in hand-optimized processor-specific native code (32 and 64 bit). Statistics Data manipulation: Sort and filter data, process missing values, remove outliers, etc. Supports .NET data binding. Statistical Models: Simple, multiple, nonlinear, logistic, Poisson regression. Generalized Linear Models. One and two-way ANOVA. Hypothesis Tests: 12 14 hypothesis tests, including the z-test, t-test, F-test, runs test, and more advanced tests, such as the Anderson-Darling test for normality, one and two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, and Levene's test for homogeneity of variances. Multivariate Statistics: K-means cluster analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), multivariate probability distributions. Statistical Distributions: 25 29 continuous and discrete statistical distributions, including uniform, Poisson, normal, lognormal, Weibull and Gumbel (extreme value) distributions. Random numbers: Random variates from any distribution, 4 high-quality random number generators, low discrepancy sequences, shufflers. New in version 4.0 (November, 2010) Support for .NET Framework Version 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 TPL Parallellized – multicore ready sparse linear program solver - can solve problems with more than 1 million variables. Mixed integer linear programming using a branch and bound algorithm. special functions: hypergeometric, Riemann zeta, elliptic integrals, Frensel functions, Dawson's integral. Full set of window functions for FFT's. Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $999  $399  Team License (3 developers) $1999  $799  Department License (8 developers) $3999  $1599  Site License (Unlimited developers in one physical location) $7999  $3199    NMath http://www.centerspace.net .NET math and statistics libraries matrix and vector classes random number generators Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) numerical integration linear programming linear regression curve and surface fitting optimization hypothesis tests analysis of variance (ANOVA) probability distributions principal component analysis cluster analysis built on the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL), which contains highly-optimized, extensively-threaded versions of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) and LAPACK (Linear Algebra PACKage). Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $1295 $388 Team License (5 developers) $5180 $1554   DotNumerics http://www.dotnumerics.com/NumericalLibraries/Default.aspx free DotNumerics is a website dedicated to numerical computing for .NET that includes a C# Numerical Library for .NET containing algorithms for Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Optimization problems. The Linear Algebra library includes CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack, ports from Fortran to C# of LAPACK, BLAS and EISPACK, respectively. Linear Algebra (CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack). Systems of linear equations, eigenvalue problems, least-squares solutions of linear systems and singular value problems. Differential Equations. Initial-value problem for nonstiff and stiff ordinary differential equations ODEs (explicit Runge-Kutta, implicit Runge-Kutta, Gear's BDF and Adams-Moulton). Optimization. Unconstrained and bounded constrained optimization of multivariate functions (L-BFGS-B, Truncated Newton and Simplex methods).   Math.NET Numerics http://numerics.mathdotnet.com/ free an open source numerical library - includes special functions, linear algebra, probability models, random numbers, interpolation, integral transforms. A merger of dnAnalytics with Math.NET Iridium in addition to a purely managed implementation will also support native hardware optimization. constants & special functions complex type support real and complex, dense and sparse linear algebra (with LU, QR, eigenvalues, ... decompositions) non-uniform probability distributions, multivariate distributions, sample generation alternative uniform random number generators descriptive statistics, including order statistics various interpolation methods, including barycentric approaches and splines numerical function integration (quadrature) routines integral transforms, like fourier transform (FFT) with arbitrary lengths support, and hartley spectral-space aware sequence manipulation (signal processing) combinatorics, polynomials, quaternions, basic number theory. parallelized where appropriate, to leverage multi-core and multi-processor systems fully managed or (if available) using native libraries (Intel MKL, ACMS, CUDA, FFTW) provides a native facade for F# developers

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• WordPress SEO Plugins to make your Blog Search Engine Friendly

  - by Vaibhav

  WordPress is the most common blogging system in use today and its use as a CMS is also wide spread. With hundreds of millions of sites using wordpress, getting correct SEO for your WordPress based Blog or Site is very important. We get regular queries from people who want Search Engine Optimisation for their site or blog which is made using wordpress. Here is a list of 16 of the best WordPress Plug-ins That can help you achieve better rankings: All in one SEO Pack This is most popular plugin among all SEO plugins for WordPress. It is easy to use and is compatible with most of the WordPress plugins. It works as a complete package of SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizing search engines for your titles and avoiding duplicate content. You can also include META tags manually (Met title, Meta description and Met keywords) for all pages and post in your website. HeadSpace2 HeasSpace2 is available in different languages , you can manage a wide range of SEO Tasks related with meta data, you can tag your posts, Custom descriptions and titles. So your page can rank the created relevancy on Search engines and you can load different settings for different pages. Platinum SEO plugin Automatic 301 redirects permalink changes, META tags generation, avoids duplicate content, and does SEO optimization of post and page titles and a lots of other features. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin It’s a modified version of all-in-one SEO Pack. It has some unique feature over All-in-one SEO plugin, It generate titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords automatically when overrides are not present. Google XML Sitemaps Sitemaps Generated by this tool are supported by  Google,  Yahoo,  Bing, and Ask. We all know Sitemaps make indexing of web pages easier for web crawlers. Crawlers can retrieve complete structure of site and more information by sitemaps. They notify all major search engines about new posts every time you create a new post. Sitemap Generator You can generate highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress page. You can choose what to show and what not to show, you can list the items in your choice of orde. It supports pages and permalinks and multi-level categories. SEO Slugs They can generate more search engine friendly URLs for your site. Slugs are filename assigned to your post , this plugin removes all  common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘what’, ‘you’ from slug which are assigned automatically to your post. SEO Post Links This is a similar plugin to SEO Slug, it removes unnecessary keywords from slug to make it short and SEO friendly and you can fix the number of characters in your post. Automatic SEO links With this tool you can create auto linking in your post. You can use this tool for inter linking or external linking too. Just select your words, anchor text target URL nature of links ( Do fallow / No follow ). This plugin will replace the matches found in post, WP Backlinks A helpful plugin for link exchange , whenever any webmaster submits a link for link exchange, the plugin will spider webmasters site for reciprocal link, and if everything is found good , your link will be exchanged. SEO Title Tag You can optimize your Title  tags of  Word press blog through this plugin . You can also override the title tag with custom titles , mass editing and title tags for 404 pages which are the main feature of this plugin. 404 SEO plugin With this Plugin you can customize 404 page of your site; you can give customized error message and links to relevant pages of your site. Redirection A powerful plugins to manage 301 redirection and logs related with redirection, with this plugin you can track 404 errors and track the log of all redirected URLs , this plugin can redirect  post automatically when URL changes for that post. AddToAny This plugin helps your readers to share, save, email and bookmark your posts and pages. It supports more than a hundred social bookmarking , networking and sharing sites. SEO Friendly Images You can make SEO friendly images available on your site with the help of this tool. It updates images with proper titles and ALT tags. Robots Meta A plugin which prevents Search engines to index comments on your post, login and admin pages. It also allows to add tags for individual pages.

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• How to Automate your Database Documentation

  - by Jonathan Hickford

  In my previous post, “Automating Deployments with SQL Compare command line” I looked at how teams can automate the deployment and post deployment validation of SQL Server databases using the command line versions of Red Gate tools. In this post I’m looking at another use for the command line tools, namely using them to generate up-to-date documentation with every database change. There are many reasons why up-to-date documentation is valuable. For example when somebody new has to work on or administer a database for the first time, or when a new database comes into service. Having database documentation reduces the risks of making incorrect decisions when making changes. Documentation is very useful to business intelligence analysts when writing reports, for example in SSRS. There are a couple of great examples talking about why up to date documentation is valuable on this site:  Database Documentation – Lands of Trolls: Why and How? and Database Documentation Using SQL Doc. The short answer is that it can save you time and reduce risk when you need that most! SQL Doc is a fast simple tool that automatically generates database documentation. It can create documents in HTML, Word or pdf files. The documentation contains information about object definitions and dependencies, along with any other information you want to associate with each object. The SQL Doc GUI, which is included in Red Gate’s SQL Developer Bundle and SQL Toolbelt, allows you to add additional notes to objects, and customise which objects are shown in the docs.  These settings can be saved as a .sqldoc project file. The SQL Doc command line can use this project file to automatically update the documentation every time the database is changed, ensuring that documentation that is always up to date. The simplest way to keep documentation up to date is probably to use a scheduled task to run a script every day. However if you have a source controlled database, or are using a Continuous Integration (CI) server or a build server, it may make more sense to use that instead. If  you’re using SQL Source Control or SSDT Database Projects to help version control your database, you can automatically update the documentation after each change is made to the source control repository that contains your database. To get this automation in place,  you can use the functionality of a Continuous Integration (CI) server, which can trigger commands to run when a source control repository has changed. A CI server will also capture and save the documentation that is created as an artifact, so you can always find the exact documentation for a specific version of the database. This forms an always up to date data dictionary. If you don’t already have a CI server in place there are several you can use, such as the free open source Jenkins or the free starter editions of TeamCity. I won’t cover setting these up in this article, but there is information about using CI servers for automating database tasks on the Red Gate Database Delivery webpage. You may be interested in Red Gate’s SQL CI utility (part of the SQL Automation Pack) which is an easy way to update a database with the latest changes from source control. The PowerShell example below shows how to create the documentation from a database. That database might be your integration database or a shared development database that is always up to date with the latest changes. $serverName = "server\instance" $databaseName = "databaseName" # If you want to document multiple databases use a comma separated list $userName = "username" $password = "password" # Path to SQLDoc.exe $SQLDocPath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Doc 3\SQLDoc.exe" $arguments = @( "/server:$($serverName)", "/database:$($databaseName)", "/username:$($userName)", "/password:$($password)", "/filetype:html", "/outputfolder:.", # "/project:$args[0]", # If you already have a .sqldoc project file you can pass it as an argument to this script. Values in the project will be overridden with any options set on the command line "/name:$databaseName Report", "/copyrightauthor:$([Environment]::UserName)" ) write-host $arguments & $SQLDocPath $arguments There are several options you can set on the command line to vary how your documentation is created. For example, you can document multiple databases or exclude certain types of objects. In the example above, we set the name of the report to match the database name, and use the current Windows user as the documentation author. For more examples of how you can customise the report from the command line please see the SQL Doc command line documentation If you already have a .sqldoc project file, or wish to further customise the report by including or excluding specific objects, you can use this project on the command line. Any settings you specify on the command line will override the defaults in the project. For details of what you can customise in the project please see the SQL Doc project documentation. In the example above, the line to use a project is commented out, but you can uncomment this line and then pass a path to a .sqldoc project file as an argument to this script.  Conclusion Keeping documentation about your databases up to date is very easy to set up using SQL Doc and PowerShell. By using a CI server to run this process you can trigger the documentation to be run on every change to a source controlled database, and keep historic documentation available. If you are considering more advanced database automation, e.g. database unit testing, change script generation, deploying to large numbers of targets and backup/verification, please email me at [email protected] for further script samples or if you have any questions.

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• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Martijn Verburg

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top-rated speakers at each JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers, who, through conference surveys, recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have been so recognized. Martijn Verburg has, in recent years, established himself as an important mover and shaker in the Java community. His “Diabolical Developer” session at the JavaOne 2011 Conference got people’s attention by identifying some of the worst practices Java developers are prone to engage in. Among other things, he is co-leader and organizer of the thriving London Java User Group (JUG) which has more than 2,500 members, co-represents the London JUG on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, and leads the global effort for the Java User Group “Adopt a JSR” and “Adopt OpenJDK” programs. Career highlights include overhauling technology stacks and SDLC practices at Mizuho International, mentoring Oracle on technical community management, and running off shore development teams for AIG. He is currently CTO at jClarity, a start-up focusing on automating optimization for Java/JVM related technologies, and Product Advisor at ZeroTurnaround. He co-authored, with Ben Evans, "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" published by Manning and, as a leading authority on technical team optimization, he is in high demand at major software conferences.Verburg is participating in five sessions, a busy man indeed. Here they are: CON6152 - Modern Software Development Antipatterns (with Ben Evans) UGF10434 - JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs’ “Adopt” Programs in Your Group (with Csaba Toth) BOF4047 - OpenJDK Building and Testing: Case Study—Java User Group OpenJDK Bugathon (with Ben Evans and Cecilia Borg) BOF6283 - 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters (with Bruno Souza and Heather Vancura-Chilson) HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz, Kirk Pepperdine, Ellen Kraffmiller and Henri Tremblay) When I asked Verburg about the biggest mistakes Java developers tend to make, he listed three: A lack of communication -- Software development is far more a social activity than a technical one; most projects fail because of communication issues and social dynamics, not because of a bad technical decision. Sadly, many developers never learn this lesson. No source control -- Developers simply storing code in local filesystems and emailing code in order to integrate Design-driven Design -- The need for some developers to cram every design pattern from the Gang of Four (GoF) book into their source code All of which raises the question: If these practices are so bad, why do developers engage in them? “I've seen a wide gamut of reasons,” said Verburg, who lists them as: * They were never taught at high school/university that their bad habits were harmful.* They weren't mentored in their first professional roles.* They've lost passion for their craft.* They're being deliberately malicious!* They think software development is a technical activity and not a social one.* They think that they'll be able to tidy it up later.A couple of key confusions and misconceptions beset Java developers, according to Verburg. “With Java and the JVM in particular I've seen a couple of trends,” he remarked. “One is that developers think that the JVM is a magic box that will clean up their memory, make their code run fast, as well as make them cups of coffee. The JVM does help in a lot of cases, but bad code can and will still lead to terrible results! The other trend is to try and force Java (the language) to do something it's not very good at, such as rapid web development. So you get a proliferation of overly complex frameworks, libraries and techniques trying to get around the fact that Java is a monolithic, statically typed, compiled, OO environment. It's not a Golden Hammer!”I asked him about the keys to running a good Java User Group. “You need to have a ‘Why,’” he observed. “Many user groups know what they do (typically, events) and how they do it (the logistics), but what really drives users to join your group and to stay is to give them a purpose. For example, within the LJC we constantly talk about the ‘Why,’ which in our case is several whys:* Re-ignite the passion that developers have for their craft* Raise the bar of Java developers in London* We want developers to have a voice in deciding the future of Java* We want to inspire the next generation of tech leaders* To bring the disparate tech groups in London together* So we could learn from each other* We believe that the Java ecosystem forms a cornerstone of our society today -- we want to protect that for the futureLooking ahead to Java 8 Verburg expressed excitement about Lambdas. “I cannot wait for Lambdas,” he enthused. “Brian Goetz and his group are doing a great job, especially given some of the backwards compatibility that they have to maintain. It's going to remove a lot of boiler plate and yet maintain readability, plus enable massive scaling.”Check out Martijn Verburg at JavaOne if you get a chance, and, stay tuned for a longer interview yours truly did with Martijn to be publish on otn/java some time after JavaOne. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Martijn Verburg

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top-rated speakers at each JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers, who, through conference surveys, recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have been so recognized. Martijn Verburg has, in recent years, established himself as an important mover and shaker in the Java community. His “Diabolical Developer” session at the JavaOne 2011 Conference got people’s attention by identifying some of the worst practices Java developers are prone to engage in. Among other things, he is co-leader and organizer of the thriving London Java User Group (JUG) which has more than 2,500 members, co-represents the London JUG on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, and leads the global effort for the Java User Group “Adopt a JSR” and “Adopt OpenJDK” programs. Career highlights include overhauling technology stacks and SDLC practices at Mizuho International, mentoring Oracle on technical community management, and running off shore development teams for AIG. He is currently CTO at jClarity, a start-up focusing on automating optimization for Java/JVM related technologies, and Product Advisor at ZeroTurnaround. He co-authored, with Ben Evans, "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" published by Manning and, as a leading authority on technical team optimization, he is in high demand at major software conferences.Verburg is participating in five sessions, a busy man indeed. Here they are: CON6152 - Modern Software Development Antipatterns (with Ben Evans) UGF10434 - JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs’ “Adopt” Programs in Your Group (with Csaba Toth) BOF4047 - OpenJDK Building and Testing: Case Study—Java User Group OpenJDK Bugathon (with Ben Evans and Cecilia Borg) BOF6283 - 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters (with Bruno Souza and Heather Vancura-Chilson) HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz, Kirk Pepperdine, Ellen Kraffmiller and Henri Tremblay) When I asked Verburg about the biggest mistakes Java developers tend to make, he listed three: A lack of communication -- Software development is far more a social activity than a technical one; most projects fail because of communication issues and social dynamics, not because of a bad technical decision. Sadly, many developers never learn this lesson. No source control -- Developers simply storing code in local filesystems and emailing code in order to integrate Design-driven Design -- The need for some developers to cram every design pattern from the Gang of Four (GoF) book into their source code All of which raises the question: If these practices are so bad, why do developers engage in them? “I've seen a wide gamut of reasons,” said Verburg, who lists them as: * They were never taught at high school/university that their bad habits were harmful.* They weren't mentored in their first professional roles.* They've lost passion for their craft.* They're being deliberately malicious!* They think software development is a technical activity and not a social one.* They think that they'll be able to tidy it up later.A couple of key confusions and misconceptions beset Java developers, according to Verburg. “With Java and the JVM in particular I've seen a couple of trends,” he remarked. “One is that developers think that the JVM is a magic box that will clean up their memory, make their code run fast, as well as make them cups of coffee. The JVM does help in a lot of cases, but bad code can and will still lead to terrible results! The other trend is to try and force Java (the language) to do something it's not very good at, such as rapid web development. So you get a proliferation of overly complex frameworks, libraries and techniques trying to get around the fact that Java is a monolithic, statically typed, compiled, OO environment. It's not a Golden Hammer!”I asked him about the keys to running a good Java User Group. “You need to have a ‘Why,’” he observed. “Many user groups know what they do (typically, events) and how they do it (the logistics), but what really drives users to join your group and to stay is to give them a purpose. For example, within the LJC we constantly talk about the ‘Why,’ which in our case is several whys:* Re-ignite the passion that developers have for their craft* Raise the bar of Java developers in London* We want developers to have a voice in deciding the future of Java* We want to inspire the next generation of tech leaders* To bring the disparate tech groups in London together* So we could learn from each other* We believe that the Java ecosystem forms a cornerstone of our society today -- we want to protect that for the futureLooking ahead to Java 8 Verburg expressed excitement about Lambdas. “I cannot wait for Lambdas,” he enthused. “Brian Goetz and his group are doing a great job, especially given some of the backwards compatibility that they have to maintain. It's going to remove a lot of boiler plate and yet maintain readability, plus enable massive scaling.”Check out Martijn Verburg at JavaOne if you get a chance, and, stay tuned for a longer interview yours truly did with Martijn to be publish on otn/java some time after JavaOne.

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• Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners 2012: ADF & Fusion Development

  - by Dana Singleterry

  Normal 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards honor customers for their cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. The awards were presented during Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and following winners are for the category of ADF & Fusion Development. Micros – an OPN Platinum partner – has been working closely with Oracle product management teams in applying industry best practices in the development of their solutions. Their current application suite for the hospitality industry was built on Oracle Forms and the Oracle database running on MS Windows. The next generation of this suite is being developed and released in modules that are now based on Oracle FMW (including ADF) 11g technologies and Oracle Database 11g all running on Oracle Linux. The primary driver was that of modernization and hence the reason Oracle ADF was selected to provide a rich UI for business processes that could be served up through traditional methods or through mobile devices globally. SOA Suite & ADF allowed for loosely-coupled services that could evolve with the needs of the business. Micros's application innovations includes the use of business application portlets that have been published from ADF Faces Task Flows generated using WebCenter portlet libraries  & Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) with multi-layered customizations using Oracle WebCenter Composer. PCS (Marfin Egnatia Bank of Greece) – PCS Wealth Management is a WM Software Solution, which captures and automates the WM business processes allowing Service Providers to allocate enough time and effort into Customer Service and Investment Strategies, under Advisory or Execution-Only Services. The Product is built upon the latest Web Technologies and ensures Best Practices covering all functional expectations, meeting local regulatory requirements and discovering successful opportunities for the WM Customers' Portfolios. The new unified Wealth Management system offers an unparalleled User Interface taking full advantage of the user friendly ADF Faces Components to a great extent, all serving Private Banking purposes. The application offers a true Account Officer Cockpit with shallow navigation, one-click access to informed decisions and a perfect customer service. ADF Grids and Pivots, the Data Visualization Components, as well as the Calendar and Map Components are cleverly used to help the user eliminate the usage of Excel, Outlook and other systems. PCS's application is unique in the way it leverages the ADF Faces data visualization components to create a truly attractive and insightful dashboard for their application. PCS Wealth Management Demo Qualcomm – Qualcomm, a $17B per year company, designs and sells semiconductor products for wireless telecommunications, mobile and computing markets. In addition, Qualcomm companies provide various hardware and software products to facilitate the design, development and deployment of phones and the applications that run on them. Qualcomm’s challenge has been to not only develop and deploy new business system functions to keep pace with customer demand, but also to provide a customer collaboration capability that is sufficiently robust, easy to use, and flexible to meet emerging and future needs. Qualcomm has taken successful steps in building and deploying the customer engagement platform Ieveraging various Oracle technologies including Fusion Middleware (ADF, SOA, OBIEE) and their proven ERP foundation of EBS and 11g databases. The new platform delivers a more unified and “seamless” business solution with a consistent, modern “look and feel” all based on standard business processes which facilitate efficient collaboration with Qualcomm and its customers. The look and feel leverages ADF in innovative ways and includes hover over navigation, custom pagination components, and skinning. Qualcomm has exposed a services layer that provides significant functionality including order-to-ship, quote-to-order, customer on-boarding and contract validation. Qualcomm's creative designs leverage Oracle's SOA Suite to integrate with Oracle EBS and desperate applications to provide a rich user interface through the use use of Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components providing a self-service solution to their customers.

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• CLR via C# 3rd Edition is out

  - by Abhijeet Patel

  Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition of the book was an absolute treat and this edition promises to be no less. Here is a brief description of what’s new and updated from the 2nd edition. Part I – CLR Basics Chapter 1-The CLR’s Execution Model Added about discussion about C#’s /optimize and /debug switches and how they relate to each other. Chapter 2-Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types Improved discussion about Win32 manifest information and version resource information. Chapter 3-Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies Added discussion of TypeForwardedToAttribute and TypeForwardedFromAttribute. Part II – Designing Types Chapter 4-Type Fundamentals No new topics. Chapter 5-Primitive, Reference, and Value Types Enhanced discussion of checked and unchecked code and added discussion of new BigInteger type. Also added discussion of C# 4.0’s dynamic primitive type. Chapter 6-Type and Member Basics No new topics. Chapter 7-Constants and Fields No new topics. Chapter 8-Methods Added discussion of extension methods and partial methods. Chapter 9-Parameters Added discussion of optional/named parameters and implicitly-typed local variables. Chapter 10-Properties Added discussion of automatically-implemented properties, properties and the Visual Studio debugger, object and collection initializers, anonymous types, the System.Tuple type and the ExpandoObject type. Chapter 11-Events Added discussion of events and thread-safety as well as showing a cool extension method to simplify the raising of an event. Chapter 12-Generics Added discussion of delegate and interface generic type argument variance. Chapter 13-Interfaces No new topics. Part III – Essential Types Chapter 14-Chars, Strings, and Working with Text No new topics. Chapter 15-Enums Added coverage of new Enum and Type methods to access enumerated type instances. Chapter 16-Arrays Added new section on initializing array elements. Chapter 17-Delegates Added discussion of using generic delegates to avoid defining new delegate types. Also added discussion of lambda expressions. Chapter 18-Attributes No new topics. Chapter 19-Nullable Value Types Added discussion on performance. Part IV – CLR Facilities Chapter 20-Exception Handling and State Management This chapter has been completely rewritten. It is now about exception handling and state management. It includes discussions of code contracts and constrained execution regions (CERs). It also includes a new section on trade-offs between writing productive code and reliable code. Chapter 21-Automatic Memory Management Added discussion of C#’s fixed state and how it works to pin objects in the heap. Rewrote the code for weak delegates so you can use them with any class that exposes an event (the class doesn’t have to support weak delegates itself). Added discussion on the new ConditionalWeakTable class, GC Collection modes, Full GC notifications, garbage collection modes and latency modes. I also include a new sample showing how your application can receive notifications whenever Generation 0 or 2 collections occur. Chapter 22-CLR Hosting and AppDomains Added discussion of side-by-side support allowing multiple CLRs to be loaded in a single process. Added section on the performance of using MarshalByRefObject-derived types. Substantially rewrote the section on cross-AppDomain communication. Added section on AppDomain Monitoring and first chance exception notifications. Updated the section on the AppDomainManager class. Chapter 23-Assembly Loading and Reflection Added section on how to deploy a single file with dependent assemblies embedded inside it. Added section comparing reflection invoke vs bind/invoke vs bind/create delegate/invoke vs C#’s dynamic type. Chapter 24-Runtime Serialization This is a whole new chapter that was not in the 2nd Edition. Part V – Threading Chapter 25-Threading Basics Whole new chapter motivating why Windows supports threads, thread overhead, CPU trends, NUMA Architectures, the relationship between CLR threads and Windows threads, the Thread class, reasons to use threads, thread scheduling and priorities, foreground thread vs background threads. Chapter 26-Performing Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining the CLR’s thread pool. This chapter covers all the new .NET 4.0 constructs including cooperative cancelation, Tasks, the aralle class, parallel language integrated query, timers, how the thread pool manages its threads, cache lines and false sharing. Chapter 27-Performing I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining how Windows performs synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations. Then, I go into the CLR’s Asynchronous Programming Model, my AsyncEnumerator class, the APM and exceptions, Applications and their threading models, implementing a service asynchronously, the APM and Compute-bound operations, APM considerations, I/O request priorities, converting the APM to a Task, the event-based Asynchronous Pattern, programming model soup. Chapter 28-Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discusses class libraries and thread safety, primitive user-mode, kernel-mode constructs, and data alignment. Chapter 29-Hybrid Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discussion various hybrid constructs such as ManualResetEventSlim, SemaphoreSlim, CountdownEvent, Barrier, ReaderWriterLock(Slim), OneManyResourceLock, Monitor, 3 ways to solve the double-check locking technique, .NET 4.0’s Lazy and LazyInitializer classes, the condition variable pattern, .NET 4.0’s concurrent collection classes, the ReaderWriterGate and SyncGate classes.

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• Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Design Patterns: Feeling the Love after Launch

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User ExperienceIn the first video by the Oracle Applications User Experience team on the Oracle Partner Network, Vice President Jeremy Ashley said that Oracle is looking to expand the ecosystem of support for Oracle’s applications customers as they begin to assess their investment and adoption of Oracle Fusion Applications. Oracle has made a massive investment to maintain the benefits of the Fusion Applications User Experience. This summer, the Applications User Experience team released the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns.Design patterns help create consistent experiences across devices.The launch has been very well received:Angelo Santagata, Senior Principal Technologist and Fusion Middleware evangelist for Oracle,  wrote this to the system integrator community: “The web site is the result of many years of Oracle R&D into user interface design for Fusion Applications and features a really cool web app which allows you to visualise the UI components in action.”  Grant Ronald, Director of Product Management, Application Development Framework (ADF) said: “It’s a science I don't understand, but now I don't have to ... Now you can learn from the UX experience of Fusion Applications.”Frank Nimphius, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle (ADF) wrote about the launch of the design patterns for the ADF Code Corner, and Jürgen Kress, Senior Manager EMEA Alliances & Channels for Fusion MiddleWare and Service Oriented Architecture, (SOA), shared the news with his Partner Community. Oracle Twitter followers also helped spread the message about the design patterns launch: ?@bex – Brian Huff, founder and Chief Software Architect for Bezzotech, and Oracle ACE Director:“Nifty! The Oracle Fusion UX team just released new ADF design patterns.”@maiko_rocha, Maiko Rocha, Oracle Consulting Solutions Architect and Oracle FMW engineer: “Haven't seen any other vendor offer such comprehensive UX Design Patterns catalog for free!”@zirous_chad, Chad Thompson, Senior Solutions Architect for Zirous, Inc. and ADF Developer:Wow - @ultan and company did a great job with the Fusion UX PatternsWhat is a user experience design pattern?A user experience design pattern is a re-usable, usability tested functional blueprint for a particular user experience.  Some examples are guided processes, shopping carts, and search and search results.  Ultan O’Broin discusses the top design patterns every developer should know.The patterns that were just released are based on thousands of hours of end-user field studies, state-of-the-art user interface assessments, and usability testing.  To be clear, these are functional design patterns, not technical design patterns that developers may be used to working with.  Because we know there is a gap, we are putting together some training that will help close that gap.Who should care?This is an offering targeted primarily at Application Development Framework (ADF) developers. If you are faced with the following questions regarding Fusion Applications, you will want to know and learn more:•    How do I build something that looks like Fusion Applications?•    How do I build a next-generation application?•    How do I extend a Fusion Application and maintain the user experience?•    I don’t want to re-invent the wheel on the user interface, so where do I start?•    I need to build something that will eventually co-exist with Fusion Applications. How do I do that?These questions are relevant to partners with an ADF competency, individual practitioners, or small consultancies with an ADF specialization, and customers who are trying to shift their IT staff over to supporting Fusion Applications.Where you can find out more?OnlineOur Fusion User Experience design patterns maven is Ultan O’Broin. The Oracle Partner Network is helping our team bring this first e-seminar to you in order to go into a more detail on what this means and how to take advantage of it:? Webinar: Build a Better User Experience with Oracle: Oracle Fusion Applications Functional Design PatternsSept 20, 2012 , 10:30am-11:30am PacificDial-In:  1. 877-664-9137 / Passcode 102546?International:  706-634-9619  http://www.intercall.com/national/oracleuniversity/gdnam.htmlAccess the Live Event Or Via Webconference Access http://ouweb.webex.com  ?and enter this session number: 598036234At a Usergroup eventThe Fusion User Experience Advocates (FXA) are also going to be getting some deep-dive training on this content and can share it with local user groups.At OpenWorld Ultan O’Broin               Chris MuirIf you will be at OpenWorld this year, our own Ultan O’Broin will be visiting the ADF demopod to say hello, thanks to Shay Shmeltzer, Senior Group Manager for ADF outbound communication and at the OTN lounge: Monday 10-10:45, Tuesday 2:15-2:45, Wednesday 2:15-3:30 ?  Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF,  Moscone South, Right - S-207? “ADF Meet and Greett”, OTN Lounge, Wednesday 4:30 And I cannot talk about OpenWorld and ADF without mentioning Chris Muir’s ADF EMG event: the Year After the Year Of the ADF Developer – Sunday, Sept 30 of OpenWorld. Chris has played host to Ultan and the Applications user experience message for his online community and is now a seasoned UX expert.Expect to see additional announcements about expanded and training on similar topics in the future.

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• Exchange 2003-Exchange 2010 post migration GAL/OAB problem

  - by user68726

  I am very new to Exchange so forgive my newbie-ness. I've exhausted Google trying to find a way to solve my problem so I'm hoping some of you gurus can shed some light on my next steps. Please forgive my bungling around through this. The problem I cannot download/update the Global Address List (GAL) and Offline Address Book (OAB) on my Outlook 2010 clients. I get: Task 'emailaddress' reported error (0x8004010F) : 'The operation failed. An object cannot be found.' ---- error. I'm using cached exchange mode, which if I turn off Outlook hangs completely from the moment I start it up. (Note I've replaced my actual email address with 'emailaddress') Background information I migrated mailboxes, public store, etc. from a Small Business Server 2003 with Exchange 2003 box to a Server 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010 based primarily on an experts exchange how to article. The exchange server is up and running as an internet facing exchange server with all of the roles necessary to send and receive mail and in that capacity is working fine. I "thought" I had successfully migrated everything from the SBS03 box, and due to huge amounts of errors in everything from AD to the Exchange install itself I removed the reference to the SBS03 server in adsiedit. I've still got access to the old SBS03 box, but as I said the number of errors in everything is preventing even the uninstall of Exchange (or the starting of the Exchange Information Store service), so I'm quite content to leave that box completely out of the picture while trying to solve my problem. After research I discovered this is most likely because I failed to run the “update-globaladdresslist” (or get / update) command from the Exchange shell before I removed the Exchange 2003 server from adsiedit (and the network). If I run the command now it gives me: WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/Offline Address Book - first administrative group" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/Schedule+ Free Busy Information – first administrative group" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/ContainernameArchive" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/ContainernameContacts" is invalid and couldn't be updated. (Note that I’ve replaced my domain with “domainname.com” and my organization name with “containername”) What I’ve tried I don’t want to use the old OAB, or GAL, I don’t care about either, our GAL and distribution lists needed to be organized anyway, so at this point I really just want to get rid of the old reference to the “first administrative group” and move on. I’ve tried to create a new GAL and tell Exchange 2010 to use that GAL instead of the old GAL, but I'm obviously missing some of the commands or something dumb I need to do to start over with a blank slate/GAL/OAB. I'm very tempted to completely delete the entire "first administrative group" tree from adsiedit and see if that gets rid of the ridiculous reference that no longer exists but I dont want to break something else. Commands run to try to create a new GAL and tell exch10 to use that GAL: New-globaladdresslist –name NAMEOFNEWGAL Set-globaladdresslist GUID –name NAMEOFNEWGAL This did nothing for me except now when I run get-globaladdresslist or with the | FL pipe I see two GALs listed, the “default global address list” and the “NAMEOFNEWGAL” that I created. After a little more research this morning it looks like you can't change/delete/remove the default address list, and the only way to do what I'm trying to do would be to maybe remove the default address list via adsiedit and recreate with a command something like new-GlobalAddressList -Name "Default Global Address List" -IncludedRecipients AllRecipients. This would be acceptable but I've searched and searched and can't find instructions or a breakdown of where exactly the default GAL lives in AD, and if I'd have to remove multiple child references/records. ** Of interest** I'm getting an event ID 9337 in my application log OALGen did not find any recipients in address list ‘\Global Address List. This offline address list will not be generated. -\NAMEOFMYOAB --------- on my Exchange 2010 box, which pretty much to me seems to confirm my suspicion that the empty GAL/OAB is what's causing the Outlook client 0x8004010F error. Help please!

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• windows 2003 server : can't join domain

  - by phill

  I originally tried to rejoin a computer to a network which led to a "cannot find domain" error. The username/password box don't even come up. some tests i ran: I can ping the server, however I can't ping the domain name domain1.local. nslookup can't find the domain either. It looks to the isp's dns instead of my own to resolve the local machines. So i go to the dns and run netdiag.exe and gives me this error. DNS test . . . . . . . . . . . . . : Failed [WARNING] Cannot find a primary authoritative DNS server for the name 'stmartinsrv.stmartin.local.'. [RCODE_SERVER_FAILURE] The name 'srv.domain1.local.' may not be registered in DNS. [WARNING] The DNS entries for this DC are not registered correctly on DNS se rver '68.94.156.1'. Please wait for 30 minutes for DNS server replication. [WARNING] The DNS entries for this DC are not registered correctly on DNS se rver '68.94.157.1'. Please wait for 30 minutes for DNS server replication. [FATAL] No DNS servers have the DNS records for this DC registered. Redir and Browser test . . . . . . : Passed List of NetBt transports currently bound to the Redir NetBT_Tcpip_{04BB0F6B-06AE-4D60-80C8-2A7A24C1D87B} The redir is bound to 1 NetBt transport. List of NetBt transports currently bound to the browser NetBT_Tcpip_{04BB0F6B-06AE-4D60-80C8-2A7A24C1D87B} The browser is bound to 1 NetBt transport. then running dcdiag C:\Program Files\Support Toolsdcdiag Domain Controller Diagnosis Performing initial setup: Done gathering initial info. Doing initial required tests Testing server: Default-First-Site-Name\SRV Starting test: Connectivity The host 1c99f63c-49ec-40db-b3d3-6265c00fbd3e._msdcs.domain1.local cou ld not be resolved to an IP address. Check the DNS server, DHCP, server name, etc Although the Guid DNS name (1c99f63c-49ec-40db-b3d3-6265c00fbd3e._msdcs.domain1.local) couldn't be resolved, the server name (srv.domain1.local) resolved to the IP address (192.168.1.21) and was pingable. Check that the IP address is registered correctly with the DNS server. ......................... SRV failed test Connectivity Doing primary tests Testing server: Default-First-Site-Name\SRV Skipping all tests, because server SRV is not responding to directory service requests Running partition tests on : ForestDnsZones Starting test: CrossRefValidation ......................... ForestDnsZones passed test CrossRefValidation Starting test: CheckSDRefDom ......................... ForestDnsZones passed test CheckSDRefDom Running partition tests on : DomainDnsZones Starting test: CrossRefValidation ......................... DomainDnsZones passed test CrossRefValidation Starting test: CheckSDRefDom ......................... DomainDnsZones passed test CheckSDRefDom Running partition tests on : Schema Starting test: CrossRefValidation ......................... Schema passed test CrossRefValidation Starting test: CheckSDRefDom ......................... Schema passed test CheckSDRefDom Running partition tests on : Configuration Starting test: CrossRefValidation ......................... Configuration passed test CrossRefValidation Starting test: CheckSDRefDom ......................... Configuration passed test CheckSDRefDom Running partition tests on : domain1 Starting test: CrossRefValidation ......................... domain1 passed test CrossRefValidation Starting test: CheckSDRefDom ......................... domain1 passed test CheckSDRefDom Running enterprise tests on : domain1.local Starting test: Intersite ......................... domain1.local passed test Intersite Starting test: FsmoCheck ......................... domain1.local passed test FsmoCheck from previous postings, I've tried adding the domain suffix to the nic ip properties to both the client machine and the dc server which didn't help. note: there is only one nic on the server any ideas? thanks in advance

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• Code Structure / Level Design: Plants vs Zombies game level dissection

  - by lalan

  Hi Friends, I am interested in learning the class structure of Plants vs Zombies, particularly level design; for those who haven't played it - this video contains nice play-through: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89DfdOIJ4xw. How would I go ahead and design the code, mostly structure & classes, which allows for maximum flexibility & clean development? I am familiar with data driven design concepts, and would use events to handle most of dynamic behavior. Dissection at macro level: (Once every Level) Load tilemap, props, etc -- basically build the map (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) Show Enemies you'll face during present level (Once every Level) Unit Selection Window/Panel - selection of defensive plants (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) HUD Creation - based on unit selection (Level Loop) Enemy creation - based on types of zombies allowed (Level Loop) Sun/Resource generation (Level Loop) Show messages like 'huge wave of zombies coming', 'final wave' (Level Loop) Other unique events - Spawn gifts, money, tombstones, etc (Once every Level) Unlock new plant Potential game scripts: a) Level definitions: Level_1_1.xml, Level_1_2.xml, etc. Level_1_1.xml :: Sample script <map> <tilemap>tilemapFrontLawn</tilemap> <SpawnPoints> tiles where particular type of zombies (land vs water) may spawn</spawnPoints> <props> position, entity array -- lawnmower, </props> </map> <zombies> <... list of zombies who gonna attack by ids...> </zombies> <plants> <... list by plants which are available for defense by ids...> </plants> <progression> <ZombieWave name='first wave' spawnScript='zombieLightWave.lua' unlock='null'> <startMessages time=1.5>Ready</startMessages> <endMessages time=1.5>Huge wave of zombies incoming</endMessages> </ZombieWave> </progression> b) Entities definitions: .xmls containing zombies, plants, sun, lawnmower, coins, etc description. Potential classes: //LevelManager - Based on the level under play, it will load level script. Few of the // functions it may have: class LevelManager { public: bool load(string levelFileName); bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); private: LevelData* mLevelData; } // LevelData - Contains the details of level loaded by LevelManager. class LevelData { private: string file; // array of camera,dialog,attackwaves, etc in active level LevelCutSceneCamera** mArrayCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog** mArrayCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave** mArrayAttackWave; .... // which camera,dialog,attackwave is active in level uint mCursorCutSceneCamera; uint mCursorCutSceneDialog; uint mCursorAttackWave; public: // based on cursor, get the next camera,dialog,attackwave,etc in active level // return false/true based on failure/success bool nextCutSceneCamera(LevelCutSceneCamera**); bool nextCutSceneDialog(LevelCutSceneDialog**); } // LevelUnderPlay- LevelManager class LevelUnderPlay { private: LevelCutSceneCamera* mCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog* mCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave* mAttackWave; Entities** mSelectedPlants; Entities** mAllowedZombies; bool isCutSceneCameraActive; public: bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); } I am totally confused.. :( Does it make sense of using class composition (have flat class hierarchy) for managing levels. Is it a good idea to just add/remove/update sprites (or any drawable stuff) to current scene from LevelManager or LevelUnderPlay? If I want to make non-linear level design, how should I go ahead? Perhaps I would need a LevelProgression class, which would decide what to do based on decision tree. Any suggestions would be appreciated very much. Thank for your time, lalan

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