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  • Identity Management Monday at Oracle OpenWorld

    - by Tanu Sood
    What a great start to Oracle OpenWorld! Did you catch Larry Ellison’s keynote last evening? As expected, it was a packed house and the keynote received a tremendous response both from the live audience as well as the online community as evidenced by the frequent spontaneous applause in house and the twitter buzz. Here’s but a sampling of some of the tweets that flowed in: @paulvallee: I freaking love that #oracle has been born again in it's interest in core tech #oow (so good for #pythian) @rwang0: MyPOV: #oracle just leapfrogged the competition on the tech front across the board. All they need is the content delivery network #oow12 @roh1: LJE more astute & engaging this year. Nice announcements this year with 12c the MTDB sounding real good. #oow12 @brooke: Cool to see @larryellison interrupted multiple times by applause from the audience. Great speaker. #OOW And there’s lot more to come this week. Identity Management sessions kick-off today. Here’s a quick preview of what’s in store for you today for Identity Management: CON9405: Trends in Identity Management 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Moscone West 3003 Hear directly from subject matter experts from Kaiser Permanente and SuperValu who would share the stage with Amit Jasuja, Senior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security, to discuss how the latest advances in Identity Management that made it in Oracle Identity Management 11g Release 2 are helping customers address emerging requirements for securely enabling cloud, social and mobile environments. CON9492: Simplifying your Identity Management Implementation 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Implementation experts from British Telecom, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC participate in a panel to discuss best practices, key strategies and lessons learned based on their own experiences. Attendees will hear first-hand what they can do to streamline and simplify their identity management implementation framework for a quick return-on-investment and maximum efficiency. This session will also explore the architectural simplifications of Oracle Identity Governance 11gR2, focusing on how these enhancements simply deployments. CON9444: Modernized and Complete Access Management 4:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 We have come a long way from the days of web single sign-on addressing the core business requirements. Today, as technology and business evolves, organizations are seeking new capabilities like federation, token services, fine grained authorizations, web fraud prevention and strong authentication. This session will explore the emerging requirements for access management, what a complete solution is like, complemented with real-world customer case studies from ETS, Kaiser Permanente and TURKCELL and product demonstrations. HOL10478: Complete Access Management Monday, October 1, 1:45 p.m. – 2:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis - Salon 1/2 And, get your hands on technology today. Register and attend the Hands-On-Lab session that demonstrates Oracle’s complete and scalable access management solution, which includes single sign-on, authorization, federation, and integration with social identity providers. Further, the session shows how to securely extend identity services to mobile applications and devices—all while leveraging a common set of policies and a single instance. Product Demonstrations The latest technology in Identity Management is also being showcased in the Exhibition Hall so do find some time to visit our product demonstrations there. Experts will be at hand to answer any questions. DEMOS LOCATION EXHIBITION HALL HOURS Access Management: Complete and Scalable Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-218 Monday, October 1 9:30 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 9:30 a.m.–10:45 a.m. (Dedicated Hours) Tuesday, October 2 9:45 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–2:45 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Wednesday, October 3 9:45 a.m.–4:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–3:30 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Access Management: Federating and Leveraging Social Identities Moscone South, Right - S-220 Access Management: Mobile Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-219 Access Management: Real-Time Authorizations Moscone South, Right - S-217 Access Management: Secure SOA and Web Services Security Moscone South, Right - S-223 Identity Governance: Modern Administration and Tooling Moscone South, Right - S-210 Identity Management Monitoring with Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone South, Right - S-212 Oracle Directory Services Plus: Performant, Cloud-Ready Moscone South, Right - S-222 Oracle Identity Management: Closed-Loop Access Certification Moscone South, Right - S-221 We recommend you keep the Focus on Identity Management document handy. And don’t forget, if you are not on site, you can catch all the keynotes LIVE from the comfort of your desk on YouTube.com/Oracle. Keep the conversation going on @oracleidm. Use #OOW and #IDM and get engaged today. Photo Courtesy: @OracleOpenWorld

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  • Going to the Score Cards - Exceptional DBA Awards 2011

    - by Rodney
    This year marks my 4th year as a judge for the Exceptional DBA Awards, founded by Red Gate in 2008 to "recognize the essential but often overlooked contributions of DBAs, the unsung heroes of the IT community." As a professional DBA myself I have been honored to participate as a judge. It is not an easy job because there is a voluminous amount of nominees from all over the world. Each judge has to read through every word of the nominee's answers, deciding what makes each person special and stand out amongst their peers. What drives them? What single element of their submission will shine above all others? It is my hope that what I am about to divulge to you as a judge will prompt you to think about yourself or someone you know and decide that you may be the exceptional DBA who can take home the gold at this year's award ceremony in Seattle. We are more than a few weeks into the nomination process and there are quite a number of submissions already. I can not tell you how many as that would not be fair. I can say it is not 1 million or more. I can also say that it is not 100,000. But that is all I can say about that. However, I can tell you that it is enough this year that we are breaking records on the number of people who have been influenced, inspired or intrigued by the awards in the past. I remember them all like it were yesterday. fuzzy thought cloud here. It was a rainy day in Seattle (all memories for each award ceremony will start thusly) and I was in the hotel going over my notes on what I wanted to say about the winner of the 2008 Red Gate Exceptional DBA Award. The notes were on index cards that I had either bought or stolen from my wife, I do not recall, but I was nervous which was unlike me. This was, after all, a big night for the winner. Of course, we, the judges and the SQL community, had already decided the winner and now all that remained was to present the award. The room was packed. It was Casino night, sponsored by sqlservercentral.com. Money (fake), drinks (not fake) and camaraderie flowed through the room. Dan McClain won the award that year. He worked for Anheuser-Busch at the time. I promise that did not influence my decision. We presented Dan with the award. He was very proud of this achievement, rightfully so, as was the SQL community for him. I spoke with Dan throughout the conference and realized how huge this award was for him, not just personally but professionally. It was a rainy day in Seattle in 2009 and I was nervous. I was asked to speak to a group of people again as a judge for the Exceptional DBA Awards. This year, Josef Richberg would be the recipient of the award, but he would not be able to attend. We all prayed for him as he fought through an illness and congratulated him for his accomplishments as a DBA for his company. He got better and sallied forth and continued to give back to the SQL community that he saw as one big family. In 2010, and I am getting ahead of myself, he was asked to be a judge himself for the very award he had just received the year before. It was a sunny day in Seattle and I missed it, because it was in July and I was not there. It was a rainy day in Seattle and it is 2010 and Tracy Hamlin enters a submission that blows this judge away. She is managing a 50 Terabyte distributed database ("50 Gigabytes! Are you kidding me!!!", Rodney jokes.)  and loves her daily job as a DBA working with developers, mentoring them and teaching them best practices with kindness and patience. She is a people person who just happens to have 10+ years experience with RDBMS'. She wins the award and goes on to be recognized as famous at PASS. It will be a rainy day in Seattle this year when I sit amongst my old constituent judges and friends, Brad McGehee, http://www.simple-talk.com/books/sql-books/how-to-become-an-exceptional-dba,-2nd-edition/, Steve Jones, whom we all know and love at http://www.sqlservercentral.com and a young upstart to the SQL Community, this cat named Brent Ozar to announce the 2011 winner. I personally have not heard of Brent but I am told I have interviewed him for a DBA position several years ago and turned him down, http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2011/05/exceptional-dba-contest/ . I hope that did not jeopardize his future in the SQL world. I am a big hearted oaf and would feel horrible. Hopefully I will meet him at PASS and we can work this all out and I can help him get a DBA job. The rain has stopped and a new year is upon us. The stakes are high...the competition is fierce...the rewards are incredible. The entry form awaits you. http://www.exceptionaldba.com/ I very much look forward to meeting you and presenting the award to you in front of hundreds of your envious but proud peers as the new Exceptional DBA for 2011 at the PASS Summit. Here is what you could win: The Exceptional DBA of the Year receives full conference registration for the 2011 PSS Summit in Seattle, where the awards ceremony will take place, four nights' hotel accommodation, and $300 towards travel expenses. They will also be featured on Simple-Talk. Are you ready? Are you nervous?

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  • NET Math Libraries

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

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  • Unit testing is… well, flawed.

    - by Dewald Galjaard
    Hey someone had to say it. I clearly recall my first IT job. I was appointed Systems Co-coordinator for a leading South African retailer at store level. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an honest day’s labor and in fact I highly recommend it, however I’m obliged to refer to the designation cautiously; in reality all I had to do was monitor in-store prices and two UNIX front line controllers. If anything went wrong – I only had to phone it in… Luckily that wasn’t all I did. My duties extended to some other interesting annual occurrence – stock take. Despite a bit more curious affair, it was still a tedious process that took weeks of preparation and several nights to complete.  Then also I remember that no matter how elaborate our planning was, the entire exercise would be rendered useless if we couldn’t get the basics right – that being the act of counting. Sounds simple right? We’ll with a store which could potentially carry over tens of thousands of different items… we’ll let’s just say I believe that’s when I first became a coffee addict. In those days the act of counting stock was a very humble process. Nothing like we have today. A staff member would be assigned a bin or shelve filled with items he or she had to sort then count. Thereafter they had to record their findings on a complementary piece of paper. Every night I would manage several teams. Each team was divided into two groups - counters and auditors. Both groups had the same task, only auditors followed shortly on the heels of the counters, recounting stock levels, making sure the original count correspond to their findings. It was a simple yet hugely responsible orchestration of people and thankfully there was one fundamental and golden rule I could always abide by to ensure things run smoothly – No-one was allowed to audit their own work. Nope, not even on nights when I didn’t have enough staff available. This meant I too at times had to get up there and get counting, or have the audit stand over until the next evening. The reason for this was obvious - late at night and with so much to do we were prone to make some mistakes, then on the recount, without a fresh set of eyes, you were likely to repeat the offence. Now years later this rule or guideline still holds true as we develop software (as far removed as software development from counting stock may be). For some reason it is a fundamental guideline we’re simply ignorant of. We write our code, we write our tests and thus commit the same horrendous offence. Yes, the procedure of writing unit tests as practiced in most development houses today – is flawed. Most if not all of the tests we write today exercise application logic – our logic. They are based on the way we believe an application or method should/may/will behave or function. As we write our tests, our unit tests mirror our best understanding of the inner workings of our application code. Unfortunately these tests will therefore also include (or be unaware of) any imperfections and errors on our part. If your logic is flawed as you write your initial code, chances are, without a fresh set of eyes, you will commit the same error second time around too. Not even experience seems to be a suitable solution. It certainly helps to have deeper insight, but is that really the answer we should be looking for? Is that really failsafe? What about code review? Code review is certainly an answer. You could have one developer coding away and another (or team) making sure the logic is sound. The practice however has its obvious drawbacks. Firstly and mainly it is resource intensive and from what I’ve seen in most development houses, given heavy deadlines, this guideline is seldom adhered to. Hardly ever do we have the resources, money or time readily available. So what other options are out there? A quest to find some solution revealed a project by Microsoft Research called PEX. PEX is a framework which creates several test scenarios for each method or class you write, automatically. Think of it as your own personal auditor. Within a few clicks the framework will auto generate several unit tests for a given class or method and save them to a single project. PEX help to audit your work. It lends a fresh set of eyes to any project you’re working on and best of all; it is cost effective and fast. Check them out at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ In upcoming posts we’ll dive deeper into how it works and how it can help you.   Certainly there are more similar frameworks out there and I would love to hear from you. Please share your experiences and insights.

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  • Hello With Oracle Identity Manager Architecture

    - by mustafakaya
    Hi, my name is Mustafa! I'm a Senior Consultant in Fusion Middleware Team and living in Istanbul,Turkey. I worked many various Java based software development projects such as end-to-end web applications, CRM , Telco VAS and integration projects.I want to share my experiences and research about Fusion Middleware Products in this column. Customer always wants best solution from software consultants or developers. Solution will be a code snippet or change complete architecture. We faced different requests according to the case of customer. In my posts i want to discuss Fusion Middleware Products Architecture or how can extend usability with apis or UI customization and more and I look forward to engaging with you on your experiences and thoughts on this.  In my first post, i will be discussing Oracle Identity Manager architecture  and i plan to discuss Oracle Identity Manager 11g features in next posts. Oracle Identity Manager System Architecture Oracle Identity Governance includes Oracle Identity Manager,Oracle Identity Analytics and Oracle Privileged Account Manager. I will discuss Oracle Identity Manager architecture in this post.  In basically, Oracle Identity Manager is a n-tier standard  Java EE application that is deployed on Oracle WebLogic Server and uses  a database .  Oracle Identity Manager presentation tier has three different screen and two different client. Identity Self Service and Identity System Administration are web-based thin client. Design Console is a Java Swing Client that communicates directly with the Business Service Tier.  Identity Self Service provides end-user operations and delegated administration features. System Administration provides system administration functions. And Design Console mostly use for development management operations such as  create and manage adapter and process form,notification , workflow desing, reconciliation rules etc. Business service tier is implemented as an Enterprise JavaBeans(EJB) application. So you can extense Oracle Identity Manager capabilities.  -The SMPL and EJB APIs allow develop custom plug-ins such as management roles or identities.  -Identity Services allow use core business capabilites of Oracle Identity Manager such as The User provisioning or reconciliation service. -Integration Services allow develop custom connectors or adapters for various deployment needs. -Platform Services allow use Entitlement Servers, Scheduler or SOA composites. The Middleware tier allows you using capabilites ADF Faces,SOA Suites, Scheduler, Entitlement Server and BI Publisher Reports. So OIM allows you to configure workflows uses Oracle SOA Suite or define authorization policies use with Oracle Entitlement Server. Also you can customization of OIM UI without need to write code and using ADF Business Editor  you can extend custom attributes to user,role,catalog and other objects. Data tiers; Oracle Identity Manager is driven by data and metadata which provides flexibility and adaptability to Oracle Identity Manager functionlities.  -Database has five schemas these are OIM,SOA,MDS,OPSS and OES. Oracle Identity Manager uses database to store runtime and configuration data. And all of entity, transactional and audit datas are stored in database. -Metadata Store; customizations and personalizations are stored in file-based repository or database-based repository.And Oracle Identity Manager architecture,the metadata is in Oracle Identity Manager database to take advantage of some of the advanced performance and availability features that this mode provides. -Identity Store; Oracle Identity Manager provides the ability to integrate an LDAP-based identity store into Oracle Identity Manager architecture.  Oracle Identity Manager uses the human workflow module of Oracle Service Oriented Architecture Suite. OIM connects to SOA using the T3 URL which is front-end URL for the SOA server.Oracle Identity Manager uses embedded Oracle Entitlement Server for authorization checks in OIM engine.  Several Oracle Identity Manager modules use JMS queues. Each queue is processed by a separate Message Driven Bean (MDB), which is also part of the Oracle Identity Manager application. Message producers are also part of the Oracle Identity Manager application. Oracle Identity Manager uses a scheduled jobs for some activities in the background.Some of scheduled jobs come with Out-Of-Box such as the disable users after the end date of the users or you can define your custom schedule jobs with Oracle Identity Manager APIs. You can use Oracle BI Publisher for reporting Oracle Identity Manager transactions or audit data which are in database. About me: Mustafa Kaya is a Senior Consultant in Oracle Fusion Middleware Team, living in Istanbul. Before coming to Oracle, he worked in teams developing web applications and backend services at a telco company. He is a Java technology enthusiast, software engineer and addicted to learn new technologies,develop new ideas. Follow Mustafa on Twitter,Connect on LinkedIn, and visit his site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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  • The ugly evolution of running a background operation in the context of an ASP.NET app

    - by Jeff
    If you’re one of the two people who has followed my blog for many years, you know that I’ve been going at POP Forums now for over almost 15 years. Publishing it as an open source app has been a big help because it helps me understand how people want to use it, and having it translated to six languages is pretty sweet. Despite this warm and fuzzy group hug, there has been an ugly hack hiding in there for years. One of the things we find ourselves wanting to do is hide some kind of regular process inside of an ASP.NET application that runs periodically. The motivation for this has always been that a lot of people simply don’t have a choice, because they’re running the app on shared hosting, or don’t otherwise have access to a box that can run some kind of regular background service. In POP Forums, I “solved” this problem years ago by hiding some static timers in an HttpModule. Truthfully, this works well as long as you don’t run multiple instances of the app, which in the cloud world, is always a possibility. With the arrival of WebJobs in Azure, I’m going to solve this problem. This post isn’t about that. The other little hacky problem that I “solved” was spawning a background thread to queue emails to subscribed users of the forum. This evolved quite a bit over the years, starting with a long running page to mail users in real-time, when I had only a few hundred. By the time it got into the thousands, or tens of thousands, I needed a better way. What I did is launched a new thread that read all of the user data in, then wrote a queued email to the database (as in, the entire body of the email, every time), with the properly formatted opt-out link. It was super inefficient, but it worked. Then I moved my biggest site using it, CoasterBuzz, to an Azure Website, and it stopped working. So let’s start with the first stupid thing I was doing. The new thread was simply created with delegate code inline. As best I can tell, Azure Websites are more aggressive about garbage collection, because that thread didn’t queue even one message. When the calling server response went out of scope, so went the magic background thread. Duh, all I had to do was move the thread to a private static variable in the class. That’s the way I was able to keep stuff running from the HttpModule. (And yes, I know this is still prone to failure, particularly if the app recycles. For as infrequently as it’s used, I have not, however, experienced this.) It was still failing, but this time I wasn’t sure why. It would queue a few dozen messages, then die. Running in Azure, I had to turn on the application logging and FTP in to see what was going on. That led me to a helper method I was using as delegate to build the unsubscribe links. The idea here is that I didn’t want yet another config entry to describe the base URL, appended with the right path that would match the routing table. No, I wanted the app to figure it out for you, so I came up with this little thing: public static string FullUrlHelper(this Controller controller, string actionName, string controllerName, object routeValues = null) { var helper = new UrlHelper(controller.Request.RequestContext); var requestUrl = controller.Request.Url; if (requestUrl == null) return String.Empty; var url = requestUrl.Scheme + "://"; url += requestUrl.Host; url += (requestUrl.Port != 80 ? ":" + requestUrl.Port : ""); url += helper.Action(actionName, controllerName, routeValues); return url; } And yes, that should have been done with a string builder. This is useful for sending out the email verification messages, too. As clever as I thought I was with this, I was using a delegate in the admin controller to format these unsubscribe links for tens of thousands of users. I passed that delegate into a service class that did the email work: Func<User, string> unsubscribeLinkGenerator = user => this.FullUrlHelper("Unsubscribe", AccountController.Name, new { id = user.UserID, key = _profileService.GetUnsubscribeHash(user) }); _mailingListService.MailUsers(subject, body, htmlBody, unsubscribeLinkGenerator); Cool, right? Actually, not so much. If you look back at the helper, this delegate then will depend on the controller context to learn the routing and format for the URL. As you might have guessed, those things were turning null after a few dozen formatted links, when the original request to the admin controller went away. That this wasn’t already happening on my dedicated server is surprising, but again, I understand why the Azure environment might be eager to reclaim a thread after servicing the request. It’s already inefficient that I’m building the entire email for every user, but going back to check the routing table for the right link every time isn’t a win either. I put together a little hack to look up one generic URL, and use that as the basis for a string format. If you’re wondering why I didn’t just use the curly braces up front, it’s because they get URL formatted: var baseString = this.FullUrlHelper("Unsubscribe", AccountController.Name, new { id = "--id--", key = "--key--" }); baseString = baseString.Replace("--id--", "{0}").Replace("--key--", "{1}"); Func unsubscribeLinkGenerator = user => String.Format(baseString, user.UserID, _profileService.GetUnsubscribeHash(user)); _mailingListService.MailUsers(subject, body, htmlBody, unsubscribeLinkGenerator); And wouldn’t you know it, the new solution works just fine. It’s still kind of hacky and inefficient, but it will work until this somehow breaks too.

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  • Weekend With #iPad

    - by andrewbrust
    Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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  • Simple-Talk development: a quick history lesson

    - by Michael Williamson
    Up until a few months ago, Simple-Talk ran on a pure .NET stack, with IIS as the web server and SQL Server as the database. Unfortunately, the platform for the site hadn’t quite gotten the love and attention it deserved. On the one hand, in the words of our esteemed editor Tony “I’d consider the current platform to be a “success”; it cost $10K, has lasted for 6 years, was finished, end to end in 6 months, and although we moan about it has got us quite a long way.” On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that it needed some serious work. Among other issues, we had authors that wouldn’t blog because our current blogging platform, Community Server, was too painful for them to use. Forgetting about Simple-Talk for a moment, if you ask somebody what blogging platform they’d choose, the odds are they’d say WordPress. Regardless of its technical merits, it’s probably the most popular blogging platform, and it certainly seemed easier to use than Community Server. The issue was that WordPress is normally hosted on a Linux stack running PHP, Apache and MySQL — quite a difference from our Microsoft technology stack. We certainly didn’t want to rewrite the entire site — we just wanted a better blogging platform, with the rest of the existing, legacy site left as is. At a very high level, Simple-Talk’s technical design was originally very straightforward: when your browser sends an HTTP request to Simple-Talk, IIS (the web server) takes the request, does some work, and sends back a response. In order to keep the legacy site running, except with WordPress running the blogs, a different design is called for. We now use nginx as a reverse-proxy, which can then delegate requests to the appropriate application: So, when your browser sends a request to Simple-Talk, nginx takes that request and checks which part of the site you’re trying to access. Most of the time, it just passes the request along to IIS, which can then respond in much the same way it always has. However, if your request is for the blogs, then nginx delegates the request to WordPress. Unfortunately, as simple as that diagram looks, it hides an awful lot of complexity. In particular, the legacy site running on IIS was made up of four .NET applications. I’ve already mentioned one of these applications, Community Server, which handled the old blogs as well as managing membership and the forums. We have a couple of other applications to manage both our newsletters and our articles, and our own custom application to do some of the rendering on the site, such as the front page and the articles. When I say that it was made up of four .NET applications, this might conjure up an image in your mind of how they fit together: You might imagine four .NET applications, each with their own database, communicating over well-defined APIs. Sadly, reality was a little disappointing: We had four .NET applications that all ran on the same database. Worse still, there were many queries that happily joined across tables from multiple applications, meaning that each application was heavily dependent on the exact data schema that each other application used. Add to this that many of the queries were at least dozens of lines long, and practically identical to other queries except in a few key spots, and we can see that attempting to replace one component of the system would be more than a little tricky. However, the problems with the old system do give us a good place to start thinking about desirable qualities from any changes to the platform. Specifically: Maintainability — the tight coupling between each .NET application made it difficult to update any one application without also having to make changes elsewhere Replaceability — the tight coupling also meant that replacing one component wouldn’t be straightforward, especially if it wasn’t on a similar Microsoft stack. We’d like to be able to replace different parts without having to modify the existing codebase extensively Reusability — we’d like to be able to combine the different pieces of the system in different ways for different sites Repeatable deployments — rather than having to deploy the site manually with a long list of instructions, we should be able to deploy the entire site with a single command, allowing you to create a new instance of the site easily whether on production, staging servers, test servers or your own local machine Testability — if we can deploy the site with a single command, and each part of the site is no longer dependent on the specifics of how every other part of the site works, we can begin to run automated tests against the site, and against individual parts, both to prevent regressions and to do a little test-driven development In the next part, I’ll describe the high-level architecture we now have that hopefully brings us a little closer to these five traits.

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  • Verizon Wireless Supports its Mission-Critical Employee Portal with MySQL

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Verizon Wireless, the #1 mobile carrier in the United States, operates the nation’s largest 3G and 4G LTE network, with the most subscribers (109 millions) and the highest revenue ($70.2 Billion in 2011). Verizon Wireless built the first wide-area wireless broadband network and delivered the first wireless consumer 3G multimedia service in the US, and offers global voice and data services in more than 200 destinations around the world. To support 4.2 million daily wireless transactions and 493,000 calls and emails transactions produced by 94.2 million retail customers, Verizon Wireless employs over 78,000 employees with area headquarters across the United States. The Business Challenge Seeing the stupendous rise in social media, video streaming, live broadcasting…etc which redefined the scope of technology, Verizon Wireless, as a technology savvy company, wanted to provide a platform to its employees where they could network socially, view and host microsites, stream live videos, blog and provide the latest news. The IT team at Verizon Wireless had abundant experience with various technology platforms to support the huge number of applications in the company. However, open-source products weren’t yet widely used in the organization and the team had the ambition to adopt such technologies and see if the architecture could meet Verizon Wireless’ rigid requirements. After evaluating a few solutions, the IT team decided to use the LAMP stack for Vzweb, its mission-critical, 24x7 employee portal, with Drupal as the front end and MySQL on Linux as the backend, and for a few other internal websites also on MySQL. The MySQL Solution Verizon Wireless started to support its employee portal, Vzweb, its online streaming website, Vztube, and internal wiki pages, Vzwiki, with MySQL 5.1 in 2010. Vzweb is the main internal communication channel for Verizon Wireless, while Vztube hosts important company-wide webcasts regularly for executive-level announcements, so both channels have to be live and accessible all the time for its 78,000 employees across the United States. However during the initial deployment of the MySQL based Intranet, the application experienced performance issues. High connection spikes occurred causing slow user response time, and the IT team applied workarounds to continue the service. A number of key performance indexes (KPI) for the infrastructure were identified and the operational framework redesigned to support a more robust website and conform to the 99.985% uptime SLA (Service-Level Agreement). The MySQL DBA team made a series of upgrades in MySQL: Step 1: Moved from MyISAM to InnoDB storage engine in 2010 Step 2: Upgraded to the latest MySQL 5.1.54 release in 2010 Step 3: Upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5 in 2011, and leveraging MySQL Thread Pool as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition to scale better After making those changes, the team saw a much better response time during high concurrency use cases, and achieved an amazing performance improvement of 1400%! In January 2011, Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, announced the iPhone launch during the opening keynote at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and that presentation was streamed live to its 78,000 employees. The event was broadcasted flawlessly with MySQL as the database. Later in 2011, Hurricane Irene attacked the East Coast of United States and caused major life and financial damages. During the hurricane, the team directed more traffic to its west coast data center to avoid potential infrastructure damage in the East Coast. Such transition was executed smoothly and even though the geographical distance became longer for the East Coast users, there was no impact in the performance of Vzweb and Vztube, and the SLA goal was achieved. “MySQL is the key component of Verizon Wireless’ mission-critical employee portal application,” said Shivinder Singh, senior DBA at Verizon Wireless. “We achieved 1400% performance improvement by moving from the MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB, upgrading to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5, and using the MySQL Thread Pool to support high concurrent user connections. MySQL has become part of our IT infrastructure, on which potentially more future applications will be built.” To learn more about MySQL Enterprise Edition, Get our Product Guide.

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  • Not so long ago in a city not so far away by Carlos Martin

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is the story of how the EMEA Presales Center turned an Oracle intern into a trusted technology advisor for both Oracle’s Sales and customers. It was the summer of 2011 when I was finishing my Computer Engineering studies as well as my internship at Oracle when I was offered what could possibly be THE dream job for any young European Computer Engineer. Apart from that, it also seemed like the role was particularly tailored to me as I could leverage almost everything I learned at University and during the internship. And all of it in one of the best cities to live in, not only from my home country but arguably from Europe: Malaga! A day at EPC As part of the EPC Technology pillar, and later on completely focused on WebCenter, there was no way to describe a normal day on the job as each day had something unique. Some days I was researching documentation in order to elaborate accurate answers for a customer’s question within a Request for Information or Proposal (RFI/RFP), other days I was doing heavy programming in order to bring a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a customer to life and last not but least, some days I presented to the customer via webconference the demo I built for them the past weeks. So as you can see, the role has research, development and presentation, could you ask for more? Well, don’t worry because there IS more! Internationality As the organization’s name suggests, EMEA Presales Center, it is the Center of Presales within Europe, Middle East and Africa so I got the chance to work with great professionals from all this regions, expanding my network and learning things from one country to apply them to others. In addition to that, the teams based in the Malaga office are comprised of many young professionals hailing mainly from Western and Central European countries (although there are a couple of exceptions!) with very different backgrounds and personalities which guaranteed many laughs and stories during lunch or coffee breaks (or even while working on projects!). Furthermore, having EPC offices in Bucharest and Bangalore and thanks to today’s tele-presence technologies, I was working every day with people from India or Romania as if they were sitting right next to me and the bonding with them got stronger day by day. Career development Apart from the research and self-study I’ve earlier mentioned, one of the EPC’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is that 15% of your time is spent on training so you get lots and lots of trainings in order to develop both your technical product knowledge and your presentation, negotiation and other soft skills. Sometimes the training is via webcast, sometimes the trainer comes to the office and sometimes, the best times, you get to travel abroad in order to attend a training, which also helps you to further develop your network by meeting face to face with many people you only know from some email or instant messaging interaction. And as the months go by, your skills improving at a very fast pace, your relevance increasing with each new project you successfully deliver, it’s only a matter of time (and a bit of self-promoting!) that you get the attention of the manager of a more senior team and are offered the opportunity to take a new step in your professional career. For me it took 2 years to move to my current position, Technology Sales Consultant at the Oracle Direct organization. During those 2 years I had built a good relationship with the Oracle Direct Spanish sales and sales managers, who are also based in the Malaga office. I supported their former Sales Consultant in a couple of presentations and demos and were very happy with my overall performance and attitude so even before the position got eventually vacant, I got a heads-up from then in advance that their current Sales Consultant was going to move to a different position. To me it felt like a natural step, same as when I joined EPC, I had at least a 50% of the “homework” already done but wanted to experience that extra 50% to add new product and soft skills to my arsenal. The rest is history, I’ve been in the role for more than half a year as I’m writing this, achieved already some important wins, gained a lot of trust and confidence in front of customers and broadened my view of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio. I look back at the 2 years I spent in EPC and think: “boy, I’d recommend that experience to absolutely anyone with the slightest interest in IT, there are so many different things you can do as there are different kind of roles you can end up taking thanks to the experience gained at EPC” /* 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;}

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  • Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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  • Html.RenderAction Failed when Validation Failed

    - by Shaun
    RenderAction method had been introduced when ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released in its MvcFuture assembly and then final announced along with the ASP.NET MVC 2.0. Similar as RenderPartial, the RenderAction can display some HTML markups which defined in a partial view in any parent views. But the RenderAction gives us the ability to populate the data from an action which may different from the action which populating the main view. For example, in Home/Index.aspx we can invoke the Html.RenderPartial(“MyPartialView”) but the data of MyPartialView must be populated by the Index action of the Home controller. If we need the MyPartialView to be shown in Product/Create.aspx we have to copy (or invoke) the relevant code from the Index action in Home controller to the Create action in the Product controller which is painful. But if we are using Html.RenderAction we can tell the ASP.NET MVC from which action/controller the data should be populated. in that way in the Home/Index.aspx and Product/Create.aspx views we just need to call Html.RenderAction(“CreateMyPartialView”, “MyPartialView”) so it will invoke the CreateMyPartialView action in MyPartialView controller regardless from which main view. But in my current project we found a bug when I implement a RenderAction method in the master page to show something that need to connect to the backend data center when the validation logic was failed on some pages. I created a sample application below.   Demo application I created an ASP.NET MVC 2 application and here I need to display the current date and time on the master page. I created an action in the Home controller named TimeSlot and stored the current date into ViewDate. This method was marked as HttpGet as it just retrieves some data instead of changing anything. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } Next, I created a partial view under the Shared folder to display the date and time string. 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %> 2:  3: <span>Now: <% 1: : ViewData["timeslot"].ToString() %></span> Then at the master page I used Html.RenderAction to display it in front of the logon link. 1: <div id="logindisplay"> 2: <% 1: Html.RenderAction("TimeSlot", "Home"); %> 3:  4: <% 1: Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> 5: </div> It’s fairly simple and works well when I navigated to any pages. But when I moved to the logon page and click the LogOn button without input anything in username and password the validation failed and my website crashed with the beautiful yellow page. (I really like its color style and fonts…)   How ASP.NET MVC executes Html.RenderAction In this example all other pages were rendered successful which means the ASP.NET MVC found the TimeSolt action under the Home controller except this situation. The only different is that when I clicked the LogOn button the browser send an HttpPost request to the server. Is that the reason of this bug? I created another action in Home controller with the same action name but for HttpPost. 1: [HttpPost] 2: [ActionName("TimeSlot")] 3: public ActionResult TimeSlot(object dummy) 4: { 5: return TimeSlot(); 6: } Or, I can use the AcceptVerbsAttribute on the TimeSlot action to let it allow both HttpGet and HttpPost. 1: [AcceptVerbs("GET", "POST")] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } And then repeat what I did before and this time it worked well. Why we need the action for HttpPost here as it’s just data retrieving? That is because of how ASP.NET MVC executes the RenderAction method. In the source code of ASP.NET MVC we can see when proforming the RenderAction ASP.NET MVC creates a RequestContext instance from the current RequestContext and created a ChildActionMvcHandler instance which inherits from MvcHandler class. Then the ASP.NET MVC processes the handler through the HttpContext.Server.Execute method. That means it performs the action as a stand-alone request asynchronously and flush the result into the  TextWriter which is being used to render the current page. Since when I clicked the LogOn the request was in HttpPost so when ASP.NET MVC processed the ChildActionMvcHandler it would find the action which allow the current request method, which is HttpPost. Then our TimeSlot method in HttpGet would not be matched.   Summary In this post I introduced a bug in my currently developing project regards the new Html.RenderAction method provided within ASP.NET MVC 2 when processing a HttpPost request. In ASP.NET MVC world the underlying Http information became more important than in ASP.NET WebForm world. We need to pay more attention on which kind of request it currently created and how ASP.NET MVC processes.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • User is trying to leave! Set at-least confirm alert on browser(tab) close event!!

    - by kaushalparik27
    This is something that might be annoying or irritating for end user. Obviously, It's impossible to prevent end user from closing the/any browser. Just think of this if it becomes possible!!!. That will be a horrible web world where everytime you will be attacked by sites and they will not allow to close your browser until you confirm your shopping cart and do the payment. LOL:) You need to open the task manager and might have to kill the running browser exe processes.Anyways; Jokes apart, but I have one situation where I need to alert/confirm from the user in any anyway when they try to close the browser or change the url. Think of this: You are creating a single page intranet asp.net application where your employee can enter/select their TDS/Investment Declarations and you wish to at-least ALERT/CONFIRM them if they are attempting to:[1] Close the Browser[2] Close the Browser Tab[3] Attempt to go some other site by Changing the urlwithout completing/freezing their declaration.So, Finally requirement is clear. I need to alert/confirm the user what he is going to do on above bulleted events. I am going to use window.onbeforeunload event to set the javascript confirm alert box to appear.    <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">        window.onbeforeunload = confirmExit;        function confirmExit() {            return "You are about to exit the system before freezing your declaration! If you leave now and never return to freeze your declaration; then they will not go into effect and you may lose tax deduction, Are you sure you want to leave now?";        }    </script>See! you are halfway done!. So, every time browser unloads the page, above confirm alert causes to appear on front of user like below:By saying here "every time browser unloads the page"; I mean to say that whenever page loads or postback happens the browser onbeforeunload event will be executed. So, event a button submit or a link submit which causes page to postback would tend to execute the browser onbeforeunload event to fire!So, now the hurdle is how can we prevent the alert "Not to show when page is being postback" via any button/link submit? Answer is JQuery :)Idea is, you just need to set the script reference src to jQuery library and Set the window.onbeforeunload event to null when any input/link causes a page to postback.Below will be the complete code:<head runat="server">    <title></title>    <script src="jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>    <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">        window.onbeforeunload = confirmExit;        function confirmExit() {            return "You are about to exit the system before freezing your declaration! If you leave now and never return to freeze your declaration; then they will not go into effect and you may lose tax deduction, Are you sure you want to leave now?";        }        $(function() {            $("a").click(function() {                window.onbeforeunload = null;            });            $("input").click(function() {                window.onbeforeunload = null;            });        });    </script></head><body>    <form id="form1" runat="server">    <div></div>    </form></body></html>So, By this post I have tried to set the confirm alert if user try to close the browser/tab or try leave the site by changing the url. I have attached a working example with this post here. I hope someone might find it helpful.

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  • International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# &amp; Silverlight &ndash; Part 2

    - by MarkPearl
    So the brunt of my my very complex F# code has been done. Now it’s just putting the Silverlight stuff in. The first thing I did was add a new project to my solution. I gave it a name and VS2010 did the rest of the magic in creating the .Web project etc. In this instance because I want to take the MVVM approach and make use of commanding I have decided to make the frontend a Silverlight4 project. I now need move my F# code into a proper Silverlight Library. Warning – when you create the Silverlight Library VS2010 will ask you whether you want it to be based on Silverlight3 or Silverlight4. I originally went for Silverlight4 only to discover when I tried to compile my solution that I was given an error… Error 12 F# runtime for Silverlight version v4.0 is not installed. Please go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177463 to download and install matching.. After asking around I discovered that the Silverlight4 F# runtime is not available yet. No problem, the suggestion was to change the F# Silverlight Library to a Silverlight3 project however when going to the properties of the project file – even though I changed it to Silverlight3, VS2010 did not like it and kept reverting it to a Silverlight4 project. After a few minutes of scratching my head I simply deleted Silverlight4 F# Library project and created a new F# Silverlight Library project in Silverlight3 and VS2010 was happy. Now that the project structure is set up, rest is fairly simple. You need to add the Silverlight Library as a reference to the C# Silverlight Front End. Then setup your views, since I was following the MVVM pattern I made a Views & ViewModel folder and set up the relevant View and ViewModels. The MainPageViewModel file looks as follows using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; namespace IROAFrontEnd.ViewModels { public class MainPageViewModel : ViewModelBase { private string _iroaString; private string _inputCharacters; public string InputCharacters { get { return _inputCharacters; } set { if (_inputCharacters != value) { _inputCharacters = value; OnPropertyChanged("InputCharacters"); } } } public string IROAString { get { return _iroaString; } set { if (_iroaString != value) { _iroaString = value; OnPropertyChanged("IROAString"); } } } public ICommand MySpecialCommand { get { return new MyCommand(this); } } public class MyCommand : ICommand { readonly MainPageViewModel _myViewModel; public MyCommand(MainPageViewModel myViewModel) { _myViewModel = myViewModel; } public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; public bool CanExecute(object parameter) { return true; } public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } } } } One of the features I like in Silverlight4 is the new commanding. You will notice in my I have put the code under the command execute to reference to my F# module. At the moment this could be cleaned up even more, but will suffice for now.. public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } I then needed to set the view up. If we have a look at the MainPageView.xaml the xaml code will look like the following…. Nothing to fancy, but battleship grey for now… take careful note of the binding of the command in the button to MySpecialCommand which was created in the ViewModel. <UserControl x:Class="IROAFrontEnd.Views.MainPageView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Text="{Binding InputCharacters, Mode=TwoWay}"/> <Button Grid.Row="1" Command="{Binding MySpecialCommand}"> <TextBlock Text="Generate"/> </Button> <TextBlock Grid.Row="2" Text="{Binding IROAString}"/> </Grid> </UserControl> Finally in the App.xaml.cs file we need to set the View and link it to the ViewModel. private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { var myView = new MainPageView(); var myViewModel = new MainPageViewModel(); myView.DataContext = myViewModel; this.RootVisual = myView; }   Once this is done – hey presto – it worked. I typed in some “Test Input” and clicked the generate button and the correct Radio Operators Alphabet was generated. And that’s the end of my first very basic F# Silverlight application.

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  • What's going on with INETA and the Regional Speakers Bureau?

    - by Chris Williams
    For those of you that have been waiting patiently (and not so patiently) I'm happy to say that we're very near completion on some changes/enhancements/improvements that will allow us to finally go live with the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau. I know quite a few of you have already registered, which is great (though some of you may need to come back and update your info) and we've had a few folks submit requests, mostly in a test capacity, but soon we'll be up and live. Here's how it breaks down. Be sure to read this, because things have changed a bit from when we initially announced it. 1. The majority of our speaker/event funding is going into the Regional Speakers Bureau.  The National Bureau still exists, but it's a good bit smaller than it was before, and it's not an "every group" benefit anymore. We'll be using the National Bureau as more of a strategic task force, targeting high impact events and areas that need some community building love from INETA. These will be identified and handled on a case by case basis, and may include more than just user group events. 2. You're going to get more events per group, per year than you did before. Not only are we focusing more resources on this program, but we're also making a lot of efforts to use it more effectively. With the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau, you should be able to get 2-3 INETA speakers per year, on average. Not every geographical area will have exactly the same experience, but we're doing the best we can. 3. It's not a farm team program for the National Bureau. Unsurprisingly, I managed to offend a number of people when I previously made the comment that the Regional Speakers Bureau program was a farm team or stepping stone to the National Bureau. It was a poor choice of words.  Anyone can participate in the Regional Speakers Bureau, and I look forward to working with all of you. 4. There is assistance for your efforts. The exact final details are still being hammered out, but expect it to look something like this: (all distances listed are based on a round trip) Distances < 120 miles = $0 121 miles - 240 miles = $50 (effectively 1 to 2 hours, each way) 241 miles - 360 miles = $100 (effectively 2 to 3 hours, each way) 361 miles - 480 miles = $200 (effectively 3 to 4 hours, each way) For those of you who travel a lot, we're working on a solution to handle group visits when you're away from home. These will (for now) be handled on a case by case basis. 5. We're going to make it as easy as possible to work with the program. In order to do this, we need a few things from you. For speakers, that means your home address. It also means (maybe) filling out a simple 1 line expense report via the INETA website. For user groups, it means making sure your meeting address is up to date as well. 6. Distances will be automatically calculated from your home of record to the user group event and back. We realize that this is not a perfect solution to every instance, but we're not paying you to speak at an event, and you won't be taxed on this money. It's simply some assistance to make your community efforts easier. Our way of saying thanks for everything you do. 7. Sounds good so far, what's the catch? There's always a catch, right? In this case there are two of them: 1) At this time, Microsoft employees are welcome to use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, but are not eligible for financial assistance. 2) Anyone can register and use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, however you must receive and maintain a net score of 3+ positive ratings (we're implementing a thumbs up / thumbs down system) in order to receive financial assistance. These ratings are provided by the User Group leaders after the meeting has taken place. 8. Involvement by the User Group leaders is a key factor in the success of this program. Your job isn't done once you request a speaker. After you've had your meeting, it's critical that you go back to the website and take a very small survey. Doing this ensures that the speaker gets rated (and compensated if eligible) and also ensures that you can make another request, since you won't be able to make a new request if you have an old one outstanding. 9. What about Canada? We're definitely working on that. Unfortunately nothing new to report on that front, other than to say that we're trying. So... this is where things stand currently. We're working very quickly to get this in place and get speakers and groups together. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I'll answer them as quickly as possible. If I've forgotten anything, or if things change, I'll update it here. Thanks, Chris G. Williams INETA Board of Directors

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  • Advanced donut caching: using dynamically loaded controls

    - by DigiMortal
    Yesterday I solved one caching problem with local community portal. I enabled output cache on SharePoint Server 2007 to make site faster. Although caching works fine I needed to do some additional work because there are some controls that show different content to different users. In this example I will show you how to use “donut caching” with user controls – powerful way to drive some content around cache. About donut caching Donut caching means that although you are caching your content you have some holes in it so you can still affect the output that goes to user. By example you can cache front page on your site and still show welcome message that contains correct user name. To get better idea about donut caching I suggest you to read ScottGu posting Tip/Trick: Implement "Donut Caching" with the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution Feature. Basically donut caching uses ASP.NET substitution control. In output this control is replaced by string you return from static method bound to substitution control. Again, take a look at ScottGu blog posting I referred above. Problem If you look at Scott’s example it is pretty plain and easy by its output. All it does is it writes out current user name as string. Here are examples of my login area for anonymous and authenticated users:    It is clear that outputting mark-up for these views as string is pretty lame to implement in code at string level. Every little change in design will end up with new version of controls library because some parts of design “live” there. Solution: using user controls I worked out easy solution to my problem. I used cache substitution and user controls together. I have three user controls: LogInControl – this is the proxy control that checks which “real” control to load. AnonymousLogInControl – template and logic for anonymous users login area. AuthenticatedLogInControl – template and logic for authenticated users login area. This is the control we render for each user separately because it contains user name and user profile fill percent. Anonymous control is not very interesting because it is only about keeping mark-up in separate file. Interesting parts are LogInControl and AuthenticatedLogInControl. Creating proxy control The first thing was to create control that has substitution area where “real” control is loaded. This proxy control should also be available to decide which control to load. The definition of control is very primitive. <%@ Control EnableViewState="false" Inherits="MyPortal.Profiles.LogInControl" %> <asp:Substitution runat="server" MethodName="ShowLogInBox" /> But code is a little bit tricky. Based on current user instance we decide which login control to load. Then we create page instance and load our control through it. When control is loaded we will call DataBind() method. In this method we evaluate all fields in loaded control (it was best choice as Load and other events will not be fired). Take a look at the code. public static string ShowLogInBox(HttpContext context) {     var user = SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser;     string controlName;       if (user != null)         controlName = "AuthenticatedLogInControl.ascx";     else         controlName = "AnonymousLogInControl.ascx";       var path = "~/_controltemplates/" + controlName;     var output = new StringBuilder(10000);       using(var page = new Page())     using(var ctl = page.LoadControl(path))     using(var writer = new StringWriter(output))     using(var htmlWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(writer))     {         ctl.DataBind();         ctl.RenderControl(htmlWriter);     }     return output.ToString(); } When control is bound to data we ask to render it its contents to StringBuilder. Now we have the output of control as string and we can return it from our method. Of course, notice how correct I am with resources disposing. :) The method that returns contents for substitution control is static method that has no connection with control instance because hen page is read from cache there are no instances of controls available. Conclusion As you saw it was not very hard to use donut caching with user controls. Instead of writing mark-up of controls to static method that is bound to substitution control we can still use our user controls.

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  • Happy 3rd Birthday SilverlightCream!

    - by Dave Campbell
    Happy 3rd Birthday!     Yesterday (May 16) was the 'Birthday' of SilverlightCream, which started just after MIX in 2007 with a post "Interesting Silverlight posts today: Silverlight Control & Silverlight Pad". Too many good posts flying around led me to want to archive them, particularly since I was being aggregated at a new site Silverlight.net, and I could give some of that 'reach' to the community. Saturday's post was number 862, and as of that post, there were 5697 blog posts archived in the database all tagged up and searchable at SilverlightCream.com using the search page. The search needs to be better, and that's another discussion, but it does work. The blog didn't begin life as the SilverlightCream blog, as is obvious from the name, but once I realized people were following it closely, I've tried to keep the signal-to-noise ratio very high. I even secured another blog for when I just want to rant about something to keep that stuff out of this one :) If you've been around since MIX07 days you've heard all this, but after talking to some people at MIX10 I realized not everyone knows all the ways the information is presented, so I figured doing a post like this once a year probably isn't a bad idea :) I scrounge through an ever-growing list of blogs (right now sitting at 505) looking for good stuff. I try to spin through the list every day, but with the list growing that large, it's getting tough. I usually use it as a background task while working or watching TV. If I just sit and go through the blogs it takes about an hour. The list is long enough now that from time to time, I'll only get partway through it and have 10 to 13 entries, so I'll just stop there and go on the next day... I don't like to have more than 15 in any single post. It's all pattern recognition as in "seen that", "seen that", "that's new", etc... so if you're a blogger, look at a heading below for some comments about blogging from my perspective. When I see something new, I make sure you're not pulling a 'Mike Taulty' on me and dumping 6 or 8 new posts in one day :), and I tag the ones I want to review. If there's not a lot going on, I may just push the posts as I come across them. Some days there may be 60 posts in that 'to review' list! Some are non-Silverlight, some are essentially duplicates of others, some are demos, ads, new releases of something, session materials, etc. I push lots of material into a database at WynApse.com, and the "Tagged Posts" menu on the left sidebar there takes you to a tag cloud of (at this very moment) "9224 articles tagged 13915 different ways using 459 unique tags". There are links in there on Gibson guitars, Jazz Guitar instructional stuff, Ford F-250 links, and tons of technical and non-technical stuff I've been aggregating for about 5 years now. So when I decide to blog (or shoutout) something, I first push it into the database at WynApse.com. Then I tag it all up and push it into the database at SilverlightCream.com. Then it gets pushed to @SilverlightNews. For a little over a year now, we're tracking unique IP hits on posts launched from either the blog post or from one of the SilverlightCream.com pages, and the posts with top hits from unique IP addresses in the last 7 days are displayed in a 'Skim' page at SilverlightCream... and that page needs work as well. The Skim page and tracking was the brainchild of my buddy Michael Washington. What I blog/shoutout After some time doing posts, I decided there were things that probably have no need to be searchable, but are good information, so I post those as 'Shoutouts'. Eventually I also decided the Shoutouts should get posted to @SilverlightNews, and that's now taking place. Notes to bloggers Remember I said spinning throught the Big List-o-BlogsTM is pattern recognition... that means I don't spend a lot of time on any individual blog deciding if it has new content. If you're familiar with the term 'Above the Fold', then you're probably ok. If I have to scroll the page to see if there's something new, or wade through some maze of menus, I'm probably going to miss new stuff. Likewise if you only show the latest on the front page and make it a puzzle to find the rest of them, or if you make the titles and initial graphics almost identical to the previous article, I'll miss it. Another thing is name/brand-recognition. Far be it for me (WynApse) to comment on someone blogging with a pseudonym, but if you want to get get some recognition, you are going to want your name to be available somewhere. I can think right off the top of my head of a couple good blogs that I have no idea of the individuals' real names. I can pull that off a bit because I've been around so long almost everyone knows who I am, but if you're new to the blog-o-sphere, being able to be name-recognized is as important as getting your brand out there. Kick my tires Finally, stuff happens... I may hit the wrong key and delete your blog, or a post might slip past me and I not realize it's new because of the naming, and never blog it. If you think I missed something, send me an email or use the submit page at SilverlightCream.com. Some bloggers have figured out that if they submit (one way or another) to me, their posts will go out next. I try to honor anyone that takes the time to submit with a quicker 'Cream posting. Thanks! Finally, thanks to everyone that contributes to the community as a whole... the blogs, the videos, and the presentations. A special thanks to everyone that reads SilverlightCream, or follows @WynApse or @SilverlightNews. Keep it all coming, and... Stay in the 'Light

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  • Supporting users if they're not on your site

    - by Roger Hart
    Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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  • Design a T-shirt for .NET Reflector Pro

    - by Laila
    Win a .NET Reflector Pro license, a box of Red Gate goodies, and a t-shirt printed with your design! Red Gate likes t-shirts. Each of our teams has one. In fact, each individual person has one, numbered according to when they joined the company: Red Gate's 1st, 2nd, and so on right up to Red Gate's 170th, with the slogan "More than just a number". Those t-shirts are important, chiefly because they remind the people wearing them that they are important. But that isn't enough. What really makes us great are the people who choose to use our tools. So we'd like to extend our tradition of t-shirts to include you and put the design of our next shirt entirely in your hands. We'd like you to come up with a witty slogan or create an inventive or simply beautiful t-shirt design for .NET Reflector Pro, our add-in for Visual Studio, which allows you to step into decompiled assemblies whilst debugging in Visual Studio. When you're done, post your masterpiece to Twitter with the hash tag #reflectortees, and @redgate will take a look! We'll pick the best design, and the winner will get a licensed copy of .NET Reflector Pro and a box of Red Gate goodies - not to mention a copy of their t-shirt. The winning design will go into production and be worn and given out at tradeshows, conferences, and user group events across the world, proudly bearing the name of their designer. We'll also pick three runners-up who will receive licenses for .NET Reflector Pro. Red Gate goodie box Interested? If you're up for the challenge, then we've got some resources to get you started. Inside the .zip file you'll find high-quality versions of the following: T-shirt templates: don't forget to design the front and the back! Different versions of the .NET Reflector Pro logo and Red Gate logo. Colour sheets to give you an easy reference to the Red Gate colours, including hex and RGB values. You can create and send us as many designs as you like, and each of them will be considered for the prize. To submit your designs, simply tweet including the competition hash tag, #reflectortees, and a link to somewhere we can see your design: either an image hosting site such as Twitpic, Flickr or Picasa, or a personal blog. You will need to create a Twitter account (which is free), if you don't already have one. You only have three limits: The background colour of the t-shirt should be one of our brand colours (red, light/dark grey or black), though you're welcome to use other colours in the rest of the design. You need to make use of either the .NET Reflector Pro logo OR the Red Gate logo (please keep them as they are) If you include any text or slogan, stick with just one or two colors for it. Apart from that, go wild. Go and do whatever it is you do when you get creative: whether you walk barefoot on the grass with a pencil and paper, sit cross-legged on a pile of cushions with a laptop, or simply close your eyes and float through a mist of ideas, now is your chance. Make sure you enjoy it. We're looking forward to seeing your creations. Terms and conditions 1. The closing date for entries is June 11th, 2010 (4 p.m. UK time). Red Gate Software Ltd reserves the right to extend the competition deadline at its discretion. If there is a revision, the revised date will be published on this blog and the date for announcing the results will be postponed accordingly. 2. The winning designer will be notified on June 14th, 2010 through Twitter. The winner must claim his/her prize by sending us a high-resolution image of their design via email (i.e. Illustrator EPS files or appropriate format, ideally at 300dpi). If the winner does not come forward within 3 days of the announcement, they will forfeit their prize and another winner will be selected from the runners-up. The names of the winner and runners-up will be posted on this blog by June 18th.  3. Entry is completed on the designer posting a link to their entry in a tweet with the correct hash tag, #reflectortees. 4. Red Gate Software needs to hold the rights to using the winning design in order to put the t-shirt into production. We will make sure that this is fine with the winner before we do so, but if you do not want us holding the rights to your design, please do not submit your designs. We reserve the right to slightly alter or adjust any artwork we decide to use (mainly to make it easier to print), but we will make sure we contact the winner for approval first. The winner will also need to allow us the use of his/her name for purposes of promoting your design. 5. Entries must be entirely your own original work and must not breach any copyright or third party rights. Red Gate Software Ltd will not be made partially or fully liable for any non-original work submitted by you. 6. This competition is free: you do not need to buy anything or be an existing customer to enter. 7. This competition is not open to employees of Red Gate Software Ltd, their families, or any other company directly connected with the administration of this promotion.

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  • Cloud Computing Architecture Patterns: Don’t Focus on the Client

    - by BuckWoody
    Normally I try to put topics in the positive in other words "Do this" not "Don't do that". Sometimes its clearer to focus on what *not* to do. Popular development processes often start with screen mockups, or user input descriptions. In a scale-out pattern like Cloud Computing on Windows Azure, that's the wrong place to start. Start with the Data    Instead, I recommend that you start with the data that a process requires. That data might be temporary or persisted, but starting with the data and its requirements helps to define not only the storage engine you need but also drives everything from security to the integrity of the application. For instance, assume the requirements show that the user must enter their phone number, and that this datum is used in a contact management system further down the application chain. For that datum, you can determine what data type you need (U.S. only or International?) the security requirements, whether it needs ACID compliance, how it will be searched, indexed and so on. From one small data point you can extrapolate out your options for storing and processing the data. Here's the interesting part, which begins to break the patterns that we've used for decades: all of the data doesn't have the same requirements. The phone number might be best suited for a list, or an element, or a string, with either BASE or ACID requirements, based on how it is used. That means we don't have to dump everything into XML, an RDBMS, a NoSQL engine, or a flat file exclusively. In fact, one record might use all of those depending on the use-case requirements. Next Is Data Management  With the data defined, we can move on to how to store the data. Again, the requirements now dictate whether we need a full relational calculus or set-based operations, or we can choose another method based on the requirements for the data. And breaking another pattern its OK to store in more than once, in more than one location. We do this all the time for reporting systems and Business Intelligence systems, so this is a pattern we need to think about even for OLTP data. Move to Data Transport How does the data get around? We can use a connection-based method, sending the data along a transport to the storage engine, but in some cases we may want to use a cache, a queue, the Service Bus, or Complex Event Processing. Finally, Data Processing Most RDBMS engines, NoSQL, and certainly Big Data engines not only store data, but can process and manipulate it as well. Its doubtful that you'll calculate that phone number right? Well, if you're the phone company, you most certainly will. And so we see that even once we've chosen the data type, storage and engine, the same element can have different computing requirements based on how it is used. Sure, We Need A Front-End At Some Point Not all data is entered by human hands in fact most data isn't. We don't really need a Graphical User Interface (GUI) we need some way for a GUI to get data into and out of the systems listed earlier.   But when we do need to allow users to enter or examine data, that should be left to the GUI that best fits the device the user has. Ever tried to use an application designed for a web browser on a phone? Or one designed for a tablet on a phone? Its usually quite painful. The siren song of "We'll just write one interface for all devices" is strong, and has beguiled many an unsuspecting architect. But they just don't work out.   Instead, focus on the data, its transport and processing. Create API calls or a message system that allows for resilient transport to the device or interface, and let it do what it does best. References Microsoft Architecture Journal:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx Patterns and Practices:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921345.aspx Windows Azure iOS, Android, Windows 8 Mobile Devices SDK: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/get-started-ios/ Windows Azure Facebook SDK: http://ntotten.com/2013/03/14/using-windows-azure-mobile-services-with-the-facebook-sdk-for-windows-phone/

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  • SPARC M7 Chip - 32 cores - Mind Blowing performance

    - by Angelo-Oracle
    The M7 Chip Oracle just announced its Next Generation Processor at the HotChips HC26 conference. As the Tech Lead in our Systems Division's Partner group, I had a front row seat to the extraordinary price performance advantage of Oracle current T5 and M6 based systems. Partner after partner tested  these systems and were impressed with it performance. Just read some of the quotes to see what our partner has been saying about our hardware. We just announced our next generation processor, the M7. This has 32 cores (up from 16-cores in T5 and 12-cores in M6). With 20 nm technology  this is our most advanced processor. The processor has more cores than anything else in the industry today. After the Sun acquisition Oracle has released 5 processors in 4 years and this is the 6th.  The S4 core  The M7 is built using the foundation of the S4 core. This is the next generation core technology. Like its predecessor, the S4 has 8 dynamic threads. It increases the frequency while maintaining the Pipeline depth. Each core has its own fine grain power estimator that keeps the core within its power envelop in 250 nano-sec granularity. Each core also includes Software in Silicon features for Application Acceleration Support. Each core includes features to improve Application Data Integrity, with almost no performance loss. The core also allows using part of the Virtual Address to store meta-data.  User-Level Synchronization Instructions are also part of the S4 core. Each core has 16 KB Instruction and 16 KB Data L1 cache. The Core Clusters  The cores on the M7 chip are organized in sets of 4-core clusters. The core clusters share  L2 cache.  All four cores in the complex share 256 KB of 4 way set associative L2 Instruction Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. Two cores share 256 KB of 8 way set associative L2 Data Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. With this innovative Core Cluster architecture, the M7 doubles core execution bandwidth. to maximize per-thread performance.  The Chip  Each  M7 chip has 8 sets of these core-clusters. The chip has 64 MB on-chip L3 cache. This L3 caches is shared among all the cores and is partitioned into 8 x 8 MB chunks. Each chunk is  8-way set associative cache. The aggregate bandwidth for the L3 cache on the chip is over 1.6TB/s. Each chip has 4 DDR4 memory controllers and can support upto 16 DDR4 DIMMs, allowing for 2 TB of RAM/chip. The chip also includes 4 internal links of PCIe Gen3 I/O controllers.  Each chip has 7 coherence links, allowing for 8 of these chips to be connected together gluelessly. Also 32 of these chips can be connected in an SMP configuration. A potential system with 32 chips will have 1024 cores and 8192 threads and 64 TB of RAM.  Software in Silicon The M7 chip has many built in Application Accelerators in Silicon. These features will be exposed to our Software partners using the SPARC Accelerator Program.  The M7  has built-in logic to decompress data at the speed of memory access. This means that applications can directly work on compressed data in memory increasing the data access rates. The VA Masking feature allows the use of part of the virtual address to store meta-data.  Realtime Application Data Integrity The Realtime Application Data Integrity feature helps applications safeguard against invalid, stale memory reference and buffer overflows. The first 4-bits if the Pointer can be used to store a version number and this version number is also maintained in the memory & cache lines. When a pointer accesses memory the hardware checks to make sure the two versions match. A SEGV signal is raised when there is a mismatch. This feature can be used by the Database, applications and the OS.  M7 Database In-Memory Query Accelerator The M7 chip also includes a In-Silicon Query Engines.  These accelerate tasks that work on In-Memory Columnar Vectors. Oracle In-Memory options stores data in Column Format. The M7 Query Engine can speed up In-Memory Format Conversion, Value and Range Comparisons and Set Membership lookups. This engine can work on Compressed data - this means not only are we accelerating the query performance but also increasing the memory bandwidth for queries.  SPARC Accelerated Program  At the Hotchips conference we also introduced the SPARC Accelerated Program to provide our partners and third part developers access to all the goodness of the M7's SPARC Application Acceleration features. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in knowing more about this program. 

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  • Creating a Reverse Proxy with URL Rewrite for IIS

    - by OWScott
    There are times when you need to reverse proxy through a server. The most common example is when you have an internal web server that isn’t exposed to the internet, and you have a public web server accessible to the internet. If you want to serve up traffic from the internal web server, you can do this through the public web server by creating a tunnel (aka reverse proxy). Essentially, you can front the internal web server with a friendly URL, even hiding custom ports. For example, consider an internal web server with a URL of http://10.10.0.50:8111. You can make that available through a public URL like http://tools.mysite.com/ as seen in the following image. The URL can be made public or it can be used for your internal staff and have it password protected and/or locked down by IP address. This is easy to do with URL Rewrite and IIS. You will also need Application Request Routing (ARR) installed even though for a simple reverse proxy you won’t use most of ARR’s functionality. If you don’t already have URL Rewrite and ARR installed you can do so easily with the Web Platform Installer. A lot can be said about reverse proxies and many different situations and ways to route the traffic and handle different URL patterns. However, my goal here is to get you up and going in the easiest way possible. Then you can dig in deeper after you get the base configuration in place. URL Rewrite makes a reverse proxy very easy to set up. Note that the URL Rewrite Add Rules template doesn’t include Reverse Proxy at the server level. That’s not to say that you can’t create a server-level reverse proxy, but the URL Rewrite rules template doesn’t help you with that. Getting Started First you must create a website on your public web server that has the public bindings that you need. Alternately, you can use an existing site and route using conditions for certain traffic. After you’ve created your site then open up URL Rewrite at the site level. Using the “Add Rule(s)…” template that is opened from the right-hand actions pane, create a new Reverse Proxy rule. If you receive a prompt (the first time) that the proxy functionality needs to be enabled, select OK. This is telling you that a proxy can route traffic outside of your web server, which happens to be our goal in this case. Be aware that reverse proxy rules can be dangerous if you open sites from inside you network to the world, so just be aware of what you’re doing and why. The next and final step of the template asks a few questions. The first textbox asks the name of the internal web server. In our example, it’s 10.10.0.50:8111. This can be any URL, including a subfolder like internal.mysite.com/blog. Don’t include the http or https here. The template assumes that it’s not entered. You can choose whether to perform SSL Offloading or not. If you leave this checked then all requests to the internal server will be over HTTP regardless of the original web request. This can help with performance and SSL bindings if all requests are within a trusted network. If the network path between the two web servers is not completely trusted and safe then uncheck this. Next, the template enables you to create an outbound rule. This is used to rewrite links in the page to look like your public domain name rather than the internal domain name. Outbound rules have a lot of CPU overhead because the entire web content needs to be parsed and updated. However, if you need it, then it’s well worth the extra CPU hit on the web server. If you check the “Rewrite the domain names of the links in HTTP responses” checkbox then the From textbox will be filled in with what you entered for the inbound rule. You can enter your friendly public URL for the outbound rule. This will essentially replace any reference to 10.10.0.50:8111 (or whatever you enter) with tools.mysite.com in all <a>, <form>, and <img> tags on your site. That’s it! Well, there is a lot more that you can do, this but will give you the base configuration. You can now visit www.mysite.com on your public web server and it will serve up the site from your internal web server. You should see two rules show up; one inbound and one outbound. You can edit these, add conditions, and tweak them further as needed. One common issue that can occur without outbound rules has to do with compression. If you run into errors with the new proxied site, try turning off compression to confirm if that’s the issue. Here’s a link with details on how to deal with compression and outbound rules. I hope this was helpful to get started and to see how easy it is to create a simple reverse proxy using URL Rewrite for IIS.

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  • Backpacks and Booth Paint: TechEd 2012

    - by The Un-T Guy
    Arriving in the parking lot of the Orange County Convention Center, I immediately knew I was in the right place. As far as the eye could see, the acres of asphalt were awash in backpacks, quirky (to be kind) outfits, and bad haircuts. This was the place. This was Microsoft Mecca v2012 for geeks and nerds, the Central Florida event of the year, a gathering of high tech professionals whose skills I both greatly respect and, frankly, fear a little. I was wholly and completely out of element, a dork in a vast sea of geek jumbo. It like was wearing dockers and a golf shirt walking into a RenFaire, but one with really crappy costumes and no turkey legs...save those attached to some of the attendees. Of course the corporate whores...errrr, vendors were in place, ready to parlay the convention's fre-nerd-ic energy into millions of dollars by convincing the big-brained and under-sexed in the crowd (i.e., virtually all of them...present company excluded, of course) that their product or service was the only thing standing between them and professional success, industry fame, and clear skin. "With KramTech 2012," they seemed to scream, "you will be THE ROCK STAR of your company's IT department!" As car shows and tattoo parlors learned long ago, Tech companies seem to believe that the best way to attract the attention of this crowd is through the hint of the promise of sex. They recruit and deploy an army of "sales reps" whose primary qualifications appear to be long hair, short skirts, high heels, and a vagina. Unlike their distant cousins in the car and body art industries, however, this sub-species of booth paint (semi-gloss decoration that adds nothing to the substance of the product) seems torn between committing to being all-out sex objects and recognition that they are in the presence of intelligent, discerning people. People who are smart enough to know exactly what these vendors are doing. Also unlike their distant car show and tattoo shop cousins, these young women (what…are there no gay tech professionals who could use some eye candy?) seem to realize that while IT remains a male-dominated field, there are ever-increasing numbers of intelligent, capable, strong professional women – women who’ve battled to make it in this field through hard work and work performance rather than a hard body and performing after work. This is not to say that all of the young female sales reps are there only because of their physical attributes. Many are competent, intelligent, and driven -- not to mention attractive. They're working hard on the front lines of delivering the next generation of technology. The distinction is pretty clear, however, between these young professionals and the booth paint. The former enthusiastically deliver credible information about the products they’re hawking. The latter are positioned in the aisles, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they struggle to operate the badge readers. Surprisingly, not all of the women in attendance seemed to object to the objectification of their younger sisters. One IT professional woman who came of age in the industry (mostly in IT marketing) said, “I have no problem with it. I was a ‘booth babe’ for years and it doesn’t bother me at all.” Others, however, weren’t quite so gracious. One woman I spoke with, an IT manager from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said it was demeaning and frankly, as more and more women grow into IT management positions, not a great marketing idea. “Using these young women is, to me, no different than vendors giving out t-shirts to attract attention. It’s sad because it’s still hard for a woman to be respected in the IT field and this just perpetuates the outdated notion that IT is a male-dominated field.” She went on to say that decisions by vendors to employ these young women in this “inappropriate way” could impact her purchasing decisions. “I might be swayed toward a vendor who has women on staff who are intelligent and dynamic rather than the vendors who use the ‘decoration’ girls.” So in many ways, the IT industry is no different than most other industries as it struggles to maximize performance by finding and developing talent – all of the talent, not just the 50% with a penis. Women in IT, like their brethren, struggle to find their niche in the field, to grow professionally, and reach for the brass ring, struggling to overcome obstacles as they climb the mountain of professional success in a never-ending cycle of economic uncertainty. But as (generally) well-educated and highly-trained professionals, they are probably better positioned than those in many other industries. Beside, they’ve got one other advantage over their non-IT counterparts as they attempt their ascent to the summit: They’ve already got the backpacks.

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  • Resetting Your Oracle User Password with SQL Developer

    - by thatjeffsmith
    There’s nothing more annoying than having to email, call, or log a support ticket to have one of your accounts reset. This is no less annoying in the Oracle database. Those pesky security folks have determined that your password should only be valid for X days, and your time is up. Time to reset the password! Except…you can’t log into the database to reset your password. What now? Wait a second, look at this nifty thing I see in SQL Developer: Right click on my connection, reset password not available! Why not? The JDBC Driver Doesn’t Support This Operation We can’t make this call over the Oracle JDBC layer, because it hasn’t been implemented. However our primary interface, OCI, does indeed support this. In order to use the Oracle Call Interface (OCI), you need to have an Oracle Client on your machine. The good news is that this is fairly easy to get going. The Instant Client will do. You have two options, the full or ‘Lite’ Instant Clients. If you want SQL*Plus and the other client tools, go for the full. If you just want the basic drivers, go for the Lite. Either of these is fine, but mind the bit level and version of Oracle! Make sure you get a 32 bit Instant Client if you run 32 bit SQL Developer or 64 bit if you run 64 Here’s the download link What, you didn’t believe me? Mind the version of Oracle too! You want to be at the same level or higher of the database you’re working with. You can use a 11.2.0.3 client with 11.2.0.1 database but not a 10gR2 client with 11gR2 database. Clear as mud? Download and Extract Put it where you want – Program Files is as good as place as any if you have the rights. When you’re done, copy that directory path you extracted the archive to, because we’re going to add it to your Windows PATH environment variable. The easiest way to find this in Windows 7 is to open the Start dialog and type ‘path’. In Windows 8 you’ll cast your spell and wave at your screen until something happens. I recommend you put it up front so we find our DLLs first. Now with that set, let’s start up SQL Developer. Check the Connection Context menu again Bingo! What happened there? SQL Developer looks to see if it can find the OCI resources. Guess where it looks? That’s right, the PATH. If it finds what it’s looking for, and confirms the bit level is right, it will activate the Reset Password option. We have a Preference to ‘force’ an OCI/THICK connection that gives you a few other edge case features, but you do not need to enable this to activate the Reset Password. Not necessary, but won’t hurt anything either. There are a few actual benefits to using OCI powered connections, but that’s beyond the scope of today’s blog post…to be continued. Ok, so we’re ready to go. Now, where was I again? Oh yeah, my password has expired… Right click on your connection and now choose ‘Reset Password’ You’ll need to know your existing password and select a new one that meets your databases’s security standards. I Need Another Option, This Ain’t Working! If you have another account in the database, you can use the DBA Panel to reset a user’s password, or of course you can spark up a SQL*Plus session and issue the ALTER USER JEFF IDENTIFIED BY _________; command – but you knew this already, yes? I need more help ‘installing’ the Instant Client, help! There are lots and lots of resources out there on this subject. But I also know from personal experience that many of you have problems getting this to ‘work.’ The key things to remember is to download the right bit level AND make sure the client install directory is in your path. I know many folks that will just ‘install’ the Instant Client directly to one of their ‘bin’ type directories. You can do that if you want, but I prefer the cleaner method. Of course if you lack admin privs to change the PATH variable, that might be your only option. Or you could do what the original ORA- message indicated and ‘contact your DBA.’

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  • Camera Projection back Into 3D world, offset error

    - by Anthony
    I'm using XNA to simulate a robot in a 3D world and then do image analysis on what the camera sees. I have my camera looking down in front of the direction that the robot is going, and I have the robot detecting white pixels. I'm trying to take the white pixels that it finds and project them back into the 3D world so that I can see if it is actually detecting the correct pixels. I almost have it working, but there is an offset between where the white is in in the World and were I put my orange triangles (which represent what the robot things is white). /// <summary> /// Takes a bool map of and makes vertex positions based on the map. /// </summary> /// <param name="c"> The bool map</param> private void ProjectBoolMapOnGroundAnthony2(bool[,] c) { float triangleSize = 0.04f; // Point of interest in World W cordinate system. Vector3 pointOfInterest_W = Vector3.Zero; // Point of interest in Robot Cordinate system R Vector3 pointOfInterest_R = Vector3.Zero; // alpha is the angle from the robot camera to where it is looking in the center. //double alpha = Math.Atan(1.8f / 1); /// Matrix representation of the view determined by the position, target, and updirection. Matrix View = ((SimulationMain)Game).mainRobot.robotCameraView.View; /// Matrix representation of the view determined by the angle of the field of view (Pi/4), aspectRatio, nearest plane visible (1), and farthest plane visible (1200) Matrix Projection = ((SimulationMain)Game).mainRobot.robotCameraView.Projection; /// Matrix representing how the real world cordinates differ from that of the rendering by the camera. Matrix World = ((SimulationMain)Game).mainRobot.robotCameraView.World; Plane groundPlan = new Plane(Vector3.UnitZ, 0.0f); for (int x = 0; x < this.screenWidth; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < this.screenHeight; ) { if (c[x, y] == true && this.count1D < 62000) { int j = 1; Vector3 nearPlanePoint = Game.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(new Vector3(x, y, 0), Projection, View, World); Vector3 farPlanePoint = Game.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(new Vector3(x, y, 1), Projection, View, World); //Vector3 pointOfInterest_W = Vector3.in Ray ray = new Ray(nearPlanePoint, farPlanePoint); pointOfInterest_W = ray.Position + ray.Direction * (float) ray.Intersects(groundPlan); this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.X = pointOfInterest_W.X - triangleSize; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.Y = pointOfInterest_W.Y - triangleSize * j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.Z = pointOfInterest_W.Z; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Color = Color.DarkOrange; // Put another vertex a the position but +1 in the X direction triangleSize //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.X = pointOnGroud.X + 3; //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.Y = pointOnGroud.Y + j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.X = pointOfInterest_W.X; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.Y = pointOfInterest_W.Y + triangleSize * j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.Z = pointOfInterest_W.Z; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Color = Color.Red; // Put another vertex a the position but +1 in the X direction //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.X = pointOnGroud.X; //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.Y = pointOnGroud.Y + 3 + j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Position.X = pointOfInterest_W.X + triangleSize; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Position.Y = pointOfInterest_W.Y - triangleSize * j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Position.Z = pointOfInterest_W.Z; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Color = Color.Orange; this.count1D += 3; y += j; } else { y++; } } } } The world is a grass texture with lines on it. The world plane is normal at (0,0,1). Any ideas on why there is an offset? Any Ideas? Thanks for the help, Anthony G.

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