price comparison - Page 154

Initializing an object to all zeroes

- by dash-tom-bang

Oftentimes data structures' valid initialization is to set all members to zero. Even when programming in C++, one may need to interface with an external API for which this is the case. Is there any practical difference between: some_struct s; memset(s, 0, sizeof(s)); and simply some_struct s = { 0 }; Do folks find themselves using both, with a method for choosing which is more appropriate for a given application? For myself, as mostly a C++ programmer who doesn't use memset much, I'm never certain of the function signature so I find the second example is just easier to use in addition to being less typing, more compact, and maybe even more obvious since it says "this object is initialized to zero" right in the declaration rather than waiting for the next line of code and seeing, "oh, this object is zero initialized." When creating classes and structs in C++ I tend to use initialization lists; I'm curious about folks thoughts on the two "C style" initializations above rather than a comparison against what is available in C++ since I suspect many of us interface with C libraries even if we code mostly in C++ ourselves.

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Editing XML file content with Python.

- by Hooloovoo

Hi, I am trying to use Python to read in an XML file containing some parameter names and values, e.g. ... <parameter name='par1'> <value>24</value> </parameter> <parameter name='par2'> <value>Blue/Red/Green</value> </parameter> ... and then pass it a dictionary with the parameter names {'par1':'53','par2':'Yellow/Pink/Black',...} and corresponding new values to replace the old ones in the XML file. The output should then overwrite the original XML file. At the moment I am converting the XML to a python dictionary and after some element comparison and regular expression handling, writing the output again in XML format. I am not too happy with this and was wondering whether anyone can recommend a more efficient way of doing it? Thanks.

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Avoiding instanceof in Java

- by Mark Lutton

Having a chain of "instanceof" operations is considered a "code smell". The standard answer is "use polymorphism". How would I do it in this case? There are a number of subclasses of a base class; none of them are under my control. An analogous situation would be with the Java classes Integer, Double, BigDecimal etc. if (obj instanceof Integer) {NumberStuff.handle((Integer)obj);} else if (obj instanceof BigDecimal) {BigDecimalStuff.handle((BigDecimal)obj);} else if (obj instanceof Double) {DoubleStuff.handle((Double)obj);} I do have control over NumberStuff and so on. I don't want to use many lines of code where a few lines would do. (Sometimes I make a HashMap mapping Integer.class to an instance of IntegerStuff, BigDecimal.class to an instance of BigDecimalStuff etc. But today I want something simpler.) I'd like something as simple as this: public static handle(Integer num) { ... } public static handle(BigDecimal num) { ... } But Java just doesn't work that way. I'd like to use static methods when formatting. The things I'm formatting are composite, where a Thing1 can contain an array Thing2s and a Thing2 can contain an array of Thing1s. I had a problem when I implemented my formatters like this: class Thing1Formatter { private static Thing2Formatter thing2Formatter = new Thing2Formatter(); public format(Thing thing) { thing2Formatter.format(thing.innerThing2); } } class Thing2Formatter { private static Thing1Formatter thing1Formatter = new Thing1Formatter(); public format(Thing2 thing) { thing1Formatter.format(thing.innerThing1); } } Yes, I know the HashMap and a bit more code can fix that too. But the "instanceof" seems so readable and maintainable by comparison. Is there anything simple but not smelly?

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C++0x Smart Pointer Comparisons: Inconsistent, what's the rationale?

- by GManNickG

In C++0x (n3126), smart pointers can be compared, both relationally and for equality. However, the way this is done seems inconsistent to me. For example, shared_ptr defines operator< be equivalent to: template <typename T, typename U> bool operator<(const shared_ptr<T>& a, const shared_ptr<T>& b) { return std::less<void*>()(a.get(), b.get()); } Using std::less provides total ordering with respect to pointer values, unlike a vanilla relational pointer comparison, which is unspecified. However, unique_ptr defines the same operator as: template <typename T1, typename D1, typename T2, typename D2> bool operator<(const unique_ptr<T1, D1>& a, const unique_ptr<T2, D2>& b) { return a.get() < b.get(); } It also defined the other relational operators in similar fashion. Why the change in method and "completeness"? That is, why does shared_ptr use std::less while unique_ptr uses the built-in operator<? And why doesn't shared_ptr also provide the other relational operators, like unique_ptr? I can understand the rationale behind either choice: with respect to method: it represents a pointer so just use the built-in pointer operators, versus it needs to be usable within an associative container so provide total ordering (like a vanilla pointer would get with the default std::less predicate template argument) with respect to completeness: it represents a pointer so provide all the same comparisons as a pointer, versus it is a class type and only needs to be less-than comparable to be used in an associative container, so only provide that requirement But I don't see why the choice changes depending on the smart pointer type. What am I missing? Bonus/related: std::shared_ptr seems to have followed from boost::shared_ptr, and the latter omits the other relational operators "by design" (and so std::shared_ptr does too). Why is this?

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Comparing C++ input with array values

- by Security_Gate

Hey everyone, Over the last couple months I've still been slowly but surely trudging through C++, and I've run into a snag that I've been meaning to figure out. I've tried asking/reading/searching, but I could never find an appropriate answer. Maybe it is simply because the question is sort of difficult to ask. What I'm trying to do is at the end of my program, have the end sequence compare the input value with values within an Array. Do I have to loop a comparison sequence? Is there an easier way around this? #include <iostream> #include <string> using namespace std; int main () { string YesAnswers[5] = {"Y", "YES", "yes" "y"}; string Name; string YN; do { cout << "Enter your name: "; getline(cin, Name); cout << "Your name is "<< Name; cout <<"\nIs this correct? Y\N: "; cin >> YN; } while(YN == YesAnswers); system("Pause"); return 0; }

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Align a set of elements that are not next to each other in the HTML

- by user1917727

I am creating a comparison table where the columns are built as below: <div id = "wrapper"> <div id = "col1"> <div class = "row1"> text lots more text and more text </div> <div class = "row2"> text </div> <div class = "row3"> text </div> </div> <div id = "col2"> <div class = "row1"> text </div> <div class = "row2"> a lot of text </div> <div class = "row3"> text </div> </div> </div> Col1 and col2 are then displayed as an inline-block so they visually sit next to each other on the page. The problem is that the contents of each row may vary. Without setting a min-height of each row, how could i make sure that each row visually lines up with its corresponding row from the other column? I can't think of any way to achieve this in CSS alone. I'm wondering if there's some sneaky jQuery way of achieving this? EDIT: I Can't change the HTML structure. Cheers

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Windows Server 2012 Branchcache vs. DFS-R

- by TheCleaner

Warning, subjective question ahead! But hopefully a good one that won't get closed. SCENARIO: I have a branch office that currently has no on-premise server. They access everything including a DC across a 12Mbps WAN link (MPLS). The link isn't saturated, averaging around 20% utilization. The circuit is very stable and has a high SLA and excellent uptime. However, large file transfers (mainly reads, not writes) from the file server across the WAN can be slow. We don't currently utilize DFS. RESEARCH DONE: I'm aware of WAN acceleration, using either dedicated hardware (Riverbed) or a dedicated software VM (Silver Peak) for example. But the pricing is outside of our current budget and the need isn't quite there yet from our perspective (since the issue is mainly in a "pull" scenario not necessarily push/pull). I'm mainly looking at deploying a Windows server at this branch office and either utilizing DFS-R or BranchCache. Looking at a table comparison and assuming we are looking at a "hosted branchcache server" and not simply distributed: It would appear there are benefits to both, even if both are "hosted" on a server. QUESTIONS I ACTUALLY HAVE: In what scenarios do each of these techs shine and where do you choose one over the other? Looking at a hosted Branchcache server, can you set "pre-fetching" of certain folders/files on the central file server so that they are immediately accessible locally at the branch? Do you have to do this on a schedule (if it is possible)? Looking at DFS-R my concern (and apparently solved with 3rd party apps) is file locking and making sure the file gets updated properly during a write operation (ie, making sure if both copies are accessed and both are written to, which file takes precedence and what happens to the changes?). Ideal it would seem would be to lock any alternate replicas of the data, but is it really that big of an issue? Does Branchcache lock the central file for editing? Does branchcache only transmit the deltas back to the central file of what has changed? Would either technology be ill advised if the branch office server was going to be utilized as a domain controller as well?

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iPhone 3G refuses to transfer purchased apps to iTunes

- by andynormancx

My iPhone 3G refuses to transfer purchased apps to iTunes. This is causing me major problems with syncing. Whenever I attempt to transfer apps from the iPhone to iTunes it goes through the motions, but never actually transfers anything. It displays the various apps in the info area at the top of the screen, but the progress bar never advances. In comparison when I sync other iPhones, using the same install of iTunes, the progress bar advances and apps are transferred. The same also happens on clean installs of iTunes on other computers, it seems to be my iPhone that is the common factor. I have tried restoring the phone from a backup, which makes no difference. This started happening months ago and the phone has since been upgraded to 3.0 and 3.1, but the problem still persists. Originally it was just a minor irritation, but I made and attempt to fix it which has made things worse. I deleted all the apps from with iTunes and then did "Transfer purchases" in the hope that it might fix something. It didn't fix anything. Also, I cannot now sync at all. If I do sync iTunes now does "transferring purchases", fails to transfer and then deletes all the apps (and data) from my iPhone. It also means I can't sync music, podcasts or anything else. I can't sync anything else, because I can't temporarily turn off app syncing because then iTunes warns that the apps on the iPhone will be deleted. I also tried de-authorising and re-authorising. What can I do to get app syncing working again ? P.S. I have considered deleting all the apps and reinstalling them one by one, in the hope that it will fix the problem. However I don't really want to embark on doing that for 55+ apps and re-entering login details etc for the apps that need them, especially as I might then find out it didn't solve the problem. Update: The latest update to iTunes 9 has improved things in one key aspect. If I let a sync run to completion iTunes no longer deletes all the apps from my phone. So I can now sync all my other data, even if I still can't sync my apps. Resolved: See my answer to the question for how I finally resolved the problem.

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Configuring gmail for use on mailing lists

- by reemrevnivek

This is really two questions in one. First, are nettiquette guidelines still accurate in their restrictions on ASCII vs. HTML, posting style, and line length? (Here's a recent metafilter discussion of the topic.) Second, If they are not, should these guidelines be respected? If they are (or if they should still be respected), how can modern mail programs be configured to work properly with them? Most mailing list etiquette statements appear to have been written by sysadmins who loved their command lines, and refuse to change anything. Many still reference rfc1855, written in 1995. Just reading that paginated TXT should give you an idea of the climate at the time. Here's a short, fairly random list of mailing list etiquette statements with some extracted formatting guidelines: Mozilla - HTML discouraged, interleaved posting. FreeBSD - No HTML, don't top post, line length at 75 characters. Fedora - No HTML, bottom-post. You get the idea. You've all seen etiquette statements before. So, assuming that the rules should be obeyed (Usually a good idea), what can be done to allow me to still use a modern mail program, and exchange mail with friends who use the same programs? We like to format our mail. Bold headings, code snippets (sometimes syntax highlighted, if the copy-paste pulls RTF text as from XCOde and Eclipse), free line breaks determined by your browser width, and the (very) occasional image make the message easier to read. Threaded conversations are a wonderful thing. Broadband connections are, I'm sure, the rule for most of the users of SU and of developer mailing lists, disk space is cheap, and so the overhead of HTML is laughable. However, I don't want to post a question to a mailing list and have the guru who can answer my question automatically delete it, or come off as uncaring. Until I hear otherwise, I'll continue to respect the rules as best I can. For a common example of the problem, Gmail, by default, sends HTML formatted messages with bottom-posted quotes (which are folded in, just read the last message immediately above), and uses the frame width to wrap lines, rather than a character count. ASCII can be selected, and quotes can be moved and reversed, but line wraps of quotes don't work, line breaks are tedious to add (and more tedious to read, if they're super small in comparison to the width of the frame). Is there a forwarding, free mail program which can help with this exercise? Should an "RFC1855 mode" lab be written? Or do I have to go to the command line for my mailing lists, and gmail for my other mail?

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debian packages version convention

- by JackWu

I'm using debian/Ubuntu, and get confused about versions of packages. When using dpkg -l command, I get: ii vim 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.1 Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor ii vim-common 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.1 Vi IMproved - Common files ii vim-runtime 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.1 Vi IMproved - Runtime files ii vim-tiny 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.1 Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - compact version ii virt-what 1.11-1 detect if we are running in a virtual machine ii w3m 0.5.3-5ubuntu1 WWW browsable pager with excellent tables/frames support ii watershed 6 reduce superfluous executions of idempotent command ii wget 1.13.4-2ubuntu1 retrieves files from the web ii whiptail 0.52.11-2ubuntu10 Displays user-friendly dialog boxes from shell scripts ii whoopsie 0.1.33 Ubuntu crash database submission daemon ii wimlib9 1.5.0-1~webupd8~precise Library to extract, create, modify, and mount WIM files ii wimtools 1.5.0-1~webupd8~precise Tools to extract, create, modify, and mount WIM files ii wireless-tools 30~pre9-5ubuntu2 Tools for manipulating Linux Wireless Extensions ii wpasupplicant 0.7.3-6ubuntu2.1 client support for WPA and WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i) ii x11-common 1:7.6+12ubuntu2 X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure ii x11-utils 7.6+4ubuntu0.1 X11 utilities ii xauth 1:1.0.6-1 X authentication utility ii xbitmaps 1.1.1-1 Base X bitmaps ii xclip 0.12-1 command line interface to X selections ii xfonts-encodings 1:1.0.4-1ubuntu1 Encodings for X.Org fonts ii xfonts-utils 1:7.6+1 X Window System font utility programs ii xkb-data 2.5-1ubuntu1.3 X Keyboard Extension (XKB) configuration data ii xml-core 0.13 XML infrastructure and XML catalog file support rc xpdf 3.02-21build1 Portable Document Format (PDF) reader ii xterm 271-1ubuntu2.1 X terminal emulator ii xz-lzma 5.1.1alpha+20110809-3 XZ-format compression utilities - compatibility commands ii xz-utils 5.1.1alpha+20110809-3 XZ-format compression utilities ii zabbix-agent 1:1.8.11-1 network monitoring solution - agent ii zlib1g 1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3ubuntu4 compression library - runtime ii zlib1g-dev 1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3ubuntu4 compression library - development ii zsh 4.3.17-1ubuntu1 shell with lots of features The third column is version, but it all messed up in a way I can't understand. I mean, different packages use total different naming specification. Here are the major questions: Why there are ubuntu in them, and there are not? what all the special -~+ mean? alpha and build, dfsg, what are they? Can I just use them casually? vim and other packages have 2:, what does that mean? How version comparison works, since they can be so different? Can anyone please explain this to me? Or where can I find an official document? Thanks in advance.

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What are incentives (if any) to use WinRT instead of .Net?

- by Ark-kun

Let's compare WinRT with .Net .Net .Net is the 13+ years evolution of COM. Three main parts of .Net are execution environment, standard libraries and supported languages. CLR is the native-code execution environment based on COM .Net Framework has a big set of standard libraries (implemented using managed and native code) that can be used from all .Net languages. There are .Net classes that allow using OS APIs. WPF or Silverlight provide a XAML-based UI framework .Net can be used with C++, C#, Javascript, Python, Ruby, VB, LISP, Scheme and many other languages. C++/.Net is a variation of the C++ language that allows interaction with .Net objects. .Net supports inheritance, generics, operator and method overloading and many other features. .Net allows creating apps that run on Windows (XP, 7, 8 Pro (Desktop and Metro), RT, CE, etc), Mac OS, Linux (+ other *nix); iOS, Android, Windows Phone (7, 8); Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox; XBox 360, Playstation Suite; raw microprocessors. There is support for creating games (2D/3D) using any managed language or C++. Created by Developer Division WinRT WinRT is based on COM. Three main parts of WinRT are execution environment, standard libraries and supported languages. WinRT has a native-code execution environment based on COM WinRT has a set of standard libraries that more or less can be used from WinRT languages. There are WinRT classes that allow using OS APIs. Unnamed Silverlight clone provides a XAML-based UI framework WinRT can be used with C++, C#, Javascript, VB. C++/CX is a variation of the C++ language that allows interaction with WinRT objects. Custom WinRT components don't support inheritance (classes must be sealed), generics, operator overloading and many other features. WinRT allows creating apps that run on Windows 8 Pro and RT (Metro only); Windows Phone 8 (limited). There is support for creating games (2D/3D) using C++ only. Ordered by Windows Team I think that all the aspects except the last ones are very important for developers. On the other hand it seems that the most important aspect for Microsoft is the last one. So, given the above comparison of conceptually identical technologies, what are incentives (if any) to use WinRT instead of .Net?

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SQL Express 2008 R2 on Amazon EC2 instance: tons of free memory, poor performance

- by gravyface

The old SQL Express 2005 was running on a low-end single Xeon CPU Dell server, RAID 5 7200 disks, 2 GB RAM (SBS 2003). I have not done any baseline measurements on the old physical server, but the Web app is used by half a dozen people (maybe 2 concurrently), so I figured "how bad can an Amazon EC2 instance be?". It's pretty horrible: a difference of 8 seconds of load time on one screen. First of all, I'm not a SQL guru, but here's what I've tried: Had a Small Instance, now running a c1.medium (High Cpu Medium) Windows 2008 32-bit R2 EBS-backed instance running IIS 7.5 and SQL Express 2008 R2. No noticeable improvement. Changed Page File from fixed 256 to Automatic. Setup a Striped Mirror from within Disk Management with two attached 1 GB EBS volumes. Moved database and transaction log, left everything else on the boot EBS volume. No noticeable change. Looked at memory, ~1000 MB of physical memory free (1.7 GB total). Changed SQL instance to use a minimum of 1024 RAM; restarted server, no change in memory usage. SQL still only using ~28MB of RAM(!). So I'm thinking: this database is tiny (28MB), why isn't the whole thing cached in RAM? Surely that would speed up performance. The transaction log is 241 MB. Seems kind of large in comparison -- has this not been committed? Is it a cause of performance degradation? I recall something about Recovery Models and log sizes somewhere in my travels, but not positive. Another thing: the old server was running SQL Express 2005. Not sure if that has any impact, but I tried changing the compatibility level from SQL 2000 to 2008, but that had no effect. Anyways, what else can I try here? Seems ridiculous to throw more virtual hardware at this thing. I know I/O is going to be rough on EBS volumes, but surely others are successfully running small .NET/SQL apps on reasonably priced instances?

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Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

- by Ricardo Ferreira

In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks. 2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"? 5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools. - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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Building an ASP.Net 4.5 Web forms application - part 4

- by nikolaosk

?his is the fourth post in a series of posts on how to design and implement an ASP.Net 4.5 Web Forms store that sells posters on line.There are 3 more posts in this series of posts.Please make sure you read them first.You can find the first post here. You can find the second post here. You can find the third post here. In this new post we will build on the previous posts and we will demonstrate how to display the posters per category.We will add a ListView control on the PosterList.aspx and will bind data from the database. We will use the various templates.Then we will write code in the PosterList.aspx.cs to fetch data from the database.1) Launch Visual Studio and open your solution where your project lives2) Open the PosterList.aspx page. We will add some markup in this page. Have a look at the code below <section class="posters-featured"> <ul> <asp:ListView ID="posterList" runat="server" DataKeyNames="PosterID" GroupItemCount="3" ItemType="PostersOnLine.DAL.Poster" SelectMethod="GetPosters"> <EmptyDataTemplate> <table id="Table1" runat="server"> <tr> <td>We have no data.</td> </tr> </table> </EmptyDataTemplate> <EmptyItemTemplate> <td id="Td1" runat="server" /> </EmptyItemTemplate> <GroupTemplate> <tr ID="itemPlaceholderContainer" runat="server"> <td ID="itemPlaceholder" runat="server"></td> </tr> </GroupTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <td id="Td2" runat="server"> <table> <tr> <td> </td> <td> <a href="PosterDetails.aspx?posterID=<%#:Item.PosterID%>"> <img src="<%#:Item.PosterImgpath%>" width="100" height="75" border="1"/></a> </td> <td> <a href="PosterDetails.aspx?posterID=<%#:Item.PosterID%>"> <span class="PosterName"> <%#:Item.PosterName%> </span> </a> <br /> <span class="PosterPrice"> <b>Price: </b><%#:String.Format("{0:c}", Item.PosterPrice)%> </span> <br /> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </ItemTemplate> <LayoutTemplate> <table id="Table2" runat="server"> <tr id="Tr1" runat="server"> <td id="Td3" runat="server"> <table ID="groupPlaceholderContainer" runat="server"> <tr ID="groupPlaceholder" runat="server"></tr> </table> </td> </tr> <tr id="Tr2" runat="server"><td id="Td4" runat="server"></td></tr> </table> </LayoutTemplate> </asp:ListView> </ul> </section> 3) We have a ListView control on the page called PosterList. I set the ItemType property to the Poster class and then the SelectMethod to the GetPosters method. I will create this method later on. (ItemType="PostersOnLine.DAL.Poster" SelectMethod="GetPosters")Then in the code below I have the data-binding expression Item available and the control becomes strongly typed.So when the user clicks on the link of the poster's category the relevant information will be displayed (photo,name and price) <td> <a href="PosterDetails.aspx?posterID=<%#:Item.PosterID%>"> <img src="<%#:Item.PosterImgpath%>" width="100" height="75" border="1"/></a> </td>4) Now we need to write the simple method to populate the ListView control.It is called GetPosters method.The code follows public IQueryable<Poster> GetPosters([QueryString("id")] int? PosterCatID) { PosterContext ctx = new PosterContext(); IQueryable<Poster> query = ctx.Posters; if (PosterCatID.HasValue && PosterCatID > 0) { query = query.Where(p=>p.PosterCategoryID==PosterCatID); } return query; } This is a very simple method that returns information about posters related to the PosterCatID passed to it.I bind the value from the query string to the PosterCatID parameter at run time.This is all possible due to the QueryStringAttribute class that lives inside the System.Web.ModelBinding and gets the value of the query string variable id.5) I run my application and then click on the "Midfilders" link. Have a look at the picture below to see the results. In the Site.css file I added some new CSS rules to make everything more presentable. .posters-featured { width:840px; background-color:#efefef;}.posters-featured a:link, a:visited, a:active, a:hover { color: #000033; }.posters-featured a:hover { background-color: #85c465; } 6) I run the application again and this time I do not choose any category, I simply navigate to the PosterList.aspx page. I see all the posters since no query string was passed as a parameter.Have a look at the picture below ?ake sure you place breakpoints in the code so you can see what is really going on.In the next post I will show you how to display poster details.Hope it helps!!!

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Our Look at the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview

- by Asian Angel

Have you been hearing all about Microsoft’s work on Internet Explorer 9 and are curious about it? If you are wanting a taste of the upcoming release then join us as we take a look at the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview. Note: Windows Vista and Server 2008 users may need to install a Platform Update (see link at bottom for more information). Getting Started If you are curious about the systems that the platform preview will operate on here is an excerpt from the FAQ page (link provided below). There are two important points of interest here: The platform preview does not replace your regular Internet Explorer installation The platform preview (and the final version of Internet Explorer 9) will not work on Windows XP There really is not a lot to the install process…basically all that you will have to deal with is the “EULA Window” and the “Install Finished Window”. Note: The platform preview will install to a “Program Files Folder” named “Internet Explorer Platform Preview”. Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview in Action When you start the platform preview up for the first time you will be presented with the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive homepage. Do not be surprised that there is not a lot to the UI at this time…but you can get a good idea of how Internet Explorer will act. Note: You will not be able to alter the “Homepage” for the platform preview. Of the four menus available there are two that will be of interest to most people…the “Page & Debug Menus”. If you go to navigate to a new webpage you will need to go through the “Page Menu” unless you have installed the Address Bar Mini-Tool (shown below). Want to see what a webpage will look like in an older version of Internet Explorer? Then choose your version in the “Debug Menu”. We did find it humorous that IE6 was excluded from the choices offered. Here is what the URL entry window looks like if you are using the “Page Menu” to navigate between websites. Here is the main page of the site here displayed in “IE9 Mode”…looking good. Here is the main page viewed in “Forced IE5 Document Mode”. There were some minor differences (colors, sidebar, etc.) in how the main page displayed in comparison to “IE9 Mode”. Being able to switch between modes makes for an interesting experience… As you can see there is not much to the “Context Menu” at the moment. Notice the slightly altered icon for the platform preview… “Add” an Address Bar of Sorts If you would like to use a “make-shift” Address Bar with the platform preview you can set up the portable file (IE9browser.exe) for the Internet Explorer 9 Test Platform Addressbar Mini-Tool. Just place it in an appropriate folder, create a shortcut for it, and it will be ready to go. Here is a close look at the left side of the Address Bar Mini-Tool. You can try to access “IE Favorites” but may have sporadic results like those we experienced during our tests. Note: The Address Bar Mini-Tool will not line up perfectly with the platform preview but still makes a nice addition. And a close look at the right side of the Address Bar Mini-Tool. In order to completely shut down the Address Bar Mini-Tool you will need to click on “Close”. Each time that you enter an address into the Address Bar Mini-Tool it will open a new window/instance of the platform preview. Note: During our tests we noticed that clicking on “Home” in the “Page Menu” opened the previously viewed website but once we closed and restarted the platform preview the test drive website was the starting/home page again. Even if the platform preview is not running the Address Bar Mini-Tool can still run as shown here. Note: You will not be able to move the Address Bar Mini-Tool from its’ locked-in position at the top of the screen. Now for some fun. With just the Address Bar Mini-Tool open you can enter an address and cause the platform preview to open. Here is our example from above now open in the platform preview…good to go. Conclusion During our tests we did experience the occasional crash but overall we were pleased with the platform preview’s performance. The platform preview handled rather well and definitely seemed much quicker than Internet Explorer 8 on our test system (a definite bonus!). If you are an early adopter then this could certainly get you in the mood for the upcoming beta releases! Links Download the Internet Explorer 9 Preview Platform Download the Internet Explorer 9 Test Platform Addressbar Mini-Tool Information about Platform Update for Windows Vista & Server 2008 View the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview FAQ Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPMake Ctrl+Tab in Internet Explorer 7 Use Most Recent OrderRemove ISP Text or Corporate Branding from Internet Explorer Title BarWhy Can’t I Turn the Details/Preview Panes On or Off in Windows Vista Explorer?Prevent Firefox or Internet Explorer from Printing the URL on Every Page TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses

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Developer’s Life – Summary of Superhero Articles

- by Pinal Dave

Earlier this year, I wrote an article series where I talked about developer’s life and compared it with Superhero. I have got amazing response to this series and I have been receiving quite a lots of email suggesting that I should write more blog post about them. Currently I am not planning to write more blog post but I will soon continue another series. In this blog post, I have summarized the entire series. Let me know if you want me to write about any superhero. I will see what I can do about that hero. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Captain America Captain America was first created as a comic book character in the 1940’s as a way to boost morale during World War II. Aimed at a children’s audience, his legacy faded away when the war ended. However, he has recently has a major reboot to become a popular movie character that deals with modern issues. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is the Incredible Hulk The Incredible Hulk is possibly one of the scariest superheroes out there. All superheroes are meant to be “out of this world” and awe-inspiring, but I think most people will agree with I say The Hulk takes this to the next level. He is the result of an industrial accident, which is scary enough in it’s own right. Plus, when mild-mannered Bruce Banner is angered, he goes completely out-of-control and transforms into a destructive monster that he cannot control and has no memories of. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Wonder Woman We have focused a lot lately on this “superhero series.” I love fantasy books and movies, and I feel like there is a lot to be learned from them. As I am writing this series, though, I have noticed that every super hero I write about is a man. So today, I would like to talk about the major female super hero – Wonder Woman. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Harry Potter Harry Potter might not be a superhero in the traditional sense, but I believe he still has a lot to teach us and show us about life as a developer. If you have been living under a rock for the last 17 years, you might not know that Harry Potter is the main character in an extremely popular series of books and movies documenting the education and tribulation of a young wizard (and his friends). Developer’s Life – Every Developer is Like Transformers Transformers may not be superheroes – they don’t wear capes, they don’t have amazing powers outside of their size and folding ability, they’re not even human (technically). Part of their enduring popularity is that while we are enjoying over-the-top movies, we are learning about good leadership and strong personal skills. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Iron Man Iron Man is another superhero who is not naturally “super,” but relies on his brain (and money) to turn him into a fighting machine. While traditional superheroes are still popular, a three-movie franchise and incorporation into the new Avengers series shows that Iron Man is popular enough on his own. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Sherlock Holmes I have been thinking a lot about how developers are like super heroes, and I have written two blog posts now comparing them to Spiderman and Superman. I have a lot of love and respect for developers, and I hope that they are enjoying these articles, and others are learning a little bit about the profession. There is another fictional character who, while not technically asuper hero, is very powerful, and I also think stands as a good example of a developer. That character is Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is a British detective, first made popular at the turn of the 19thcentury by author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The original Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective who could solve the most mind-boggling crime through simple observations and deduction. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Chhota Bheem Chhota Bheem is a cartoon character that is extremely popular where I live. He is my daughter’s favorite characters. I like to say that children love Chhota Bheem more than their parents – it is lucky for us he is not real! Children love Chhota Bheem because he is the absolute “good guy.” He is smart, loyal, and strong. He and his friends live in Dholakpur and fight off their many enemies – and always win – in every episode. In each episode, they learn something about friendship, bravery, and being kind to others. Chhota Bheem is a good role model for children, and I think that he is a good role model for developers are well. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Batman Batman is one of the darkest superheroes in the fantasy canon. He does not come to his powers through any sort of magical coincidence or radioactive insect, but through a lot of psychological scarring caused by witnessing the death of his parents. Despite his dark back story, he possesses a lot of admirable abilities that I feel bear comparison to developers. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Superman I enjoyed comparing developers to Spiderman so much, that I have decided to continue the trend and encourage some of my favorite people (developers) with another favorite superhero – Superman. Superman is probably the most famous superhero – and one of the most inspiring. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Spiderman I have to admit, Spiderman is my favorite superhero. The most recent movie recently was released in theaters, so it has been at the front of my mind for some time. Spiderman was my favorite superhero even before the latest movie came out, but of course I took my whole family to see the movie as soon as I could! Every one of us loved it, including my daughter. We all left the movie thinking how great it would be to be Spiderman. So, with that in mind, I started thinking about how we are like Spiderman in our everyday lives, especially developers. I would like to know which Superhero is your favorite hero! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Developer, Superhero

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SQLAuthority News – Tips for Traveling to Nepal

- by pinaldave

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you might know that I travel nearly 20+ days out of 30 days in a month. There are cases when I don’t have a chance to go home for an entire month and my family has to travel to different cities just to meet me. During my recent visit, one of my acquaintances suggested that I should blog about my travel experiences as well. This can be helpful to others who are traveling to the country or city. I have previously written about my experience about all the airlines in India. I would be writing about a few tips about traveling to the beautiful country Nepal today. Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal is very scenic. There are lots of historical places to see and visit. I was fortunate enough to stopover the Pashupatinath Temple, Bhaktapur, Vasantpur and the temple of Kumari Goddess. I also visited casinos there, but even if I have stayed in Las Vegas for 3 and a half years before, I was not keen on them so I left the casinos just like what I did in Las Vegas . I also traveled to the famous Thamel area by car. Here are my quick tips for anyone who is planning to visit Nepal. They are not categorized but just written in the order that came to my mind. Please note that if you are an Indian, you will get a special privilege everywhere in Nepal, beginning right from the Indian airports. Use the expression “Nameste!” If you want to greet any Indian or Nepali. Indian Nationals do not need visa/passport to enter Nepal. In fact, Indian Nationals can just walk in to Nepal without any passport; but should have any valid Indian ID. There is no use of a passport since it will not be stamped at any immigration ports, whether in India or Nepal. Indian currency is widely accepted everywhere. However, please bring only Rs. 100 bills/notes as Rs. 500 or Rs. 1000 are not accepted. However, casinos there will accept larger bills. Indian National Language – Hindi is widely spoken and understood everywhere. I did not find a single person who had trouble speaking it. Nepali language uses the scripting language as Devnagari, which is similar to Hindi. Here, you will find food of almost every country. The taste of Nepali food is authentic and very delicious. It is very safe to travel and move around in Kathmandu (despite what media suggests). However, it will really help if you have a friend who speaks Nepali. You can negotiate a few deals and cut off to almost 1/5 of the original quoted price of products sold here. If you are from Gujarat, India – you will find Nepali language sharing many common words. Temples are everywhere, so do not miss to visit a few of them. Pashupatinath is a must. Only followers of Hindu religion (from Nepal and India only) are allowed in most of the holy places. Camera is allowed everywhere except on the holy places. Now it is your turn to share your opinions or any suggestions. I think Nepal is a great country as there are lots of places to visit. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL, Technology

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Blogging: MacJournal & Windows Live Writer

- by Jeff Julian

One thing I have learned about using a Mac is that Apple does not produce very many free applications. The ones they do are typically not full featured and to get the full feature you need to buy their upgraded version. For example, when it comes to Photo editing and cataloging, iPhoto is not a solution for large files or RAW processing, you need Aperture which is a couple hundred dollars. I am not complaining because I like it when an application has a product team who generates revenue with it, because the chance of them being around longer seems to be higher. What is my point in all of this? Apple does not produce a product for blogging/journaling like Microsoft does with Windows Live Writer. I love Windows Live Writer. If you are on a Windows box, it is a required tool in your toolbox if you publish to a blog. The cleanness of the interface, integration with most blog APIs and ability to Save Local or Publish as a Draft make capturing your thoughts for publishing now or later a very easy task. My hope is that Microsoft will port it to the Mac, but I don’t believe that will ever happen as it is not a revenue generating product and Microsoft doesn’t often port to a Mac besides Remote Desktop Connection and MSN Messenger. For my configuration I used to use only Boot Camp on my two MacBook Pros I have owned in the past three years because I’m a PC, but after four different rebuilds (not typically due to Windows, but Boot Camp or Parallels) I decided to move off the Boot Camp platform and to VMWare Fusion. This is a complete separate blog post that I should spec out in MacJournal, but I now always boot into the Mac OS and use Fusion for my AJI Software VM or my client’s VMs. It just seems to work better for me and I have a very nice way to backup my Windows environments with VMWare.Needless to say, there was need in my new laptop configuration for a blogging tool that worked natively on a Mac. I don’t like to power up my machine for writing a document or working on an image and need to boot up a VM just so I can use Windows. Some would say why not just use a Windows laptop and put the MBP on eBay? It is just a preference and right now, I like the Mac OS for day to day work. So in comes MacJournal, part of the current MacHeist package for $19.95 (MacJournal is normally $39.95). This product is definitely not WLW, but WLW is missing some features I like in MacJournal. I hope the price point comes down on MacJournal cause I could see paying $19.95 for it, but it is always hard for me to buy a piece of software for $39.95 when I can use something else. But I am a cheapskate when it comes to software packages. I suggest if you are using a Mac to drop what you are doing pick up the MacHeist bundle today before it is over, but if you are reading this later, than download the trial and see if MacJournal is a solution for you. If you have any other suggestions that are as nice or cheaper, please comment.Product LinksMacJournal by Mariners Software $39.95 (part of MacHeist bundle for $19.95 with only one day left)Windows Live Writer by MicrosoftThis post was created using MacJournal.[Update: The joys of formatting. Make sure if you are a Geekswithblogs.net member that you use this configuration to setup the Metablog formatting of paragraphs correctly]

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Using C# 4.0’s DynamicObject as a Stored Procedure Wrapper

- by EltonStoneman

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Overview Ignoring the fashion, I still make a lot of use of DALs – typically when inheriting a codebase with an established database schema which is full of tried and trusted stored procedures. In the DAL a collection of base classes have all the scaffolding, so the usual pattern is to create a wrapper class for each stored procedure, giving typesafe access to parameter values and output. DAL calls then looks like instantiate wrapper-populate parameters-execute call: using (var sp = new uspGetManagerEmployees()) { sp.ManagerID = 16; using (var reader = sp.Execute()) { //map entities from the output } } Or rolling it all into a fluent DAL call – which is nicer to read and implicitly disposes the resources: This is fine, the wrapper classes are very simple to handwrite or generate. But as the codebase grows, you end up with a proliferation of very small wrapper classes: The wrappers don't add much other than encapsulating the stored procedure call and giving you typesafety for the parameters. With the dynamic extension in .NET 4.0 you have the option to build a single wrapper class, and get rid of the one-to-one stored procedure to wrapper class mapping. In the dynamic version, the call looks like this: dynamic getUser = new DynamicSqlStoredProcedure("uspGetManagerEmployees", Database.AdventureWorks); getUser.ManagerID = 16; var employees = Fluently.Load<List<Employee>>() .With<EmployeeMap>() .From(getUser); The important difference is that the ManagerId property doesn't exist in the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure class. Declaring the getUser object with the dynamic keyword allows you to dynamically add properties, and the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure class intercepts when properties are added and builds them as stored procedure parameters. When getUser.ManagerId = 16 is executed, the base class adds a parameter call (using the convention that parameter name is the property name prefixed by "@"), specifying the correct SQL Server data type (mapping it from the type of the value the property is set to), and setting the parameter value. Code Sample This is worked through in a sample project on github – Dynamic Stored Procedure Sample – which also includes a static version of the wrapper for comparison. (I'll upload this to the MSDN Code Gallery once my account has been resurrected). Points worth noting are: DynamicSP.Data – database-independent DAL that has all the data plumbing code. DynamicSP.Data.SqlServer – SQL Server DAL, thin layer on top of the generic DAL which adds SQL Server specific classes. Includes the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure base class. DynamicSqlStoredProcedure.TrySetMember. Invoked when a dynamic member is added. Assumes the property is a parameter named after the SP parameter name and infers the SqlDbType from the framework type. Adds a parameter to the internal stored procedure wrapper and sets its value. uspGetManagerEmployees – the static version of the wrapper. uspGetManagerEmployeesTest – test fixture which shows usage of the static and dynamic stored procedure wrappers. The sample uses stored procedures from the AdventureWorks database in the SQL Server 2008 Sample Databases. Discussion For this scenario, the dynamic option is very favourable. Assuming your DAL is itself wrapped by a higher layer, the stored procedure wrapper classes have very little reuse. Even if you're codegening the classes and test fixtures, it's still additional effort for very little value. The main consideration with dynamic classes is that the compiler ignores all the members you use, and evaluation only happens at runtime. In this case where scope is strictly limited that's not an issue – but you're relying on automated tests rather than the compiler to find errors, but that should just encourage better test coverage. Also you can codegen the dynamic calls at a higher level. Performance may be a consideration, as there is a first-time-use overhead when the dynamic members of an object are bound. For a single run, the dynamic wrapper took 0.2 seconds longer than the static wrapper. The framework does a good job of caching the effort though, so for 1,000 calls the dynamc version still only takes 0.2 seconds longer than the static: You don't get IntelliSense on dynamic objects, even for the declared members of the base class, and if you've been using class names as keys for configuration settings, you'll lose that option if you move to dynamics. The approach may make code more difficult to read, as you can't navigate through dynamic members, but you do still get full debugging support. var employees = Fluently.Load<List<Employee>>() .With<EmployeeMap>() .From<uspGetManagerEmployees> ( i => i.ManagerID = 16, x => x.Execute() );

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Use Advanced Font Ligatures in Office 2010

- by Matthew Guay

Fonts can help your documents stand out and be easier to read, and Office 2010 helps you take your fonts even further with support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, and more. Here’s a quick look at these new font features in Office 2010. Introduction Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft has made an effort to support more advanced font features across their products. Windows 7 includes support for advanced OpenType font features and laid the groundwork for advanced font support in programs with the new DirectWrite subsystem. It also includes the new font Gabriola, which includes an incredible number of beautiful stylistic sets and ligatures. Now, with the upcoming release of Office 2010, Microsoft is bringing advanced typographical features to the Office programs we love. This includes support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, number forms, contextual alternative characters, and more. These new features are available in Word, Outlook, and Publisher 2010, and work the same on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Please note that Windows does include several OpenType fonts that include these advanced features. Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, and Corbel all include multiple number forms, while Consolas, Palatino Linotype, and Gabriola (Windows 7 only) include all the OpenType features. And, of course, these new features will work great with any other OpenType fonts you have that contain advanced ligatures, stylistic sets, and number forms. Using advanced typography in Word To use the new font features, open a new document, select an OpenType font, and enter some text. Here we have Word 2010 in Windows 7 with some random text in the Gabriola font. Click the arrow on the bottom of the Font section of the ribbon to open the font properties. Alternately, select the text and click Font. Now, click on the Advanced tab to see the OpenType features. You can change the ligatures setting… Choose Proportional or Tabular number spacing… And even select Lining or Old-style number forms. Here’s a comparison of Lining and Old-style number forms in Word 2010 with the Calibri font. Finally, you can choose various Stylistic sets for your font. The dialog always shows 20 styles, whether or not your font includes that many. Most include only 1 or 2; Gabriola includes 6. Here’s lorem ipsum text, using the Gabriola font with Stylistic set 6. Impressive, huh? The font ligatures change based on context, so they will automatically change as you are typing. Watch the transition as we typed the word Microsoft in Word with Gabriola stylistic set 6. Here’s another example, showing the fi and tt ligatures in Calibri. These effects work great in Word 2010 in XP, too. And, since Outlook uses Word as it’s editing engine, you can use the same options in Outlook 2010. Note that these font effects may not show up the same if the recipient’s email client doesn’t support advanced OpenType typography. It will, of course, display perfectly if the recipient is using Outlook 2010. Using advanced typography in Publisher 2010 Publisher 2010 includes the same advanced font features. This is especially nice for those using Publisher for professional layout and design. Simply insert a text box, enter some text, select it, and click the arrow on the bottom of the font box as in Word to open the font properties. This font options dialog is actually more advanced than Word’s font options. You can preview your font changes on sample text right in the properties box. You can also choose to add or remove a swash from your characters. Conclusion Advanced typographical effects are a welcome addition to Word and Publisher 2010, and they are very impressive when coupled with modern fonts such as Gabriola. From designing elegant headers to using old-style numbers, these features are very useful and fun. Do you have a favorite OpenType font that includes advanced typographical features? Let us know in the comments! More Reading Advances in typography in Windows 7 – Engineering 7 Blog New features in Microsoft Word 2010 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Font in Excel 2007Ask the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both?Keep Websites From Using Tiny Fonts in SafariAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteFriday Fun: Desktop Tower Defense Pro TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users

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Using LogParser - part 2

- by fatherjack

PersonAddress.csv SalesOrderDetail.tsv In part 1 of this series we downloaded and installed LogParser and used it to list data from a csv file. That was a good start and in this article we are going to see the different ways we can stream data and choose whether a whole file is selected. We are also going to take a brief look at what file types we can interrogate. If we take the query from part 1 and add a value for the output parameter as -o:datagrid so that the query becomes LOGPARSER "SELECT top 15 * FROM C:\LP\person_address.csv" -o:datagrid and run that we get a different result. A pop-up dialog that lets us view the results in a resizable grid. Notice that because we didn't specify the columns we wanted returned by LogParser (we used SELECT *) is has added two columns to the recordset - filename and rownumber. This behaviour can be very useful as we will see in future parts of this series. You can click Next 10 rows or All rows or close the datagrid once you are finished reviewing the data. You may have noticed that the files that I am working with are different file types - one is a csv (comma separated values) and the other is a tsv (tab separated values). If you want to convert a file from one to another then LogParser makes it incredibly simple. Rather than using 'datagrid' as the value for the output parameter, use 'csv': logparser "SELECT SalesOrderID, SalesOrderDetailID, CarrierTrackingNumber, OrderQty, ProductID, SpecialOfferID, UnitPrice, UnitPriceDiscount, LineTotal, rowguid, ModifiedDate into C:\Sales_SalesOrderDetail.csv FROM C:\Sales_SalesOrderDetail.tsv" -i:tsv -o:csv Those familiar with SQL will not have to make a very big leap of faith to making adjustments to the above query to filter in/out records from the source file. Lets get all the records from the same file where the Order Quantity (OrderQty) is more than 25: logparser "SELECT SalesOrderID, SalesOrderDetailID, CarrierTrackingNumber, OrderQty, ProductID, SpecialOfferID, UnitPrice, UnitPriceDiscount, LineTotal, rowguid, ModifiedDate into C:\LP\Sales_SalesOrderDetailOver25.csv FROM C:\LP\Sales_SalesOrderDetail.tsv WHERE orderqty > 25" -i:tsv -o:csv Or we could find all those records where the Order Quantity is equal to 25 and output it to an xml file: logparser "SELECT SalesOrderID, SalesOrderDetailID, CarrierTrackingNumber, OrderQty, ProductID, SpecialOfferID, UnitPrice, UnitPriceDiscount, LineTotal, rowguid, ModifiedDate into C:\LP\Sales_SalesOrderDetailEq25.xml FROM C:\LP\Sales_SalesOrderDetail.tsv WHERE orderqty = 25" -i:tsv -o:xml All the standard comparison operators are to be found in LogParser; >, <, =, LIKE, BETWEEN, OR, NOT, AND. Input and Output file formats. LogParser has a pretty impressive list of file formats that it can parse and a good selection of output formats that will let you generate output in a format that is useable for whatever process or application you may be using. From any of these To any of these IISW3C: parses IIS log files in the W3C Extended Log File Format. NAT: formats output records as readable tabulated columns. IIS: parses IIS log files in the Microsoft IIS Log File Format. CSV: formats output records as comma-separated values text. BIN: parses IIS log files in the Centralized Binary Log File Format. TSV: formats output records as tab-separated or space-separated values text. IISODBC: returns database records from the tables logged to by IIS when configured to log in the ODBC Log Format. XML: formats output records as XML documents. HTTPERR: parses HTTP error log files generated by Http.sys. W3C: formats output records in the W3C Extended Log File Format. URLSCAN: parses log files generated by the URLScan IIS filter. TPL: formats output records following user-defined templates. CSV: parses comma-separated values text files. IIS: formats output records in the Microsoft IIS Log File Format. TSV: parses tab-separated and space-separated values text files. SQL: uploads output records to a table in a SQL database. XML: parses XML text files. SYSLOG: sends output records to a Syslog server. W3C: parses text files in the W3C Extended Log File Format. DATAGRID: displays output records in a graphical user interface. NCSA: parses web server log files in the NCSA Common, Combined, and Extended Log File Formats. CHART: creates image files containing charts. TEXTLINE: returns lines from generic text files. TEXTWORD: returns words from generic text files. EVT: returns events from the Windows Event Log and from Event Log backup files (.evt files). FS: returns information on files and directories. REG: returns information on registry values. ADS: returns information on Active Directory objects. NETMON: parses network capture files created by NetMon. ETW: parses Enterprise Tracing for Windows trace log files and live sessions. COM: provides an interface to Custom Input Format COM Plugins. So, you can query data from any of the types on the left and really easily get it into a format where it is ready for analysis by other tools. To a DBA or network Administrator with an enquiring mind this is a treasure trove. In part 3 we will look at working with multiple sources and specifically outputting to SQL format. See you there!

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To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question…

- by Patrick Liekhus

UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback and comments. I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations. I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping. According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care? Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this? Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed. No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members. Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability. The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose. It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified. The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help? Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched. I have been interested in ORM for some time now. My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations. However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns. Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO). The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO. With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps. While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking. DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it. This sounds worse than it really is. What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with. Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable. And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - - Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities. In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these. We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers. Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly. This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team. I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”. In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework. Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements. With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance. Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems. If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it? Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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Sun Fire X4800 M2 Posts World Record x86 SPECjEnterprise2010 Result

- by Brian

Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 M2 using the Intel Xeon E7-8870 processor and Sun Fire X4470 M2 using the Intel Xeon E7-4870 processor, produced a world record single application server SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark result of 27,150.05 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server ran the application tier and the Sun Fire X4470 M2 server was used for the database tier. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server demonstrated 63% better performance compared to IBM P780 server result of 16,646.34 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server demonstrated 4% better performance than the Cisco UCS B440 M2 result, both results used the same number of processors. This result used Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server 1.7.0_02, and Oracle Database 11g. This result was produced using Oracle Linux. Performance Landscape Complete benchmark results are at the SPEC website, SPECjEnterprise2010 Results. The table below compares against the best results from IBM and Cisco. SPECjEnterprise2010 Performance Chart as of 3/12/2012 Submitter EjOPS* Application Server Database Server Oracle 27,150.05 1x Sun Fire X4800 M2 8x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E7-8870 Oracle WebLogic 12c 1x Sun Fire X4470 M2 4x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E7-4870 Oracle Database 11g (11.2.0.2) Cisco 26,118.67 2x UCS B440 M2 Blade Server 4x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E7-4870 Oracle WebLogic 11g (10.3.5) 1x UCS C460 M2 Blade Server 4x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E7-4870 Oracle Database 11g (11.2.0.2) IBM 16,646.34 1x IBM Power 780 8x 3.86 GHz POWER 7 WebSphere Application Server V7 1x IBM Power 750 Express 4x 3.55 GHz POWER 7 IBM DB2 9.7 Workgroup Server Edition FP3a * SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS, bigger is better. Configuration Summary Application Server: 1 x Sun Fire X4800 M2 8 x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon processor E7-8870 256 GB memory 4 x 10 GbE NIC 2 x FC HBA Oracle Linux 5 Update 6 Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.5) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM on Linux, version 1.7.0_02 (Java SE 7 Update 2) Database Server: 1 x Sun Fire X4470 M2 4 x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E7-4870 512 GB memory 4 x 10 GbE NIC 2 x FC HBA 2 x Sun StorageTek 2540 M2 4 x Sun Fire X4270 M2 4 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array Oracle Linux 5 Update 6 Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.2 Benchmark Description SPECjEnterprise2010 is the third generation of the SPEC organization's J2EE end-to-end industry standard benchmark application. The SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark has been designed and developed to cover the Java EE 5 specification's significantly expanded and simplified programming model, highlighting the major features used by developers in the industry today. This provides a real world workload driving the Application Server's implementation of the Java EE specification to its maximum potential and allowing maximum stressing of the underlying hardware and software systems. The workload consists of an end to end web based order processing domain, an RMI and Web Services driven manufacturing domain and a supply chain model utilizing document based Web Services. The application is a collection of Java classes, Java Servlets, Java Server Pages, Enterprise Java Beans, Java Persistence Entities (pojo's) and Message Driven Beans. The SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark heavily exercises all parts of the underlying infrastructure that make up the application environment, including hardware, JVM software, database software, JDBC drivers, and the system network. The primary metric of the SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark is jEnterprise Operations Per Second ("SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS"). This metric is calculated by adding the metrics of the Dealership Management Application in the Dealer Domain and the Manufacturing Application in the Manufacturing Domain. There is no price/performance metric in this benchmark. Key Points and Best Practices Sixteen Oracle WebLogic server instances were started using numactl, binding 2 instances per chip. Eight Oracle database listener processes were started, binding 2 instances per chip using taskset. Additional tuning information is in the report at http://spec.org. See Also Oracle Press Release -- SPECjEnterprise2010 Results Page Sun Fire X4800 M2 Server oracle.com OTN Sun Fire X4270 M2 Server oracle.com OTN Sun Storage 2540-M2 Array oracle.com OTN Oracle Linux oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN WebLogic Suite oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjEnterprise are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Sun Fire X4800 M2, 27,150.05 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS; IBM Power 780, 16,646.34 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS; Cisco UCS B440 M2, 26,118.67 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS. Results from www.spec.org as of 3/27/2012.

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SQL SERVER – Free Print Book on SQL Server Joes 2 Pros Kit

- by pinaldave

Rick Morelan and I were discussing earlier this month that what we can give back to the community. We believe our books are very much successful and very well received by the community. The five books are a journey from novice to expert. The books have changed many lives and helped many get jobs as well pass the SQL Certifications. Rick is from Seattle, USA and I am from Bangalore, India. There are 12 hours difference between us. We try to do weekly meeting to catch up on various personal and SQL related topics. Here is one of our recent conversations. Rick and Pinal Pinal: Good Morning Rick! Rick: Good Morning…err… Good Evening to you – Pinal! Pinal: Hey Rick, did you read the recent email which I sent you – one of our reader is thanking us for writing Joes 2 Pros series. He wants to dedicate his success to us. Can you believe it? Rick: Yeah, he is very kind but did you tell him that it is all because of his hard work on learning subject and we have very little contribution in his success. Pinal: Absolutely, I told him the same – I said we just wrote the book but it is he who learned from it and proved himself in his job. It is all him! We were just igniters. Rick: Good response. Pinal: Hey Rick! Are we doing enough for the community? What can we do more? Rick: Hmmm… Let us do something more. Pinal: Remember once we discussed the idea of if anyone who buys our Joes 2 Pros Combo Kit in the next 2 weeks – we will send them SQL Wait Stats for free. What do you say? Rick: I agree! Great Idea! Let us do it. Free Giveaway Well Rick and I liked the idea of doing more. We have decided to give away free SQL Server Wait Stats books to everybody who will purchase Joes 2 Pros Combo Kit between today (Oct 15, 2012) and Oct 26, 2012. This is not a contest or a lucky winner opportunity. Everybody who participates will qualify for it. Combo Availability USA – Amazon India - Flipkart | Indiaplaza Note1: USA kit contains FREE 5 DVDs. India Kit does not contain 5 DVDs due to legal issues. Note2: Indian Kit is priced at special Indian Economic Price. Qualify for Free Giveaway You must have purchased our Joes 2 Pros Combo Kit of 5 books between Oct 15, 2012 and Oct 26, 2012. Purchase before Oct 15, 2012 and after Oct 26, 2012 will not qualify for this giveaway. Send your original receipt (email, order details) to following addresses: “[email protected];[email protected]” with the subject line “Joes 2 Pros Kit Promotion Free Offer”. Do not change the subject line or your email may be missed. Clearly mention your shipping address with phone number and pin/zip code. Send your receipt before Oct 30, 2012. We will not entertain any conversation after Oct 30, 2012 cut off date. The Free books will be sent to USA and India address only. Availability USA - Amazon | India - Flipkart | Indiaplaza Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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Do We Indeed Have a Future? George Takei on Star Wars.

- by Bil Simser

George Takei (rhymes with Okay), probably best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek, has always had deep concerns for the present and the future. Whether on Earth or among the stars, he has the welfare of humanity very much at heart. I was digging through my old copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a great publication on monster and films that I grew up with, and came across this. This was his reaction to STAR WARS from issue 139 of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was written June 6, 1977. It is reprinted here without permission but I hope since the message is still valid to this day and has never been reprinted anywhere, nobody will mind me sharing it. STAR WARS is the most pre-posterously diverting galactic escape and at the same time the most hideously credible portent of the future yet.While I thrilled to the exploits that reminded me of the heroics of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, Burt Lancaster as the Crimson Pirate and Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, I was at the same time aghast at the phantasmagoric violence technology can place at our disposal. STAR WARS raised in my mind the question - do we indeed have a future?It seems to me what George Lucas has done is to masterfully guide us on a journey through space and time and bring us back face to face with today's reality. STAR WARS is more than science fiction, I think it is science fictitious reality.Just yesterday, June 7, 1977, I read that the United States will embark on the production of a neutron bomb - a bomb that will kill people on a gigantic scale but will not destroy buildings. A few days before that, I read that the Pentagon is fearful that the Soviets may have developed a warhead that could neutralize ours that have a capacity for that irrational concept overkill to the nth power. Already, it seems we have the technology to realize the awesome special effects simulations that we saw in the film.The political scene of STAR WARS is that of government by force and power, of revolutions based on some unfathomable grievance, survival through a combination of cunning and luck and success by the harnessing of technology - a picture not very much at variance from the political headlines that we read today.And most of all, look at the people; both the heroes in the film and the reaction of the audience. First, the heroes; Luke Skywalker is a pretty but easily led youth. Without any real philosophy to guide him, he easily falls under the influence of a mystical old man believed previously to be an eccentric hermit. Recognize a 1960's hippie or a 1970's moonie? Han Solo has a philosophy coupled with courage and skill. His philosophy is money. His proficiency comes for a price - the highest. Solo is a thoroughly avaricious mercenary. And the Princess, a decisive, strong, self-confident and chilly woman. The audience cheered when she wielded a gun. In all three, I missed qualities that could be called humane - love, kindness, yes, I missed sensuality. I also missed a sense of ideals and faith. In this regard the machines seemed more human. They demonstrated real affection for each other and an occasional poutiness. They exhibited a sense of fidelity and constancy. The machines were humanized and the humans conversely seemed mechanical.As a member of the audience, I was swept up by the sheer romantic escapsim of it all. The deering-dos, the rope swing escape across the pit, the ray gun battles and especially the swash buckle with the ray swords. Great fun!But I just hope that we weren't too intoxicated by the escapism to be able to focus on the recognizable. I hope the beauty of the effects didn't narcotize our sensitivity to violence. I hope the people see through the fantastically well done futuristic mirrors to the disquieting reflection of our own society. I hope they enjoy STAR WARS without being "purely entertained".

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