kingdom of fish - Page 14

Convert JSON into array dataType

- by Myhome Stories

I have the following JSON string var json = {"result":[{"address":" Ardenham Court, Oxford Road ,AYLESBURY, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE ,UNITED KINGDOM","picture":"1.jpg","uniqueid":"8b54275a60088547d473d462763b4738","story":"I love my home. I feel safe, I am comfortable and I am loved. A home can't be a home without our parents and our loved ones. But sad to say, some are experiencing that eventhough their loved ones are in their houses, they are not loving each other. There is a big war. You can't call it a home."}]} I want to get address ,picture,story separately for accomplish this. I tried recent answers in stackoverflow, but I was not able to achieve it. Below is what I have tried, $.each(json.result.address, function (index, value) { // Get the items var items = this.address; // Here 'this' points to a 'group' in 'groups' // Iterate through items. $.each(items, function () { console.log(this.text); // Here 'this' points to an 'item' in 'items' }); });

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jQuery: change a css value if a option is selected

- by Ivan Castellanos

I'm trying to make an option dropdown menu and I got stuck when I try to show a textbox if the option 'other' is selected. there's what I have: <span id="con-country"><label for="country">Country: </label> <select name="country" required="required"> <option value="usa">United States</option> <option value="uk">United Kingdom</option> <option id="other" value="other">Other</option> </select> </span> <span id="con-specify"> <label for="specify">Specify: </label> <input type="text" name="specify" id="c-specify" required="required"></input> </span> CSS: #con-specify{ margin-left: 50px; display: none; } Simple huh?, the problem is that I don't know how to do the code in jQuery So, if the user select other in the menu, then the textbox should appear, how can I do that?

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Cisco Pix 501 - reaching local host limit, showing odd IP addresses

- by cdonner

I am running out of licenses on my Pix 501, and the show local-host command lists a number of odd IP addresses that do not belong to my 10.10.1.* subnet. Any idea what they are? The only thing I could find was a potential ISP: DINSA is Defence Interoperable Network Services Authority, an agency of the Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom. Does not sound right. I don't see any active connections, though. I can't ping or traceroute these IPs, but they reappear after I clear the list, with various other addresses in that general range, up until the connection limit is reached. Based on the number denied, I suppose I would have a lot more of them had I not the connection limit. Very dubious. Is anybody else seeing this? pixfirewall# show local-host Interface inside: 10 active, 10 maximum active, **118 denied** local host: <10.10.1.110>, TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <10.10.1.176>, TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <10.10.1.170>, TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 1/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <10.10.1.175>, TCP connection count/limit = 11/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 1/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <10.10.1.108>, TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <25.33.41.115>, // ???????????????? what is this? TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <25.33.226.124>, // ???????????????? what is this? TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <10.10.1.172>, TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <25.36.114.91>, // ???????????????? what is this? TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): local host: <10.10.1.109>, TCP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited TCP embryonic count = 0 TCP intercept watermark = unlimited UDP connection count/limit = 0/unlimited AAA: Xlate(s): Conn(s): pixfirewall#

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Gene Hunt Says:

- by BizTalk Visionary

"She's as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot" "He's got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course" "You so much as belch out of line and I'll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate" "Let's go play slappyface" "your surrounded by armed barstewards" “Right, get out and find this murdering scum right now!” [pause] “Scratch that, we start 9am sharp tomorrow, it's beer-o-clock.” "So then Cartwright, you're such a good Detective.... Go and Detect me a packet of Garibaldies" "You're not the one who is going to have to knit himself a new arsehole after 25 years of aggressive male love in prison" “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “They reckon you've got concussion - but personally, I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom playing king of the jungle.” “You great... soft... sissy... girlie... nancy... french... bender... Man-United supporting POOF!!” “Drugs eh? What's the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren't there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.” “He's Dead! It's quite serious!” “Fanny in the flat...Nice Work” “SoopaDoopa” “Tits in a Jumper!” “Drop your weapons! You are surrounded by armed bastards!” “It's 1973, almost dinnertime. I'm 'avin 'oops!” “Trust the Gene Genie!” “I wanna hump Britt Ekland...What're we gonna do...!” “Was that 'E' and you don't know the rest?! or you going 'Eeee, I Dunno'” “Good Girl! Prostate probe and no jelly. “ “Give over, it's nothing like Spain!” “I'll come over your houses and stamp on all your toys!” “The Wizard will sort it out. It's cos of the wonderful things he does” “Cartwright can jump up and down on his knackers!” “It's not a windup love, he really thinks like this!” “Women! You can't say two words to them” “I was thinking, maybe, a Berni Inn!” “If I wanted a bollocking for drinking too much...!” “Shhhh...hear that...that's the sound of this case being closed! “Chicken!? In a basket!?” “Seems a large quantity of cocaine...” “You probably thought he kept his cock in his keks!” “The tail-end of Rays demotion speech!” “Stephen Warren is gay!?” “You're a smart boy, use your initiative!” “Don't be such a Jessie!” “I find the idea of a bird brushing her teeth...!” “Never been tempted to the Magic talcum powder?” “Make sure she's got nice tits!” “You're more likely to find an ostrich with a plum up it's arse!” “Drink this lot under the table and have a pint on the way home!” “Never be a female Prime Minister!” “Pub? Pub! pub!.....Pub!” “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys!” “The number for the special clinic is on the notice board!” “If me uncle had tits, would he be me auntie!” “Got your vicars in a twist!” “We Done?!” “Your mates got balls...If they were any bigger he'd need a wheelbarrow!” “The Ending - from 'I want to go home' to the end music.”

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Do You Develop Your PL/SQL Directly in the Database?

- by thatjeffsmith

I know this sounds like a REALLY weird question for many of you. Let me make one thing clear right away though, I am NOT talking about creating and replacing PLSQL objects directly into a production environment. Do we really need to talk about developers in production again? No, what I am talking about is a developer doing their work from start to finish in a development database. These are generally available to a development team for building the next and greatest version of your databases and database applications. And of course you are using a third party source control system, right? Last week I was in Tampa, FL presenting at the monthly Suncoast Oracle User’s Group meeting. Had a wonderful time, great questions and back-and-forth. My favorite heckler was there, @oraclenered, AKA Chet Justice. I was in the middle of talking about how it’s better to do your PLSQL work in the Procedure Editor when Chet pipes up - Don’t do it that way, that’s wrong Just press play to edit the PLSQL directly in the database Or something along those lines. I didn’t get what the heck he was talking about. I had been showing how the Procedure Editor gives you much better feedback and support when working with PLSQL. After a few back-and-forths I got to what Chet’s main objection was, and again I’m going to paraphrase: You should develop offline in your SQL worksheet. Don’t do anything in the database until it’s done. I didn’t understand. Were developers expected to be able to internalize and mentally model the PL/SQL engine, see where their errors were, etc in these offline scripts? No, please give Chet more credit than that. What is the ideal Oracle Development Environment? If I were back in the ‘real world’ of database development, I would do all of my development outside of the ‘dev’ instance. My development process looks a little something like this: Do I have a program that already does something like this – copy and paste Has some smart person already written something like this – copy and paste Start typing in the white-screen-of-panic and bungle along until I get something that half-works Tweek, debug, test until I have fooled my subconscious into thinking that it’s ‘good’ As you might understand, I don’t want my co-workers to see the evolution of my code. It would seriously freak them out and I probably wouldn’t have a job anymore (don’t remind me that I already worked myself out of development.) So here’s what I like to do: Run a Local Instance of Oracle on my Machine and Develop My Code Privately I take a copy of development – that’s what source control is for afterall – and run it where no one else can see it. I now get to be my own DBA. If I need a trace – no problem. If I want to run an ASH report, no worries. If I need to create a directory or run some DataPump jobs, that’s all on me. Now when I get my code ‘up to snuff,’ then I will check it into source control and compile it into the official development instance. So my teammates suddenly go from seeing no program, to a mostly complete program. Is this right? If not, it doesn’t seem wrong to me. And after talking to Chet in the car on the way to the local cigar bar, it seems that he’s of the same opinion. So what’s so wrong with coding directly into a development instance? I think ‘wrong’ is a bit strong here. But there are a few pitfalls that you might want to look out for. A few come to mind – and I’m sure Chet could add many more as my memory fails me at the moment. But here goes: Development instance isn’t properly backed up – would hate to lose that work Development is wiped once a week and copied over from Prod – don’t laugh Someone clobbers your code You accidentally on purpose clobber someone else’s code The more developers you have in a single fish pond, the greater chance something ‘bad’ will happen This Isn’t One of Those Posts Where I Tell You What You Should Be Doing I realize many shops won’t be open to allowing developers to stage their own local copies of Oracle. But I would at least be aware that many of your developers are probably doing this anyway – with or without your tacit approval. SQL Developer can do local file tracking, but you should be using Source Control too! I will say that I think it’s imperative that you control your source code outside the database, even if your development team is comprised of a single developer. Store your source code in a file, and control that file in something like Subversion. You would be shocked at the number of teams that do not use a source control system. I know I continue to be shocked no matter how many times I meet another team running by the seat-of-their-pants. I’d love to hear how your development process works. And of course I want to know how SQL Developer and the rest of our tools can better support your processes. And one last thing, if you want a fun and interactive presentation experience, be sure to have Chet in the room

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Tuning Red Gate: #4 of Some

- by Grant Fritchey

First time connecting to these servers directly (keys to the kingdom, bwa-ha-ha-ha. oh, excuse me), so I'm going to take a look at the server properties, just to see if there are any issues there. Max memory is set, cool, first possible silly mistake clear. In fact, these look to be nicely set up. Oh, I'd like to see the ANSI Standards set by default, but it's not a big deal. The default location for database data is the F:\ drive, where I saw all the activity last time. Cool, the people maintaining the servers in our company listen, parallelism threshold is set to 35 and optimize for ad hoc is enabled. No shocks, no surprises. The basic setup is appropriate. On to the problem database. Nothing wrong in the properties. The database is in SIMPLE recovery, but I think it's a reporting system, so no worries there. Again, I'd prefer to see the ANSI settings for connections, but that's the worst thing I can see. Time to look at the queries, tables, indexes and statistics because all the information I've collected over the last several days suggests that we're not looking at a systemic problem (except possibly not enough memory), but at the traditional tuning issues. I just want to note that, I started looking at the system, not the queries. So should you when tuning your environment. I know, from the data collected through SQL Monitor, what my top poor performing queries are, and the most frequently called, etc. I'm starting with the most frequently called. I'm going to get the execution plan for this thing out of the cache (although, with the cache dumping constantly, I might not get it). And it's not there. Called 1.3 million times over the last 3 days, but it's not in cache. Wow. OK. I'll see what's in cache for this database: SELECT deqs.creation_time, deqs.execution_count, deqs.max_logical_reads, deqs.max_elapsed_time, deqs.total_logical_reads, deqs.total_elapsed_time, deqp.query_plan, SUBSTRING(dest.text, (deqs.statement_start_offset / 2) + 1, (deqs.statement_end_offset - deqs.statement_start_offset) / 2 + 1) AS QueryStatement FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS deqs CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle) AS dest CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(deqs.plan_handle) AS deqp WHERE dest.dbid = DB_ID('Warehouse') AND deqs.statement_end_offset > 0 AND deqs.statement_start_offset > 0 ORDER BY deqs.max_logical_reads DESC ; And looking at the most expensive operation, we have our first bad boy: Multiple table scans against very large sets of data and a sort operation. a sort operation? It's an insert. Oh, I see, the table is a heap, so it's doing an insert, then sorting the data and then inserting into the primary key. First question, why isn't this a clustered index? Let's look at some more of the queries. The next one is deceiving. Here's the query plan: You're thinking to yourself, what's the big deal? Well, what if I told you that this thing had 8036318 reads? I know, you're looking at skinny little pipes. Know why? Table variable. Estimated number of rows = 1. Actual number of rows. well, I'm betting several more than one considering it's read 8 MILLION pages off the disk in a single execution. We have a serious and real tuning candidate. Oh, and I missed this, it's loading the table variable from a user defined function. Let me check, let me check. YES! A multi-statement table valued user defined function. And another tuning opportunity. This one's a beauty, seriously. Did I also mention that they're doing a hash against all the columns in the physical table. I'm sure that won't lead to scans of a 500,000 row table, no, not at all. OK. I lied. Of course it is. At least it's on the top part of the Loop which means the scan is only executed once. I just did a cursory check on the next several poor performers. all calling the UDF. I think I found a big tuning opportunity. At this point, I'm typing up internal emails for the company. Someone just had their baby called ugly. In addition to a series of suggested changes that we need to implement, I'm also apologizing for being such an unkind monster as to question whether that third eye & those flippers belong on such an otherwise lovely child.

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Vacations on Rodrigues 2014

And now something completely different compared to the usual technical or community related articles here on this blog. Yes, this time I'm writing some lines on my (and my family's) activities during our long weekend stay on Rodrigues. So, please bear with me, it's eventually a bit more personal... Grab a soda, some popcorn and a cosy place to continue to read. var googleAlbumLink = "https://plus.google.com/photos/117698191428446859536/albums/6047895311458281985"; //optional----------------------- var mySlideWidth = 580; var mySlideHeight = 340; var mySlideDelay = 7000; //delay in milliseconds Special promotions during school holidays Originally, our children started to ask more frequently about going on the plane again. Obviously, after their aunty from Germany was around during May, they were really eager to travel again. So, we decided that it might be a great opportunity to book some vacations during their school holidays. And just in time the local hotels and hotel groups started to advertise their special promotions for citizens and residents. After collecting multiple brochures over several days, we got attracted by various hotel packages on Rodrigues - most interestingly the expenses for the stay and flight ticket were less compared to other resorts here on the main island. As we have been to Rodrigues already back in 2008, we followed up on this idea and got in touch with a couple travel agencies. Well, I have to report that you should be really careful about the promotions from some of them. We had a very negative experience with Shamal Travel Agency in Quatre Bornes regarding their adverts and the actual price levels and age definition for children. Please, stay away from them if you are interested in transparent cost and services. Anyway, after some arrangements with two other close families we managed to confirm our stay at the Cotton Bay Hotel in Rodrigues. Given the fact that we already stayed there, and the hotel has been renovated recently, and it is under new management all looked very promising and relaxed for our vacation. Counting the days... As we already booked in July our children were counting down the days. And it got more interesting as soon as they were on school holidays finally. Well, the day arrived and waking them up at 2:30 hrs wasn't a problem after all. Quite the opposite it was fascinating for us parents to watch them waiting for the transport and later on during the airport transfer. Despite the early hours both didn't fall asleep and it was all so exciting. We are taking the plane! Well organised by the Cotton Bay Hotel Honestly, it was a breeze and a smooth ride during our stay at the hotel. From the airport transfer, the cleanliness of our bungalow, the organisation of our day trips, and the SPA - all very well and enjoyable. The children had great fun, and although it was a bit too windy to plunge into the pool they had a lot of fun with other activities on the beach and at the Kid's Club. Oh, and we had our private petting zoo with cows, sheep and goats just close to the terrace. Some of us went to check out the SPA facilities and I have to admit that the services regarding Hammam and Sauna are better than at some other hotels in Mauritius. I don't know after how many months or years I was once again enjoying a very hot sauna. Little draw-back but nothing to worry about... There is no cold water or at least ice cubes to cool down the body, but hey there was a nice breeze coming over the hills. Some day trips to mention Based on a friend's recommendation we walked to a "restaurant" called Chez Solange & Robert. Hahaha, restaurant is widely stretched in this case, as we enjoyed a great BBQ with fresh lobster, whole fish, and pieces of chicken breast in an open cottage. Just some wooden structure covered with dried palm leaves on the roof - island feeling pure! The other day we went to the Giant Tortoise & Cave Reserve Francois Leguat to observe the giant Aldabra turtles and to visit the Grande Caverne. The biggest limestone cave on the island. Compared to our last visit this was a novelty after checking out the Caverne Partate. The formations of stalactites and stalagmites are very impressive and imaginative. Our guide had lots of funny terms and despite the low light conditions the kids had a great time wandering around on the narrow wooden paths and stairs. And last but not least, we decided to check out the Tyrodrig zip lines... Everyone was allowed to join the trip through the air, and our little ones stayed close to our field guides. But finally went on their own on the very last traversal. Puuuh, it was astounishing to glide over the valley, and for sure something to repeat next time. Impressions of our vacation on Rodrigues 2014 Next stay has been discussed already Oh yes, Rodrigues baby! We are going to come again! Tentative dates have been discussed already and now it's up to us to earn enough our next holiday on that wonderful remote piece of paradise. Eventually, a little bit longer than this time. We'll see...

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7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012

- by Bruno.Borges

Yesterday was 12/12/12, and everybody went crazy on Twitter with cool memes like this one. And maybe you are now wondering why I mentioned 7 (seven) on the blog title. Because I want to play numbers? Yes! Today is 7 days after JavaOne Latin America 2012 is over (... and I had to figure out an excuse for taking so long to blog about it...). So unless you were at JavaOne Latin America this year, here are 7 things you missed: OTN Lounge mini-theatreThere was a mini-theatre holding several lightning talks. We had people from SouJava JUG, GoJava JUG, Globalcode, and several other Java gurus and companies running demos, talks, and even more. For example, @drspockbr talked about the ScrumToys project, that demonstrates the power of JSF. Hands On Lab for JAX-RS and WebSocketsOne of the cool things to do during JavaOne is to come to these Hands On labs and really do something using new technologies with the help of experts. This one in particular, was covered by me, Arun Gupta, and Reza Rahman. The HOL had more people than laptops (and we had 48 laptops!) interested on understanding and learning about the new stuff that is coming within Java EE 7. Things like JAX-RS, Server-sent Events and WebSockets. Hey, if you want to try this HOL by yourself, it is available on Github, so go for it! If you have questions, just let me know! Java Community KeynoteThis keynote presented a lot of cool things like startups using Java in their projects, the Duke Awards, SouJava winning the JCP Outstanding Award, the Java Band, and even more! It was really a space where the Java community could present what they are doing and what they want to do. There's a lot of interest on the Adopt-a-JSR program and the Adopt-OpenJDK. There's also an Adopt-a-JavaEE-JSR program! Take a look if you want to participate and Make the Future Java. Java EE (JMS, JAX-RS) sessions from Reza Rahman, the HeavyMetal guyReza is a well know professional and Java EE enthusiast from the communitty who just joined Oracle this year. His sessions were very well attended, perhaps because of a high interest on the new things coming to Java EE 7 like JMS 2.0 and JAX-RS 2.0. If you want to look at what he did at this JavaOne edition, read his blog post. By the way, if you like Java and heavymetal, you should follow him on Twitter as well! :-) Java EE (WebSockets, HTML5) sessions from Arun Gupta, the GlassFish guyIf you don't know Arun Gupta, no worries. You will have time to know about him while you read his Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Arun has been evangelizing Java EE for a long time, and is now spreading his word about the new upcoming version Java EE 7. He gave one talk about HTML5 Productivity on the Java EE 7 platform, and another one on building web apps with WebSockets. Pretty neat! Arun blogged about JavaOne Latin America as well. Read it here. Java Embedded and JavaFXIf there are two things that are really trending in the Java World right now besides Java EE 7, certainly they are JavaFX and Java Embedded. There were 14 talks covering Java Embedded, from Java Cards to Raspberry.pi, from Java ME to Java on your TV with Ginga-J. The Internet of Things is becoming true, and Java is the only platform today that can connect it all in an standardized and concise way. JavaFX gained a lot of attention too. There were 8 sessions covering what the platform has to offer in terms of Rich User Experience. The JavaFX Scene Builder is an awesome tool to start playing designing an UI, and coding for JavaFX is like coding Swing with 8 hands, one holding your coffee cup. You can achieve a lot, with your two hands (unless, you really have 8 hands, then you can achieve 4 times more :-). If you want to read more about JavaFX, go to Stephen Chin's blog post. GlassFish and Friends Party, 1st edition at JavaOne Lating AmericaThis is probably the thing that I'm most proud. We brought to Brasil the tradition of holding a happy hour for all GlassFish, Java EE friends. This party started almost 7 years ago in San Francisco, and it was about time to bring it to Brazil! The party happened on Tuesday night, right after JavaOne General Keynote, at the Tribeca Pub. We had about 80 attendees and met a lot of Java EE developers there! People from JUGs, Oracle, Locaweb and Red Hat showed up too, including some execs from Oracle that didn't resist and could not miss a party like this one.Lots of caipirinhas, beer and food to everyone, some cool music... even The Fish walking around the party with Juggy!You can see more photos from the party on an album I shared with the recently created GlassFish Brasil community on Google+ here (but you may be more interested in joining the GlassFish english community). There's also more pictures that Arun took and shared on this link. So now you may want to consider coming to Brazil next year! Java EE 7 is on its way, and Brazil is happily and patiently waiting for it, with a lot of enthusiasm. By the way, GlassFish and Java EE 6 just celebrated a Happy Birthday!

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A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

- by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

- by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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Top ten things that don't make sense in The Walking Dead

- by iamjames

For those of you that don't know, The Walking Dead is a popular American TV show on AMC about a group of people trying to survive in a zombie-filled world.Here's the top ten eleven things that don't make sense on the show (and have never been explained) 1) They never visit stores. No Walmarts, Kmarts, Targets, shopping malls, pawn shops, gas stations, etc. You'd think that would be the first place you'd visit for supplies, but they never have. Not once. There was a tiny corner store they visited in a small town, and while many products were already gone they did find several useful items. 2) They never raid houses. Why not? One would imagine that they would want to search houses for useful items, but they don't.3) They don't use 2 way radios. Modern 2-way radios have a 36-mile range. That's probably best possible range, but even if the range is only 10% of that, 3.6 miles, that's still more than enough for most situations, for the occasional "hey zombies attacking can you give me a hand?" or "there's zombies walking by stay inside until they leave" or "remember to pick up milk at the store love mom". And yes they would need batteries or recharging, but they have been using gas-powered generators on the show and I'm sure a car charger would work.4) They use gas-guzzling vehicles. Every vehicle they have is from the 80s or 90s except for the new Kia SUV there for product placement. Why? They should all be driving new small SUVs or hybrids. Visit a dealership and steal more fuel-efficient vehicles, because while the Walmart's might be empty from people raiding them for supplies, I'm sure most people weren't thinking "Gee, I should go car shopping" when the infection hit5) They drive a motorcycle. Seriously? Let's find the least protective vehicle and drive that. And while motorcycles get reasonable gas mileage, 5 people in a SUV gets better gas mileage per person than 5 people all driving motorcycles so it doesn't make economical sense either.6) They drive loud vehicles. The motorcycle used is commonly referred to as a chopper and is about as loud as a motorcycle can get. The zombies are attracted to loud noise, so wouldn't it make more sense to drive vehicles that makes less sound? Because as soon as you stop the bike and get off you're surrounded by zombies that heard you coming. And it's not just the bike, the ~1980s Chevy SUV in the show is also very loud.7) They never run out of food. Seems like that would be a almost daily struggle, keeping enough food available for about a dozen people, yet I've never seen them visit a grocery store or local convenience store to stock up.8) They don't carry swords, machetes, clubs, etc. Let's face it, biting is not a very effective means of attack. It's good for animals because they have fangs and little else, but humans have been finding better ways of killing each other since forever. So why doesn't everyone on the show carry a sword or machete or at least a baseball bat? Anything is better than wasting valuable bullets all the time. Sure, dozen zombies approaching? Shoot them. One zombie approaching? Save the bullet, cut off it's head. 9) They do not wear protective clothing. Human teeth are not exactly the sharpest teeth in the animal kingdom. The leather shoes your dog ripped to shreds within minutes would probably take you days to bite through. So why do they walk around half-naked? Yes I know it's hot in Atlanta, but you'd think they'd at least have some tough leather coats or something for protection. Maybe put a few small vent holes in the fabric if it's really hot. Or better: make your own chainmail. Chainmail was used for thousands of years for protection from swords and is still used by scuba divers for protection from sharks. If swords and sharks can't puncture it, human teeth don't stand a chance. 10) They don't build barricades or dig trenches around properties. In Season 2 they stayed at a farm in the middle of no where. While being far away from people is a great way to stay far away from zombies, it would still make sense to build some sort of defenses. Hordes of zombies would knock down almost any fence, but what about a trench or moat? Maybe something not too wide so it can be jumped over easily but a zombie would fall into because I haven't seen too many jumping zombies on the show. 11) They don't live in a mall or tall office building. A mall would be perfect. They have large security gates designed to keep even hundreds of people from breaking in and offer lots of supplies and food. They're usually hundreds of thousands of square feet and fully enclosed, one could probably live their entire life happily in a mall. Tall office building with on-site cafeteria would be another good choice. They also usually offer good security and office furniture could be pushed out of the windows to crush approaching zombies, and the cafeteria is usually stocked to provide food for hundreds or thousands of office workers so food wouldn't be a problem for a long time. So there you have it, eleven things that don't make sense in The Walking Dead. Have any of your own you'd like to add or were one of these things covered in the show? Let me know in the comments.

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Agile Development Requires Agile Support

- by Matt Watson

Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly. The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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First Foray–About timeout

- by SQLMonger

It has been quite a while since I signed up for this blog site and high time that something was posted. I have a list of topics that I will be working through and posting. Some I am sure will have been posted by others, but I will be sticking to the technical problems and challenges that I’ve recently faced, and the solutions that worked for me. My motto when learning something new has always been “My kingdom for an example!”, and I plan on delivering useful examples here so others can learn from my efforts, failures and successes. A bit of background about me… My name is Clayton Groom. I am a founding partner of a consulting firm in St. Louis Missouri, Covenant Technology Partners, LLC and focus on SQL Server Data Warehouse design, Analysis Services and Enterprise Reporting solutions. I have been working with SQL Server since the early nineties, when it still only ran on OS/2. I love solving puzzles and technical challenges. Enough about me… On to a real problem… SSIS Connection Time outs versus Command Time outs Last week, I was working on automating the processing for a large Analysis Services cube. I had reworked an SSIS package and script task originally posted by Vidas Matelis that automates the process of adding new and dropping old partitions to/from an Analysis Services cube. I had the package working great, tested, and ready for deployment. It basically performs a query against the source system to determine if there is new data in the warehouse that will require a new partition to be added to the cube, and it checks the cube to see if there are any partitions that are present that are no longer needed in a rolling 60 month window. My client uses Tivoli for running all their production jobs, and not SQL Agent, so I had to build a command line file for Tivoli to use to run the package. Everything was going great. I had tested the command file from my development workstation using an XML configuration file to pass in server-specific parameters into the package when executed using the DTExec utility. With all the pieces ready, I updated the dtsconfig file to point to the UAT environment and started working with the Tivoli developer to test the job. On the first run, the job failed, and from what I could see in the SSIS log, it had failed because of a timeout. Other errors in the log made me think that perhaps the connection string had not been passed into the package correctly. We bumped the Connection Manager timeout values from 20 seconds to 120 seconds and tried again. The job still failed. After changing the command line to use the /SET option instead of the /CONFIGFILE option, we tested again, and again failure. After a number more failed attempts, and getting the Teradata DBA involved to monitor and see if we were connecting and failing or just failing to connect, we determined that the job was indeed connecting to the server and then disconnecting itself after 30 seconds. This seemed odd, as we had the timeout values for the connection manager set to 180 seconds by then. At this point one of the DBA’s found a post on the Teradata forum that had the clues to the puzzle: There is a separate “CommandTimeout” custom property on the Data source object that may needed to be adjusted for longer running queries. I opened up the SSIS package, opened the data flow task that generated the partition list table and right-clicked on the data source. from the context menu, I selected “Show Advanced Editor” and found the property. Sure enough, it was set to 30 seconds. The CommandTimeout property can also be edited in the SSIS Properties sheet. In order to determine how long the timeout needed to be, I ran the query from the task in the development environment and received a response in a matter of seconds. I then tried the same query against the production database and waited several minutes for a response. This did not seem to be a reasonable response time for the query involved, and indeed it wasn’t. The Teradata DBA’s adjusted the query governor settings for the service account I was testing with, and we were able to get the response back down under a minute. Still, I set the CommandTimeout property to a much higher value in case the job was ever started during a time of high-demand on the production server. With this change in place, the job finally completed successfully. The lesson learned for me was two-fold: Always compare query execution times between development and production environments, and don’t assume that production will always be faster. With higher user demands, query governors, and a whole lot more data, the execution time of even what might seem to be simple queries can vary greatly. SSIS Connection time out settings do not affect command time outs. Connection timeouts control how long the package will wait for a response from the server before assuming the server is not available or is not responding. Command time outs control how long a task will wait for results to start being returned before deciding that the server is not responding. Both lessons seem pretty straight forward, and I felt pretty sheepish once I finally figured out what the issue was. To be fair though, In the 5+ years that I have been working with SSIS, I could only recall one other time where I had to set the CommandTimeout property, and that memory only resurfaced while I was penning this post.

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WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP

- by agallego

Oracle PartnerNetwork | Account | Feedback JOIN THE ORACLE WEBLOGIC PARTNER COMMUNITY AND ATTEND A WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP Dear partner As a valued partner we would like to invite you for the WebLogic Partner Community and our WebLogic 12c hands-on Bootcamps – free of charge! Please first login at http://partner.oracle.com and then visit: WebLogic Partner Community. (If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center). The goal of the WebLogic Partner Community is to provide you with the latest information on Oracle's offerings and to facilitate the exchange of experience within community members. Register Now FREE Assessment vouchers to become certified and WebLogic Server 12c 200 new Features and Training Connect and Network WebLogic Blogs WebLogic on Facebook WebLogic on LinkedIn WebLogic on Twitter WebLogic on Oracle Mix WebLogic 12c hands-on Workshops We offer free3 days hands-on WebLogic 12c workshops for Oracle partners who want to become Application Grid Specialized: Register Here! Country Date Location Registration Germany 3-5 April 2012 Oracle Düsseldorf Click here France 24-26 April 2012 Oracle Colombes Click here Spain 08-10 May 2012 Oracle Madrid Click here Netherlands 22-24 May 2012 Oracle Amsterdam Click here United Kingdom 06-08 June 2012 Oracle Reading Click here Italy 19-21 June 2012 Oracle Cinisello Balsamo Click here Portugal 10-12 July 2012 Oracle Lisbon Click here Skill requirements Attendees need to have the following skills as this is required by the product-set and to make sure they get the most out of the training: Basic knowledge in Java and JavaEE Understanding the Application Server concept Basic knowledge in older releases of WebLogic Server would be beneficial Member of WebLogic Partner Community for registration please vist http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Hardware requirements Every participant works on his own notebook. The minimal hardware requirements are: 4Gb physical RAM (we will boot the image with 2Gb RAM) dual core CPU 15 GB HD Software requirements Please install Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.8 Follow-up and certification With the workshop registration you agree to the following next steps Follow-up training attend and pass the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist Registration For details and registration please visit Register Here Free WebLogic Certification (Free assessment voucher to become certified) For all WebLogic experts, we offer free vouchers worth $195 for the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist assessment. To demonstrate your WebLogic knowledge you first have to pass the free online assessment Oracle Application Grid PreSales Specialist. For free vouchers, please send an e-mail with the screenshot of your Oracle Application Grid PreSales certirficate to [email protected] including your Name, Company, E-mail and Country. Note: This offer is limited to partners from Europe Middle East and Africa. Partners from other countries please contact your Oracle partner manager. WebLogic Specialization To become specialized in Application Grid, please make sure that you access the: Application Grid Specialization Guide Application Grid Specialization Checklist If you have any questions please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Key New Capabilities Java EE 6 and Developer Productivity Simplified Deployment and Management with Virtualization Integrated Traffic Management Enhanced High Availability and Disaster Recovery Much Higher Performance For more information please visit: Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch Technical Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch WebLogic OTN Website WebLogic 12c Virtual Conference Environment WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea (OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Best regards, Jürgen Kress WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA Tel. +49 89 1430 1479 E-Mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact PBC | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States Your privacy is important to us. You can login to your account to update your e-mail subscriptions or you can opt-out of all Oracle Marketing e-mails at any time. Please note that opting-out of Marketing communications does not affect your receipt of important business communications related to your current relationship with Oracle such as Security Updates, Event Registration notices, Account Management and Support/Service communications.

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The design of a generic data synchronizer, or, an [object] that does [actions] with the aid of [helpers]

- by acheong87

I'd like to create a generic data-source "synchronizer," where data-source "types" may include MySQL databases, Google Spreadsheets documents, CSV files, among others. I've been trying to figure out how to structure this in terms of classes and interfaces, keeping in mind (what I've read about) composition vs. inheritance and is-a vs. has-a, but each route I go down seems to violate some principle. For simplicity, assume that all data-sources have a header-row-plus-data-rows format. For example, assume that the first rows of Google Spreadsheets documents and CSV files will have column headers, a.k.a. "fields" (to parallel database fields). Also, eventually, I would like to implement this in PHP, but avoiding language-specific discussion would probably be more productive. Here's an overview of what I've tried. Part 1/4: ISyncable class CMySQL implements ISyncable GetFields() // sql query, pdo statement, whatever AddFields() RemFields() ... _dbh class CGoogleSpreadsheets implements ISyncable GetFields() // zend gdata api AddFields() RemFields() ... _spreadsheetKey _worksheetId class CCsvFile implements ISyncable GetFields() // read from buffer AddFields() RemFields() ... _buffer interface ISyncable GetFields() AddFields($field1, $field2, ...) RemFields($field1, $field2, ...) ... CanAddFields() // maybe the spreadsheet is locked for write, or CanRemFields() // maybe no permission to alter a database table ... AddRow() ModRow() RemRow() ... Open() Close() ... First Question: Does it make sense to use an interface, as above? Part 2/4: CSyncer Next, the thing that does the syncing. class CSyncer __construct(ISyncable $A, ISyncable $B) Push() // sync A to B Pull() // sync B to A Sync() // Push() and Pull() only differ in direction; factor. // Sync()'s job is to make sure that the fields on each side // match, to add fields where appropriate and possible, to // account for different column-orderings, etc., and of // course, to add and remove rows as necessary to sync. ... _A _B Second Question: Does it make sense to define such a class, or am I treading dangerously close to the "Kingdom of Nouns"? Part 3/4: CTranslator? ITranslator? Now, here's where I actually get lost, assuming the above is passable. Sometimes, two ISyncables speak different "dialects." For example, believe it or not, Google Spreadsheets (accessed through the Google Data API "list feed") returns column headers lower-cased and stripped of all spaces and symbols! That is, sys_TIMESTAMP is systimestamp, as far as my code can tell. (Yes, I am aware that the "cell feed" does not strip the name so; however cell-by-cell manipulation is too slow for what I'm doing.) One can imagine other hypothetical examples. Perhaps even the data itself can be in different "dialects." But let's take it as given for now, and not argue this if possible. Third Question: How would you implement "translation"? Note: Taking all this as an exercise, I'm more interested in the "idealized" design, rather than the practical one. (God knows that shipped sailed when I began this project.) Part 4/4: Further Thought Here's my train of thought to demonstrate I've thunk, albeit unfruitfully: First, I thought, primitively, "I'll just modify CMySQL::GetFields() to lower-case and strip field names so they're compatible with Google Spreadsheets." But of course, then my class should really be called, CMySQLForGoogleSpreadsheets, and that can't be right. So, the thing which translates must exist outside of an ISyncable implementor. And surely it can't be right to make each translation a method in CSyncer. If it exists outside of both ISyncable and CSyncer, then what is it? (Is it even an "it"?) Is it an abstract class, i.e. abstract CTranslator? Is it an interface, since a translator only does, not has, i.e. interface ITranslator? Does it even require instantiation? e.g. If it's an ITranslator, then should its translation methods be static? (I learned what "late static binding" meant, today.) And, dear God, whatever it is, how should a CSyncer use it? Does it "have" it? Is it, "it"? Who am I? ...am I, "I"? I've attempted to break up the question into sub-questions, but essentially my question is singular: How does one implement an object A that conceptually "links" (has) two objects b1 and b2 that share a common interface B, where certain pairs of b1 and b2 require a helper, e.g. a translator, to be handled by A? Something tells me that I've overcomplicated this design, or violated a principle much higher up. Thank you all very much for your time and any advice you can provide.

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ADF Partner Community News Session - Open Invitation: "ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English)"

- by Frank Nimphius

After a successful guest performance of Ted Farrell in 2011, this year's international ADF speaker to speak during an ADF News session is Chris Muir from Oracle. ADF News Session - Friday September 14, 8:30 AM - 9.00 AM (CET) - Topic: ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English) +++ this webcast will be conducted in English +++ dial-in numbers conc. ADF News Session, Sep. 14 2012 You are invited to join the next ADF News Session, that is going to take place September 14 2012 speaker: Chris Muir / Oracle time: 8:30 AM (CET) duration: 30 minutes topic: ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English) dial-in webconf: https://oraclemeetings.webex.com conf ID: 595 484 157 confkey: 123456 Please enter your name and an abbreviation of you company name when dialing in (please don´t use blanks and special characters). Please notice that this information will be visible to all participants of the webcast. Thank you. dial-in telco: +49 (0)69 2222 16 106 or +49 (0)800 66 485 15 ConfCode: 208 503 9 SecurityPasscode: 112233 Other toll-free dial in numbers for EMEA countries are listed below (information is supplied without liability): 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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Austria 0800005967 Belgium 080048331 Croatia 0800222323 Czech Republic 800701080 Denmark 80889099 Estonia 8000111325 Egypt 08000000213 Finland 0800112073 France 0805632866 Greece 00800127897 Hungary 0680011201 Iceland 8008779 Ireland 1800932479 Israel 1809452571 Italy 800897629 Latvia 80002397 Luxembourg 80026598 Netherlands 08000235028 Norway 80010796 Poland 8001213557 Portugal 800814990 Romania 0800895563 Russia 81080029351012 Saudi Arabia 8008444320 Slovak Republic 0800001586 Slovenia 080080466 South Africa 0800980961 Spain 800098600 Sweden 856619465 Switzerland 0800650026 Turkey 00800 44632129 Ukraine 0800500166 United Arab Emirates 8000440344 United Kingdom 08006948154

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Silverlight and Unexpected Font Sizes

- by Eric J.

Someone please teach me to fish here... I'm just learning Silverlight and have ran into a few situations where the font size actually used is drastically different than I would expect. There's probably something conceptual that I'm missing. Case A In one instance, I have defined a user control that presents a Label to show text. If one clicks on the label, the label (that is in a stack panel, in the user control) is replaced with a TextBox. When used at the top of a page (as in the example below with lblName) the label text is very small (around 8 points). When clicked on, the text box that replaces the label uses the specified fonts size. That same user control, used in different parts of the app, uses the same font for Label and TextBox. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="33" /> <RowDefinition Height="267*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <StackPanel Height="Auto" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Name="stackPanel" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="Auto" Grid.Row="1" /> <my:EditLabel Height="33" HorizontalAlignment="Left" x:Name="lblName" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="Auto" FlexText="{Binding Name, Mode=TwoWay}" FontSize="20" MinHeight="24" /> </Grid> Case B I'm using the LiquidMenu.Menu control to pop up a menu when a button is pressed. The font looks huge compared to the rest of my page (maybe 36 points?). I tried forcing it to a very small by explicitly setting it to 8pt, but that had no effect. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{x:Null}"> <StackPanel x:Name="labelStackPanel" Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Height="24" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Name="labelText" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="200" Text="(Value Goes Here)" /> </StackPanel> <liquidMenu:Menu x:Name="popupMenu" Canvas.Left="40" Canvas.Top="40" ItemSelected="MenuList_ItemSelected" Visibility="Collapsed" Height="Auto" FontSize="8"> <liquidMenu:MenuItem ID="delete" Icon="Images/Delete10.png" Text="Delete" Shortcut="Del" /> <liquidMenu:MenuItem ID="exclusive" Icon="" Text="Exclusive" Shortcut="Ctrl+E" /> <liquidMenu:MenuItem ID="properties" Icon="" Text="Properties" Shortcut="Ctrl+P" /> </liquidMenu:Menu> </Grid> Answers to these specific issues are great, a new way to think about this type of issue so that I understand how to control font size is better.

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SSLException: Keystore does not support enabled cipher suites

- by wurfkeks

I want to implement a small android application, that works as SSL Server. After lot of problems with the right format of the keystore, I solved this and run into the next one. My keystore file is properly loaded by the KeyStore class. But when I try to open the server socket (socket.accept()) the following error is raised: javax.net.ssl.SSLException: Could not find any key store entries to support the enabled cipher suites. I generated my keystore with this command: keytool -genkey -keystore test.keystore -keyalg RSA -keypass ssltest -storepass ssltest -storetype BKS -provider org.bouncycastle.jce.provider.BouncyCastleProvider -providerpath bcprov.jar with the Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy for Java SE6 applied to my jre6. I got a list of supported ciphers suites by calling socket.getSupportedCipherSuites() that prints a long list with very different combinations. But I don't know how to get a supported key. I also tried the android debug keystore after converting it to BKS format using portecle but get still the same error. Can anyone help and tell how I can generate a key that is compatible with one of the cipher suites? Version Information: targetSDK: 15 tested on emulator running 4.0.3 and real device running 2.3.3 BounceCastle 1.46 portecle 1.7 Code of my test application: public class SSLTestActivity extends Activity implements Runnable { SSLServerSocket mServerSocket; ToggleButton tglBtn; /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); this.tglBtn = (ToggleButton)findViewById(R.id.toggleButton1); tglBtn.setOnCheckedChangeListener(new CompoundButton.OnCheckedChangeListener() { @Override public void onCheckedChanged(CompoundButton buttonView, boolean isChecked) { if (isChecked) { new Thread(SSLTestActivity.this).run(); } else { try { if (mServerSocket != null) mServerSocket.close(); } catch (IOException e) { Log.e("SSLTestActivity", e.toString()); } } } }); } @Override public void run() { try { KeyStore keyStore = KeyStore.getInstance(KeyStore.getDefaultType()); keyStore.load(getAssets().open("test.keystore"), "ssltest".toCharArray()); ServerSocketFactory socketFactory = SSLServerSocketFactory.getDefault(); mServerSocket = (SSLServerSocket) socketFactory.createServerSocket(8080); while (!mServerSocket.isClosed()) { Socket client = mServerSocket.accept(); PrintWriter output = new PrintWriter(client.getOutputStream(), true); output.println("So long, and thanks for all the fish!"); client.close(); } } catch (Exception e) { Log.e("SSLTestActivity", e.toString()); } } }

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How to represent different entities that have identical behavior?

- by Dominik

I have several different entities in my domain model (animal species, let's say), which have a few properties each. The entities are readonly (they do not change state during the application lifetime) and they have identical behavior (the differ only by the values of properties). How to implement such entities in code? Unsuccessful attempts: Enums I tried an enum like this: enum Animals { Frog, Duck, Otter, Fish } And other pieces of code would switch on the enum. However, this leads to ugly switching code, scattering the logic around and problems with comboboxes. There's no pretty way to list all possible Animals. Serialization works great though. Subclasses I also thought about where each animal type is a subclass of a common base abstract class. The implementation of Swim() is the same for all Animals, though, so it makes little sense and serializability is a big issue now. Since we represent an animal type (species, if you will), there should be one instance of the subclass per application, which is hard and weird to maintain when we use serialization. public abstract class AnimalBase { string Name { get; set; } // user-readable double Weight { get; set; } Habitat Habitat { get; set; } public void Swim(); { /* swim implementation; the same for all animals but depends uses the value of Weight */ } } public class Otter: AnimalBase{ public Otter() { Name = "Otter"; Weight = 10; Habitat = "North America"; } } // ... and so on Just plain awful. Static fields This blog post gave me and idea for a solution where each option is a statically defined field inside the type, like this: public class Animal { public static readonly Animal Otter = new Animal { Name="Otter", Weight = 10, Habitat = "North America"} // the rest of the animals... public string Name { get; set; } // user-readable public double Weight { get; set; } public Habitat Habitat { get; set; } public void Swim(); } That would be great: you can use it like enums (AnimalType = Animal.Otter), you can easily add a static list of all defined animals, you have a sensible place where to implement Swim(). Immutability can be achieved by making property setters protected. There is a major problem, though: it breaks serializability. A serialized Animal would have to save all its properties and upon deserialization it would create a new instance of Animal, which is something I'd like to avoid. Is there an easy way to make the third attempt work? Any more suggestions for implementing such a model?

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Consolidating coding styles: Funcs, private method, single method classes

- by jdoig

Hi all, We currently have 3 devs with, some, conflicting styles and I'm looking for a way to bring peace to the kingdom... The Coders: Foo 1: Likes to use Func's & Action's inside public methods. He uses actions to alias off lengthy method calls and Func's to perform simple tasks that can be expressed in 1 or 2 lines and will be used frequently through out the code Pros: The main body of his code is succinct and very readable, often with only one or 2 public methods per class and rarely any private methods. Cons: The start of methods contain blocks of lambda rich code that other developers don't enjoy reading; and, on occasion, can contain higher order functions that other dev's REALLY don't like reading. Foo 2: Likes to create a private method for (almost) everything the public method will have to do . Pros: Public methods remain small and readable (to all developers). Cons: Private methods are numerous. With private methods that call into other private methods, that call into... etc, etc. Making code hard to navigate. Foo 3: Likes to create a public class with a, single, public method for every, non-trivial, task that needs performing, then dependency inject them into other objects. Pros: Easily testable, easy to understand (one object, one responsibility). Cons: project gets littered by classes, opening multiple class files to understand what code does makes navigation awkward. It would be great to take the best of all these techniques... Foo-1 Has really nice, readable (almost dsl-like) code... for the most part, except for all the Action and Func lambda shenanigans bulked together at the start of a method. Foo-3 Has highly testable and extensible code that just feels a bit "belt-&-braces" for some solutions and has some code-navigation niggles (constantly hitting F12 in VS and opening 5 other .cs files to find out what a single method does). And Foo-2... Well I'm not sure I like anything about the one-huge .cs file with 2 public methods and 12 private ones, except for the fact it's easier for juniors to dig into. I admit I grossly over-simplified the explanations of those coding styles; but if any one knows of any patterns, practices or diplomatic-manoeuvres that can help unite our three developers (without just telling any of them to just "stop it!") that would be great. From a feasibility standpoint : Foo-1's style meets with the most resistance due to some developers finding lambda and/or Func's hard to read. Foo-2's style meets with a less resistance as it's just so easy to fall into. Foo-3's style requires the most forward thinking and is difficult to enforce when time is short. Any ideas on some coding styles or conventions that can make this work?

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Passing custom info to mongrel_rails start

- by whaka

One thing I really don't understand is how I can pass custom start-up options to a mongrel instance. I see that a common approach is the use environment variables, but in my environment this is not going to work because my rails application serves many different clients. Much code is shared between clients, but there are also many differences which I implement by subclassing controllers and views to overload or extend existing features or introduce new ones. To make this all work, I simply add the paths to client specific modules the module load path ($:). In order to start the application for a particular client, I could now use an environment variable like say, TARGET=AMAZONE. Unfortunately, on some systems I'm running multiple mongrel clusters, each cluster serving a different client. Some of these systems run under Windows and to start mongrel I installed mongrel_services. Clearly, this makes my environment variable unsuitable. Passing this extra bit of data to the application is proving to be a real challenge. For a start, mongrel_rails service_install will reject any [custom] command line parameters that aren't documented. I'm not too concerned as installing the services using the install program is trivial. However, even if I manage to install mongrel_services such that when run it passes the custom command line option --target to mongrel_rails start, I get an error because mongrel_rails doesn't recognize the switch. So here were the things I looked at: Pass an extra parameter: mongrel_rails start --target XYZ ... use a config file and add target:XYZ, then do: mongrel_rails start -C x:\myapp\myconfig.yml modify the file: Ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\mongrel-1.1.5-x86-mswin32-60\lib\mongrel\command.rb Perhaps I can use the --script option, but all docs that I found on it were for Unix 1 and 2 simply don't work. I played with 4 but never managed it to do anything. So I had no choice but to go with 3. While it is relatively simple, I hate changing ruby library code. Particularly disappointing is that 2 doesn't work. I mean what is so unreasonable about adding other [custom] options in the config file? Actually I think this is a fundamental piece that is missing in rails. Somehow, the application should be able to register and access command line arguments it expects. If anybody has a good idea how to do this more elegantly using the current infrastructure, I have a chocolate fish to give away!!!

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Sound Complete Not Firing (AS3)

- by JasonMc92

I have a bit of a quandary. I need to call a function inside a MovieClip once a particular sound has finished playing. The sound is played via a sound channel in an external class which I have imported. Playback is working perfectly. Here is the relevent code from my external class, Sonus. public var SFXPRChannel:SoundChannel = new SoundChannel; var SFXPRfishbeg:Sound = new sfxpr_fishbeg(); var SFXPRfishmid:Sound = new sfxpr_fishmid(); var SFXPRfishend3:Sound = new sfxpr_fishend3(); var SFXPRfishend4:Sound = new sfxpr_fishend4() public function PlayPrompt(promptname:String):void { var sound:String = "SFXPR" + promptname; SFXPRChannel = this[sound].play(); } This is called via an import in the document class "osr", thus I access it in my project via "osr.Sonus.---" In my project, I have the following line of code. osr.Sonus.SFXPRChannel.addEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, promptIsFinished); function prompt():void { var level = osr.Gradua.Fetch("fish", "arr_con_level"); Wait(true); switch(level) { case 1: osr.Sonus.PlayPrompt("fishbeg"); break; case 2: osr.Sonus.PlayPrompt("fishmid"); break; case 3: osr.Sonus.PlayPrompt("fishend3"); break; case 4: osr.Sonus.PlayPrompt("fishend4"); break; } } function Wait(yesno):void { gui.Wait(yesno); } function promptIsFinished(evt:Event):void { Wait(false); } osr.Sonus.PlayPrompt(...) and gui.Wait(...) both work perfectly, as I use them in other contexts in this part of the project without error. Basically, after the sound finishes playing, I need Wait(false); to be called, but the event listener does not appear to be "hearing" the SOUND_COMPLETE event. Did I make a mistake somewhere? For the record, due to my project structure, I cannot call the appropriate Wait(...) function from within Sonus. Help?

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AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

- by REA_ANDREW

I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection. A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract. I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services. My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue. The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make. Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); } My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); } Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor and work as it should normally. To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url. From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters. I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together. I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors. I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me. I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used. To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } } Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation. I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example. You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach. OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); } Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use. Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined. This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/ Cheers for now, Andrew P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon.

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I’m sorry RPGs, it’s not you, it’s me: The birth of my game idea

- by George Clingerman

One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on. The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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Scott Guthrie in Glasgow

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s. Visual Studio 2010 Right now you can download and install Visual Studio 2010 Candidate Release, but soon we will have the final product in our hands. With it there are some amazing improvements, and not just in the IDE. New versions of VB and C# come out of the box as well as Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration. The new Intellisense features allow inline support for Types and Dictionaries as well as being able to type just part of a name and have the list filter accordingly. Even better, and my personal favourite is one that Scott did not mention, and that is that it is not case sensitive so I can actually find things in C# with its reasonless case sensitivity (Scott, can we please have an option to turn that off.) Another nice feature is the Routing engine that was created for ASP.NET MVC is now available for WebForms which is good news for all those that just imported the MVC DLL’s to get at it anyway. Another fantastic feature that will need some exploring is the ability to add validation rules to your entities and have them validated automatically on the front end. This removes the need to add your own validators and means that you can control an objects validation rules from a single location, the object. A simple command “GridView.EnableDynamicData(gettype(product))“ will enable this feature on controls. What was not clear was wither there would be support for this in WPF and WinForms as well. If there is, we can write our validation rules once and use everywhere. I was disappointed to here that there would be no inbuilt support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with VS2010, but I think it will be there for .vNext. Because I have been concentrating on the Visual Studio ALM enhancements to VS2010 I found this section invaluable as I now know at least some of what I missed. Silverlight 4 I am not a big fan of Silverlight. There I said it, and I will probably get lynched for it. My big problem with Silverlight is that most of the really useful things I leaned from WPF do not work. I am only going to mention one thing and that is “x:Type”. If you are a WPF developer you will know how much power these 6 little letters provide; the ability to target templates at object types being the the most magical and useful. But, and this is a massive but, if you are developing applications that MUST run on platforms other than windows then Silverlight is your only choice (well that and Flash, but lets just not go there). And Silverlight has a huge install base as well.. 60% of all internet connected devices have Silverlight. Can Adobe say that? Even though I am not a fan of it my current project is a Silverlight one. If you start your XAML experience with Silverlight you will not be disappointed and neither will the users of the applications you build. Scott showed us a fantastic application called “Silverface” that is a Silverlight 4 Out of Browser application. I have looked for a link and can’t find one, but true to form, here is a fantastic WPF version called Fish Bowl from Microsoft. ASP.NET MVC 2 ASP.NET MVC is something I have played with but never used in anger. It is definitely the way forward, but WebForms is not dead yet. there are still circumstances when WebForms are better. If you are starting from greenfield and you are using TDD, then MVC is ultimately the only way you can go. New in version 2 are Dynamic Scaffolding helpers that let you control how data is presented in the UI from the Entities. Adding validation rules and other options that make sense there can help improve the overall ease of developing the UI. Also the Microsoft team have heard the cries of help from the larger site builders and provided “Areas” which allow a level of categorisation to your Controllers and Views. These work just like add-ins and have their own folder, but also have sub Controllers and Views. Areas are totally pluggable and can be dropped onto existing sites giving the ability to have boxed products in MVC, although what you do with all of those views is anyone's guess. They have been listening to everyone again with the new option to encapsulate UI using the Html.Action or Html.ActionRender. This uses the existing .ascx functionality in ASP.NET to render partial views to the screen in certain areas. While this was possible before, it makes the method official thereby opening it up to the masses and making it a standard. At the end of the session Scott pulled out some IIS goodies including the IIS SEO Toolkit which can be used to verify your own site is “good” for search engine consumption. Better yet he suggested that you run it against your friends sites and shame them with how bad they are. note: make sure you have fixed yours first. Windows Phone 7 Series I had already seen the new UI for WP7 and heard about the developer story, but Scott brought that home by building a twitter application in about 20 minutes using the emulator. Scott’s only mistake was loading @plip’s tweets into the app… And guess what, it was written in Silverlight. When Windows Phone 7 launches you will be able to use about 90% of the codebase of your existing Silverlight application and use it on the phone! There are two downsides to the new WP7 architecture: No, your existing application WILL NOT work without being converted to either a Silverlight or XNA UI. NO, you will not be able to get your applications onto the phone any other way but through the Marketplace. Do I think these are problems? No, not even slightly. This phone is aimed at consumers who have probably never tried to install an application directly onto a device. There will be support for enterprise apps in the future, but for now enterprises should stay on Windows Phone 6.5.x devices. Post Event drinks At the after event drinks gathering Scott was checking out my HTC HD2 (released to the US this month on T-Mobile) and liked the Windows Phone 6.5.5 build I have on it. We discussed why Microsoft were not going to allow Windows Phone 7 Series onto it with my understanding being that it had 5 buttons and not 3, while Scott was sure that there was more to it from a hardware standpoint. I think he is right, and although the HTC HD2 has a DX9 compatible processor, it was never built with WP7 in mind. However, as if by magic Saturday brought fantastic news for all those that have already bought an HD2: Yes, this appears to be Windows Phone 7 running on a HTC HD2. The HD2 itself won't be getting an official upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series, so all eyes are on the ROM chefs at the moment. The rather massive photos have been posted by Tom Codon on HTCPedia and they've apparently got WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and other bits working. The ROM isn't online yet but according to the post there's a beta version coming soon. Leigh Geary - http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news5648.html What was Scott working on on his flight back to the US? Technorati Tags: VS2010,MVC2,WP7S,WP7 Follow: @CAMURPHY, @ColinMackay, @plip and of course @ScottGu

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