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.NET Rocks is on the Road Again!

- by Scott Spradlin

Carl and Richard are loading up the DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) and driving to our town again to show off their favorite bits of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Richard talks about Web load testing and Carl talks about Silverlight 4.0 and multimedia. And to make the night even more fun, they are going to bring a mystery rock star from the Visual Studio world to the event and interview them for a special .NET Rocks Road Trip show series. Along the way we’ll be giving away some great prizes, showing off some awesome technology and having a ton of laughs. So come out to the most fun you can have in a geeky evening - and learn a few things along the way about web load testing and Silverlight 4! And one lucky person at the event will win "Ride Along with Carl and Richard" and get to board the RV and ride with the boys to the next town on the tour -- Chicago. (don’t worry, they will get you home again!) So come out to the most fun you can have in a geeky evening – and find out what’s new and cool in Visual Studio 2010! To get insure we have sufficient food for everyone, please register for this event at http://stlnet.eventbrite.com This registration information will only be used to obtain accurate counts for food preparation. All other answers are optional and will be used for purely statistical analysis. No information will be shared outside the St. Louis .NET User Group. Here is a list of prizes to be given away at the event: Telerik Premium Collection Pre-Emptive One Year Commercial Runtime Intelligence license Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler Quest Toad Extension for Visual Studio DevExpress Code Rush and Refactor Pro Grape City Active Report/BI Suite Grape City Spread 5.0 JetBrains Resharper Component One Studio for ASP.NET Component One Studio for Silverlight Please check out the event sponsors: Visit http://www.dotnetrocks.com/roadtrip for more information! Thursday, April 29, 2010 6:00 pm - Food and social 6:30 pm - .NET Rocks Interview 7:15 pm - Richard Campbell 8:00 pm - Carl Franklin 8:45 pm - prizes!

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//TODO: Test this thoroughly!!!!!!

- by Edward Boyle

I just ran into an ugly sight in my code: //TODO: Test this thoroughly!!!!!! private void ... I would very much like to go back in time and ask the past me what I meant, why did I add that TODO:? …And then, smack the s%#t out of him. No matter how much testing I do of this code I will always wonder if the past me found something. Was it actually that code or was it a calling method that may bring unwanted results. The fact that I find absolutely nothing wrong with the code makes it that much more haunting. The moral of the story; when you find something wrong and need to test it thoroughly, stay up another hour testing it. The clarity in your head at that moment, on that issue, at that specific moment in time, would take hours worth of commenting to justify not finishing it now. Maybe what I meant was: // TODO: Test this thoroughly!!!!!! // All seems fine but test it just in case, not to worry. private void ... Doubt it. -I’m screwed.

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How to evaluate the quality of Rails code?

- by Fortuity

In a code review, what do you look for to assess a developer's expertise? Given an opportunity to look at a developer's work on a real-world project, what tell-tale signs are a tip-off to carelessness or lack of experience? Conversely, where do you look in the code to find evidence of a developer's skill or knowledge of best practices? For example, if I'm looking at a typical Rails app, I would be happy to see the developer is using RSpec (showing a commitment to using test-driven development and knowledge that RSpec is currently more popular than the default TestUnit). But in examining the specs for a Rails model, I see that the developer is testing associations, which might indicate a lack of real understanding of Rails testing requirements (since such tests are redundant given that they only test what's already implemented and tested in ActiveRecord). More generally, I might look to see if developers are writing their own implementations versus using widely available gems or if they are cleaning up code versus leaving lots of commented-out "leftovers." What helps you determine the skill of a Rails developer? What's your code quality checklist?

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.Net Rocks Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip coming to Raleigh, NC May 6th

- by Jim Duffy

Listen up .NET developers within 50 miles of Research Triangle Park, NC! Take out that red, blue, green, black or any other color Sharpie marker you fancy and circle May 6th! Fellow Microsoft Regional Directors Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell are going to be bringing the .Net Rocks Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip to town. What’s that you say, you’ve never been to a .Net Rocks Road Trip event and don’t know what to expect? Let me help with that. I stol… uhhh… I mean I was “inspired” by some content I found on the event information page. “Carl and Richard are loading up the DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) and driving to your town again to show off their favorite bits of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Richard talks about Web load testing and Carl talks about Silverlight 4.0 and multimedia. And to make the night even more fun, we’re going to bring a mystery rock star from the Visual Studio world to the event and interview them for a special .NET Rocks Road Trip show series. Along the way we’ll be giving away some great prizes, showing off some awesome technology and having a ton of laughs. So come out to the most fun you can have in a geeky evening – and learn a few things along the way about web load testing and Silverlight 4!“ I know I’ll be there so what are you waiting for? Head over to the event registration page and sign up today! Have a day. :-|

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String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace

- by Scott Dorman

An empty string is different than an unassigned string variable (which is null), and is a string containing no characters between the quotes (""). The .NET Framework provides String.Empty to represent an empty string, and there is no practical difference between ("") and String.Empty. One of the most common string comparisons to perform is to determine if a string variable is equal to an empty string. The fastest and simplest way to determine if a string is empty is to test if the Length property is equal to 0. However, since strings are reference types it is possible for a string variable to be null, which would result in a runtime error when you tried to access the Length property. Since testing to determine if a string is empty is such a common occurrence, the .NET Framework provides the static method String.IsNullOrEmpty method: public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(string value) { if (value != null) { return (value.Length == 0); } return true; } It is also very common to determine if a string is empty and contains more than just whitespace characters. For example, String.IsNullOrEmpty(" ") would return false, since this string is actually made up of three whitespace characters. In some cases, this may be acceptable, but in many others it is not. TO help simplify testing this scenario, the .NET Framework 4 introduces the String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method: public static bool IsNullOrWhiteSpace(string value) { if (value != null) { for (int i = 0; i < value.Length; i++) { if (!char.IsWhiteSpace(value[i])) { return false; } } } return true; } Using either String.IsNullOrEmpty or String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace helps ensure correctness, readability, and consistency, so they should be used in all situations where you need to determine if a string is null, empty, or contains only whitespace characters. Technorati Tags: .NET,C# 4

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How to evaluate the quality of Rails code?

- by Fortuity

In a code review, what do you look for to assess a developer's expertise? Given an opportunity to look at a developer's work on a real-world project, what tell-tale signs are a tip-off to carelessness or lack of experience? Conversely, where do you look in the code to find evidence of a developer's skill or knowledge of best practices? For example, if I'm looking at a typical Rails app, I would be happy to see the developer is using RSpec (showing a commitment to using test-driven development and knowledge that RSpec is currently more popular than the default TestUnit). But in examining the specs for a Rails model, I see that the developer is testing associations, which might indicate a lack of real understanding of Rails testing requirements (since such tests are redundant given that they only test what's already implemented and tested in ActiveRecord). More generally, I might look to see if developers are writing their own implementations versus using widely available gems or if they are cleaning up code versus leaving lots of commented-out "leftovers." What helps you determine the skill of a Rails developer? What's your code quality checklist?

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Silverlight Cream for April 21, 2010 -- #843

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Alan Beasley, Roboblob, SilverLaw, Mike Snow, and Chris Koenig. Shoutouts: Ozymandias has a discussion up: The Three Pillars of Xbox Live on Windows Phone John Papa announced that Silverlight 4 is now on WebPI: Get Silverlight 4 – Simplified! Dan Wahlin posted the code and material from DevConnections: Code from my DevConnections Talks and Workshop Tim Heuer has a good deal posted from GoDaddy: Get a Silverlight XAP signing certificate for cheap thanks to GoDaddy From SilverlightCream.com: ListBox Styling (Part2-ControlTemplate) in Expression Blend & Silverlight Alan Beasley is back with part 2 of his ListBox styling tutorial adventure in Expression Blend... this looks like some of the stuff I was getting close to in Win32 a bunch of years back... great stuff... thanks Alan! Unit Testing Modal Dialogs in MVVM and Silverlight 4 Roboblob responds to some feedback with an expansion on his previous post with the addition of some Unit Testing. ChildWindowResizeBehavior - Silverlight 4 Blend 4 RC design time support SilverLaw has a short post about a behavior he has available at the Expression Gallery that resizes a child window with the Mouse Wheel, and also has Design-time support in Blend. Tip of the Day #111 – How to Configure your Silverlight App to run in Elevated Trust Mode Mike Snow has his latest tip up, and this one is on both ends of of the Elevated Trust Mode of OOB ... how to set it, and what your user experience is like. WP7 Part 2 – Working with Data Chris Koenig has part 2 of his WP7 exploration up ... he's tackling Nerd Dinner and pulling down Odata. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Why are two indicator-network versions being worked on?

- by Daniel Rodrigues

Some months ago, on the road to Ubuntu Maverick, a new system indicator, network (with connman as a backend), started to be developed. The plan was to get it into UNE and release it with no notifcation area. Unfortunately it didn't make it into the final version. However, continued efforts are still being made to improve it, and I'm getting regular updates. From a blueprint from the last UDS, I read that the plan was to ship no notification area and only indicators. For that, it was defined that nm-applet (backend: NetworkManager) should be ported to the appindicator library. Today I discovered that those efforts are going on and a initial version is available for testing, available from Matt Trudel PPA (Natty only). So, my questions is, to whoever has the necessary info: wouldn't it be easier to join efforts and concentrate the work in just one version (probably NetworkManager backend, as that's the official plan), instead of breaking those efforts apart and hampering both testing and developing? Both indicators are being developed by Canonical engineers, and that really doesn't make much sense. So, any Canonical engineer willing to clarify this?

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BizTalk Pipeline Component Error: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"

- by Stuart Brierley

Yesterday I posted about my BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component, which can be found on Codeplex if anyone is interested in taking a look. During testing of this component I began to encounter an error whereby the component would throw an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error when processing as a part of a Custom Pipeline. This was occurring when the component was reading a ReadOnlySeekableStream so that the data can be archived to file, but the actual code throwing the error was somewhere in the depths of the Microsoft.BizTalk.Streaming stack. It turns out that there is a known issue where this exception can be thrown because the garbage collector has disposed of of the stream before execution of the custom pipeline has completed. To get around this you need to add the streams in your code to the pipeline context resource tracker. So a block of my code goes from: originalStrm = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream(); if (!originalStrm.CanSeek) { ReadOnlySeekableStream seekableStream = new ReadOnlySeekableStream(originalStrm); inmsg.BodyPart.Data = seekableStream; originalStrm = inmsg.BodyPart.Data; } fileArchive = new FileStream(FullPath, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write); binWriter = new BinaryWriter(fileArchive); byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize]; int sizeRead = 0; while ((sizeRead = originalStrm.Read(buffer, 0, bufferSize)) != 0) { binWriter.Write(buffer, 0, sizeRead); } to originalStrm = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream(); if (!originalStrm.CanSeek) { ReadOnlySeekableStream seekableStream = new ReadOnlySeekableStream(originalStrm); inmsg.BodyPart.Data = seekableStream; originalStrm = inmsg.BodyPart.Data; } pc.ResourceTracker.AddResource(originalStrm); fileArchive = new FileStream(FullPath, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write); binWriter = new BinaryWriter(fileArchive); byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize]; int sizeRead = 0; while ((sizeRead = originalStrm.Read(buffer, 0, bufferSize)) != 0) { binWriter.Write(buffer, 0, sizeRead); } So far this seems to have solved the issue, the error is no more, and my archive component is continuing its way through testing.

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Does TDD really work for complex projects?

- by Amir Rezaei

I’m asking this question regarding problems I have experienced during TDD projects. I have noticed the following challenges when creating unit tests. Generating and maintaining mock data It’s hard and unrealistic to maintain large mock data. It’s is even harder when database structure undergoes changes. Testing GUI Even with MVVM and ability to test GUI, it takes a lot of code to reproduce the GUI scenario. Testing the business I have experience that TDD works well if you limit it to simple business logic. However complex business logic is hard to test since the number of combinations of tests (test space) is very large. Contradiction in requirements In reality it’s hard to capture all requirements under analysis and design. Many times one note requirements lead to contradiction because the project is complex. The contradiction is found late under implementation phase. TDD requires that requirements are 100% correct. In such cases one could expect that conflicting requirements would be captured during creating of tests. But the problem is that this isn’t the case in complex scenarios. I have read this question: Why does TDD work? Does TDD really work for complex enterprise projects, or is it practically limit to project type?

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SQLAuthority News – Scaling Up Your Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2008 R2

- by pinaldave

Data Warehouses are suppose to be containing huge amount of the data from the beginning. However, there are cases when too big is not enough. Every Data Warehouse Admin will agree that they have faced situation where they will need to scale up their data warehouse. Microsoft has released white paper discussing the same. Here is the abstract from the Microsoft Official site: SQL Server 2008 introduced many new functional and performance improvements for data warehousing, and SQL Server 2008 R2 includes all these and more. This paper discusses how to use SQL Server 2008 R2 to get great performance as your data warehouse scales up. We present lessons learned during extensive internal data warehouse testing on a 64-core HP Integrity Superdome during the development of the SQL Server 2008 release, and via production experience with large-scale SQL Server customers. Our testing indicates that many customers can expect their performance to nearly double on the same hardware they are currently using, merely by upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2 from SQL Server 2005 or earlier, and compressing their fact tables. We cover techniques to improve manageability and performance at high-scale, encompassing data loading (extract, transform, load), query processing, partitioning, index maintenance, indexed view (aggregate) management, and backup and restore. Scaling Up Your Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2008 R2 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Part 3: Customization Strategy or how long does it take

- by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

The previous part in this blog should have made us aware, that many procedures are required to manage all these steps. To review your status let me ask you a question:What is your Customization Strategy?Your answer might be something like, 'customization strategy, well, we have standards and we let requirement documents approve'.Let me ask you another question:How long does it take to redeploy all your customizations into a fresh installation?In 90% of all installations the answer to this question would be: we can't!Although no one would have to do it (hopefully), just thinking about it and recognizing that we have today too many manual steps involved, different procedures and sometimes (undocumented) manual steps to complete a customization installation. And ... in general too many customizations.Why is working with customizations often so complicated and time consuming?Here are the key reasons as I have identified them in my projects:Customization standards defined, but not maintainedDifferent knowledge on developer side (results getting an individual developer touch)No need to automate deployment (not forced by client)Different documentation styles, not easy to hand over to someone elseDifferent development concepts, difficult for the maintenanceJust the minimum present for testing, often positive testing onlyDeviations from naming conventions accepted, although definedComplicated procedures, therefore sometimes partially ignoredAnd last but not least, hand made version control (still)If you would have to 'redeploy all your customizations' you would have to Follow all your own standards and best practiceTrack deviations and define corrective tasksAutomate as much as possible, minimize manual tasksDo not allow any change coming in without version controlUtilize products to support you in deploymentMinimize hand made scripts and extensive documentationReview regularly used techniques to guarantee that all are in line with the current release and also easy maintainableCreate solution libraries and force the team to contribute and reuseDefine quality activities and execute themDefine a procedure to release customizationsI know, it is easy to write down, but much harder to manage. Will provide some guidelines in my next blog.Volker

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ASP.Net MVC: Areas and controllers

- by xamlnotes

Areas are a great feature of MVC now. The let you put common code into an Area and then its segregated from other code. That makes it really easy to put those common feature in one spot and not have the interfere with other code. So today I was working on a new area and starting to test code in it. But the controller method could not be found. Testing the routes and all of the names proved no help either. So I am banging my head against the wall. Then I took a peak at one of the existing controllers in another Area in the same app. Looked similar, but … There was a Namespaceat the top of that controller with that Area in the Namespace. I had copied my controller in from somewhere else and therefore it did not have the Namespace there. I put in the right Namespace and cool, it worked right away. So add that to your list when testing.

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Improving the speed of writing code in C#

- by Robert Harvey

Laugh if you want, but I used to develop substantial line-of-business applications in VB6, long before the .NET framework came along. Why, when I was your age, we used to walk two miles in the snow, uphill. Both ways... Love it or hate it, VB6 had a REPL-like feel, and a very rapid development cycle. I would like to know how to come closer to that process in C#. In VB6, I could write a function, execute it, debug it and have it fully functional in a few minutes. I am told this is how the Lisp crowd works. It's a very rapid-fire style of programming. In C# I write a function, then I write a unit test for that function (which is OK, I understand the value of that), then I right-click, run test, wait for the project to compile (takes about 10 seconds right now, which would be an eternity for a REPL loop), and get an exception. Honestly, this feels more like my junior college days, when I used to feed punch cards into a hopper and wait for a printout (exaggerating only slightly for effect). Additionally, my tendency nowadays is to make everything public while I'm testing it. Unit testing with private accessors works fine, but you can't trace through the code (unless, of course, I'm doing something wrong) while you're using them. So what I'd like to know is, what adjustments have you made to your development process in C# to streamline it, and make it possible to write and verify your code very rapidly?

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Generalized Ajax function [migrated]

- by TecBrat

Not sure if this question will be considered "off topic". If it is, I'll remove it, but: I hadn't see this yet so I wrote it and would like to know if this is a good approach to it. Would anyone care to offer improvements to it, or point me to an example of where someone else has already written it better? function clwAjaxCall(path,method,data,asynch) { var xmlhttp; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); } else {// code for IE6, IE5 xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } if(asynch) { xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() { if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200) { //alert(xmlhttp.responseText); //var newaction=xmlhttp.responseText; //alert('Action becomes '+newaction); return xmlhttp.responseText; } } } if(method=='GET'){path=path+"/?"+data;} xmlhttp.open(method,path,asynch); if(method=='GET'){xmlhttp.send();}else{xmlhttp.send(data);} if (!asynch){return xmlhttp.responseText;} } I then called it like Just Testing <script type="text/javascript" src="/mypath/js/clwAjaxCall.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> document.write("<br>More Testing"); document.write(clwAjaxCall("http://www.mysite.com",'GET',"var=val",false)); </script>

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Is this kind of Design by Contract useless?

- by Charlie Pigarelli

I've just started informatics university and I'm attending a programming course about C(++). The programming professor prefers to teach very few things (in 3 month we have just reached the functions topic) and connect every topic with a type of programming design that somehow is similar to the Design by Contract design. Basically what he ask us to do is to write every exercise with comments Pre-conditions, Post-conditions and Invariants that should prove the correctness of each program we write. But this doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, ok: maybe writing down your thoughts prevent you from doing some mistakes, but if this is all an abstract thing, then if your program intuition is wrong you'll write your program wrong and then you'll also write pre and post conditions wrong probably auto convincing your self about its correctness. Most of the time, both me and other students have written programs that seemed ok and that had correct pre and post condition too. But at the moment of testing it was just completely wrong. I had some experience before this course of programming and I had written a lot of line of code before and I found myself comfortably with just writing a program and unit test it. It take less time to accomplish and is less "abstract" than just thinking about what every single piece of your program should do in every case (which is kinda like mentally testing it). Finally, all this pre and post conditions takes me like 80% of the total time of the exercise. It's harder to think about putting down this pre and post correct than to write the program itself. Since we are like the only course of the only university probably in the entire world that makes this things, could someone please tell me how should I manage this thing? Am I right thinking that this doesn't worth anything? Should I change university? (there are like double of the people attending that course and it seems that usually very few people passes the exam the first year). Should I convince myself it's method is right?

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Staying OO and Testable while working with a database

- by Adam Backstrom

What are some OOP strategies for working with a database but keeping thing testable? Say I have a User class and my production environment works against MySQL. I see a couple possible approaches, shown here using PHP: Pass in a $data_source with interfaces for load() and save(), to abstract the backend source of data. When testing, pass a different data store. $user = new User( $mysql_data_source ); $user-load( 'bob' ); $user-setNickname( 'Robby' ); $user-save(); Use a factory that accesses the database and passes the result row to User's constructor. When testing, manually generate the $row parameter, or mock the object in UserFactory::$data_source. (How might I save changes to the record?) class UserFactory { static $data_source; public static function fetch( $username ) { $row = self::$data_source->get( [params] ); $user = new User( $row ); return $user; } } I have Design Patterns and Clean Code here next to me, but I'm struggling to find applicable concepts.

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MySQL – Export the Resultset to CSV file

- by Pinal Dave

In SQL Server, you can use BCP command to export the result set to a csv file. In MySQL too, You can export data from a table or result set as a csv file in many methods. Here are two methods. Method 1 : Make use of Work Bench If you are using Work Bench as a querying tool, you can make use of it’s Export option in the result window. Run the following code in Work Bench SELECT db_names FROM mysql_testing; The result will be shown in the result windows. There is an option called “File”. Click on it and it will prompt you a window to save the result set (Screen shot attached to show how file option can be used). Choose the directory and type out the name of the file. Method 2 : Make use of OUTFILE command You can do the export using a query with OUTFILE command as shown below SELECT db_names FROM mysql_testing INTO OUTFILE 'C:/testing.csv' FIELDS ENCLOSED BY '"' TERMINATED BY ';' ESCAPED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n'; After the execution of the above code, you can find a file named testing.csv in C drive of the server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: CSV

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How do I speed up XML parsing operation?

- by absentx

I currently have a php script set up to do some xml parsing. Sometimes the script is set as an on page include and other times it is accessed via an ajax call. The problem is the load time for this particular page is very long. I started to think that the php I had written to find what I need in the XML was written poorly and my script is very resource intense. After much research and testing the problem is indeed not my scripting (well perhaps you could consider it a problem with my scripting), but it looks like it takes a long time to load the particular xml sources. My code is like such: $source_recent = 'my xml feed'; $source_additional = 'the other feed I need'; $xmlstr_recent = file_get_contents($source_recent); $feed_recent = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr_recent); $xmlstr_additional = file_get_contents($source_additional); $feed_additional = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr_additional); In all my testing, the above code is what takes the time, not the additional processing I do below. Is there anyway around this or am I at the mercy of the load time of the xml URL's? One crazy thought I had to get around it is to load the xml contents into a db every so often, then just query the db for what I need. Thoughts? Ideas?

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Exalytics Increases Customer Revenue, and Saves Time, Risk & Cost

- by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

We are getting some great proof point stories now from our customers who are succeeding with the Exalytics in-memory system for OBI and Essbase. See below for some recent testimony: San Diego Unified School District Harnesses Attendance, Procurement, and Operational Data with Oracle Exalytics, Generating $4.4 Million in Savings: according to independent assessment by Mainstay Salire, the district is on track to achieve substantial benefits from the Oracle Exalytics solution, including an $8.25 million increase in attendance revenue, $75,000 a year savings in operational efficiencies, and $1 million in hardware cost avoidance. NilsonGroup chooses Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine as their solution to access critical data to keep its stores competitive with real-time Mobile BI: it took only “3 days to get up and running” with Exalytics. Video Nykredit, in the Danish Financial Sector, describes their experiences from testing the Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine: “it was up and running within 4 days” with “more intuitive dashboards” and “up to 70x better performance” and “cheaper maintenance and lower total cost of ownership”. Video Sodexo chose Oracle Exalytics as their business analytics platform; accelerating Essbase “more than 8x” performance for more than 2,000 Excel-addin users, “significantly changing how people in information management now deal with data”. Video Polk, Savvis, Nykredit, and Key Energy describe testing of the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine: to “reach more users than we ever have before”, “to fly through the data without impeding the analytic process”, “drive our enterprise groups into this tool instead of having departmental solutions”, and the “advanced visualisation this product enables”. Video

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SQL Server 2008 R2: These are a Few of My Favorite Things

- by smisner

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jorge Segarra (blog | twitter) who decided that we should write about our favorite new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2. The majority of my published works concentrates on Reporting Services, so the obious answer for me is about favorite new features is...Reporting Services. I can't pick just one thing in Reporting Services, so instead I thought I'd compile a list of my posts of the new features in Reporting Services 2008 R2: Map Wizard for spatial data (The World is But a Stage) Pagination features (I've Got Your Page Number) Lookup functions (Look Up, Look Down, Look All Around - Part I, Part II, Part III) Test Connection button (Testing, Testing 1-2-3) Conditional formatting based on format, i.e. RenderFormat (As You Like It) And I wrote an overview of the business intelligence features in SQL Server 2008 R2 for Microsoft Press in the free e-book, Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, if you're curious about what else is new in both the BI platform as well as the relational engine. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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Fuzzing for Security

- by Sylvain Duloutre

Yesterday, I attended an internal workshop about ethical hacking. Hacking skills like fuzzing can be used to quantitatively assess and measure security threats in software. Fuzzing is a software testing technique used to discover coding errors and security loopholes in software, operating systems or networks by injecting massive amounts of random data, called fuzz, to the system in an attempt to make it crash. If the program contains a vulnerability that can leads to an exception, crash or server error (in the case of web apps), it can be determined that a vulnerability has been discovered.A fuzzer is a program that generates and injects random (and in general faulty) input to an application. Its main purpose is to make things easier and automated.There are typically two methods for producing fuzz data that is sent to a target, Generation or Mutation. Generational fuzzers are capable of building the data being sent based on a data model provided by the fuzzer creator. Sometimes this is simple and dumb as sending random bytes, swapping bytes or much smarter by knowing good values and combining them in interesting ways.Mutation on the other hand starts out with a known good "template" which is then modified. However, nothing that is not present in the "template" or "seed" will be produced.Generally fuzzers are good at finding buffer overflow, DoS, SQL Injection, Format String bugs etc. They do a poor job at finding vulnerabilites related to information disclosure, encryption flaws and any other vulnerability that does not cause the program to crash. Fuzzing is simple and offers a high benefit-to-cost ratio but does not replace other proven testing techniques.What is your computer doing over the week-end ?

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Advantages and Disadvantages of the Waterfall Methodology

In my personal opinion I believe the waterfall method is one of the worst methodologies to use when developing larger systems because it leaves is no room for mistakes. As the name implies the waterfall methodology does not allow for projects to go back up stream to recover from design errors, missing and/or limited requirements. In addition, hidden bugs are not usually found until the testing phase. This can prove to be very costly and time consuming to the developer and the client. According to NCycles.com, the waterfall methodology structures a project into separate stages with defined deliverables from each phase. Define Design Code Test Implement Document and Maintain The advantages found by Ncycle.com to this methodology are: Ease in analyzing potential changes Ability to coordinate larger teams, even if geographically distributed Can enable precise dollar budget Less total time required from Subject Matter Experts The disadvantages found by Ncycle.com to this methodology are: Lack of flexibility Hard to predict all needs in advance Intangible knowledge lost between hand-offs Lack of team cohesion Design flaws not discovered until the Testing phase References: NCycles.com (2002). Retrieved from http://www.ncycles.com/e_whi_Methodologies.htmmethodology on April 17, 2009

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Oracle University Partner Enablement Update (15th November)

- by swalker

Two new OPN Only Boot Camps available The following OPN Only Boot Camps have just become available: 3-day Oracle Exadata 11g Technical Boot Camp: Prepares you for becoming an Oracle Exadata 11g Certified Implementation Specialist Currently scheduled in Germany, UK Available for scheduling in all countries Live Virtual Class dates: 15-17 Feb 12 & 16-18 May 12 5-day Oracle BI Enterprise Edition 11g Implementation Boot Camp Currently scheduled in Sweden Available for scheduling in all countries View the complete OPN Only Boot Camp schedule. Certification News: Java SE 7 Be one of the first to get Java SE 7 certified. The following exams have recently become available for beta testing: Exam Code and Title Certification Track 1Z1-805 Upgrade to Java SE 7 Programmer (Beta until 17-Dec-11 ) Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 7 Programmer 1Z1-803 Java SE 7 Programmer I (Beta until 17-Dec-11 ) Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer A beta exam offers you two distinct advantages: you will be one of the first to get certified you pay a lower price. Beta exams can be taken at any Pearson VUE Testing Center. New CoursesOracle University released several new courses recently. Please click here to find out more about the new course titles. Are you looking for insight from the Oracle University experts? Check out these Oracle University Newsletters: Technology Newsletters Applications Newsletters Stay Connected to Oracle University: LinkedIn OracleMix Twitter Facebook

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SPUtility.SendMail and the 2048 Character Limit

- by Damon

We were in the middle of testing a web part responsible for gathering information from visitors to our Client's website and emailing it to someone responsible for responding to the request. During testing, however, it was brought to our attention that the message was cutting off at 2048 characters. Now, 2048 is one of those numbers that is usually indicative of some computational limit, but I was hopeful that Microsoft had thought through the possibility of emailing more than 2048 characters from SharePoint. Luckily I was right. and wrong. As it turns out, SPUtility.SendMail is not limited to any specific character limit as far as I can tell. However, each LINE of text that you send via SendMail cannot exceed 2048 characters. Since we were sending an HTML email it was constructed entirely without line breaks, far exceeding the 2048 character limit and ultimately helping to educate me about this obscure technical limitation whose only benefit thus far is offering me something to rant about on my blog. The fix is simple, just put in a carriage return and a line break often enough to avoid going past the 2048 character limit. I'm sure someone can present a great technical reason for the 2048 character limit, but it seems fairly arbitrary since the "\r\n" that got appended to the string are ultimately just characters too.

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