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• Connecting two monitors at the corners

  - by fastmultiplication

  I am using two separate X screens on two monitors and I would like them to be connected at the lower right corner. That is, if you move to the lower right corner of screen0 the mouse should appear at the upper left of screen1. I do not want an entire edge of each monitor to be permeable to the mouse. I modified the xorg.conf file like so: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen1" Relative "Screen0" 1200 1000 InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" EndSection (screen 0's resolution is 1280x1024) so there is a bit of overlap. However whenever I move the mouse to the bottom of screen0, the pointer appears at the upper left of screen1. And, the entire top of screen1 is permeable to the mouse and brings it to the lower left corner of screen0. I have tried various numbers in following the "relative" statement - if I put 1280 1024 the mouse does not cross over at all. If I use 1280 1023 the entire right side of screen0 is permeable. I haven't been able to find any documentation about how to explicitly tell the mouse where to crossover - is there some? It seems that xorg is being really aggressive in guessing where the mouse crossover should take place. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks!

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• monitor height differences & the mouse going off screen

  - by fastmultiplication

  In ubuntu 10.10 I have a dual monitor setup. I have an nVidia graphics card and am using twinview. One of the monitors is 1024 pixels high and the other is 900. In the monitor configuration screen & in real life, I have them set up side by side, 1024 on the left. The result of this is that when I am on the bottom of the left monitor and move the mouse to the right, it goes into the hidden area below the right monitor's visible area. It seems like it would make a lot more sense for it to be bumped up to the bottom of the right monitor - since one almost never wants to move the mouse into an area of the screen that doesn't show up. And, systems I have used before have been set up that way. How can I set this up? I am not interested in lists of window managers for ubuntu; I would like to know the identity of a particular WM or set of steps I can take to solves the particular problem I have outlined above. Thanks! EDIT: I changed to use two seperate X window monitors, and set them up relatively positioned so that just the corner touches and the mouse can cross there, so the difference in heights doesn't matter.

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• How do I configure an Intel HD Graphics 4000?

  - by derabbink

  First off, please note that last night I already posted this question to a launchpad mailing list, so this could be considered a cross post. However, I think this is a better place to ask the same question The question: How can I configure my Ubuntu 12.04, with upgraded kernel (3.6), to use the Intel HD Graphics 4000 adapter? (Intel HD 4000 is the standard of 3rd gen Intel Core i7 (Ivy Bridge) graphics adapter) Some output: $ glxinfo name of display: :0 X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation) Major opcode of failed request: 154 (GLX) Minor opcode of failed request: 19 (X_GLXQueryServerString) Serial number of failed request: 12 Current serial number in output stream: 12 $ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf this is probably the farthest from what it should be Section "Screen" Identifier "Default Screen" DefaultDepth 24 EndSection Section "Module" Load "glx" EndSection $ lspci I only listed the line I think are relevant. If you want more info in order to help me, please comment :) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge Graphics Controller (rev 09) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Panther Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04) 16:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Whistler XT [AMD Radeon HD 6700M Series] 16:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Turks HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6000 Series]

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• Problem with gluOrtho2D()

  - by Shashwat

  I was trying to understand the gluOrtho2D function. I have drawn 4 lines originating from the center reaching up to 4 corners of the screen. You can follow the below code. osize is a variable which is used to set the parameters of gluOrtho2D. It will create a window of size 2*osize. If works fine when osize is 1. Lines reach the corners. But as I increase the value of osize, the length of the lines decreases (cross becomes smaller and does not cover the whole screen). But I think it should reach the corner. void display() { glClear( GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT ); //glViewport(0, 0, 100, 100); glMatrixMode (GL_PROJECTION); float osize = 1.2; //glOrtho(-osize*1.0, osize*1.0, osize*1.0, -osize*1.0, -1.0, 1.0); gluOrtho2D(-osize*1.0, osize*1.0, osize*1.0, -osize*1.0); glMatrixMode (GL_MODELVIEW); glBegin(GL_LINES); glColor3f(0.0, 0.0, 1.0); glVertex2f(0.0, 0.0); glVertex2f(-osize*1.0, -osize*1.0); glVertex2f(0.0, 0.0); glVertex2f(-osize*1.0, osize*1.0); glVertex2f(0.0, 0.0); glVertex2f(osize*1.0, -osize*1.0); glVertex2f(0.0, 0.0); glVertex2f(osize*1.0, osize*1.0); glEnd(); glutSwapBuffers(); //includes glFlush(); } What is the problem?

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• How can I get non-programmer colleagues on board with bespoke software rather than Dynamics CRM + Sharepoint?

  - by Bendos

  I am working with a company which designs and builds one-off machines. They have been 'dabbling' with hosted Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint (on different servers!) in an attempt to centralise their data and help colleagues collaborate more effectively across projects. They haven't used either system to their potential. Now we are looking at the engineering department who already use a form of version control software for the various CAD files (Autodesk Vault) however it is becoming increasingly necessary to implement more of a generic file version control system as they use many more files than can be managed in Vault (sometimes just photos or scans of paper documents), hence why they were looking at using Sharepoint. However... as the 'programmer' of the bunch, I can see several scenarios which don't seem to fit well with the Dynamics + Sharepoint approach; simple reports based on cross-table queries, exporting certain metrics as a spreadsheet, defining project hierarchies and many-many relationships, and as such I have been pushing for an in-house developed 'ECM' / 'ERP' software package (perhaps in .NET or php). Some colleagues seem to attach a greater value to the MS software (perhaps becuase it has a logo!) but don't see that it's just a framework, not a solution. Can anyone provide a good example of when custom software would actually be better than using Dynamics + Sharepoint and how do I relate that to non-technical staff?

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• Developing an Interface to a Dynamic System

  - by radix07

  I work for a small company and have been designing a GUI to interface our embedded system. The problem with this embedded system is that it is not a finished product (may never be) and is constantly under development and being tweaked and updated for different customers and applications in small volumes. So to deal with this I made a program that can export all the data from a spreadsheet where most of the embedded system variables are sourced from and throw them into a small database for the GUI application to use. This database program I made also spits out a cross reference file for the embedded system which allows the GUI to look up all the variables. This system works pretty well so far, and is even integrated with version control among the GUI, database, and embedded system. The big problem is that there is constant development on several projects that use this system and it gets terribly tedious to keep the system up to date and bring in new changes. This has gotten to the point to where I have had to code the GUI to dynamically (generically) generate all interfaces since I am never guaranteed to find the same data the same way. I have not been able to come up with a good way to uniquely identify the data I import from excel since all fields are able to be changed (due to engineering stubbornness, code re-factoring and/or excel issues) and I cannot assign a fixed reference within the sheet itself. So, are there any good methods or ideas on how to handle the chaos?

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• Is sending data to a server via a script tag an outdated paradigm?

  - by KingOfHypocrites

  I inherited some old javascript code for a website tracker that submits data to the server using a script url: var src = "http://domain.zzz/log/method?value1=x&value2=x" var e = document.createElement('script'); e.src = src; I guess the idea was that cross domain requests didn't haven't to be enabled perhaps. Also it was written back in 2005. I'm not sure how well XmlHttpRequests were supported at the time. Anyone could stick this on their website and send data to our server for logging and it ideally would work in most any browser with javascript. The main limitation is all the server can do is send back javascript code and each request has to wait for a response from the server (in the form of a generic acknowledgement javascript method call) to know it was received, then it sends the next. I can't find anyone doing this online or any metrics as to whether this faster or more secure than XmlHttpRequests. I don't know if this is just an old way of doing things or it's still the best way to send data to the server when you are mostly trying to send data one way and you need the best performance possible. So in summary is sending data via a script tag an outdated paradigm? Should I abandon in favor of using XmlHttpRequsts?

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• Choosing a JavaScript Asynch-Loader

  - by Prisoner ZERO

  I’ve been looking at various asynchronous resource-loaders and I’m not sure which one to use yet. Where I work we have disparate group-efforts whose class-modules may use different versions of jQuery (etc). As such, nested dependencies may differ, as well. I have no control over this, so this means I need to dynamically load resources which may use alternate versions of the same library. As such, here are my requirements: Load JavaScript and CSS resource files asynchronously. Manage dependency-order and nested-dependencies across versions. Detect if a resource is already loaded. Must allow for cross-domain loading (CDN's) (optional) Allow us to unload a resource. I’ve been looking at: Curl RequireJS JavaScriptMVC LABjs I might be able to fake these requirements myself by loading versions into properly-namespaced variables & using an array to track what is already loaded...but (hopefully) someone has already invented this. So my questions are: Which ones do you use? And why? Are there others that my satisfy my requirements fully? Which do you find most eloquent and easiest to work with? And why?

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• Spend Analytics on a Grand Scale

  - by jacqueline.coolidge(at)oracle.com

  The Wall St. Journal reports in Billions in Bloat Uncovered in Beltway that a recent study by Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a massive study of several programs and agencies that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars each year.  This report help save $100 to $200 Billion dollars by identifying duplicate spending and ineffective programs that can be consolidated or eliminated. Now, that is spend analytics on a massive scale! It remains to be seen how actionable that information will be.  Certainly, there have been studies before that identify wasteful spending.  But, it’s a great case of the power of business intelligence and spend analytics.   Many companies do find significant savings when they implement spend and procurement analytics. What makes for an excellent spend analysis? It should be: Objective and provide visibility across programs and/or divisions A cross functional analysis that links financial with performance metrics Prescriptive and actionable Spend and procurement analytics have been HOT during the economic downturn! I expect 2011 will see many more companies get serious about spend analytics and would love to hear from companies who are willing to share their experience.

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• what will EcmaScript 6 bring to the table for us

  - by user697296

  Our company ported moderate chunks of business logic to JavaScript. We compile the code with a minifier, which further improves performance. Since the language is dynamically typed, it lends itself well to obfuscation, which occurs as a byproduct of minification. We went to great efforts to ensure it positively screams, performance-wise. We can now do what we did before, faster, better, with less code, on more platforms. In summary, we are very satisfied with the current state of the language. I personally love the language especially for its cross-platform nature. So naturally, I read up a lot about the state of JavaScript compilers, performance and compatibility across as many browsers and platforms as I have time to research. The one theme which has been growing louder and louder these days, is the news about ECMAScript 6. So far, what I have been able to gather is that ES6 promises a better development experience; firstly by enabling new ways to do things, secondly by reporting errors early. This sounds great for those who are still waiting for the language to meet their needs before jumping on board. But we have already jumped on board in a big way. Sure, I expect that we will have to do ongoing maintenance and feature revisions on our code through the years, and that we would obviously make use of best practices at the time. But I don't see us refactoring major portions of it to take advantage of language features that are mostly intended to boost developer productivity. I keep wondering, what impact will the language advances ultimately have on our existing, well-written, well-performing code base? Is there something I am missing? Is there something we ought to look out for? Does anyone have tips or guidance on how we should approach the ecmascript.next finalization? Should we care?

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• Determining whether two fast moving objects should be submitted for a collision check

  - by dreta

  I have a basic 2D physics engine running. It's pretty much a particle engine, just uses basic shapes like AABBs and circles, so no rotation is possible. I have CCD implemented that can give accurate TOI for two fast moving objects and everything is working smoothly. My issue now is that i can't figure out how to determine whether two fast moving objects should even be checked against each other in the first place. I'm using a quad tree for spacial partitioning and for each fast moving object, i check it against objects in each cell that it passes. This works fine for determining collision with static geometry, but it means that any other fast moving object that could collide with it, but isn't in any of the cells that are checked, is never considered. The only solution to this i can think of is to either have the cells large enough and cross fingers that this is enough, or to implement some sort of a brute force algorithm. Is there a proper way of dealing with this, maybe somebody solved this issue in an efficient manner. Or maybe there's a better way of partitioning space that accounts for this?

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• What could cause a sudden stop in Box2D?

  - by alexanderpine

  I'm using Box2d for a game, and I have a bug that's driving me nuts. I've simplified the situation down to a square player sliding back and forth frictionlessly on top of a floor composed of a series of square tiles, driven by the left and right keys (which apply a horizontal force). Works great, sliding back and forth across the whole floor. Except... Every once in a while, the player will suddenly stick at the edge of one of the tiles as if it is hitting a (nonexistent) wall. Further pushes in the same direction it was traveling will fail, but as soon as I push backwards once in the opposite direction, I can push forwards past the sticking point again. The sticking point seems to be random, except for being on the edge of a tile. Happens while going left or right. For debugging purposes, I keep the Positions/velocity values for the previous two update ticks and print them out when this stop occurs. As an example, here you see the player moving right, decelerating slightly; pos2 should be about 8.7, but it stops dead instead. tick0: pos= 8.4636 vel= 7.1875 tick1: pos= 8.5816 vel= 7.0833 tick2: pos= 8.5816 vel= 0.0000 So, as the player is 0.8 and the tiles 1.0 wide, the player is stopping just as it is about to cross onto the next tile (8.5816 + 0.8/2 = 8.9816). In fact, I get a collision message (which I ignore except noting that it happened). It only seems to happen at x.5816 (or -x.4184) while moving right, and x.4167 (or -x.5833) while moving left I said that it's like hitting a wall, but in fact, when it hits a wall, the numbers look more like: tick0: pos0= 12.4131 vel2= 8.4375 tick1: pos1= 12.5555 vel1= 8.5417 tick2: pos2= 12.5850 vel0= 0.0000 so it moves further right on the last tick, which puts it in contact with the wall. Anyone seen anything like this. Any suggestion on how I could be causing this behavior.

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• How do web servers enforce the same-origin policy?

  - by BBnyc

  I'm diving deeper into developing RESTful APIs and have so far worked with a few different frameworks to achieve this. Of course I've run into the same-origin policy, and now I'm wondering how web servers (rather than web browsers) enforce it. From what I understand, some enforcing seems to happen on the browser's end (e.g., honoring a Access-Control-Allow-Origin header received from a server). But what about the server? For example, let's say a web server is hosting a Javascript web app that accesses an API, also hosted on that server. I assume that server would enforce the same-origin policy --- so that only the javascript that is hosted on that server would be allowed to access the API. This would prevent someone else from writing a javascript client for that API and hosting it on another site, right? So how would a web server be able to stop a malicious client that would try to make AJAX requests to its api endpoints while claiming to be running javascript that originated from that same web server? What's the way most popular servers (Apache, nginx) protect against this kind of attack? Or is my understanding of this somehow off the mark? Or is the cross-origin policy only enforced on the client end?

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• jQuery - upgrade from version 1.6.x to 1.7

  - by Renso

  Goal: Issues to consider when upgrading from jQuery version 1.6 to 1.7. This is a short list and may help identify the real issues you need to concern yourself with in stead of reading through all the release notesSummary of issues encountered during upgrade:As you prepare for upgrade to jQuery 1.7 from 1.6.x, this is a quick glimpse of all the issues that are relevant, not sure if it covers all but may be all you need to worry about.Use this method only for checking checkboxes and radio buttons:$("input:checked")http://api.jquery.com/checked-selector/This will work regardless of the version of jQuery you are using. Note that $("input).attr("checked") returns true prior to jQuery 1.6. Only retrieve "real" attributes with "attr", in order versions it would also retrieve properties like "tagName", this no longer works with jQuery 1.6.1+Why does $("input").attr("checked") no longer (from version 1.6.1+) return TRUE or FALSE, because if you look at the HTML (as well as W3C spec) it does not contain a true/false, but the value checked="checked", which is what it should have returned in the first place. $("input").prop("checked") works, return true, because there is in fact a DOM property for "checked" with the value being "true" or "false".Furthermore, if you want to upgrade to jQuery 1.7 you should only have to worry about this for most part:1. isNumeric() is new, be careful as the older version jQuery.isNaN() has been deprecated2. jqXHR success and error have been deprecated3. When rendering content with text(), white space issue cross-browsers: http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/3144Other than the issues above I am not aware of any deprecations you need to worry about.Hope this helps to get everyone up to version 1.7

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• Game Development

  - by Sundareswaran Senthilvel

  I'm planning to write a game from scratch (a BIG Game, for commercial purpose). I'm aware that there are certain compute libraries like OpenCL, AMD APP SDK, C++ AMP as well as DirectCompute - both from MS (NOT interested in CUDA) are available in the market. I'm planning to write the game from the scratch, which includes the following engines... 1.Physics Engine 2.AI Engine 3.Main Game Engine (... and if anything is missed). I'm aware that, there are some free physics engine libraries in the market. Not sure about free AI engine libraries. I'm bit confused in choosing between the OpenCL, AMD APP SDK, and C++ AMP libraries (as already mentioned i'm NOT interested in CUDA). I want my game to be published in Windows/Android/Mac OSX. It means it should be a cross-platform game. I will be having "one source code" that i'll compile for various platforms like Windows/Android/Mac OSX, and any others if i missed. Note: Since I'm NOT a Java guy, kindly do NOT suggest me the Java Language. For Graphics language should i use OpenGL or DirectX 11? I have heard that OpenGL runs on a single core, and not sure of DirectX 11. Between OpenGL and DirectX which one should i follow? or else, are there any other graphics language that i need to start with? I want to make use of the parallelism in GPU as well as CPU.

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• Which field of programming is known as the best practice for Java? [closed]

  - by user1276509

  I'm a CS student and I have some programming background such as PHP, JavaScript and Pascal. Since Java is so popular among local companies and Java is known as market skill, I'm going to learn it. But I don't know in which field I can use it. So I wonder, what can I do with Java? I heard that Java is not good for web development, although there is Play! Framework. I know a lot of people who prefer to use Python, Ruby and PHP for web development instead of Java and its Play. I also heard that Java is not good to write destkop applications, although it's cross-platform. Many programmers prefer C# for destkop. So I see there's only one field which I can use Java for it - is Android development. But I'm not interested in mobile application development. So my question is which field of programming is known as the best practice for Java? Thanks in advance.

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• Massive Affiliate Shopping Platform. Is WordPress really suitable? [closed]

  - by SPI

  I am working on an online shopping platform that acquires it's data from various affiliate programs through XML files. I am talking hundreds and thousands of items per program here that change often if they go out of stock. My clients choice of CMS was WordPress. I am guessing he assumed the user friendly interface would make life easy for him. However, the fact that he hired me to parse the XML files, store data in the back-end and basically make everything work tells me he had very little clue about what he was getting himself into. My impression is that WordPress has a very specific way of handling data as it divides everything into categories/sub-categories in the back-end which is very counter intuitive to a business model where data exists in numbers of over hundreds and thousands of items and is further cross referenced by programs so that any change in the programs XML file can easily be reflected products page. Conclusion I have a very specific database model implemented for handling my clients needs. However, this model conflicts with how wordpress chooses to save data in the back-end natively. I am absolutely convinced WordPress is geared towards anything that might resemble a blog and definitely not THIS. I am thinking about asking my client to shift to a custom CMS. Before making my pitch though, I wanted to run this by the stack community. Thanks for the input in advance.

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• Problems installing Memcache (PECL extension)

  - by Petrus

  I have installed memcached fine, and now I will need to install PECL extension memcache. Im running RedHat x86_64 es5. The installation gives me this: downloading memcache-2.2.6.tgz ... Starting to download memcache-2.2.6.tgz (35,957 bytes) ..........done: 35,957 bytes 11 source files, building running: phpize Configuring for: PHP Api Version: 20090626 Zend Module Api No: 20090626 Zend Extension Api No: 220090626 Enable memcache session handler support? [yes] : Notice: Use of undefined constant STDIN - assumed 'STDIN' in PEAR/Frontend/CLI.php on line 304 Warning: fgets() expects parameter 1 to be resource, string given in PEAR/Frontend/CLI.php on line 304 Warning: fgets() expects parameter 1 to be resource, string given in /usr/lib/php/PEAR/Frontend/CLI.php on line 304 building in /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6 running: /root/tmp/pear/memcache/configure --enable-memcache-session=yes checking for egrep... grep -E checking for a sed that does not truncate output... /bin/sed checking for cc... cc checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out checking whether the C compiler works... yes checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of executables... checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes checking whether cc accepts -g... yes checking for cc option to accept ANSI C... none needed checking how to run the C preprocessor... cc -E checking for icc... no checking for suncc... no checking whether cc understands -c and -o together... yes checking for system library directory... lib checking if compiler supports -R... no checking if compiler supports -Wl,-rpath,... yes checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking host system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking target system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking for PHP prefix... /usr checking for PHP includes... -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib checking for PHP extension directory... /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626 checking for PHP installed headers prefix... /usr/include/php checking if debug is enabled... no checking if zts is enabled... no checking for re2c... re2c checking for re2c version... invalid configure: WARNING: You will need re2c 0.13.4 or later if you want to regenerate PHP parsers. checking for gawk... gawk checking whether to enable memcache support... yes, shared checking whether to enable memcache session handler support... yes checking for the location of ZLIB... no checking for the location of zlib... /usr checking for session includes... /usr/include/php checking for memcache session support... enabled checking for ld used by cc... /usr/bin/ld checking if the linker (/usr/bin/ld) is GNU ld... yes checking for /usr/bin/ld option to reload object files... -r checking for BSD-compatible nm... /usr/bin/nm -B checking whether ln -s works... yes checking how to recognize dependent libraries... pass_all checking for ANSI C header files... yes checking for sys/types.h... yes checking for sys/stat.h... yes checking for stdlib.h... yes checking for string.h... yes checking for memory.h... yes checking for strings.h... yes checking for inttypes.h... yes checking for stdint.h... yes checking for unistd.h... yes checking dlfcn.h usability... yes checking dlfcn.h presence... yes checking for dlfcn.h... yes checking the maximum length of command line arguments... 98304 checking command to parse /usr/bin/nm -B output from cc object... ok checking for objdir... .libs checking for ar... ar checking for ranlib... ranlib checking for strip... strip checking if cc supports -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions... no checking for cc option to produce PIC... -fPIC checking if cc PIC flag -fPIC works... yes checking if cc static flag -static works... yes checking if cc supports -c -o file.o... yes checking whether the cc linker (/usr/bin/ld -m elf_x86_64) supports shared libraries... yes checking whether -lc should be explicitly linked in... no checking dynamic linker characteristics... GNU/Linux ld.so checking how to hardcode library paths into programs... immediate checking whether stripping libraries is possible... yes checking if libtool supports shared libraries... yes checking whether to build shared libraries... yes checking whether to build static libraries... no creating libtool appending configuration tag "CXX" to libtool configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating config.h running: make /bin/sh /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/libtool --mode=compile cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache.c -o memcache.lo mkdir .libs cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache.c -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/memcache.o /bin/sh /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/libtool --mode=compile cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_queue.c -o memcache_queue.lo cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_queue.c -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/memcache_queue.o /bin/sh /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/libtool --mode=compile cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_standard_hash.c -o memcache_standard_hash.lo cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_standard_hash.c -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/memcache_standard_hash.o /bin/sh /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/libtool --mode=compile cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_consistent_hash.c -o memcache_consistent_hash.lo cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_consistent_hash.c -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/memcache_consistent_hash.o /bin/sh /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/libtool --mode=compile cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_session.c -o memcache_session.lo cc -I/usr/include/php -I. -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -c /root/tmp/pear/memcache/memcache_session.c -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/memcache_session.o /bin/sh /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/libtool --mode=link cc -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/include -I/root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/main -I/root/tmp/pear/memcache -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -g -O2 -o memcache.la -export-dynamic -avoid-version -prefer-pic -module -rpath /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/modules memcache.lo memcache_queue.lo memcache_standard_hash.lo memcache_consistent_hash.lo memcache_session.lo cc -shared .libs/memcache.o .libs/memcache_queue.o .libs/memcache_standard_hash.o .libs/memcache_consistent_hash.o .libs/memcache_session.o -Wl,-soname -Wl,memcache.so -o .libs/memcache.so creating memcache.la (cd .libs && rm -f memcache.la && ln -s ../memcache.la memcache.la) /bin/sh /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/libtool --mode=install cp ./memcache.la /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/modules cp ./.libs/memcache.so /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/modules/memcache.so cp ./.libs/memcache.lai /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/modules/memcache.la PATH="$PATH:/sbin" ldconfig -n /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/modules ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Libraries have been installed in: /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcache-2.2.6/modules If you ever happen to want to link against installed libraries in a given directory, LIBDIR, you must either use libtool, and specify the full pathname of the library, or use the `-LLIBDIR' flag during linking and do at least one of the following: - add LIBDIR to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH' environment variable during execution - add LIBDIR to the `LD_RUN_PATH' environment variable during linking - use the `-Wl,--rpath -Wl,LIBDIR' linker flag - have your system administrator add LIBDIR to `/etc/ld.so.conf' See any operating system documentation about shared libraries for more information, such as the ld(1) and ld.so(8) manual pages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Build complete. Don't forget to run 'make test'. running: make INSTALL_ROOT="/root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6" install Installing shared extensions: /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/ running: find "/root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6" | xargs ls -dils 361232 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 28 10:47 /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6 361263 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 28 10:47 /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6/usr 361264 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 28 10:47 /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6/usr/lib 361265 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 28 10:47 /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6/usr/lib/php 361266 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 28 10:47 /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6/usr/lib/php/extensions 361267 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 28 10:47 /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626 361262 236 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 235575 Jan 28 10:47 /root/tmp/pear-build-root/install-memcache-2.2.6/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/memcache.so Build process completed successfully Installing '/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/memcache.so' install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/memcache-2.2.6 Extension memcache enabled in php.ini The memcache.so object is not in /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626 I tried as well to install this extension "memcached 1.0.2 (PHP extension for interfacing with memcached via libmemcached library)" but it failed: downloading memcached-1.0.2.tgz ... Starting to download memcached-1.0.2.tgz (22,724 bytes) ........done: 22,724 bytes 4 source files, building running: phpize Configuring for: PHP Api Version: 20090626 Zend Module Api No: 20090626 Zend Extension Api No: 220090626 building in /root/tmp/pear-build-root/memcached-1.0.2 running: /root/tmp/pear/memcached/configure checking for egrep... grep -E checking for a sed that does not truncate output... /bin/sed checking for cc... cc checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out checking whether the C compiler works... yes checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of executables... checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes checking whether cc accepts -g... yes checking for cc option to accept ANSI C... none needed checking how to run the C preprocessor... cc -E checking for icc... no checking for suncc... no checking whether cc understands -c and -o together... yes checking for system library directory... lib checking if compiler supports -R... no checking if compiler supports -Wl,-rpath,... yes checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking host system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking target system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking for PHP prefix... /usr checking for PHP includes... -I/usr/include/php -I/usr/include/php/main -I/usr/include/php/TSRM -I/usr/include/php/Zend -I/usr/include/php/ext -I/usr/include/php/ext/date/lib checking for PHP extension directory... /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626 checking for PHP installed headers prefix... /usr/include/php checking if debug is enabled... no checking if zts is enabled... no checking for re2c... re2c checking for re2c version... invalid configure: WARNING: You will need re2c 0.13.4 or later if you want to regenerate PHP parsers. checking for gawk... gawk checking whether to enable memcached support... yes, shared checking for libmemcached... yes, shared checking whether to enable memcached session handler support... yes checking whether to enable memcached igbinary serializer support... no checking for ZLIB... yes, shared checking for zlib location... /usr checking for session includes... /usr/include/php checking for memcached session support... enabled checking for memcached igbinary support... disabled checking for libmemcached location... configure: error: memcached support requires libmemcached. Use --with-libmemcached-dir= to specify the prefix where libmemcached headers and library are located ERROR: `/root/tmp/pear/memcached/configure' failed The memcached.so object is not in /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626 Is there a kind soul out there that can solve this puzzle?

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• Executing legacy MSBuild scripts in TFS 2010 Build

  - by Jakob Ehn

  When upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010, all builds are “upgraded” in the sense that a build definition with the same name is created, and it uses the UpgradeTemplate  build process template to execute the build. This template basically just runs MSBuild on the existing TFSBuild.proj file. The build definition contains a property called ConfigurationFolderPath that points to the TFSBuild.proj file. So, existing builds will run just fine after upgrade. But what if you want to use the new workflow functionality in TFS 2010 Build, but still have a lot of MSBuild scripts that maybe call custom MSBuild tasks that you don’t have the time to rewrite? Then one option is to keep these MSBuild scrips and call them from a TFS 2010 Build workflow. This can be done using the MSBuild workflow activity that is avaiable in the toolbox in the Team Foundation Build Activities section: This activity wraps the call to MSBuild.exe and has the following parameters: Most of these properties are only relevant when actually compiling projects, for example C# project files. When calling custom MSBuild project files, you should focus on these properties: Property Meaning Example CommandLineArguments Use this to send in/override MSBuild properties in your project “/p:MyProperty=SomeValue” or MSBuildArguments (this will let you define the arguments in the build definition or when queuing the build) LogFile Name of the log file where MSbuild will log the output “MyBuild.log” LogFileDropLocation Location of the log file BuildDetail.DropLocation + “\log” Project The project to execute SourcesDirectory + “\BuildExtensions.targets” ResponseFile The name of the MSBuild response file SourcesDirectory + “\BuildExtensions.rsp” Targets The target(s) to execute New String() {“Target1”, “Target2”} Verbosity Logging verbosity Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.BuildVerbosity.Normal Integrating with Team Build   If your MSBuild scripts tries to use Team Build tasks, they will most likely fail with the above approach. For example, the following MSBuild project file tries to add a build step using the BuildStep task:   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" /> <Target Name="MyTarget"> <BuildStep TeamFoundationServerUrl="$(TeamFoundationServerUrl)" BuildUri="$(BuildUri)" Name="MyBuildStep" Message="My build step executed" Status="Succeeded"></BuildStep> </Target> </Project> When executing this file using the MSBuild activity, calling the MyTarget, it will fail with the following message: The "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Tasks.BuildStep" task could not be loaded from the assembly \PrivateAssemblies\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.ProcessComponents.dll. Could not load file or assembly 'file:///D:\PrivateAssemblies\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.ProcessComponents.dll' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. Confirm that the <UsingTask> declaration is correct, that the assembly and all its dependencies are available, and that the task contains a public class that implements Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITask. You can see that the path to the ProcessComponents.dll is incomplete. This is because in the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets file the task is referenced using the $(TeamBuildRegPath) property. Also note that the task needs the TeamFounationServerUrl and BuildUri properties. One solution here is to pass these properties in using the Command Line Arguments parameter:   Here we pass in the parameters with the corresponding values from the curent build. The build log shows that the build step has in fact been inserted:   The problem as you probably spted is that the build step is insert at the top of the build log, instead of next to the MSBuild activity call. This is because we are using a legacy team build task (BuildStep), and that is how these are handled in TFS 2010. You can see the same behaviour when running builds that are using the UpgradeTemplate, that cutom build steps shows up at the top of the build log.

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• Building Visual Studio Setup Projects with TFS 2010 Team Build

  - by Jakob Ehn

  One of the most common complaints from people starting to use Team Build is that is doesn’t support building Microsoft’s own Setup and Deployment project (*.vdproj). When creating a default build definition that compiles a solution containing a setup project, you’ll get the following warning: The project file "MyProject.vdproj" is not supported by MSBuild and cannot be built.   This is what the problem is all about. MSBuild, that is used for compiling your projects, does not understand the proprietary vdproj format defined by Microsoft quite some time ago. Unfortunately there is no sign that this will change in the near future, in fact the setup projects has barely changed at all since they were introduced. VS 2010 brings no new features or improvements hen it comes to the setup projects. VS 2010 does include a limited version of InstallShield which promises to be more MSBuild friendly and with more or less the same features as VS setup projects. I hope to get a closer look at this installer project type soon. But, how do we go about to build a Visual Studio setup project and produce an MSI as part of a Team Build process? Well, since only one application known to man understands the vdproj projects, we will have to installa copy of Visual Studio on the build server. Sad but true. After doing this, we use the Visual Studio command line interface (devenv) to perform the build. In this post I will show how to do this by using the InvokeProcess activity directly in a build workflow template. You’ll want to run build your setup projects after you have successfully compiled the projects.   Install Visual Studio 2010 on the build server(s)   Open your build process template /remember to branch or copy the xaml file before modifying it!)   Locate the Try to Compile the Project activity   Drop an instance of the InvokeProcess activity from the toolbox onto the designer, after the Run MSBuild for Project activity   Drop an instance of the WriteBuildMessage activity inside the Handle Standard Output section. Set the Importance property to Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildMessageImportance.High (NB: This is necessary if you want the output from devenv to show up in the build log when running the build with the default verbosity) Set the Message property to stdOutput   Drop an instance of the WriteBuildError activity to the Handle Error Output section Set the Message property to errOutput   Select the InvokeProcess activity and set the values of the parameters to:     The finished workflow should look like this:     This will generate the MSI files, but they won’t be copied to the drop location. This is because we are using devenv and not MSBuild, so we have to do this explicitly   Drop a Sequence activity somewhere after the Copy to Drop location activity.   Create a variable in the Sequence activity of type IEnumerable<String> and call it GeneratedInstallers   Drop a FindMatchingFiles activity in the sequence activity and set the properties to:     Drop a ForEach<String> activity after the FindMatchingFiles activity. Set the Value property to GeneratedInstallers   Drop an InvokeProcess activity inside the ForEach activity.  FileName: “xcopy.exe” Arguments: String.Format("""{0}"" ""{1}""", item, BuildDetail.DropLocation) The Sequence activity should look like this:     Save the build process template and check it in.   Run the build and verify that the MSI’s is built and copied to the drop location.   Note 1: One of the drawback of using devenv like this in a team build is that since all the output from the default compilations is placed in the Binaries folder, the outputs is not avaialable when devenv is invoked, which causes the whole solution to rebuild again. In TFS 2008, this was pretty simple to fix by using the CustomizableOutDir property. In TFS 2010, the same feature is not avaialble. Jim Lamb blogged about this recently, have a look at it if you have a problem with this: http://blogs.msdn.com/jimlamb/archive/2010/04/13/customizableoutdir-in-tfs-2010.aspx   Note 2: Although the above solution works, a better approach is to wrap this in a custom activity that you can use in your builds. I will come back to this in a future post.

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• Using an alternate search platform in Commerce Server 2009

  - by Lewis Benge

  Although Microsoft Commerce Server 2009's architecture is built upon Microsoft SQL Server, and has the full power of the SQL Full Text Indexing Search Platform, there are time however when you may require a richer or alternate search platform. One of these scenarios if when you want to implement a faceted (refinement) search into your site, which provides dynamic refinements based on the search results dataset. Faceted search is becoming popular in most online retail environments as a way of providing an enhanced user experience when browsing a larger catalogue. This is powerful for two reasons, firstly with a traditional search it is down to a user to think of a search term suitable for the product they are trying to find. This typically will not return similar products or help in any way to refine a larger dataset. Faceted searches on the other hand provide a comprehensive list of product properties, grouped together by similarity to help the user narrow down the results returned, as the user progressively restricts the search criteria by selecting additional criteria to search again, these facets needs to continually refresh. The whole experience allows users to explore alternate brands, price-ranges, or find products they hadn't initially thought of or where looking for in a bid to enhance cross sell in the retail environment. The second advantage of this type of search from a business perspective is also to harvest the search result to start to profile your user. Even though anonymous users may routinely visit your site, and will not necessarily register or complete a transaction to build up marketing data- profiling, you can still achieve the same result by recording search facets used within the search sequence. Below is a faceted search scenario generated from eBay using the search term "server". By creating a search profile of clicking through Computer & Networking -> Servers -> Dell - > New and recording this information against my user profile you can start to predict with a lot more certainty what types of products I am interested in. This will allow you to apply shopping-cart analysis against your search data and provide great cross-sale or advertising opportunity, or personalise the user experience based on your prediction of what the user may be interested in. This type of search is extremely beneficial in e-Commerce environments but achieving it out of the box with Commerce Server and SQL Full Text indexing can be challenging. In many deployments it is often easier to use an alternate search platform such as Microsoft's FAST, Apache SOLR, or Endecca, however you still want these products to integrate natively into Commerce Server to ensure that up-to-date inventory information is presented, profile information is generated, and you provide a consistant API. To do so we make the most of the Commerce Server extensibilty points called operation sequence components. In this example I will be talking about Apache Solr hosted on Apache Tomcat, in this specific example I have used the SolrNet C# library to interface to the Java platform. Also I am not going to talk about Solr configuration of indexing – but in a production envionrment this would typically happen by using Powershell to call the Commerce Server management webservice to export your catalog as XML, apply an XSLT transform to the file to make it conform to SOLR and use a simple HTTP Post to send it to the search enginge for indexing. Essentially a sequance component is a step in a serial workflow used to call a data repository (which in most cases is usually the Commerce Server pipelines or databases) and map to and from a Commerce Entity object whilst enforcing any business rules. So the first step in the process is to add a new class library to your existing Commerce Server site. You will need to use a new library as Sequence Components will need to be strongly named to be deployed. Once you are inside of your new project, add a new class file and add a reference to the Microsoft.Commerce.Providers, Microsoft.Commerce.Contracts and the Microsoft.Commerce.Broker assemblies. Now make your new class derive from the base object Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Components.OperationSequanceComponent and overide the ExecuteQueryMethod. Your screen will then look something similar ot this: As all we are doing on this component is conducting a search we are only interested in the ExecuteQuery method. This method accepts three arguments, queryOperation, operationCache, and response. The queryOperation will be the object in which we receive our search parameters, the cache allows access to the Commerce Server cache allowing us to store regulary accessed information, and the response object is the object which we will return the result of our search upon. Inside this method is simply where we are going to inject our logic for our third party search platform. As I am not going to explain the inner-workings of actually making a SOLR call, I'll simply provide the sample code here. I would highly recommend however looking at the SolrNet wiki as they have some great explinations of how the API works. What you will find however is that there are some further extensions required when attempting to integrate a custom search provider. Firstly you out of the box the CommerceQueryOperation you will receive into the method when conducting a search against a catalog is specifically geared towards a SQL Full Text Search with properties such as a Where clause. To make the operation you receive more relevant you will need to create another class, this time derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Contract.Messages.CommerceSearchCriteria and within this you need to detail the properties you will require to allow you to submit as parameters to the SOLR search API. My exmaple looks like this: [DataContract(Namespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/microsoft-multi-channel-commerce-foundation/types/2008/03")] public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearch : CommerceSearchCriteria { private Dictionary<string, string> _facetQueries;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch() { _facetQueries = new Dictionary<String, String>();   }     public Dictionary<String, String> FacetQueries { get { return _facetQueries; } set { _facetQueries = value; } }   public String SearchPhrase{ get; set; } public int PageIndex { get; set; } public int PageSize { get; set; } public IEnumerable<String> Facets { get; set; }   public string Sort { get; set; }   public new int FirstItemIndex { get { return (PageIndex-1)*PageSize; } }   public int LastItemIndex { get { return FirstItemIndex + PageSize; } } }  To allow you to construct a CommerceQueryOperation call within the API you will also need to construct another class to derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Common.MessageBuilders.CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder and is simply used to construct an instance of the CommerceQueryOperation you have just created and expose the properties you want set. My Message builder looks like this: public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder : CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder { private CommerceCatalogSolrSearch _solrSearch;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder() { _solrSearch = new CommerceCatalogSolrSearch(); }   public String SearchPhrase { get { return _solrSearch.SearchPhrase; } set { _solrSearch.SearchPhrase = value; } }   public int PageIndex { get { return _solrSearch.PageIndex; } set { _solrSearch.PageIndex = value; } }   public int PageSize { get { return _solrSearch.PageSize; } set { _solrSearch.PageSize = value; } }   public Dictionary<String,String> FacetQueries { get { return _solrSearch.FacetQueries; } set { _solrSearch.FacetQueries = value; } }   public String[] Facets { get { return _solrSearch.Facets.ToArray(); } set { _solrSearch.Facets = value; } } public override CommerceSearchCriteria ToSearchCriteria() { return _solrSearch; } }  Once you have these two classes in place you can now safely cast the CommerceOperation you receive as an argument of the overidden ExecuteQuery method in the SequenceComponent to the CommerceCatalogSolrSearch operation you have just created, e.g. public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch TryGetSearchCriteria(CommerceOperation operation) { var searchCriteria = operation as CommerceQueryOperation; if (searchCriteria == null) throw new Exception("No search criteria present");   var local = (CommerceCatalogSolrSearch) searchCriteria.SearchCriteria; if (local == null) throw new Exception("Unexpected Search Criteria in Operation");   return local; }  Now you have all of your search parameters present, you can go off an call the external search platform API. You will of-course get proprietry objects returned, so the next step in the process is to convert the results being returned back into CommerceEntities. You do this via another extensibility point within the Commerce Server API called translatators. Translators are another separate class, this time derived inheriting the interface Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Translators.IToCommerceEntityTranslator . As you can imaginge this interface is specific for the conversion of the object TO a CommerceEntity, you will need to implement a separate interface if you also need to go in the opposite direction. If you implement the required method for the interace you will get a single translate method which has a source onkect, destination CommerceEntity, and a collection of properties as arguments. For simplicity sake in this example I have hard-coded the mappings, however best practice would dictate you map the objects using your metadatadefintions.xml file . Once complete your translator would look something like the following: public class SolrEntityTranslator : IToCommerceEntityTranslator { #region IToCommerceEntityTranslator Members   public void Translate(object source, CommerceEntity destinationCommerceEntity, CommercePropertyCollection propertiesToReturn) { if (source.GetType().Equals(typeof (SearchProduct))) { var searchResult = (SearchProduct) source;   destinationCommerceEntity.Id = searchResult.ProductId; destinationCommerceEntity.SetPropertyValue("DisplayName", searchResult.Title); destinationCommerceEntity.ModelName = "Product";   } }  Once you have a translator in place you can then safely map the results of your search platform into Commerce Entities and attach them on to the CommerceResponse object in a fashion similar to this: foreach (SearchProduct result in matchingProducts) { var destinationEntity = new CommerceEntity(_returnModelName);   Translator.ToCommerceEntity(result, destinationEntity, _queryOperation.Model.Properties); response.CommerceEntities.Add(destinationEntity); }  In SOLR I actually have two objects being returned – a product, and a collection of facets so I have an additional translator for facet (which maps to a custom facet CommerceEntity) and my facet response from SOLR is passed into the Translator helper class seperatley. When all of this is pieced together you have sucessfully completed the extensiblity point coding. You would have created a new OperationSequanceComponent, a custom SearchCritiera object and message builder class, and translators to convert the objects into Commerce Entities. Now you simply need to configure them, and can start calling them in your code. Make sure you sign you assembly, compile it and identiy its signature. Next you need to put this a reference of your new assembly into the Channel.Config configuration file replacing that of the existing SQL Full Text component: You will also need to add your translators to the Translators node of your Channel.Config too: Lastly add any custom CommerceEntities you have developed to your MetaDataDefintions.xml file. Your configuration is now complete, and you should now be able to happily make a call to the Commerce Foundation API, which will act as a proxy to your third party search platform and return back CommerceEntities of your search results. If you require data to be enriched, or logged, or any other logic applied then simply add further sequence components into the OperationSequence (obviously keeping the search response first) to the node of your Channel.Config file. Now to call your code you simply request it as per any other CommerceQuery operation, but taking into account you may be receiving multiple types of CommerceEntity returned: public KeyValuePair<FacetCollection ,List<Product>> DoFacetedProductQuerySearch(string searchPhrase, string orderKey, string sortOrder, int recordIndex, int recordsPerPage, Dictionary<string, string> facetQueries, out int totalItemCount) { var products = new List<Product>(); var query = new CommerceQuery<CatalogEntity, CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder>();   query.SearchCriteria.PageIndex = recordIndex; query.SearchCriteria.PageSize = recordsPerPage; query.SearchCriteria.SearchPhrase = searchPhrase; query.SearchCriteria.FacetQueries = facetQueries;     totalItemCount = 0; CommerceResponse response = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(query.ToRequest()); var queryResponse = response.OperationResponses[0] as CommerceQueryOperationResponse;   // No results. Return the empty list if (queryResponse != null && queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Count == 0) return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>();   totalItemCount = (int)queryResponse.TotalItemCount;   // Prepare a multi-operation to retrieve the product variants var multiOperation = new CommerceMultiOperation();     //Add products to results foreach (Product product in queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "Product")) { var productQuery = new CommerceQuery<Product>(Product.ModelNameDefinition); productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.Id = product.Id; productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.CatalogId = product.CatalogId;   var variantQuery = new CommerceQueryRelatedItem<Variant>(Product.RelationshipName.Variants);   productQuery.RelatedOperations.Add(variantQuery);   multiOperation.Add(productQuery); }   CommerceResponse variantsResponse = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(multiOperation.ToRequest()); foreach (CommerceQueryOperationResponse queryOpResponse in variantsResponse.OperationResponses) { if (queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities.Count() > 0) products.Add(queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities[0]); }   //Get facet collection FacetCollection facetCollection = queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "FacetCollection").FirstOrDefault();     return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>(facetCollection, products); }    ..And that is it – simply a few classes and some configuration will allow you to extend the Commerce Server query operations to call a third party search platform, whilst still maintaing a unifed API in the remainder of your code. This logic stands for any extensibility within CommerceServer, which requires excution in a serial fashioon such as call to LOB systems or web service to validate or enrich data. Feel free to use this example on other applications, and if you have any questions please feel free to e-mail and I'll help out where I can!

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Uncovering Compiler Errors in ASP.NET MVC Views

  - by Ben Griswold

  ASPX and ASCX files are compiled on the fly when they are requested on the web server. This means it’s possible that you aren’t catching compile errors associated with your views when you build your ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio.  Unless you’re willing to click through your entire application, rendering each view looking for errors, you application is left a little vulnerable to user issues.  Fortunately, there’s a work around.  Open up your MVC project file in notepad or within the Visual Studio IDE by unloading the project and then editing the .csproj file (both actions are available by right-clicking on the Project Node in Solution Explorer.)  Notice the MvcBuildViews option.  It’s probably set to false.  Flip the value to true and you’ll magically start compiling your views when you build your application. <MvcBuildViews>false</MvcBuildViews> Taking this action will slow down your builds a bit, but if you’re a hack like me, it’ll probably save your day in the long run. Now you’re probably thinking, “Neat trick – how’s it work?”  Scroll down toward the bottom of your csproj file and you will notice the AfterBuild target triggers the AspNetCompiler action if the MvcBuildViews option is set to true.  <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">   <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp"                   PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" /> </Target> Great. One more thing. Let’s say you don’t want to slow down all of your builds, but you absolutely want to know if there are any compiler issues with your views before you commit your code to version control or deploy or whatever.  Here’s what you can do – change the AfterBuild condition to run if your configuration is set to Release mode.  <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Release'">   <!– Always pre-compile ASPX and ASCX in release mode –>   <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp"                   PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" /> </Target> Now your debug mode builds will continue to be as fast as ever and you can quickly validate your views by building in release mode when you so choose.  There’s one little catch – this setup won’t consider the MvcBuildViews option whatsoever! So if you decide to go with this configuration, you might want to add a comment near the MvcBuildViews option letting other developers know they can change the MvcBuildViews option as much as they’d like but it’s not going to affect the AfterBuild action.  Or don’t include the comment and let your team members figure it out for themselves…

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• Transformation of Product Management in Telecommunications for Rapid Launch of Next Generation Products

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } The Telecom industry continues to evolve through disruptive products, uncertain markets, shorter product lifecycles and convergence of technologies. Today’s market has moved from network centric to consumer centric and focuses primarily on the customer experience. It has resulted in several product management challenges such as an increased complexity and volume of offerings, creating product variants, accelerating time-to-market, ability to provide multiple product views for varied stakeholders, leveraging OSS intelligence to BSS layer, product co-creation and increasing audit and security concerns for service providers. The document discusses how enterprise product management enabled by PLM-based product catalogue solutions helps to launch next generation products rapidly in the context of the Telecommunication Industry.   1.0.       Introduction   Figure 1: Business Scenario   Modern business demands the launch of complex products in a very short timeframe and effecting changes in the price plan faster without IT intervention. One of the key transformation initiatives companies are focusing on is in the area of product management transformation and operational efficiency improvement. As part of these initiatives, companies are investing in best- in-class COTs-based Product Management solutions developed on industry-wide standards.   The new COTs packages are planned to integrate with existing or new B/OSS systems to provide a strategic end-to-end agile solution for reduced time-to-market and order journey time. In addition, system rationalization is being undertaken to phase out legacy systems and migrate to strategic systems.   2.0.       An Overview of Product Management in Telecom   Product data in telecom is multi- dimensional and difficult to manage. It increased significantly due to the complexity of the product, product offerings on the converged network, increased volume of offerings, bundled offering structures and ever increasing regulatory requirements.   In addition, the shrinking product lifecycle in telecom makes it difficult to manage the dynamic product data. Mergers and acquisitions coupled with organic growth pose major challenges in product portfolio management. It is a roadblock in the journey towards becoming an agile organization.       Figure 2: Complexity in Product Management   Network Technology’ is the new dimension in telecom product management where the same products are realized through different networks i.e., Soiled network to Converged network. Consequently, the product solution is different.     Figure 3: Current Scenario - Pain Points in Product Management   The major business implications arising out of the current scenario are slow time-to-market and an inefficient process that affects innovation.   3.0. Transformation of Next Generation Product Management   Companies must focus on their Product Management Transformation Journey in the areas of:   ·       Management of single truth of product information across the organization/geographies which is currently managed in heterogeneous systems   ·       Management of the Intellectual Property (IP) on the product concept and partnership in the design of discrete components to integrate into the system   ·       Leveraging structured and unstructured product data within the extended enterprise to extract consumer insights and drive innovation   ·       Management of effective operational separation to comply with regulatory bodies   ·       Reuse of existing designs and add relevant features such as value-added services to enable effective product bundling     Figure 4: Next generation needs   PLM-based Enterprise Product Catalogue solutions efficiently address the above requirements and act as an enabler towards product management transformation and rapid product launch.   4.0. PLM-based Enterprise Product Management     Figure 5: PLM-based Enterprise Product Mastering   Enterprise Product Management (EPM) enables the business to manage complex product attributes of data in complex environments. Product Mastering helps create a 'single view' of the product by creating a business-driven, IT-supported environment where a global 'single truth record' is created, managed and reused.   4.1 The Business Case for Telco PLM-based solutions for Enterprise Product Management   ·       Telco PLM-based Product Mastering solutions provide a centralized authoring environment for product definition and control of all product data and rules   ·       PLM packages are designed to support multiple perspectives of product data (ordering perspective, billing perspective, provisioning perspective)   ·       Maintains relationships/links between different elements of the entire product definition   ·       Telco PLM packages are specialized in next generation lifecycle management requirements of products such as revision and state management, test and release management, role management and impact analysis)   ·       Takes into consideration all aspects of OSS product requirements compared to CRM product catalogue solutions where the product data managed is mostly order oriented and transactional     ·       New breed of Telco PLM packages are designed with 'open' standards such as SID and eTOM. They are interoperable, support integration frameworks such as subscription and notification.   ·       Telco PLM packages have developed good collaboration frameworks to integrate suppliers and partners into the product development value chain   4.2 Various Architectures/Approaches for Product Mastering using Telco PLM systems   4. 2.a Single Central Product Management (Mastering) Approach   Figure 6: Single Central Product Management (Master) Approach       This approach is implemented across verticals such as aerospace and automotive. It focuses on a physically centralized product master to which other sources are dependent on. The product definition data (Product bundles, service bundles, price plans, offers and discounts, product configuration rules and market campaigns) is created and maintained physically in a centralized environment. In addition, the product definition/authoring environment is centralized. The existing legacy product definition data available in CRM product catalogue, billing catalogue and the legacy product catalogue is migrated to the centralized PLM-based Enterprise Product Management solution.   Architectural changes must be made in the existing business landscape of applications to create and revise data because the applications have to refer to the central repository for approvals and validation of product configurations. It is achieved by modifying how the applications write data or how the applications can be adapted to use the rules to be managed and published.   Complete product configuration validation will be done in enterprise / central product catalogue and final configuration will be sent to the B/OSS system through the SOA compliant product distribution architecture. The approach/architecture enables greater control in terms of product data management and product data governance.   4.2.b Federated Product Management (Mastering) Architecture     Figure 7: Federated Product Management (Mastering) Architecture   In the federated product mastering approach, the basic unique product definition data (product id, description product hierarchy, basic price plans and simple product design rules) will be centrally created and will be maintained. And, the advanced product definition (Product bundling, promotions, offers & discount plans) will be created in respective down stream OSS systems. The advanced product definition (Product bundling, promotions, offers and discount plans) will be created in respective downstream OSS systems.   For example, basic product definitions such as attributes, product hierarchy and basic price plans will be created and maintained in Enterprise/Central product reference catalogue and distributed to downstream OSS systems. Respective downstream OSS systems build product bundles, promotions, advanced price plans over the basic product definition and master the advanced product definition. Central reference database accesses the respective other source product master data and assembles a point-in-time consolidated view of the product. The approach is typically adapted in some merger and acquisition scenarios where there is a low probability of a central physical authority managing the data. In addition, the migration effort in this case is minimal and there are no big architectural changes to the organization application landscape. However, this approach will not result in better product data management and data governance.   5.0 Customer Scenario – Before EPC deployment   A leading global telecommunications service provider wanted to launch a quad play and triple play service offering in the shortest possible lead time. The service provider was offering Broadband and VoIP services to customers. The company wanted to reuse a majority of the Broadband services and price plans and bundle them with new wireless and IPTV services for quad play and triple play. The challenges in launching the new service offerings were:       Figure 8: Triple Play Plan   ·       Broadband product data was stored in multiple product catalogues (CRM catalogue, Billing catalogue, spread sheets)   ·       Product managers spent a lot of time performing tasks involving duplication or re-keying of data. Manual effort caused errors, cost and time over-runs.   ·       No effective product and price data governance mechanism. Price change issues arising from the lack of data consistency across systems resulted in leakage of customer value and revenue.   ·       Product data had re-usability issues and was not in a structured format. It resulted in uncontrolled product portfolio creation and product management issues.   ·       Lack of enterprise product model resulted into product distribution challenges and thus delays in product launch.   ·       Designers are constrained by existing legacy product management solutions to model product/service requirements and product configuration rules such as upgrading, downgrading and cross selling.    5.1 Customer Scenario - After EPC deployment     Figure 9: SOA-based end-to-end EPC Solution   The company deployed PLM-based Enterprise Product Catalogue solutions to launch quad play service after evaluating various product catalogues. The broadband product offering, service and price data were migrated to the new system, and the product and price plan hierarchy for new offerings were created using the entities defined in the Enterprise Product Model. Supplier product catalogue data such as routers and set up boxes were loaded onto the new solution through SOA-based web service. Price plans and configuration rules were built in the new system. The validated final product configurations were extracted from the product catalogue in a SID format and were distributed to the downstream B/OSS systems through exposed SOA-based web services. The transformations required for the B/OSS system were handled using the transformation layer as part of the solution.   6.0 How PLM enabled Product Management Transformation         Figure 10: Product Management Transformation     PLM-based Product Catalogue Solution helped the customer reduce the product launch cycle time by 30% and enable transformation of Product Management for next generation services.   7.0 Conclusion   On the one hand, the telecom industry is undergoing changes due to disruptions, uncertain product markets and increased complexity of products. On the other hand, the ARPU is decreasing year-on-year. Communications Service Providers are embarking on convergence, bundled service offerings, flexibility to cross-sell and up-sell, introduce new value-added services, leverage Web 2.0 concepts and network capabilities. Consequently, large scale IT transformation initiatives to improve their ARPU supporting network and business transformations are a business imperative. Product Management has become a focus area. Companies are investing in best-in- class COTS solutions to reduce time-to-market, ensure rapid service delivery and improve operational efficiency. An efficient PLM-based enterprise product mastering solution plays a key role in achieving zero touch automation and rapid product launch.   References:   1.     Preston G.Smith, Donald G.Reineristsem, Van Nostrand Reinhold “Developing Products in Half the time”.   2.     John G. Innes, "Achieving Successful Product Change", Pitman Publishing.   3.     D T Pham and R M Setchi (16th Jan, 2001) "Authoring environment for documentation development" University of Wales Cardiff, U.K., Proceedings on Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Vol. 215, Part B.   4.     Oracle Product Hub for Communications:   http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/master-data-management/product-hub-082059.html  

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• #MIX Day 2 Keynote: Put the Phone Down and Listen

  - by andrewbrust

  MIX day 1’s keynote was all about Windows Phone 7 (WP7).  MIX day 2’s was a reminder that Microsoft has much more going on than a new mobile platform.  Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, Doug Purdy and others showed us lots of other good things coming from Microsoft, mostly in the developer stack, that we certainly shouldn’t overlook.  These included the forthcoming IE9, its new JavaScript compiling engine and support for HTML 5 that takes full advantage of the local PC resources, including the Graphics Processing Unit.  The announcements also included important additions to ASP.NET (and one subtraction, in the form of lighter-weight ViewState technology) including almost-obsessive jQuery support.  That support is so good that John Resig, creator of the jQuery project, came on stage to tell us so.  Then Scott Guthrie told us that Microsoft would be contributing code to Open Source jQuery project. This is not your father’s Microsoft, it would seem. But to me, the crown jewel in today’s keynote were the numerous announcements around the Open Data Protocol (OData).  OData is nothing more than the protocol side of “Astoria” (now known as WCF Data Services, and until recently called ADO.NET Data Services) separated out and opened up as a platform-neutral standard.  The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was Microsoft’s vehicle for first announcing OData, as well as project “Dallas,” an Azure-based cloud platform for publishing commercial OData feeds.  And we had already known about “bridges” for Astoria (and thus OData) for PHP and Java.  We also knew that PowerPivot, Microsoft’s forthcoming self-service BI plug-in for Excel 2010, will consume OData feeds and then facilitate drill-down analysis of their data.  And we recently found out that SQL Reporting Services reports (in the forthcoming SQL Server 2008 R2) and SharePoint 2010 lists will be consumable in OData format as well. So what was left to announce?  How about OData clients for Palm webOS and Apple iPhone/Objective C?  How about the release to Open Source of .NET’s OData client?  Or the ability to publish any SQL Azure database as an OData service by simply checking a checkbox at deployment?  Maybe even a Silverlight tool (code-named “Houston”) to create SQL Azure databases (and then publish them as OData) right in the browser?  And what if you you could get at NetFlix’s entire catalog in OData format?  You can – just go to http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/ and see for yourself.  Douglas Purdy, who made these announcements said “we want OData to work on as many devices and platforms as possible.”  After all the cross-platform OData announcements made in about a half year’s time, it’s hard to dispute this. When Microsoft plays the data card, and plays it well, watch out, because data programmability is the company’s heritage.  I’ll be discussing OData at length in my April Redmond Review column.  I wrote that column two weeks ago, and was convinced then that OData was a big deal. Today upped the ante even more.  And following the Windows Phone 7 euphoria of yesterday was, I think, smart timing.  The phone, if it’s successful, will be because it’s a good developer platform play.  And developer platforms (as well as their creators) are most successful when they have a good data strategy.  OData is very Silverlight-friendly, and that means it’s WP7-friendly too.  Phone plus service-oriented data is a one-two punch.  A phone platform without data would have been a phone with no signal.

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