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• Silverlight Cream for June 15, 2010 - 2 -- #883

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Vibor Cipan, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Kirupa, and Xianzhong Zhu. Shoutouts (thought I gave up on them, didn't you?): Jesse Liberty has the companion video to his WP7 OData post up: New Video: Master/Detail in WinPhone 7 with oData Michael Scherotter who made the first Ball Watch SL1 app back in the day, has a Virtual Event: Creating an Entry for the BALL Watch Silverlight Contest... sounds like the thing to do if you want in on this :) Even if you don't speak Portuguese, you can check this out: MSN Brazil Uses Silverlight to Showcase the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Erik Mork and crew have their latest up: This Week in Silverlight – Teched and Quizes Michael Klucher has a post up to give you some relief if you're having Trouble Installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools Portuguese above and now French... Jeremy Alles has a post up about [WP7] Windows Phone 7 challenge for french readers ! Just a note, not that it makes any difference, but Adam Kinney turned @SilverlightNews over to me today. I am the only one that has ever posted on it, but still having it all to myself feels special :) From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4 tutorial: HOW TO use PathListBox and Sample Data Crank up that new version of Blend and follow along with Vibor Cipan's PathListBox tutorial ... oh, and sample data too. Cool INotifyPropertyChanged implementation Chris Klug shows off some INotifyPropertyChange goodness he is not implementing, and credits a blog by Manuel Felicio for some inspiration. Check out that post as well... I've tagged his blog... I needed *another* one :) Silverlight Tip: Using LINQ to Select the Largest Available Webcam Resolution With no Silverlight Tip of the Day today, Pete Brown stepped up with this tip for finding the largest available webcam resolution using LINQ ... and read the comment from Rene as well. Creating a Master-Detail UI in Blend Kirupa has a very nice Master/Detail UI post up with backrounder info and the code for the project. There's a running example in the post for you to get an idea what you're learning. Get started with Farseer Physics 2.1.3 in Silverlight 3 Xianzhong Zhu has a Silverlight 3 tutorial up for Farseer Physics 2.1.3 ... might track for Silverlight 4, but hey, WP7 is kinda/sort Silverlight 3, right? ... lots of code and external links. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Case Management Patterns with Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite

  - by Ajay Khanna

  Contributed by Heidi Buelow, Oracle Product Management Case Management was a hot topic all week at Oracle OpenWorld so I was excited to share our current features and upcoming plans at the session Thursday morning on Case Management Patterns with Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite.  My colleague, Ravi Rangaswamy, the Case Management Development Manager, and I, Heidi Buelow, the Case Management Product Manager, discussed case management use case patterns with an interested audience.  We also talked about the current BPM Suite offering for Case Managment and showed a demo of our upcoming release where Case Management becomes a first class component in a BPM composite application. Case Management use case patterns cover a wide range of horizontal applications such as Accounts Payable, Dispute Resolution, Call Center, Employee OnBoarding, and many vertical applications in domains and industries such as Public Sector services, Insurance claims, and Healthcare.  Really, it is any use case where the resolution of a request may require a knowledge worker making decisions using experienced judgement in the current situation.  This allows for expidited care and customer satisfaction, both being highly valued for consumer loyalty, regulatory compliance, and efficient resolution. Today, BPM Suite provides the tools for creating Case Management applications using BPMN 2.0, Business Rules, and rich BAM and Case Analytics.  The Process Composer provides the agility to change rules and processes by the business users.  The case manager and case workers have the flexibilty they need.  With integrated content management and the concept of a BPM Process Spaces instance (case) space, the current release enables case management use case applications. In the next release, Case Management becomes a first class component. By this, we mean, Case is a separate component in the composite.  We are adding case attributes such as milestones, case events, case stakeholders, and more, providing a rich toolset for the use cases that require a flexible Case Management approach.  Activites become available according to the conditions that you specify and information can be protected by permissions indicated.  In BPM Studio, you design a Case and associate all of the attributes and activities that are needed, yet, at runtime you have the flexibility to add and change these as needed. We enjoyed sharing Case Management and it was well received by the audience.  The presentation is available online and we have viewlets of the demo that will be available at release time.

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• Java Spotlight Episode 78: Jasper Potts on the JavaFX Scene Builder

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Tweet An interview with Jasper Potts about the new JavaFX Scene Builder. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JavaFX Scene Builder Developer Preview available for testing. Java EE Unlock the Java EE 6 Platform using NetBeans 7.1 Tuning GlassFish for Production JSF 2.2 Update from Ed Burns John Rose at Microsoft's Lang.NEXT summit Recording of John's Java 8 presentation Jeroen Frijters' presentation on IKVM.NET Martin Odersky's keynote JVM Language Summit 2012 July 30 – August 1; Oracle Santa Clara (same as last year) CFP coming in a few days JVM Language Summit 2011 Presentations & Recordings Proposed development schedule for JDK 8 Say hello to Mathias Axelsson Events April 11, Cleveland JUG, Cleveland, OH April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 17-20, GIDS, Bangalore April 21, Java Summit, Chennai April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India May 5, Bangalore, Pune, ?? - JUG outreach May 7, OTN Developer Day, Mumbai May 8, OTN Developer Day, Delhi Feature InterviewJasper Potts is the Developer Experience Architect for the Java Client Group at Oracle. Responsible for technical design for everything thats sis on the core platform including Controls, Tools, Samples and Blueprints. Formally a lead engineer on the JavaFX & Swing teams working on the new JavaFX UI Controls and Graphics frameworks. Also responsible for designing, developing and presenting demos during the keynotes at JavaOne and Devoxx. A JavaOne Rockstar presenter having presented many sessions on JavaFX and Swing at many conferences. Prior to Sun he founded Xerto a desktop applications company developing Imagery a Java professional photo management application. In this interview Jasper talks about the recently release JavaFX Scene Builder. Mail Bag What’s Cool Contribute to GlassFish in Five Different Ways Stephen Chin and James Weaver join Oracle Adam Bien - Building Java FX 2 Libraries From Source With Maven 3 Paul Sandoz - Java Boomerang Building Jigsaw on Mac OS X using VirtualBox Mandy Chung: Jigsaw for Mac OS X

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• SQL Contests – Solution – Identify the Database Celebrity

  - by Pinal Dave

  Last week we were running contest Identify the Database Celebrity and we had received a fantastic response to the contest. Thank you to the kind folks at NuoDB as they had offered two USD 100 Amazon Gift Cards to the winners of the contest. We had also additional contest that users have to download and install NuoDB and identified the sample database. You can read about the contest over here. Here is the answer to the questions which we had asked earlier in the contest. Part 1: Identify Database Celebrity Personality 1 – Edgar Frank “Ted” Codd (August 19, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned achievement. (Wki) Personality 2 – James Nicholas “Jim” Gray (born January 12, 1944; lost at sea January 28, 2007; declared deceased May 16, 2012) was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 “for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.” (Wiki) Personality 3 – Jim Starkey (born January 6, 1949 in Illinois) is a database architect responsible for developing InterBase, the first relational database to support multi-versioning, the blob column type, type event alerts, arrays and triggers. Starkey is the founder of several companies, including the web application development and database tool company Netfrastructure and NuoDB. (Wiki) Part 2: Identify NuoDB Samples Database Names In this part of the contest one has to Download NuoDB and install the sample database Hockey. Hockey is sample database and contains few tables. Users have to install sample database and inform the name of the sample databases. Here is the valid answer. HOCKEY PLAYERS SCORING TEAM Once again, it was indeed fun to run this contest. I have received great feedback about it and lots of people wants me to run similar contest in future. I promise to run similar interesting contests in the near future. Winners Within next two days, we will let winners send emails. Winners will have to confirm their email address and NuoDB team will send them directly Amazon Cards. Once again it was indeed fun to run this contest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Source of (programmer) inefficiency

  - by Daniel

  I am interested to gain a better insight about the possible reasons of personal inefficiency as programmers (and only in programming) due to – simply - our own errors (because we are humans – well, almost all of us). I am not interested in how much we are productive or in how many adjustements the customer asks for when the work is done, but where and how each of us spend that part of its time in tasks that are unproductive and there is no one to blame except ourselves. Excluding ego - feeding and / or self – gratification, what I am trying to get (for all of us) is: what are the common issues eating our time; insight on reasons for that issues; identify simple way for us, personally (not delegating actions to other or our organizations), to correct our own problems. Please, do not think in academic terms but aim at the opportunity to compare our daily experiences and understand what are and how we try to fix our personal deficiencies. If you are interested to respond to this post, please: integrate the list if you see something important (or obvious) missing; highlight or name honestly your first issue tellng the way you try to address and solve your issue acting on yourself and yourself only in a sort of "continuous quality improving" My criteria for accepting the answer is: choose the best solution (feasibility and utility) to fix one (or more) of the problems of the list. Of course, selecting an error is not a vote on our skills: maybe we are hyper professional programmers and we lose ten minutes only every year or we are terribly inefficient, losing a couple of days a week: reasons for inefficiency could be really the same - but in a different scale. A possible list: Plain error in the names (variables, functions). Inability to see the obvious in your code. Misreading. Lack of concentration. Trying to use a technology you have not mastered. Errors with data types. Time required to understand your previous code or your documentation. Trying to do something more than requested because you enjoy it Using solutions more complicated than required because you enjoy it. Plain logical errors. Errors due to your fault in communications. Distraction My first personal issue: "Trying to use a technology you do not master." I have to use daily several technologies and I often need to spend significant time correcting code because my assumptions were plainly wrong. Reasons for this: production needs put high pressure and make difficult to find the time to learn. I try to address this reading technical books - as many as I can - even if this actually consumes a lot of time.

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• Game timings and formats

  - by topright

  There are more or less standardized TV-show/movie formats and recommended timings: 1. By the early 1960s, television companies commonly presented half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly restricted to situation comedy or family comedy, and were usually aired with either a live or artificial laugh track. One hour dramas included genre series such as police and detective series, westerns, science fiction, and, later, serialized prime time soap operas. Programs today still overwhelmingly conform to these half-hour and one hour guidelines. Source 2. In the United States, most medical dramas are one hour long. Source 3. Traditionally serials were broadcast as fifteen minute installments each weekday in daytime slots. In 1956 As the World Turns debuted as the first half-hour soap opera. All soap operas broadcast half-hour episodes by the end of the 1960s. With increased popularity in the 1970s most soap operas expanded to an hour (Another World even expanded to ninety minutes for a short time). More than half of the serials had expanded to one hour episodes by 1980. As of 2010, six of the seven US serials air one hour episodes each weekday. Source Interesting. Are there any standards of timing in game development? Well, 5-20 minutes casual games, of course. There is even a "5-minutes-game" site. And 1-hour-gamer site. Are there 1-week, 1-year, 1-eternity game formats? Chess and Go - deep games that you can study all your life; but they are played in hour or several days (pro games). Addictive long-term online role-playing games (without win-condition) are played in monthes and, possibly, years. Replayability is an important factor to consider. It's good when game design document contains a line: "A game is designed for solving in X hours". How can it be measured before there is any prototype or demo? When you know your game format, you know your audience (and vice versa). It is practical question. Are there psychological researches about dynamic of gaming interest and involvement? And is there a correlation between game format and game genre?

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• How valuable are you to your organization?

  - by Lance Shaw

  I don't know about you but I find it easy to get bogged down with the daily list of tasks and deliverables.  We all have lots to do and it all seems to be due tomorrow.  If you are reading this blog, than your to-do list is almost certainly filled with tasks related to the management, processing and publishing of information.  As we get mired in the daily routine of making sure that the content management needs of the organizations are met, we can easily lose sight of the value that we bring.  After all, if information and content is the lifeblood of our organizations, then surely maintaining the healthy flow of that information has real value.  But how can you measure that value and bring it forward on your résumé or your list of achievements in time for your next performance review? The AIIM organization has spent a lot of time recently researching the value of certification for "information professionals".  When it comes to enterprise content management (ECM) there are many areas of specialization including records management, content archivist, digital asset manager, content librarian and more.  Specialization can clearly drive up your value but it can also lock you into a narrow niche area of focus.  AIIM has found that what companies also need is someone that can apply their knowledge of how information is managed within the operational scope of the business in order to drive real, measurable strategic value.  When you can showcase the value of a broader, business-wide mindset to your management, you have more opportunity to make professional progress and drive real growth where it counts, your paycheck.   We here on the Oracle WebCenter team partnered with AIIM on the research they performed around the value of an information professional certification program. In a webinar this week, Doug Miles of AIIM and I will be talking about the results of that recent survey and what it is going to mean in the future to be recognized as a "Certified Information Professional" (CIP).  Oracle sponsored this research to help individuals and companies understand the value of enterprise content management and what it means across the entire organization. I hope you will join us. If any of us were stopped in the street and were asked about it, I bet most of us would think of ourselves as an "Information Professional".  Now we have a way to actually prove it!  There's only one downside that I can see...  you will have to get your business cards updated to include the "CIP" acronym after your name.  I think you will agree that is a price worth paying!

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• Say goodbye to System.Reflection.Emit (any dynamic proxy generation) in WinRT

  - by mbrit

  tl;dr - Forget any form of dynamic code emitting in Metro-style. It's not going to happen.Over the past week or so I've been trying to get Moq (the popular open source TDD mocking framework) to work on WinRT. Irritatingly, the day before Release Preview was released it was actually working on Consumer Preview. However in Release Preview (RP) the System.Reflection.Emit namespace is gone. Forget any form of dynamic code generation and/or MSIL injection.This kills off any project based on the popular Castle Project Dynamic Proxy component, of which Moq is one example. You can at this point in time not perform any form of mocking using dynamic injection in your Metro-style unit testing endeavours.So let me take you through my journey on this, so that other's don't have to...The headline fact is that you cannot load any assembly that you create at runtime. WinRT supports one Assembly.Load method, and that takes the name of an assembly. That has to be placed within the deployment folder of your app. You cannot give it a filename, or stream. The methods are there, but private. Try to invoke them using Reflection and you'll be met with a caspol exception.You can, in theory, use Rotor to replace SRE. It's all there, but again, you can't load anything you create.You can't write to your deployment folder from within your Metro-style app. But, can you use another service on the machine to move a file that you create into the deployment folder and load it? Not really.The networking stack in Metro-style is intentionally "damaged" to prevent socket communication from Metro-style to any end-point on the local machine. (It just times out.) This militates against an approach where your Metro-style app can signal a properly installed service on the machine to create proxies on its behalf. If you wanted to do this, you'd have to route the calls through a C&C server somewhere. The reason why Microsoft has done this is obvious - taking out SRE know means they don't have to do it in an emergency later. The collateral damage in removing SRE is that you can't do mocking in test mode, but you also can't do any form of injection in production mode. There are plenty of reasons why enterprise apps might want to do this last point particularly. At CP, the assumption was that their inspection tools would prevent SRE being used as a malware vector - it now seems they are less confident about that. (For clarity, the risk here is in allowing a nefarious program to download instructions from a C&C server and make up executable code on the fly to run, getting around the marketplace restrictions.)So, two things:- System.Reflection.Emit is gone in Metro-style/WinRT. Get over it - dynamic, on-the-fly code generation is not going to to happen.- I've more or less got a version of Moq working in Metro-style. This is based on the idea of "baking" the dynamic proxies before you use them. You can find more information here: https://github.com/mbrit/moqrt

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• Slides, Code, and Photos from SPTechCon San Francisco 2011

  - by Brian Jackett

  Note: Updated 2/12/11 with links to both presentation materials.     This past week I presented two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011.  The first session was “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which .  Thanks to all of my attendees for this session.  They had so many great questions that we ran out of time before covering all of the planned material.  Especially for them I’ve provided the slides and code samples to walk through them on their own.     The second session was “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions”.  In talking with attendees before the session many were looking for 2007 content.  At the conference SharePoint 2010 was represented much more heavily than 2007, so I was glad to fill a need in the community. Slides and Code   Click here for “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” materials   Click here for “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” materials Photos Pictures on FaceBook   Click here Pictures on Windows Live (higher res)     SPTechCon San Fran Feb 2011 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL Side Trips     Aside from the conference itself I also got to take a few side trips during the nights.  A special thanks to Dux Raymond Sy (Twitter) for organizing a Mongolian Hot Pot dinner on Monday (see pictures) and Michael Noel (Twitter) for organizing a Korean bbq dinner on Tuesday (again see pictures).  These were both new experiences for me and I thoroughly enjoyed the time with friends and trying something new.  Another thanks to Mark Miller (Twitter) for giving a personal tour around various sites of San Fran to myself and a few others.  It was great hearing the backstory of different neighborhoods and buildings from someone who had lived in the area for years.  Overall a great addition to the conference itself. Conclusion     This is the 3rd SPTechCon I’ve attended and the conference is getting better with each iteration.  The fine folks at BZ Media should be proud of the effort they’ve put in.  The next SPTechCon will be in Boston in June.  As of right now I won’t be attending that one but I highly recommend anyone to go if you have the chance.         -Frog Out

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• Great Expectations - Fusion HCM Highlights at OOW

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Lisa Conley, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Fusion HCM, Oracle Applications Development Oracle Open World is just around the corner! There's always so much to see and do and learn at the conference so I want to share some of the 'don't miss' Fusion HCM highlights with you. (Use this tool to search by session number to get a full description.) For starters, we have several customers who will be sharing their Fusion HCM implementation stories. We'll kick off these presentations with a customer panel at 12:15 on Monday in Moscone West 2005 (CON9420). You'll hear from Zillow, the Gerson Lehrman Group, UBS, and ConAgra about their experiences with our products. Oracle partners MarketSphere (CON8581) and eVerge (CON3800) have implemented Fusion HCM themselves and and will talk about how they'll use their experiences to help customers with their implementations (both are in Moscone West 2006). Beth Correa, CEO of Official Payroll Advisor, will highlight her favorite things about Oracle Fusion HCM Payroll on Tuesday at 11:45 in Moscone West 2006 (CON6691). And you'll get to hear from customers again when they speak with Steve Miranda in his Oracle Applications: Strategic Directions and Recommendations session on Tuesday at 1:15 in Moscone West 2002/2004 (CON11434). To bring it all together for you, we've listed all your Fusion HCM opportunities to learn and interact in this Focus On Document. I am really looking forward to the sessions on Human Capital Management in the Cloud. The Oracle Cloud combines the multiple product offerings into a single environment that leverages a common technology infrastructure enabling users to focus on their business - not the business of managing environments. On Tuesday at 10:15 in Moscone West 2002/2004, there is a General Session entitled the Future of Oracle HCM -- Strategy and Roadmap (GEN9505). This will touch on all product lines. Fusion HCM will be highlighted in Gretchen Alarcon's Oracle HCM: Overview, Strategy, Customer Experiences, and Roadmap session on Monday at 12:15 in Moscone West 2005 (CON9410). Also on Tuesday at 1:15 in Moscone West 2006, is a session focused on Talent Management and how you can try out these new products, co-existing with your current product set (CON9430). This is important in that you can test the waters before diving in. ConAgra will be sharing their experience in this session as well.  And of course, if you want to have a personal demonstration, please come by the Oracle DEMOgrounds in West Exhibition Hall Level 1 or the Oracle Cloud Services Lounge at Moscone West Level 3 where our Oracle HCM Cloud Services experts will be ready to answer your questions. I hope you have a wonderful week in San Francisco.Lisa ConleyPrincipal Product Strategy Manager, Fusion HCMApplications DevelopmentOracle Corporation

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• If unexpected database changes cause you problems – we can help!

  - by Chris Smith

  Have you ever been surprised by an unexpected difference between you database environments? Have you ever found that your Staging database is not the same as your Production database, even though it was the week before? Has an emergency hotfix suddenly appeared in Production over the weekend without your knowledge? Has your client secretly added a couple of indices to their local version of the database to aid performance? Worse still, has a developer ever accidently run a SQL script against the wrong database without noticing their mistake? If you’ve answered “Yes” to any of the above questions then you’ve suffered from ‘drift’. Database drift is where the state of a database (schema, particularly) has moved away from its expected or official state over time. The upshot is that the database is in an unknown or poorly-understood state. Even if these unexpected changes are not destructive, drift can be a big problem when it’s time to release a new version of the database. A deployment to a target database in an unexpected state can error and fail, potentially delaying a vital, time-sensitive update. A big issue with drift is that it can be hard to spot and it can be even harder to determine its provenance. So, before you can deal with an issue caused by drift, you’ll need to know exactly what change has been made, who made it, when they made it and why they made it. Those questions can take a lot of effort to answer. Then you actually need to decide what to do. Do you rollback the change because it was bad? Retrospectively apply it to the Staging environment because it is a required change? Or script the change into version control to get it back in line with your process? Red Gate’s Database Delivery Team have been talking to DBAs, database consultants and database developers to explore the problem of drift. We’ve started to get a really good idea of how big a problem it can be and what database professionals need to know and do, in order to deal with it.  It’s fair to say, we’re pretty excited at the prospect of creating a tool that will really help and we’ve got some great feedback on our initial ideas (see image below).   We’re now well underway with the development of our new drift-spotting product – SQL Lighthouse – and we hope to have a beta release out towards the end of July. What we really need is your help to shape the product into a great tool. So, if database drift is a problem that you’d like help solving and are interested in finding out more about our product, join our mailing list to register your interest in trying out the beta release. Subscribe to our mailing list

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• SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2. The Awesome Returns.

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  Two years ago 59 SQL Server MVP's came together and helped make one of the best book on SQL Server out there. Each chapter was written by an MVP about a part of SQL Server they loved working with. This resulted in superb quality content and excellent ratings from the readers. To top it off all earnings went to a good cause, the War Child International organization. That book was SQL Server MVP Deep Dives. This year 63 SQL Server MVPs, me included, decided it was time do repeat the success of the first book. Let me introduce you the: SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2 The topics in 60 chapters are grouped in 5 groups: Architecture, Database Administration, Database Development, Performance Tuning and Optimization, Business Intelligence. They represent over 1000 years of daily experience in various areas of SQL Server. I have contributed chapter 28 in Database Development group titled Getting asynchronous with Service Broker. In it I show you the Service Broker template you can use for secure communication between two or more SQL server instances for whatever purpose you may have. If you haven't heard of Service Broker it's a part of the database engine that enables you to do completely async operations in the database itself or between databases and instances. The official release of the book will be next week at PASS where there will be 2 slots where most of the authors will be there signing the books you bring. This is also a great opportunity to meet everyone and ask about any problems you may have. So definitely come say hi. Again we decided on a charity that will be supported by this book. It's called Operation Smile. They provide free surgeries to repair cleft lip, cleft palate and other facial deformities for children around the globe. You can also help them by donating. You can preorder it on at Manning Publications website or on Amazon. By having it you not only get to learn a lot, improve your skills and have fun but you also help a child have a normal life. If that's not a good cause then I don't know what it is.

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• A Community Cure for a String Splitting Headache

  - by Tony Davis

  A heartwarming tale of dogged perseverance and Community collaboration to solve some SQL Server string-related headaches. Michael J Swart posted a blog this week that had me smiling in recognition and agreement, describing how an inquisitive Developer or DBA deals with a problem. It's a three-step process, starting with discomfort and anxiety; a feeling that one doesn't know as much about one's chosen specialized subject as previously thought. It progresses through a phase of intense research and learning until finally one achieves breakthrough, blessed relief and renewed optimism. In this case, the discomfort was provoked by the mystery of massively high CPU when searching Unicode strings in SQL Server. Michael explored the problem via Stack Overflow, Google and Twitter #sqlhelp, finally leading to resolution and a blog post that shared what he learned. Perfect; except that sometimes you have to be prepared to share what you've learned so far, while still mired in the phase of nagging discomfort. A good recent example of this recently can be found on our own blogs. Despite being a loud advocate of the lightning fast T-SQL-based string splitting techniques, honed to near perfection over many years by Jeff Moden and others, Phil Factor retained a dogged conviction that, in theory, shredding element-based XML using XQuery ought to be even more efficient for splitting a string to create a table. After some careful testing, he found instead that the XML way performed and scaled miserably by comparison. Somewhat subdued, and with a nagging feeling that perhaps he was still missing "something", he posted his findings. What happened next was a joy to behold; the community jumped in to suggest subtle changes in approach, using an attribute-based rather than element-based XML list, and tweaking the XQuery shredding. The result was performance and scalability that surpassed all other techniques. I asked Phil how quickly he would have arrived at the real breakthrough on his own. His candid answer was "never". Both are great examples of the power of Community learning and the latter in particular the importance of being brave enough to parade one's ignorance. Perhaps Jeff Moden will accept the string-splitting gauntlet one more time. To quote the great man: you've just got to love this community! If you've an interesting tale to tell about being helped to a significant breakthrough for a problem by the community, I'd love to hear about it. Cheers, Tony.

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• Am 10.02. startet WebCast-Serie für Java Entwickler und WebLogic Interessenten: WebLogic Developer - Get the latest on Oracle WebLogic Server and Java EE 6

  - by Thomas Leopold

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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:"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;} Accelerate Your Development with Oracle WebLogic Suite Many organisations are reducing travel, conference, and training budgets for their developers without any change to the results expected of those developers. So how can you keep up with the latest developments?By receiving training, delivered free of charge, at your desk!Join us during February and March for a series of online events designed and run by the development team at Oracle. Learn how Oracle WebLogic Suite enables a whole new level of productivity for enterprise developers.Virtual Developer Day - 10th FebruaryStarting with our Virtual Developer Day on 10th February, join us for a blend of hands-on labs, live chat and presentations covering the latest on WebLogic, Java EE 6 and the programming tenets that have made it a true platform breakthrough.Weekly WebLogic Webcasts from 17th February to 17th MarchAfterwards, join us every week from 17th February to 17th March for our weekly one-hour webcasts where we will show you how to build an application from the ground up using Java and JEE technologies. Presented by the engineering team for WebLogic, these webcasts will be of great value to developers and architects, not just those already using WebLogic.For registration, full session abstracts and schedule please click here. Don't miss out! Register now to join our virtual events and keep up with all the latest developments. Find out more and register now Copyright © 2011, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement

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• How far is too far?

  - by David Dorf

  Previously I've talked about Safeway's personalized pricing as well as Target's use of analytics to learn about customers.  Then last week I read about Orbitz tailoring their hotel offers based on the browser used.  (Orbitz claims that Mac users are 40% more likely than PC users to book four- or five-star hotels.)  So just how far is too far when tailoring the retail experience? When most consumers read about these types of tactics, they tend to feel violated, as if someone was reading their personal diary.  Nobody wants to be tricked into buying things.  Walking into a grocery store and seeing crates of apples stacked high looks enticing, but the crates are just for display and the apples may be over a year old.  Even though its much cheaper to print markdown tags, many retailers manually write the price tags because consumers think they deal is better if the price is hand-written. The technology already exists to personalize prices and experiences for consumers.  People get upset thinking they paid more for something than a neighbor, but it already happens all the time with cars, flights, and the use of loyalty programs and coupons. There are many variables at play for any purchase.  They only difference is that the customer segments are getting smaller, sometimes reaching a size of one. There's two ways to look at this.  Retailers have always manipulated the environment to get consumers to buy more -- or -- Retailers are getting better at tuning the shopping experience for consumers.  I choose the latter, and so do most consumers by spending their money in the stores they like.  Consumers like to see fresh flowers at the entrance to the grocery store, and they like to see specials scrawled on chalkboards. The key is making sure that consumers benefit from the experience as well.  I'm willing to give up some personal information in exchange for discounts and more relevant marketing, and the next-generation of shoppers are even less concerned about privacy.  Retailers need to use all the tools available to differentiate their offers and connect with their customers. So if Orbitz wants to put three-star hotels at the top of the list for me because I'm using a PC, that's fine by me.

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• Good Scoop: The PeopleSoft/IBM Backstory

  - by [email protected]

  Sometimes you're searching for something online and you find an unrelated, bonus nugget. Last week I stumbled across an interesting blog post from Chris Heller of a PeopleSoft consulting shop in San Ramon, CA called Grey Sparling. I don't know these guys. But Chris, who apparently used to work on the PeopleTools team, wrote a great article on a pre-acquisition, would-be deal between IBM and PeopleSoft that would have standardized PeopleSoft on IBM technology. The behind-the-scenes perspective is interesting. His commentary on the challenges that the company and PeopleSoft customers would have encountered if the deal had gone through was also interesting: ·         "No common ownership. It's hard enough to get large groups of people to work together when they work for the same company, but with two separate companies it is much, much harder. Even within Oracle, progress on Fusion applications was slow until Thomas Kurian took over Fusion applications in addition to Fusion middleware." ·         "No customer buy-in. PeopleSoft customers weren't asking for a conversion to WebSphere, so the fact that doing that could have helped PeopleSoft stay independent wouldn't have meant much to them, especially since the cost of moving to whatever a "PeopleSoft built on WebSphere" would have been significant." ·         "No executive buy-in. This is related to the previous point, but it's worth calling out separately. If Oracle had walked away and the deal with IBM had gone through, and PeopleSoft customers got put through the wringer as part of WebSphere move, all of the PeopleSoft project teams would be put in the awkward position of explaining to their management why these additional costs and headaches were happening. Essentially they would need to "sell" the partnership internally to their own management team. That's not a fun conversation to have." I'm not surprised that something like this was in the works. But I did find the inside scoop and Heller's perspective on the challenges particularly interesting. Especially the advantages of aligning development of applications and infrastructure development under one roof. Here's a link to the whole blog entry.  

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• SQL SERVER – Script to Update a Specific Column in Entire Database

  - by Pinal Dave

  Last week, I have received a very interesting question and I find in email and I really liked the question as I had to play around with SQL Script for a while to come up with the answer he was looking for. Please read the question and I believe that all of us face this kind of situation. “Pinal, In our database we have recently introduced ModifiedDate column in all of the tables. Now onwards any update happens in the row, we are updating current date and time to that field. Now here is the issue, when we added that field we did not update it with a default value because we were not sure when we will go live with the system so we let it be NULL. Now modification to the application went live yesterday and we are now updating this field. Here is where I need your help. We need to update all the tables in our database where we have column created ModifiedDate and now want to update with current datetime. As our system is already live since yesterday there are several thousands of the rows which are already updated with real world value so we do not want to update those values. Essentially, in our entire database where ever there is a ModifiedDate column and if it is NULL we want to update that with current date time?  Do you have a script for it?” Honestly I did not have such a script. This is very specific required but I was able to come up with two different methods how he can use this method. Method 1 : Using INFORMATION_SCHEMA SELECT 'UPDATE ' + T.TABLE_SCHEMA + '.' + T.TABLE_NAME + ' SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() WHERE ModifiedDate IS NULL;' FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES T INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS C ON T.TABLE_NAME = C.TABLE_NAME AND c.COLUMN_NAME ='ModifiedDate' WHERE T.TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE' ORDER BY T.TABLE_SCHEMA, T.TABLE_NAME; Method 2: Using DMV SELECT 'UPDATE ' + SCHEMA_NAME(t.schema_id) + '.' + t.name + ' SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() WHERE ModifiedDate IS NULL;' FROM sys.tables AS t INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON t.OBJECT_ID = c.OBJECT_ID WHERE c.name ='ModifiedDate' ORDER BY SCHEMA_NAME(t.schema_id), t.name; Above scripts will create an UPDATE script which will do the task which is asked. We can pretty much the update script to any other SELECT statement and retrieve any other data as well. Click to Download Scripts Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)  Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Leading an offshore team

  - by Chuck Conway

  I'm in a position where I am leading two teams of 4. Both teams are located in India. I am on the west coast of the U.S. I'm finding leading remote teams challenging: First, their command of the English language is weak. Second, I'm having difficultly understanding them through their accents. Third is timing, we are 12 hours apart. We use Skype to communicate. I have a month to get the project done. We've burned through a week just setting up the environments. At this point I'm considering working their hours, 11p PDT to 7a PDT, to get them up to speed, so that I can get the project off the ground. A 12 hour lag time is too much. I'm looking for steps I can take to be successful at leading an offshore team. Update The offshore team's primary task is coding, of course, most coding tasks do involve some design work. The offshore team's are composed of one lead, 2 mid level (4 to 5 years) developers and a junior (~2 years) developer. The project is classic waterfall. We've handed the offshore team a business and a technical design document. We are trying to manage the offshore in an agile way. We have daily conference calls with them and I'm requiring the teams to send me a daily scrum in the form of an email answering the following questions: What did I do today? What am I going to do tomorrow? What do I need from Chuck so I can do my job tomorrow? There is some ambiguity in the tasks. The intent was to give them enough direction for them to develop the task with out writing the code for them. I don't have a travel budget. I am using Fogbugz to track the tasks. Each task has been entered into Fogbugz and given a priority. Each team member has access to FogBugz and can choose what task they wish to complete. Related question: What can we do to improve the way outsourcing/offshoring works? Update 2 I've decided that I can not talk to the team once a day. I must work with them. Starting tonight I've started working the same hours they are. This makes me available to them when they have questions. It also allows me to gain their trust and respect. Stackoverflow question Leading an offshore team

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• A Bad Day at Work

  - by TehGrumpyCoder

  There's lots of ways of having a bad day at work... I suppose for many people, just being *at* work makes it a bad day, but I happen to be one of those people that found a way to do something I like for a living. I've always said "if you're not having fun, what's the point?" ... on the latest Zune podcast, they were interviewing someone from the WP7 team and he said they're mantra is "It's not done until it's fun" ... I like that too. But, even when you're doing what you like for a living, it can get tedious. There were times that I didn't look forward to going out and playing guitar on a Friday or Saturday night, and some nights I was looking at my watch just waiting for it to be over. Well, that was today... like Steve Martin in "The Jerk" ... the first hour was like a regular hour, but then the rest of the morning was like a day, and the afternoon has been like a week. I've got a list of stuff I need to get into my head, and it's tough when the highest technology you have during 9 hours of your day is .NET 2.0 and you can only run what IT installed. I get wrapped around the power take-off reading something and dearly want to write some code to try, but with the state of technology here, it's like trying to teach jazz chords to someone that showed up for their lesson with that stupid plastic guitar from Guitar Hero. I tried to watch a training video... downloaded it zipped so maybe it wouldn't be noticed like it might if I streamed it. Then nothing on this machine would play the video... dang! Well, if someone doesn't take me out on the drive tonight or back in tomorrow, maybe it'll be a better day... or maybe I'll d/l a bunch of training videos in a different format, or bring in a decent viewer, or download them to my Zune maybe... that would work. I suppose at age 61 there are worse things than feeling stifled... for instance, so far I've lived 2 years longer than my father... but at the same time, he's the one that pointed out that in my first letter home from Boot Camp "He's complaining, he's fine"... guess he had my number :) I think he'd appreciate "Teh Grumpy Coder"

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• Watch 53rd Grammy Awards 2011 Live Stream & Follow The Event On Facebook & Twitter

  - by Gopinath

  Grammy Awards is the biggest music awards ceremony that honours music genres. The 53rd Grammy Awards function will be held on February 13, 2011 at Staples Center in Los Angeles. The star studded musical event will be telecasted live on CBS TV between 8pm ET until 11:30pm ET. Behind The Scenes Live Stream On YouTube and Grammy.com Grammy, YouTube and TurboTax has teamed up to provide live stream of behind the scene coverage of key events starting at 5pm Feb 11th and runs through February 13th. Note that this stream will not broadcast the 3 hour long award presentation. Kind of bad, except the award presentation rest of the ceremony is streamed here.  The video stream is embedded below Catch live behind-the-scenes coverage of key events during GRAMMY week. Before the show, you can watch the Nominees Reception, Clive Davis Pre-GRAMMY Gala, the red carpet and the pre-telecast ceremony. During the show, go backstage to see the winners after they accept their award! You can catch the same stream on Grammys’s YouTube channel as well as on Grammy.com website Follow Grammy Awards On Facebook & Twitter The Grammy Awards has an official Facebook and Twitter account and you can follow them for all the latest information The Grammy’s Facebook Page The Grammy’s Twitter Page Grammy Live Streaming on UStream & Justin.tv Even though there is no official source that stream live of The Grammy Awards presentation ceremony, there will be plenty of unofficial sources on UStream and Justin.tv. So search UStream and Justin.tv for live streaming of The Grammy’s. TV Channels Telecasting The Grammy Awards 2011 Here is the list of TV channels in various countries offering live telecast of The Grammy Awards 2011. We keep updating this section as and when we get more information USA – CBS Television Network  – February 13, 2011 India – VH1 TV – February 14  2011 , 6:30 AM United Kingdom – ITV2  – 16 February 2011, 10:00PM – 12:00AM This article titled,Watch 53rd Grammy Awards 2011 Live Stream & Follow The Event On Facebook & Twitter, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• XNA Notes 001

  - by George Clingerman

  Just a quick recap of things I noticed going on in or around the XNA community this past week. I’m sure there’s a lot I missed (it’s a pretty big community with lots of different parts to it) but these where the things I caught that I thought were pretty cool. The XNA Team Michael Klucher gave a list of books every gamer should read. http://twitter.com/#!/mklucher/status/22313041135673344 Shawn Hargreaves posted Nelxon Studio posting about a cheatsheet for converting 3.1 to 4.0 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/04/xna-3-1-to-4-0-cheat-sheet.aspx?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter XNA Game Studio won the Frontline award for Programming Tool by GameDev magazine! Congrats to the XNA team! http://www.gdmag.com/homepage.htm XNA MVPs In January several MVPs were up for re-election, Jim Perry, Andy ‘The ZMan’ Dunn, Glenn Wilson and myself were all re-award a Microsoft MVP award for their contributions to the XNA/DirectX communities. https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx?product=1&competency=XNA%2fDirectX A movement to get Michael McLaughlin an MVP award has started and you can join in too! http://twitter.com/#!/theBigDaddio/status/22744458621620224 http://www.xnadevelopment.com/MVP/MichaelMcLaughlinMVP.txt Don’t forget you can nominate ANYONE for a MVP award, that’s how they work. https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/mvpbecoming  XNA Developers James Silva of Ska Studios hit 9,200 sales of ZP2KX and recommends you listen to Infected Mushroom. http://twitter.com/#!/Jamezila/status/22538865357094912 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infected_Mushroom Noogy creator of the upcoming XBLA title Dust an Elysian tail posts some details into his art creation. http://noogy.com/image/statue/statue.html Xbox LIVE Indie Game News Microsoft posts acknowledging there was an issue with the sales data that has been addressed and apologized for not posting about it sooner. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71347/436154.aspx#436154 Winter Uprising sales still chugging along and being updated by Xalterax (by those developers willing to actually share sales numbers. Thanks for sharing guys, much appreciated!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/70147.aspx Don’t forget about Dream Build Play coming up in February! http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx The Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games December Edition comes out on NeoGaf http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=414485 The Greatest XBox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 on DealSpwn – Congrats to DrMistry and MStarGames for his #1 spot with his massive XBLIG Space Pirates From Tomorrow! http://www.dealspwn.com/xbligoty-2010/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Dealspwn+%28Dealspwn%29 XNA Game Development The future of XACT and WP7 has finally been confirmed and we finally know what our options are for looping audio seamlessly on WP7. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/61826/436639.aspx#436639  Super Mario 3 Design Notes is an interesting read for XBLIG developers, giving some insight to the training that natural occurs for players as they start playing the game. Good things for XBLIG developers to think about. http://www.significant-bits.com/super-mario-bros-3-level-design-lessons

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• What Would a CyberWar Do To Your Business?

  - by [email protected]

  In mid-February the Bipartisan Policy Center in the United States hosted Cyber ShockWave, a simulation of how the country might respond to a catastrophic cyber event. An attack takes place, they can't isolate where it came from or who did it, simulated press reports and market impacts...and the participants in the exercise have to brief the President and advise him/her on what to do. Last week, Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff who participated in the exercise summarized his findings in Federal Computer Weekly. The article, given FCW's readership and the topic is obviously focused on the public sector and US Federal policies. However, it touches on some broader issues that impact the private sector as well--which are applicable to any government and country/region-- such as: · How would the US (or any) government collaborate to identify and defeat such an attack? Chertoff calls this out as a current gap. How do the public and private sector collaborate today? How would the massive and disparate collection of agencies and companies act together in a crunch? · What would the impact on industries and global economies be? Chertoff, and a companion article in Government Computer News, only touch briefly on the subject--focusing on the impact on capital markets. "There's no question this has a disastrous impact on the economy," said Stephen Friedman, former director of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush who played the role of treasury secretary. "You have financial markets shut down at this point, ordinary transactions are dramatically depleted, there's no question that this has a major impact on consumer confidence." That Got Me Thinking · How would it impact Oracle's customers? I know they have business continuity plans--is this one of their scenarios? What if it's not? How would it impact manufacturing lines, ATM networks, customer call centers... · How would it impact me and the companies I rely on? The supermarket down the street, my Internet Service Provider, the service station where I bought gas last night. I sure don't have any answers, and neither do Chertoff or the participants in the exercise. "I have to tell you that ... we are operating in a bit of unchartered territory." said Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general who played the role of attorney general in the exercise. But it is a good thing that governments and businesses are considering this scenario and doing what they can to prevent it from happening.

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• Friday Fun: Snowball

  - by Asian Angel

  It is Christmas Eve and hopefully you are enjoying the start of an early weekend away from work. This week we have a snowball throwing game for you to try out, so bundle up and get ready to let those snowballs fly! Snowball The object of the game is to use your snowball ammo to harass the drunk businessman and send him flying along distance-wise as far as you can. Simply use your mouse to aim and click the left button to throw snowballs. You can monitor your stats on the silver bar towards the top of the window. The sound can also be disabled if the music is bothering you, but keep in mind that all sound will be disabled if you use the option. Time to get those snowballs flying through the air!! Keep hitting the businessman with your snowballs as you chase after him. Make certain that your aim is good or you will quickly run out of snowballs! You can really get him moving along at a good rate and he can even go high enough in the air to disappear off the screen for a few moments. There is a also chance that your aim will be so wicked with the snowballs that you will literally knock the drunk businessman’s head off! Weird but possible… The game ends when one of these two events occur: 1.) you run out of snowballs or 2.) the businessman literally bounces back at and then drops behind you as seen in the screenshot here. The moment either happens your score will pop up and then you have the opportunity to try again. Have fun! Note: The bounce back event can happen when encountering cars. Play Snowball Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video] Sunset in a Tropical Paradise Wallpaper Natural Wood Grain Icons for Your Desktop and App Launcher Docks My Blackberry Is Not Working! The Apple Too?! [Funny Video] Hidden Tracks Your Stolen Mac; Free Until End of January Why the Other Checkout Line Always Moves Faster

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• Enterprise 2.0 Conference recap

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  We had a great week in Boston attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. We learned a lot from industry thought leaders and had a chance to speak with a lot of different folks about social and collaboration technologies and trends.  Of all the conferences we attend, this one definitely has a different “feel”. It seems like the attendees are younger, they dress hipper, and there is much more livelihood all around. A few of the sessions addressed this, as the "millenials" or Generation Y, have been using Web 2.0 tools, such as Facebook and Twitter for many years now, and as they are entering the workforce they are expecting similar tools to be a part of how they accomplish their job tasks. It's important to note that it's not just Millenials that are expecting these technologies, as workers young and old alike benefit from social and collaboration tools. I’ve highlighted some of the takeaways I had, as well as a reaction from John Brunswick, who helped us in staffing the booth. Giving your employees choices is empowering, but if there is no course of action or plan, it’s useless. There is no such thing as collaboration without a goal. In a few years, social will become a feature in the “platform”, a component of collaboration. Social will become part of the norm – just like email is expected when you start a job at a company, Social will be too. 1 in 3 of your employees are using tools your company doesn't sanction (how scary is this?!) 25,000 pieces of content are created every second. Context is king. Social tools help us navigate and manage the complexities we face with information overload. We need to design products for the way people work. Consumerization of the enterprise - bringing social tools like Facebook to the organization. From John Brunswick: "The conference had solid attendance, standing as a testament to organizations making a concerted effort to understand what social tools exist to support their businesses.  Many vendors were narrowly focused and people we pleasantly surprised at the breadth of capability provided by Oracle WebCenter.  People seemed to feel that it just made sense that social technology provides the most benefit when presented in the context of key business data." Did you attend the conference? What were some of your key takeaways?

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• Unit Testing TSQL

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I went through a period of time where I spent a lot of effort figuring out how to set up unit tests for TSQL. It wasn't easy. There are a few tools out there that help, but mostly it involves lots of programming. well, not as much as before. Thanks to the latest Down Tools Week at Red Gate a new utility has been built and released into the wild, SQL Test. Like a lot of the new tools coming out of Red Gate these days, this one is directly integrated into SSMS, which means you're working where you're comfortable and where you already have lots of tools at your disposal. After the install, when you launch SSMS and get connected, you're prompted to install the tSQLt example database. Go for it. It's a quick way to see how the tool works. I'd suggest using it. It' gives you a quick leg up. The concepts are pretty straight forward. There are a series of CLR commands that you use to configure a test and the test assertions. In between you're calling TSQL, either calls to your structure, queries, or stored procedures. They already have the one things that I always found wanting in database tests, a way to compare tables of results. I also like the ability to create a dummy copy of tables for the tests. It lets you control structures and behaviors so that the tests are more focused. One of the issues I always ran into with the other testing tools is that setting up the tests might require potentially destructive changes to the structure of the database (dropping FKs, etc.) which added lots of time and effort to setting up the tests, making testing more difficult, and therefor, less useful. Functionally, this is pretty similar to the Visual Studio tests and TSQLUnit tests that I used to use. The primary improvement over the Visual Studio tests is that I'm working in SSMS instead of Visual Studio. The primary improvement over TSQLUnit is the SQL Test interface it self. A lot of the functionality is the same, but having a sweet little tool to manage & run the tests from makes a huge difference. Oh, and don't worry. You can still run these tests directly from TSQL too, so automation has not gone away. I'm still thinking about how I'd use this in a dev environment where I also had source control to fret. That might be another blog post right there. I'm just getting started with SQL Test, so this is the first of several blog posts & videos. Watch this space. Try the tool.

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