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  • Oracle Romania Summer School

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 What would you say about a Summer School within a corporation where you can learn, play and practice? You might think that this is something usually uncommon for a company and you would be right. However, Oracle’s main value being innovation, we came up with a new project for Romanian students and graduates. We organised Oracle Summer School , offering them the opportunity to develop their soft skills and gain valuable business knowledge and exposure. How was Oracle Summer School programme organised? We focused on students and graduates’ needs and combined business experience with training and practice. The twenty four participants had different backgrounds, being interested in Software, Hardware, Finance, Marketing or other areas. The programme fulfilled each of these needs, bringing them in contact with Specialists and Managers. The first two weeks were dedicated to the company visits, business presentations and networking. The participants got an insight about employees’ activities and projects. Storytelling was also part of the program and people from different departments spent a couple of hours with the participants, sharing their experiences, knowledge and interesting stories. The Recruitment team delivered a training about the job interview skills in order to make the participants feel better prepared for a Recruitment process. The second module consisted of two weeks of Soft Skills trainings delivered by professional trainers from different departments. The participants gained useful insight on the competencies required within a business environment. The evenings were dedicated to social activities and it not very long until they started feel part of a team. The third module will take place at the end of September and will put the participants in contact with senior people from the business who will become their Mentors. What do the participants say about Oracle Summer School? “ As a fresh computer science graduate, Oracle Summer School gave me the opportunity of finding what are the technical and nontechnical skills required in a large multinational company. It was a great way of seeing how the theoretical knowledge I received during college is applied in real-life scenarios and what skills I still need to develop. “  (Cosmin Radu) “ When arriving at Oracle I had high expectations, but did not know exactly what was going to unfold because of the program's lack of precedence. Right after the first day, my feedback outgrew the initial forecast and the following weeks continued to build upon it. I had the pleasure to acquaint with brilliant people. The program was outlined on various profiles, delivering a comprehensive experience. It was very engaging, informative and nevertheless fun. “ (Vlad Manciu) „ Oracle Summer School is by far the best summer school that I have ever attended. For me it has been a great experience so far, because I’ve learned not only how to use soft skills in a corporate environment, but I’ve learned a great deal about myself as well. However, the most valuable asset of this 3-week period were the people that I’ve met: great individuals and great professionals, whom I really grew fond of.” (Alexandru Purcarea) “Applying to Oracle Summer School has been the best decision I took in regard to how to spend my summer holiday. I had the chance to do job shadowing at some of the departments I was interested in and I attended great trainings on various subjects such as time management and emotional intelligence. Moreover, I made friends with the other participants and we enjoyed going out together after “classes”.(Andreea Tudor) If you are interested in joining our team and attending our events please follow us on https://campus.oracle.com/campus/HR/emea_main.html /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Updates broke my themes/shell [Ubuntu 12.04 running Gnome 3 ]

    - by APNW
    I am running gnome-session 3.4.2.1. After the latest updates (listed below) my theme regressed to what looks like tango - not sure. Am unable to change it using Gnome-tweak tool or the display settings. I am also unable to change the wallpaper. Here's what it looks like: Synaptic: Chromium and this is the wallpaper page even though I have selected the wallpaper, it actually does not change. This same problem occurred on my personal computer, and one other computer I have, all running the same software/config. The interesting thing is that while Gnome 3 and Unity are affected, Cinnamon is not. What I've done so far: purged and re-installed both gnome 3 and Unity- no change noted. So, how do I fix this? Thanks Here's the installation log: Start-Date: 2013-11-07 12:01:28 Upgrade: chromium-browser-l10n:i386 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04.1, 30.0.1599.114-0ubuntu0.12.04.3), libswscale2:i386 (0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8-0ubuntu0.12.04.1), chromium-codecs-ffmpeg:i386 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04.1, 30.0.1599.114-0ubuntu0.12.04.3), chromium-browser:i386 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04.1, 30.0.1599.114-0ubuntu0.12.04.3), libpostproc52:i386 (0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8-0ubuntu0.12.04.1), libavcodec-extra-53:i386 (0.8.6ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8ubuntu0.12.04.1), libavformat53:i386 (0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8-0ubuntu0.12.04.1), libavutil-extra-51:i386 (0.8.6ubuntu0.12.04.1, 0.8.8ubuntu0.12.04.1) End-Date: 2013-11-07 12:02:00 Start-Date: 2013-11-07 17:32:55 Commandline: aptdaemon role='role-commit-packages' sender=':1.136' Install: libmusicbrainz5-0:i386 (5.0.1-2~precise2), udisks2:i386 (1.98.0-1~precise1), libclutter-gst-1.0-0:i386 (1.5.4-0ubuntu2), libudisks2-0:i386 (1.98.0-1~precise1), cinnamon-session-common:i386 (2.0.4-20131105043005-precise), librhythmbox-core6:i386 (2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), gcr:i386 (3.4.1-3~precise1), libcluttergesture-0.0.2-0:i386 (0.0.2.1-2ubuntu3), libmx-1.0-2:i386 (1.4.3-0ubuntu1), guile-2.0-libs:i386 (2.0.5+1-1), libclutter-imcontext-0.1-0:i386 (0.1.4-2build1), libnatpmp1:i386 (20110808-3ubuntu1) Upgrade: gnome-keyring:i386 (3.2.2-2ubuntu4.1, 3.4.1-4ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon:i386 (2.0.6-20131026040307-precise, 2.0.10-20131105040309-precise), gir1.2-muffin-3.0:i386 (2.0.3-20131023003029-precise, 2.0.3-20131105003012-precise), gir1.2-totem-1.0:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), nemo:i386 (2.0.2-20131023010018-precise, 2.0.5-20131105010007-precise), aisleriot:i386 (3.2.3.2-0ubuntu1, 3.4.1-1~precise1), procps:i386 (3.2.8-11ubuntu6.2, 3.2.8-11ubuntu6.3), libcinnamon-desktop0:i386 (2.0.2-20131025011504-precise, 2.0.3-20131105011505-precise), libgck-1-0:i386 (3.2.2-2ubuntu4.1, 3.4.1-3~precise1), totem-plugins:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon-desktop-data:i386 (2.0.2-20131025011504-precise, 2.0.3-20131105011505-precise), rhythmbox:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), libgcr-3-1:i386 (3.2.2-2ubuntu4.1, 3.4.1-3~precise1), seahorse:i386 (3.2.2-0ubuntu2.1, 3.4.1-2~precise1), muffin-common:i386 (2.0.3-20131023003029-precise, 2.0.3-20131105003012-precise), totem-common:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), libtotem0:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), rhythmbox-data:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), gir1.2-cinnamondesktop-3.0:i386 (2.0.2-20131025011504-precise, 2.0.3-20131105011505-precise), cinnamon-session:i386 (2.0.1-20131021043004-precise, 2.0.4-20131105043005-precise), rhythmbox-mozilla:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), rhythmbox-plugin-zeitgeist:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), libmuffin0:i386 (2.0.3-20131023003029-precise, 2.0.3-20131105003012-precise), cjs:i386 (2.0.0-20131021020602-precise, 2.0.0-20131105020703-precise), rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon-common:i386 (2.0.6-20131026040307-precise, 2.0.10-20131105040309-precise), gnome-disk-utility:i386 (3.0.2-2ubuntu7, 3.4.1-0ubuntu1~precise1), nemo-fileroller:i386 (2.0.0-20131021020004-precise, 2.0.0-20131105020003-precise), libnemo-extension1:i386 (2.0.2-20131023010018-precise, 2.0.5-20131105010007-precise), rhythmbox-plugins:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), gimp:i386 (2.8.6-0precise1~ppa, 2.8.8-0precise0~ppa), cinnamon-settings-daemon:i386 (2.0.5-20131026004504-precise, 2.0.6-20131105004505-precise), libgimp2.0:i386 (2.8.6-0precise1~ppa, 2.8.8-0precise0~ppa), gir1.2-rb-3.0:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), wpasupplicant:i386 (0.7.3-6ubuntu2.1, 0.7.3-6ubuntu2.2), libcjs0c:i386 (2.0.0-20131021020602-precise, 2.0.0-20131105020703-precise), nemo-data:i386 (2.0.2-20131023010018-precise, 2.0.5-20131105010007-precise), totem:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), gimp-data:i386 (2.8.6-0precise1~ppa, 2.8.8-0precise0~ppa), transmission-common:i386 (2.51-0ubuntu1.3, 2.73-0ubuntu1~precise1), cinnamon-translations:i386 (2.0.1-20131021040407-precise, 2.0.1-20131105040807-precise), totem-mozilla:i386 (3.0.1-0ubuntu21.1, 3.4.3-0ubuntu1~precise1), rhythmbox-plugin-magnatune:i386 (2.96-0ubuntu4.3, 2.97-1ubuntu1~precise1), transmission-gtk:i386 (2.51-0ubuntu1.3, 2.73-0ubuntu1~precise1) End-Date: 2013-11-07 17:34:40

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  • Real Time BI in the Real World

    - by tobin.gilman(at)oracle.com
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} One of my favorite BI offerings from Oracle is a solution called Oracle Real Time Decisions.  Whenever I mention this product in customer meetings, eyes light up.  There are some fascinating examples of customers using it to up-sell, cross-sell, increase customer retention, and reduce risk in real time, with off the charts return on investment. I plan to share some of those stories in a future blog.  In this post however, I want to share some far more common real time analytics use case scenarios that are being addressed with widely deployed Oracle BI and data integration technologies Not all real time BI applications require continuous learning, predictive modeling, and data mining.  Many simply require the ability to integrate, aggregate, and access information that is current (typically within in few minutes or a few seconds).  The use cases are infinite.  A few I've seen: ·         Purchasing agents need to match demand against available inventory ·         Manufacturing planners need to monitor current parts and material against scheduled build plans ·         Airline agents need to match ticket demand against flight schedules, ·         Human resources managers need to track the status of global hiring requisitions against current headcount authorizations...you get the idea. One way of doing this is to run reports or federated queries directly against transactional systems.  That approach can be viable if you only need to access simple data sets on rare occasions.  High volume and complex queries can quickly bog down performance of mission critical transactional systems.  There is an architecturally simple way of solving the problem, and it's being applied by real companies around the world to solve real needs in real time.    Cbeyond is an Atlanta, GA based  provider of voice, data and mobile business applications delivers.  They deliver real time information to its call center agents  as they are interacting with their customers. The data they need resides in production CRM and other transactional systems, but  instead or reporting directly off the those systems, data is first moved to an operational data store (ODS).  Rather than running data intensive, time consuming, and performance degrading batch ETL routines to populate the ODS, Cbeyond uses Oracle Golden Gate software to incrementally capture and move only the changed records from log files of the transactional systems every few minutes.  There is no impact on transactional system performance, and the information needed by call center representatives is up to date.  Oracle Business Intelligence software presents the information to services reps in a rich, visual, and highly interactive format. Avea is similar to Cbeyond.  They are a telecommunications company who integrates billing and customer information in an ODS that is accessed by their call center agents in real time using Oracle Golden Gate and Oracle Business Intelligence.  They've taken it a step further by using the ODS to feed a data warehouse.  The operational data store provides the current information needed by call center agents during "in flight" customer interactions.  The data warehouse is used for more sophisticated analysis of historical data.  For maximum performance, both the ODS and data warehouse run on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. These are practical illustrations of companies addressing real time reporting and analysis needs using established business intelligence/data warehousing methodologies and tools common to many IT departments.  If real time BI could benefit your organization, you may be already be closer than you thought to having the pieces in place to solving the problem.    Give us a shout if you are interested in learning more or if you have an interesting use or approach to real-time BI.

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  • Creating SparseImages for Pivot

    - by John Conwell
    Learning how to programmatically make collections for Microsoft Live Labs Pivot has been a pretty interesting ride. There are very few examples out there, and the folks at MS Live Labs are often slow on any feedback.  But that is what Reflector is for, right? Well, I was creating these InfoCard images (similar to the Car images in the "New Cars" sample collection that that MS created for Pivot), and wanted to put a Tag Cloud into the info card.  The problem was the size of the tag cloud might vary in order for all the tags to fit into the tag cloud (often times being bigger than the info card itself).  This was because the varying word lengths and calculated font sizes. So, to fix this, I made the tag cloud its own separate image from the info card.  Then, I would create a sparse image out of the two images, where the tag cloud fit into a small section of the info card.  This would allow the user to see the info card, but then zoom into the tag cloud and see all the tags at a normal resolution.  Kind'a cool. But...I couldn't find one code example (not one!) of how to create a sparse image.  There is one page on the SeaDragon site (http://www.seadragon.com/developer/creating-content/deep-zoom-tools/) that gives over the API for creating images and collections, and it sparsely goes over how to create a sparse image, but unless you are familiar with the API already, the documentation doesn't help very much. The key is the Image.ViewportWidth and Image.ViewportOrigin properties of the image that is getting super imposed on the main image.  I'll walk through the code below.  I've setup a couple Point structs to represent the parent and sub image sizes, as well as where on the parent I want to position the sub image.  Next, create the parent image.  This is pretty straight forward.  Then I create the sub image.  Then I calculate several ratios; the height to width ratio of the sub image, the width ratio of the sub image to the parent image, the height ratio of the sub image to the parent image, then the X and Y coordinates on the parent image where I want the sub image to be placed represented as a ratio of the position to the parent image size. After all these ratios have been calculated, I use them to calculate the Image.ViewportWidth and Image.ViewportOrigin values, then pass the image objects into the SparseImageCreator and call Create. The key thing that was really missing from the API documentation page is that when setting up your sub images, everything is expressed in a ratio in relation to the main parent image.  If I had known this, it would have saved me a lot of trial and error time.  And how did I figure this out?  Reflector of course!  There is a tool called Deep Zoom Composer that came from MS Live Labs which can create a sparse image.  I just dug around the tool's code until I found the method that create sparse images.  But seriously...look at the API documentation from the SeaDragon size and look at the code below and tell me if the documentation would have helped you at all.  I don't think so!   public static void WriteDeepZoomSparseImage(string mainImagePath, string subImagePath, string destination) {     Point parentImageSize = new Point(720, 420);     Point subImageSize = new Point(490, 310);     Point subImageLocation = new Point(196, 17);     List<Image> images = new List<Image>();     //create main image     Image mainImage = new Image(mainImagePath);     mainImage.Size = parentImageSize;     images.Add(mainImage);     //create sub image     Image subImage = new Image(subImagePath);     double hwRatio = subImageSize.X/subImageSize.Y;            // height width ratio of the tag cloud     double nodeWidth = subImageSize.X/parentImageSize.X;        // sub image width to parent image width ratio     double nodeHeight = subImageSize.Y / parentImageSize.Y;    // sub image height to parent image height ratio     double nodeX = subImageLocation.X/parentImageSize.X;       //x cordinate position on parent / width of parent     double nodeY = subImageLocation.Y / parentImageSize.Y;     //y cordinate position on parent / height of parent     subImage.ViewportWidth = (nodeWidth < double.Epsilon) ? 1.0 : (1.0 / nodeWidth);     subImage.ViewportOrigin = new Point(         (nodeWidth < double.Epsilon) ? -1.0 : (-nodeX / nodeWidth),         (nodeHeight < double.Epsilon) ? -1.0 : ((-nodeY / nodeHeight) / hwRatio));     images.Add(subImage);     //create sparse image     SparseImageCreator creator = new SparseImageCreator();     creator.Create(images, destination); }

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  • await, WhenAll, WaitAll, oh my!!

    - by cibrax
    If you are dealing with asynchronous work in .NET, you might know that the Task class has become the main driver for wrapping asynchronous calls. Although this class was officially introduced in .NET 4.0, the programming model for consuming tasks was much more simplified in C# 5.0 in .NET 4.5 with the addition of the new async/await keywords. In a nutshell, you can use these keywords to make asynchronous calls as if they were sequential, and avoiding in that way any fork or callback in the code. The compiler takes care of the rest. I was yesterday writing some code for making multiple asynchronous calls to backend services in parallel. The code looked as follow, var allResults = new List<Result>(); foreach(var provider in providers) { var results = await provider.GetResults(); allResults.AddRange(results); } return allResults; You see, I was using the await keyword to make multiple calls in parallel. Something I did not consider was the overhead this code implied after being compiled. I started an interesting discussion with some smart folks in twitter. One of them, Tugberk Ugurlu, had the brilliant idea of actually write some code to make a performance comparison with another approach using Task.WhenAll. There are two additional methods you can use to wait for the results of multiple calls in parallel, WhenAll and WaitAll. WhenAll creates a new task and waits for results in that new task, so it does not block the calling thread. WaitAll, on the other hand, blocks the calling thread. This is the code Tugberk initially wrote, and I modified afterwards to also show the results of WaitAll. class Program { private static Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] funcs = new Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] { async (watch) => { watch.Start(); await Task.Delay(1000); Console.WriteLine("1000 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(1500); Console.WriteLine("1500 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(2000); Console.WriteLine("2000 one has been completed."); watch.Stop(); Console.WriteLine(watch.ElapsedMilliseconds + "ms has been elapsed."); } }; static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Await in loop work starts..."); DoWorkAsync().ContinueWith(task => { Console.WriteLine("Parallel work starts..."); DoWorkInParallelAsync().ContinueWith(t => { Console.WriteLine("WaitAll work starts..."); WaitForAll(); }); }); Console.ReadLine(); } static async Task DoWorkAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); foreach (var func in funcs) { await func(watch); } } static async Task DoWorkInParallelAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); await Task.WhenAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } static void WaitForAll() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); Task.WaitAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } } After running this code, the results were very concluding. Await in loop work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 4532ms has been elapsed. Parallel work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2007ms has been elapsed. WaitAll work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2009ms has been elapsed. The await keyword in a loop does not really make the calls in parallel.

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  • Thread.Interrupt Is Evil

    - by Alois Kraus
    Recently I have found an interesting issue with Thread.Interrupt during application shutdown. Some application was crashing once a week and we had not really a clue what was the issue. Since it happened not very often it was left as is until we have got some memory dumps during the crash. A memory dump usually means WindDbg which I really like to use (I know I am one of the very few fans of it).  After a quick analysis I did find that the main thread already had exited and the thread with the crash was stuck in a Monitor.Wait. Strange Indeed. Running the application a few thousand times under the debugger would potentially not have shown me what the reason was so I decided to what I call constructive debugging. I did create a simple Console application project and try to simulate the exact circumstances when the crash did happen from the information I have via memory dump and source code reading. The thread that was  crashing was actually MS code from an old version of the Microsoft Caching Application Block. From reading the code I could conclude that the main thread did call the Dispose method on the CacheManger class which did call Thread.Interrupt on the cache scavenger thread which was just waiting for work to do. My first version of the repro looked like this   static void Main(string[] args) { Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); } static void ThreadFunc() { while (true) { object value = Dequeue(); // block until unblocked or awaken via ThreadInterruptedException } } static object WaitObject = new object(); static object Dequeue() { object lret = "got value"; try { lock (WaitObject) { } } catch (ThreadInterruptedException) { Console.WriteLine("Got ThreadInterruptException"); lret = null; } return lret; } I do start a background thread and call Thread.Interrupt on it and then directly let the application terminate. The thread in the meantime does plenty of Monitor.Enter/Leave calls to simulate work on it. This first version did not crash. So I need to dig deeper. From the memory dump I did know that the finalizer thread was doing just some critical finalizers which were closing file handles. Ok lets add some long running finalizers to the sample. class FinalizableObject : CriticalFinalizerObject { ~FinalizableObject() { Console.WriteLine("Hi we are waiting to finalize now and block the finalizer thread for 5s."); Thread.Sleep(5000); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { FinalizableObject fin = new FinalizableObject(); Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); GC.KeepAlive(fin); // prevent finalizing it too early // After leaving main the other thread is woken up via Thread.Abort // while we are finalizing. This causes a stackoverflow in the CLR ThreadAbortException handling at this time. } With this changed Main method and a blocking critical finalizer I did get my crash just like the real application. The funny thing is that this is actually a CLR bug. When the main method is left the CLR does suspend all threads except the finalizer thread and declares all objects as garbage. After the normal finalizers were called the critical finalizers are executed to e.g. free OS handles (usually). Remember that I did call Thread.Interrupt as one of the last methods in the Main method. The Interrupt method is actually asynchronous and does wake a thread up and throws a ThreadInterruptedException only once unlike Thread.Abort which does rethrow the exception when an exception handling clause is left. It seems that the CLR does not expect that a frozen thread does wake up again while the critical finalizers are executed. While trying to raise a ThreadInterrupedException the CLR goes down with an stack overflow. Ups not so nice. Why has this nobody noticed for years is my next question. As it turned out this error does only happen on the CLR for .NET 4.0 (x86 and x64). It does not show up in earlier or later versions of the CLR. I have reported this issue on connect here but so far it was not confirmed as a CLR bug. But I would be surprised if my console application was to blame for a stack overflow in my test thread in a Monitor.Wait call. What is the moral of this story? Thread.Abort is evil but Thread.Interrupt is too. It is so evil that even the CLR of .NET 4.0 contains a race condition during the CLR shutdown. When the CLR gurus can get it wrong the chances are high that you get it wrong too when you use this constructs. If you do not believe me see what Patrick Smacchia does blog about Thread.Abort and List.Sort. Not only the CLR creators can get it wrong. The BCL writers do sometimes have a hard time with correct exception handling as well. If you do tell me that you use Thread.Abort frequently and never had problems with it I do suspect that you do not have looked deep enough into your application to find such sporadic errors.

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  • A Basic Thread

    - by Joe Mayo
    Most of the programs written are single-threaded, meaning that they run on the main execution thread. For various reasons such as performance, scalability, and/or responsiveness additional threads can be useful. .NET has extensive threading support, from the basic threads introduced in v1.0 to the Task Parallel Library (TPL) introduced in v4.0. To get started with threads, it's helpful to begin with the basics; starting a Thread. Why Do I Care? The scenario I'll use for needing to use a thread is writing to a file.  Sometimes, writing to a file takes a while and you don't want your user interface to lock up until the file write is done. In other words, you want the application to be responsive to the user. How Would I Go About It? The solution is to launch a new thread that performs the file write, allowing the main thread to return to the user right away.  Whenever the file writing thread completes, it will let the user know.  In the meantime, the user is free to interact with the program for other tasks. The following examples demonstrate how to do this. Show Me the Code? The code we'll use to work with threads is in the System.Threading namespace, so you'll need the following using directive at the top of the file: using System.Threading; When you run code on a thread, the code is specified via a method.  Here's the code that will execute on the thread: private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written."); } The call to Thread.Sleep(1000) delays thread execution. The parameter is specified in milliseconds, and 1000 means that this will cause the program to sleep for approximately 1 second.  This method happens to be static, but that's just part of this example, which you'll see is launched from the static Main method.  A thread could be instance or static.  Notice that the method does not have parameters and does not have a return type. As you know, the way to refer to a method is via a delegate.  There is a delegate named ThreadStart in System.Threading that refers to a method without parameters or return type, shown below: ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); I'll show you the whole program below, but the ThreadStart instance above goes in the Main method. The thread uses the ThreadStart instance, fileWriterHandlerDelegate, to specify the method to execute on the thread: Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); As shown above, the argument type for the Thread constructor is the ThreadStart delegate type. The fileWriterHandlerDelegate argument is an instance of the ThreadStart delegate type. This creates an instance of a thread and what code will execute, but the new thread instance, fileWriter, isn't running yet. You have to explicitly start it, like this: fileWriter.Start(); Now, the code in the WriteFile method is executing on a separate thread. Meanwhile, the main thread that started the fileWriter thread continues on it's own.  You have two threads running at the same time. Okay, I'm Starting to Get Glassy Eyed. How Does it All Fit Together? The example below is the whole program, pulling all the previous bits together. It's followed by its output and an explanation. using System; using System.Threading; namespace BasicThread { class Program { static void Main() { ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); Console.WriteLine("Starting FileWriter"); fileWriter.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Called FileWriter"); Console.ReadKey(); } private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written"); } } } And here's the output: Starting FileWriter Called FileWriter File Written So, Why are the Printouts Backwards? The output above corresponds to Console.Writeline statements in the program, with the second and third seemingly reversed. In a single-threaded program, "File Written" would print before "Called FileWriter". However, this is a multi-threaded (2 or more threads) program.  In multi-threading, you can't make any assumptions about when a given thread will run.  In this case, I added the Sleep statement to the WriteFile method to greatly increase the chances that the message from the main thread will print first. Without the Thread.Sleep, you could run this on a system with multiple cores and/or multiple processors and potentially get different results each time. Interesting Tangent but What Should I Get Out of All This? Going back to the main point, launching the WriteFile method on a separate thread made the program more responsive.  The file writing logic ran for a while, but the main thread returned to the user, as demonstrated by the print out of "Called FileWriter".  When the file write finished, it let the user know via another print statement. This was a very efficient use of CPU resources that made for a more pleasant user experience. Joe

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  • Seizing the Moment with Mobility

    - by Divya Malik
    Empowering people to work where they want to work is becoming more critical now with the consumerisation of technology. Employees are bringing their own devices to the workplace and expecting to be productive wherever they are. Sales people welcome the ability to run their critical business applications where they can be most effective which is typically on the road and when they are still with the customer. Oracle has invested many years of research in understanding customer's Mobile requirements. “The keys to building the best user experience were building in a lot of flexibility in ways to support sales, and being useful,” said Arin Bhowmick, Director, CRM, for the Applications UX team. “We did that by talking to and analyzing the needs of a lot of people in different roles.” The team studied real-life sales teams. “We wanted to study salespeople in context with their work,” Bhowmick said. “We studied all user types in the CRM world because we wanted to build a user interface and user experience that would cater to sales representatives, marketing managers, sales managers, and more. Not only did we do studies in our labs, but also we did studies in the field and in mobile environments because salespeople are always on the go.” Here is a recent post from Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps which was featured on the Oracle Applications Blog.  Mobile devices are forcing a paradigm shift in the workplace – they’re changing the way businesses can do business and the type of cultures they can nurture. As our customers talk about their mobile needs, we hear them saying they want instant-on access to enterprise data so workers can be more effective at their jobs anywhere, anytime. They also are interested in being more cost effective from an IT point of view. The mobile revolution – with the idea of BYOD (bring your own device) – has added an interesting dynamic because previously IT was driving the employee device strategy and ecosystem. That's been turned on its head with the consumerization of IT. Now employees are figuring out how to use their personal devices for work purposes and IT has to figure out how to adapt. Blurring the Lines between Work and Personal Life My vision of where businesses will be five years from now is that our work lives and personal lives will be more interwoven together. In turn, enterprises will have to determine how to make employees’ work lives fit more into the fabric of their personal lives. And personal devices like smartphones are going to drive significant business value because they let us accomplish things very incrementally. I can be sitting on a train or in a taxi and be productive. At the end of any meeting, I can capture ideas and tasks or follow up with people in real time. Mobile devices enable this notion of seizing the moment – capitalizing on opportunities that might otherwise have slipped away because we're not connected. For the industry shapers out there, this is game changing. The lean and agile workforce is definitely the future. This notion of the board sitting down with the executive team to lay out strategic objectives for a three- to five-year plan, bringing in HR to determine how they're going to staff the strategic activities, kicking off the execution, and then revisiting the plan in three to five years to create another three- to five-year plan is yesterday's model. Businesses that continue to approach innovating in that way are in the dinosaur age. Today it's about incremental planning and incremental execution, which requires a lot of cohesion and synthesis within the workforce. There needs to be this interweaving notion within the workforce about how ideas cascade down, how people engage, how they stay connected, and how insights are shared. How to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Marketplace The notion of Facebook isn’t new. We lived it pre-Internet days with America Online and Prodigy – Facebook is just the renaissance of these services in a more viral and pervasive way. And given the trajectory of the consumerization of IT with people bringing their personal tooling to work, the enterprise has no option but to adapt. The sooner that businesses realize this from a top-down point of view the sooner that they will be able to really drive significant innovation and adapt to the marketplace. There are a small number of companies right now (I think it's closer to 20% rather than 80%, but the number is expanding) that are able to really innovate in this incremental marketplace. So from a competitive point of view, there's no choice but to be social and stay connected. By far the majority of users on Facebook and LinkedIn are mobile users – people on iPhones, smartphones, Android phones, and tablets. It's not the couch people, right? It's the on-the-go people – those people at the coffee shops. Usually when you're sitting at your desk on a big desktop computer, typically you have better things to do than to be on Facebook. This is a topic I'm extremely passionate about because I think mobile devices are game changing. Mobility delivers significant value to businesses – it also brings dramatic simplification from a functional point of view and transforms our work life experience. Hernan Capdevila Vice President, Oracle Applications Development

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  • Gamification = -10#/3mo

    - by erikanollwebb
    One of the purposes of gamification of anything is to see if you can modify the behavior of the user. In the enterprise, that might mean getting sales people to enter more information into a CRM system, encouraging employees to update their HR records, motivating people to participate in forums and discussions, or process invoices more quickly.  Wikipedia defines behavior modification as "the traditional term for the use of empirically demonstrated behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of behavior through its extinction, punishment and/or satiation."  Gamification is just a way to modify someone's behavior using game mechanics. And the magic question is always whether it works. So I thought I would present my own little experiment from the last few months.  This spring, I upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy 4.  It's a pretty sweet phone in many ways, but one of the little extras I discovered was a built in app called S Health. S Health is an app that you can use to track calories, weight, exercise and it has a built in pedometer. I looked at it when I got the phone, but assumed you had to turn it on to use it so I didn't look at it much.  But sometime in July, I realized that in fact, it just ran in the background and was quietly tracking my steps, with a goal of 10,000 per day.  10,000 steps per day is this magic number recommended by the Surgeon General and the American Heart Association.  Dr. Oz pushes it as the goal for daily exercise.  It's about 5 miles of walking. I'm generally not the kind of person who always has my phone with me.  I leave it in my purse and pull it out when I need it.  But then I realized that meant I wasn't getting a good measure of my steps.  I decided to do a little experiment, and carry it with me as much as possible for a week.  That's when I discovered the gamification that changed my life over the last 3 months.  When I hit 10,000 steps, the app jingled out a little "success!" tune and I got a badge.  I was hooked.  I started carrying my phone.  I started making sure I had shoes I could walk in with me.  I started walking at lunch time, because I realized how often I sat at my desk for 8-10 hours every day without moving.  I started pestering my husband to walk with me after work because I hadn't hit my 10,000 yet, leading him at one point to say "I'm not as much a slave to that badge as you are!"  I started looking at parking lots differently.  Can't get a space up close?  No worries, just that many steps toward my 10,000.  I even tried to see if there was a second power user level at 15,000 or 20,000 (*sadly, no).  If I was close at the end of the day, I have done laps around my house until I got my badge.  I have walked around the block one more time to get my badge.  I have mentally chastised myself when I forgot to put my phone in my pocket because I don't know how many steps I got.  The badge below I got when my boss and I were in New York City and we walked around the block of our hotel just to watch the badge pop up. There are a bunch of tools out on the market now that have similar ideas for helping you to track your exercise, make it social.  There are apps (my favorite is still Zombies, Run!).  You could buy a FitBit or UP by Jawbone.   Interactive fitness makes the Expresso stationary bike with built in video games.  All designed to help you be more aware of your activity and keep you engaged and motivated.  And the idea is to help you change your behavior. I know someone who would spend extra time and work hard on the Expresso because he had built up strategies for how to kill the most dragons while he was riding to get more points.  When the machine broke down, he didn't ride a different bike because it just wasn't that interesting. But for me, just the simple jingle and badge have been all I needed.  I admit, I still giggle gleefully when I hear the tune sing out from my pocket. After a few weeks, I noticed I had dropped a few pounds.  Not a lot, just 2-3.  But then I was really hooked.  I started making a point both to eat a little less and hit 10,000 steps as much as I could.  I bemoaned that during the floods in Boulder, I wasn't hitting my 10,000 steps.  And now, a few months later, I'm almost 10 lbs lighter. All for 1 badge a day. So yes, simple gamification can increase motivation and engagement.  And that can lead to changes in behavior.  Now the job is to apply that to the enterprise space in a meaningful and engaging way. 

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  • NDepend Evaluation: Part 3

    - by Anthony Trudeau
    NDepend is a Visual Studio add-in designed for intense code analysis with the goal of high code quality. NDepend uses a number of metrics and aggregates the data in pleasing static and active visual reports. My evaluation of NDepend will be broken up into several different parts. In the first part of the evaluation I looked at installing the add-in.  And in the last part I went over my first impressions including an overview of the features.  In this installment I provide a little more detail on a few of the features that I really like. Dependency Matrix The dependency matrix is one of the rich visual components provided with NDepend.  At a glance it lets you know where you have coupling problems including cycles.  It does this with number indicating the weight of the dependency and a color-coding that indicates the nature of the dependency. Green and blue cells are direct dependencies (with the difference being whether the relationship is from row-to-column or column-to-row).  Black cells are the ones that you really want to know about.  These indicate that you have a cycle.  That is, type A refers to type B and type B also refers to Type A. But, that’s not the end of the story.  A handy pop-up appears when you hover over the cell in question.  It explains the color, the dependency, and provides several interesting links that will teach you more than you want to know about the dependency. You can double-click the problem cells to explode the dependency.  That will show the dependencies on a method-by-method basis allowing you to more easily target and fix the problem.  When you’re done you can click the back button on the toolbar. Dependency Graph The dependency graph is another component provided.  It’s complementary to the dependency matrix, but it isn’t as easy to identify dependency issues using the window. On a positive note, it does provide more information than the matrix. My biggest issue with the dependency graph is determining what is shown.  This was not readily obvious.  I ended up using the navigation buttons to get an acceptable view.  I would have liked to choose what I see. Once you see the types you want you can get a decent idea of coupling strength based on the width of the dependency lines.  Double-arrowed lines are problematic and are shown in red.  The size of the boxes will be related to the metric being displayed.  This is controlled using the Box Size drop-down in the toolbar.  Personally, I don’t find the size of the box to be helpful, so I change it to Constant Font. One nice thing about the display is that you can see the entire path of dependencies when you hover over a type.  This is done by color-coding the dependencies and dependants.  It would be nice if selecting the box for the type would lock the highlighting in place. I did find a perhaps unintended work-around to the color-coding.  You can lock the color-coding in by hovering over the type, right-clicking, and then clicking on the canvas area to clear the pop-up menu.  You can then do whatever with it including saving it to an image file with the color-coding. CQL NDepend uses a code query language (CQL) to work with your code just like it was a database.  CQL cannot be confused with the robustness of T-SQL or even LINQ, but it represents an impressive attempt at providing an expressive way to enumerate and interrogate your code. There are two main windows you’ll use when working with CQL.  The CQL Query Explorer allows you to define what queries (rules) are run as part of a report – I immediately unselected rules that I don’t want in my results.  The CQL Query Edit window is where you can view or author your own rules.  The explorer window is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t mention it further other than to say that any queries you author will appear in the custom group. Authoring your own queries is really hard to screw-up.  The Intellisense-like pop-ups tell you what you can do while making composition easy.  I was able to create a query within two minutes of playing with the editor.  My query warns if any types that are interfaces don’t start with an “I”. WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TYPES WHERE IsInterface AND !NameLike “I” The results from the CQL Query Edit window are immediate. That fact makes it useful for ad hoc querying.  It’s worth mentioning two things that could make the experience smoother.  First, out of habit from using Visual Studio I expect to be able to scroll and press Tab to select an item in the list (like Intellisense).  You have to press Enter when you scroll to the item you want.  Second, the commands are case-sensitive.  I don’t see a really good reason to enforce that. CQL has a lot of potential not just in enforcing code quality, but also enforcing architectural constraints that your enterprise has defined. Up Next My next update will be the final part of the evaluation.  I will summarize my experience and provide my conclusions on the NDepend add-in. ** View Part 1 of the Evaluation ** ** View Part 2 of the Evaluation ** Disclaimer: Patrick Smacchia contacted me about reviewing NDepend. I received a free license in return for sharing my experiences and talking about the capabilities of the add-in on this site. There is no expectation of a positive review elicited from the author of NDepend.

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  • JavaDay Taipei 2014 Trip Report

    - by reza_rahman
    JavaDay Taipei 2014 was held at the Taipei International Convention Center on August 1st. Organized by Oracle University, it is one of the largest Java developer events in Taiwan. This was another successful year for JavaDay Taipei with a fully sold out venue packed with youthful, energetic developers (this was my second time at the event and I have already been invited to speak again next year!). In addition to Oracle speakers like me, Steve Chin and Naveen Asrani, the event also featured a bevy of local speakers including Taipei Java community leaders. Topics included Java SE, Java EE, JavaFX, cloud and Big Data. It was my pleasure and privilege to present one of the opening keynotes for the event. I presented my session on Java EE titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". I covered the changes in Java EE 7 as well as what's coming in Java EE 8. I demoed the Cargo Tracker Java EE BluePrints. I also briefly talked about Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 8. The slides for the keynote are below (click here to download and view the actual PDF): It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file. In the afternoon I did my JavaScript + Java EE 7 talk titled "Using JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients with Java EE 7". This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The talk was completely packed. The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. I am delivering this material at JavaOne 2014 as a two-hour tutorial. This should give me a little more bandwidth to dig a little deeper, especially on the JavaScript end. I finished off Java Day Taipei with my talk titled "Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE" (this was the last session of the conference). The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here: Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE from Reza Rahman The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running. After the event the Oracle University folks hosted a reception in the evening which was very well attended by organizers, speakers and local Java community leaders. I am extremely saddened by the fact that this otherwise excellent trip was scarred by terrible tragedy. After the conference I joined a few folks for a hike on the Maokong Mountain on Saturday. The group included friends in the Taiwanese Java community including Ian and Robbie Cheng. Without warning, fatal tragedy struck on a remote part of the trail. Despite best efforts by us, the excellent Taiwanese Emergency Rescue Team and World class Taiwanese physicians we were unable to save our friend Robbie Cheng's life. Robbie was just thirty-four years old and is survived by his younger brother, mother and father. Being the father of a young child myself, I can only imagine the deep sorrow that this senseless loss unleashes. Robbie was a key member of the Taiwanese Java community and a Java Evangelist at Sun at one point. Ironically the only picture I was able to take of the trail was mere moments before tragedy. I thought I should place him in that picture in profoundly respectful memoriam: Perhaps there is some solace in the fact that there is something inherently honorable in living a bright life, dying young and meeting one's end on a beautiful remote mountain trail few venture to behold let alone attempt to ascend in a long and tired lifetime. Perhaps I'd even say it's a fate I would not entirely regret facing if it were my own. With that thought in mind it seems appropriate to me to quote some lyrics from the song "Runes to My Memory" by legendary Swedish heavy metal band Amon Amarth idealizing a fallen Viking warrior cut down in his prime: "Here I lie on wet sand I will not make it home I clench my sword in my hand Say farewell to those I love When I am dead Lay me in a mound Place my weapons by my side For the journey to Hall up high When I am dead Lay me in a mound Raise a stone for all to see Runes carved to my memory" I submit my deepest condolences to Robbie's family and hope my next trip to Taiwan ends in a less somber note.

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  • My Feelings About Microsoft Surface

    - by Valter Minute
    Advice: read the title carefully, I’m talking about “feelings” and not about advanced technical points proved in a scientific and objective way I still haven’t had a chance to play with a MS Surface tablet (I would love to, of course) and so my ideas just came from reading different articles on the net and MS official statements. Remember also that the MVP motto begins with “Independent” (“Independent Experts. Real World Answers.”) and this is just my humble opinion about a product and a technology. I know that, being an MS MVP you can be called an “MS-fanboy”, I don’t care, I hope that people can appreciate my opinion, even if it doesn’t match theirs. The “Surface” brand can be confusing for techies that knew the “original” surface concept but I think that will be a fresh new brand name for most of the people out there. But marketing department are here to confuse people… so I can understand this “recycle” of an existing name. So Microsoft is entering the hardware arena… for me this is good news. Microsoft developed some nice hardware in the past: the xbox, zune (even if the commercial success was quite limited) and, last but not least, the two arc mices (old and new model) that I use and appreciate. In the past Microsoft worked with OEMs and that model lead to good and bad things. Good thing (for microsoft, at least) is market domination by windows-based PCs that only in the last years has been reduced by the return of the Mac and tablets. Google is also moving in the hardware business with its acquisition of Motorola, and Apple leveraged his control of both the hardware and software sides to develop innovative products. Microsoft can scare OEMs and make them fly away from windows (but where?) or just lead the pack, showing how devices should be designed to compete in the market and bring back some of the innovation that disappeared from recent PC products (look at the shelves of your favorite electronics store and try to distinguish a laptop between the huge mass of anonymous PCs on displays… only Macs shine out there…). Having to compete with MS “official” hardware will force OEMs to develop better product and bring back some real competition in a market that was ruled only by prices (the lower the better even when that means low quality) and no innovative features at all (when it was the last time that a new PC surprised you?). Moving into a new market is a big and risky move, but with Windows 8 Microsoft is playing a crucial move for its future, trying to be back in the innovation run against apple and google. MS can’t afford to fail this time. I saw the new devices (the WinRT and Pro) and the specifications are scarce, misleading and confusing. The first impression is that the device looks like an iPad with a nice keyboard cover… Using “HD” and “full HD” to define display resolution instead of using the real figures and reviving the “ClearType” brand (now dead on Win8 as reported here and missed by people who hate to read text on displays, like myself) without providing clear figures (couldn’t you count those damned pixels?) seems to imply that MS was caught by surprise by apple recent “retina” displays that brought very high definition screens on tablets.Also there are no specifications about the processors used (even if some sources report NVidia Tegra for the ARM tablet and i5 for the x86 one) and expected battery life (a critical point for tablets and the point that killed Windows7 x86 based tablets). Also nothing about the price, and this will be another critical point because other platform out there already provide lots of applications and have a good user base, if MS want to enter this market tablets pricing must be competitive. There are some expansion ports (SD and USB), so no fixed storage model (even if the specs talks about 32-64GB for RT and 128-256GB for pro). I like this and don’t like the apple model where flash memory (that it’s dirt cheap used in thumdrives or SD cards) is as expensive as gold (or cocaine to have a more accurate per gram measurement) when mounted inside a tablet/phone. For big files you’ll be able to use external media and an SD card could be used to store files that don’t require super-fast SSD-like access times, I hope. To be honest I really don’t like the marketplace model and the limitation of Windows RT APIs (no local database? from a company that based a good share of its success on VB6+Access!) and lack of desktop support on the ARM (even if the support is here and has been used to port office). It’s a step toward the consumer market (where competitors are making big money), but may impact enterprise (and embedded) users that may not appreciate Windows 8 new UI or the limitations of the new app model (if you aren’t connected you are dead ). Not having compatibility with the desktop will require brand new applications and honestly made all the CPU cycles spent to convert .NET IL into real machine code in the past like a huge waste of time… as soon as a new processor architecture is supported by Windows you still have to rewrite part of your application (and MS is pushing HTML5+JS and native code more than .NET in my perception). On the other side I believe that the development experience provided by Visual Studio is still miles (or kilometres) ahead of the competition and even the all-uppercase menu of VS2012 hasn’t changed this situation. The new metro UI got mixed reviews. On my side I should say that is very pleasant to use on a touch screen, I like the minimalist design (even if sometimes is too minimal and hides stuff that, in my opinion, should be visible) but I should also say that using it with mouse and keyboard is like trying to pick your nose with boxing gloves… Metro is also very interesting for embedded devices where touch screen usage is quite common and where having an application taking all the screen is the norm. For devices like kiosks, vending machines etc. this kind of UI can be a great selling point. I don’t need a new tablet (to be honest I’m pretty happy with my wife’s iPad and with my PC), but I may change my opinion after having a chance to play a little bit with those new devices and understand what’s hidden under all this mysterious and generic announcements and specifications!

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  • Using Resources the Right Way

    - by BuckWoody
    It’s an interesting time in computing technology. At one point there was a dearth of information available for solving a given problem, or educating ourselves on broader topics so that we can solve problems in the future. With dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands of web sites and content available (for free, in many cases) from vendors, peers, even colleges and universities, it seems like there is actually too much information. Who has the time to absorb all this information and training? Even if you had the inclination, where to start? In fact, it seems so overwhelming that I often hear people saying that they can’t find the training they need, or that vendor X or Y “doesn’t help their users”. On questioning these folks, however, I often find that they – and sometimes I - haven’t put in the effort to learn what resources we have. That’s where blogs, like this one, can help. If you follow a blog, either by checking it often or perhaps subscribing to the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, you’ll be able to spread out the search or create a mental filter for the information you need. But it’s not enough just read a blog or a web page. The creators need real feedback – what doesn’t work, and what does. Yes, you’re allowed to tell a vendor or writer “This helped me because…” so that you reinforce the positives. To be sure, bring up what doesn’t work as well –  that’s fine. But be specific, and be constructive. You’d be surprised at how much it matters. I know for a fact at Microsoft we listen – there is a real live person that reads your comments. I’m sure this is true of other vendors, and I also know that most blog authors – yours truly most especially – wants to know what you think.   In this blog entry I’d to call your attention to three resources you have at your disposal, and how you can use them to help. I’ll try to bring up things like this from time to time that I find useful, and cover in them in more depth like this. Think of this as a synopsis of a longer set of resources that you can use to filter whether you want to research further, bookmark, or forward on to a circle of friends where you think it might help them.   Data Driven Design Concepts http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156154 I’ll start with a great site that walks you through the process of designing a solution from a data-first perspective. As you know, I believe all computing is merely re-arranging data. If you follow that logic as well, you’ll realize that whenever you create a solution, you should start at the data-end of the application. This resource helps you do that. Even if you don’t use the specific technologies the instructions use, the concepts hold for almost any other technology that deals with data. This should be a definite bookmark for a developer, DBA, or Data Architect. When I mentioned my admiration for this resource here at Microsoft, the team that created it contacted me and asked if I’d share an e-mail address to my readers so that you can comment on it. You’re guaranteed to be heard – you can suggest changes, talk about how useful – or not – it is, and so on. Here’s that address:  [email protected]   End-to-End Example of a complete Hybrid Application – with Live Demo https://azurestocktrader.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx I learn by example. I also like having ready-made, live, functional demos that show the completed solution at work. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how a complex, complete, hybrid application that bridges on-premises systems with cloud-based databases, code, functions and more, this is it. It’s a stock-trading simulator, and you can get everything from the design to the code itself, or you can just play with the application. It’s running on Windows Azure, the actual production servers we use for everything else. Using a Cloud-Based Service https://azureconfigweb.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx Along with that stock-trading application, you have a full demonstration and usable code sample of a web-based service available. If you’re a developer, this is a style of code you need to understand for everything from iPhone development to a full Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. So check out these resources. I’ll post more from time to time as I run across them. Hopefully they’ll be as useful to you as they are to me. Oh, and if you have a comment on any of the resources, let them know. And if you have any comments about these or any of my entries, feel free to post away. To quote a famous TV Show: “Hello Seattle – I’m listening…”

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  • #OOW 2012 : IaaS, Private Cloud, Multitenant Database, and X3H2M2

    - by Eric Bezille
    The title of this post is a summary of the 4 announcements made by Larry Ellison today, during the opening session of Oracle Open World 2012... To know what's behind X3H2M2, you will have to wait a little, as I will go in order, beginning with the IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service - announcement. Oracle IaaS goes Public... and Private... Starting in 2004 with Fusion development, Oracle Cloud was launch last year to provide not only SaaS Application, based on standard development, but also the underlying PaaS, required to build the specifics, and required interconnections between applications, in and outside of the Cloud. Still, to cover the end-to-end Cloud  Services spectrum, we had to provide an Infrastructure as a Service, leveraging our Servers, Storage, OS, and Virtualization Technologies, all "Engineered Together". This Cloud Infrastructure, was already available for our customers to build rapidly their own Private Cloud either on SPARC/Solaris or x86/Linux... The second announcement made today bring that proposition a big step further : for cautious customers (like Banks, or sensible industries) who would like to benefits from the Cloud value of "as a Service", but don't want their Data out in the Cloud... We propose to them to operate the same systems, Exadata, Exalogic & SuperCluster, that are providing our Public Cloud Infrastructure, behind their firewall, in a Private Cloud model. Oracle 12c Multitenant Database This is also a major announcement made today, on what's coming with Oracle Database 12c : the ability to consolidate multiple databases with no extra additional  cost especially in terms of memory needed on the server node, which is often THE consolidation limiting factor. The principle could be compare to Solaris Zones, where, you will have a Database Container, who is "owning" the memory and Database background processes, and "Pluggable" Database in this Database Container. This particular feature is a strong compelling event to evaluate rapidly Oracle Database 12c once it will be available, as this is major step forward into true Database consolidation with Multitenancy on a shared (optimized) infrastructure. X3H2M2, enabling the new Exadata X3 in-Memory Database Here we are :  X3H2M2 stands for X3 (the new version of Exadata announced also today) Heuristic Hierarchical Mass Memory, providing the capability to keep most if not all the Data in the memory cache hierarchy. Of course, this is the major software enhancement of the new X3 Exadata machine, but as this is a software, our current customers would be able to benefit from it on their existing systems by upgrading to the new release. But that' not the only thing that we did with X3, at the same time we have upgraded everything : the CPUs, adding more cores per server node (16 vs. 12, with the arrival of Intel E5 / Sandy Bridge), the memory with 512GB memory as well per node,  and the new Flash Fire card, bringing now up to 22 TB of Flash cache. All of this 4TB of RAM + 22TB of Flash being use cleverly not only for read but also for write by the X3H2M2 algorithm... making a very big difference compare to traditional storage flash extension. But what does those extra performances brings to you on an already very efficient system: double your performances compare to the fastest storage array on the market today (including flash) and divide you storage price x10 at the same time... Something to consider closely this days... Especially that we also announced the availability of a new Exadata X3-2 8th rack : a good starting point. As you have seen a major opening for this year again with true innovation. But that was not the only thing that we saw today, as before Larry's talk, Fujitsu did introduce more in deep the up coming new SPARC processor, that they are co-developing with us. And as such Andrew Mendelsohn - Senior Vice President Database Server Technologies came on stage to explain that the next step after I/O optimization for Database with Exadata, was to accelerate the Database at execution level by bringing functions in the SPARC processor silicium. All in all, to process more and more Data... The big theme of the day... and of the Oracle User Groups Conferences that were also happening today and where I had the opportunity to attend some interesting sessions on practical use cases of Big Data one in Finances and Fraud profiling and the other one on practical deployment of Oracle Exalytics for Data Analytics. In conclusion, one picture to try to size Oracle Open World ... and you can understand why, with such a rich content... and this only the first day !

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  • Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects

    - by Jeff
    This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some facilities for editing data. CoasterBuzz has a database full of amusement parks and roller coasters. The entities enjoy the relationships that you would expect, though they're further defined by "instances" of a coaster, to define one that has moved between parks as one, with different names and operational dates. And of course, there are pictures and news items, too. It's not horribly complex, except when you have to account for a name change and display just the newest name. In all previous versions, data access was straight SQL. As so much of the old code was rooted in 2003, with some changes in 2008, there wasn't much in the way of ORM frameworks going on then. Let me rephrase that, I mostly wasn't interested in ORM's. Since that time, I used a little LINQ to SQL in some projects, and a whole bunch of nHibernate while at Microsoft. Through all of that experience, I have to admit that these frameworks are often a bigger pain in the ass than not. They're great for basic crud operations, but when you start having all kinds of exotic relationships, they get difficult, and generate all kinds of weird SQL under the covers. The black box can quickly turn into a black hole. Sometimes you end up having to build all kinds of new expertise to do things "right" with a framework. Still, despite my reservations, I used the newer version of Entity Framework, with the "code first" modeling, in a science project and I really liked it. Since it's just a right-click away with NuGet, I figured I'd give it a shot here. My initial effort was spent defining the context class, which requires a bit of work because I deviate quite a bit from the conventions that EF uses, starting with table names. Then throw some partial querying of certain tables (where you'll find image data), and you're splitting tables across several objects (navigation properties). I won't go into the details, because these are all things that are well documented around the Internet, but there was a minor learning curve there. The basics of reading data using EF are fantastic. For example, a roller coaster object has a park associated with it, as well as a number of instances (if it was ever relocated), and there also might be a big banner image for it. This is stupid easy to use because it takes one line of code in your repository class, and by the time you pass it to the view, you have a rich object graph that has everything you need to display stuff. Likewise, editing simple data is also, well, simple. For this goodness, thank the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UpdateModel() method on the controllers is very elegant. Remember the old days of assigning all kinds of properties to objects in your Webforms code-behind? What a time consuming mess that used to be. Even if you're not using an ORM tool, having hydrated objects come off the wire is such a time saver. Not everything is easy, though. When you have to persist a complex graph of objects, particularly if they were composed in the user interface with all kinds of AJAX elements and list boxes, it's not just a simple matter of submitting the form. There were a few instances where I ended up going back to "old-fashioned" SQL just in the interest of time. It's not that I couldn't do what I needed with EF, it's just that the efficiency, both my own and that of the generated SQL, wasn't good. Since EF context objects expose a database connection object, you can use that to do the old school ADO.NET stuff you've done for a decade. Using various extension methods from POP Forums' data project, it was a breeze. You just have to stick to your decision, in this case. When you start messing with SQL directly, you can't go back in the same code to messing with entities because EF doesn't know what you're changing. Not really a big deal. There are a number of take-aways from using EF. The first is that you write a lot less code, which has always been a desired outcome of ORM's. The other lesson, and I particularly learned this the hard way working on the MSDN forums back in the day, is that trying to retrofit an ORM framework into an existing schema isn't fun at all. The CoasterBuzz database isn't bad, but there are design decisions I'd make differently if I were starting from scratch. Now that I have some of this stuff done, I feel like I can start to move on to the more interesting things on the backlog. There's a lot to do, but at least it's fun stuff, and not more forms that will be used infrequently.

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  • Clone a VirtualBox Machine

    I just installed VirtualBox, which I want to try out based on recommendations from peers for running a server from within my Windows 7 x64 OS.  Ive never used VirtualBox, so Im certainly no expert at it, but I did want to share my experience with it thus far.  Specifically, my intention is to create a couple of virtual machines.  One I intend to use as a build server, for which a virtual machine makes sense because I can easily move it around as needed if there are hardware issues (its worth noting my need for setting up a build server at the moment is a result of a disk failure on the old build server).  The other VM I want to set up will act as a proxy server for the issue tracking system were using at Code Project, Axosoft OnTime.  They have a Remote Server application for this purpose, and since the OnTime install is 300 miles away from my location, the Remote Server should speed up my use of the OnTime client by limiting the chattiness with the database (at least, thats the hope). So, I need two VMs, and Im lazy.  I dont want to have to install the OS and such twice.  No problem, it should be simple to clone a virtualbox machine, or clone a virtualbox hard drive, right?  Well unfortunately, if you look at the UI for VirtualBox, theres no such command.  Youre left wondering How do I clone a VirtualBox machine? or the slightly related How do I clone a VirtualBox hard drive? If youve used VirtualPC, then you know that its actually pretty easy to copy and move around those VMs.  Not quite so easy with VirtualBox.  Finding the files is easy, theyre located in your user folder within the .VirtualBox folder (possibly within a HardDisks folder).  The disks have a .vdi extension and will be pretty large if youve installed anything.  The one shown here has just Windows Server 2008 R2 installed on it nothing else. If you copy the .vdi file and rename it, you can use the Virtual Media Manager to view it and you can create a new machine and choose the new drive to attach to.  Unfortunately, if you simply make a copy of the drive, this wont work and youll get an error that says something to the effect of: Cannot register the hard disk PATH with UUID {id goes here} because a hard disk PATH2 with UUID {same id goes here} already exists in the media registry (PATH to XML file). There are command line tools you can use to do this in a way that avoids this error.  Specifically, the c:\Program File\Sun\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe program is used for all command line access to VirtualBox, and to copy a virtual disk (.vdi file) you would call something like this: VBoxManage clonehd Disk1.vdi Disk1_Copy.vdi However, in my case this didnt work.  I got basically the same error I showed above, along with some debug information for line 628 of VBoxManageDisk.cpp.  As my main task was not to debug the C++ code used to write VirtualBox, I continued looking for a simple way to clone a virtual drive.  I found it in this blog post. The Secret setvdiuuid Command VBoxManage has a whole bunch of commands you can use with it just pass it /? to see the list.  However, it also has a special command called internalcommands that opens up access to even more commands.  The one thats interesting for us here is the setvdiuuid command.  By calling this command and passing in the file path to your vdi file, it will reset the UUID to a new (random, apparently) UUID.  This then allows the virtual media manager to cope with the file, and lets you set up new machines that reference the newly UUIDd virtual drive.  The full command line would be: VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid MyCopy.vdi The following screenshot shows the error when trying clonehd as well as the successful use of setvdiuuid. Summary Now that I can clone machines easily, its a simple matter to set up base builds of any OS I might need, and then fork from there as needed.  Hopefully the GUI for VirtualBox will be improved to include better support for copying machines/disks, as this is Im sure a very common scenario. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Understanding the 'High Performance' meaning in Extreme Transaction Processing

    - by kyap
    Despite my previous blogs entries on SOA/BPM and Identity Management, the domain where I'm the most passionated is definitely the Extreme Transaction Processing, commonly called XTP.I came across XTP back to 2007 while I was still FMW Product Manager in EMEA. At that time Oracle acquired a company called Tangosol, which owned an unique product called Coherence that we renamed to Oracle Coherence. Beside this innovative renaming of the product, to be honest, I didn't know much about it, except being a "distributed in-memory cache for Extreme Transaction Processing"... not very helpful still.In general when people doesn't fully understand a technology or a concept, they tend to find some shortcuts, either correct or not, to justify their lack-of understanding... and of course I was part of this category of individuals. And the shortcut was "Oracle Coherence Cache helps to improve Performance". Excellent marketing slogan... but not very meaningful still. By chance I was able to get away quickly from that group in July 2007* at Thames Valley Park (UK), after I attended one of the most interesting workshops, in my 10 years career in Oracle, delivered by Brian Oliver. The biggest mistake I made was to assume that performance improvement with Coherence was related to the response time. Which can be considered as legitimus at that time, because after-all caches help to reduce latency on cached data access, hence reduce the response-time. But like all caches, you need to define caching and expiration policies, thinking about the cache-missed strategy, and most of the time you have to re-write partially your application in order to work with the cache. At a result, the expected benefit vanishes... so, not very useful then?The key mistake I made was my perception or obsession on how performance improvement should be driven, but I strongly believe this is still a common problem to most of the developers. In fact we all know the that the performance of a system is generally presented by the Capacity (or Throughput), with the 2 important dimensions Speed (response-time) and Volume (load) :Capacity (TPS) = Volume (T) / Speed (S)To increase the Capacity, we can either reduce the Speed(in terms of response-time), or to increase the Volume. However we tend to only focus on reducing the Speed dimension, perhaps it is more concrete and tangible to measure, and nicer to present to our management because there's a direct impact onto the end-users experience. On the other hand, we assume the Volume can be addressed by the underlying hardware or software stack, so if we need more capacity (scale out), we just add more hardware or software. Unfortunately, the reality proves that IT is never as ideal as we assume...The challenge with Speed improvement approach is that it is generally difficult and costly to make things already fast... faster. And by adding Coherence will not necessarily help either. Even though we manage to do so, the Capacity can not increase forever because... the Speed can be influenced by the Volume. For all system, we always have a performance illustration as follow: In all traditional system, the increase of Volume (Transaction) will also increase the Speed (Response-Time) as some point. The reason is simple: most of the time the Application logics were not designed to scale. As an example, if you have a while-loop in your application, it is natural to conceive that parsing 200 entries will require double execution-time compared to 100 entries. If you need to "Speed-up" the execution, you can only upgrade your hardware (scale-up) with faster CPU and/or network to reduce network latency. It is technically limited and economically inefficient. And this is exactly where XTP and Coherence kick in. The primary objective of XTP is about designing applications which can scale-out for increasing the Volume, by applying coding techniques to keep the execution-time as constant as possible, independently of the number of runtime data being manipulated. It is actually not just about having an application running as fast as possible, but about having a much more predictable system, with constant response-time and linearly scale, so we can easily increase throughput by adding more hardwares in parallel. It is in general combined with the Low Latency Programming model, where we tried to optimize the network usage as much as possible, either from the programmatic angle (less network-hoops to complete a task), and/or from a hardware angle (faster network equipments). In this picture, Oracle Coherence can be considered as software-level XTP enabler, via the Distributed-Cache because it can guarantee: - Constant Data Objects access time, independently from the number of Objects and the Coherence Cluster size - Data Objects Distribution by Affinity for in-memory data grouping - In-place Data Processing for parallel executionTo summarize, Oracle Coherence is indeed useful to improve your application performance, just not in the way we commonly think. It's not about the Speed itself, but about the overall Capacity with Extreme Load while keeping consistant Speed. In the future I will keep adding new blog entries around this topic, with some sample codes experiences sharing that I capture in the last few years. In the meanwhile if you want to know more how Oracle Coherence, I strongly suggest you to start with checking how our worldwide customers are using Oracle Coherence first, then you can start playing with the product through our tutorial.Have Fun !

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  • UIView with IrrlichtScene - iOS

    - by user1459024
    i have a UIViewController in a Storyboard and want to draw a IrrlichtScene in this View Controller. My Code: WWSViewController.h #import <UIKit/UIKit.h> @interface WWSViewController : UIViewController { IBOutlet UILabel *errorLabel; } @end WWSViewController.mm #import "WWSViewController.h" #include "../../ressources/irrlicht/include/irrlicht.h" using namespace irr; using namespace core; using namespace scene; using namespace video; using namespace io; using namespace gui; @interface WWSViewController () @end @implementation WWSViewController -(void)awakeFromNib { errorLabel = [[UILabel alloc] init]; errorLabel.text = @""; IrrlichtDevice *device = createDevice( video::EDT_OGLES1, dimension2d<u32>(640, 480), 16, false, false, false, 0); /* Set the caption of the window to some nice text. Note that there is an 'L' in front of the string. The Irrlicht Engine uses wide character strings when displaying text. */ device->setWindowCaption(L"Hello World! - Irrlicht Engine Demo"); /* Get a pointer to the VideoDriver, the SceneManager and the graphical user interface environment, so that we do not always have to write device->getVideoDriver(), device->getSceneManager(), or device->getGUIEnvironment(). */ IVideoDriver* driver = device->getVideoDriver(); ISceneManager* smgr = device->getSceneManager(); IGUIEnvironment* guienv = device->getGUIEnvironment(); /* We add a hello world label to the window, using the GUI environment. The text is placed at the position (10,10) as top left corner and (260,22) as lower right corner. */ guienv->addStaticText(L"Hello World! This is the Irrlicht Software renderer!", rect<s32>(10,10,260,22), true); /* To show something interesting, we load a Quake 2 model and display it. We only have to get the Mesh from the Scene Manager with getMesh() and add a SceneNode to display the mesh with addAnimatedMeshSceneNode(). We check the return value of getMesh() to become aware of loading problems and other errors. Instead of writing the filename sydney.md2, it would also be possible to load a Maya object file (.obj), a complete Quake3 map (.bsp) or any other supported file format. By the way, that cool Quake 2 model called sydney was modelled by Brian Collins. */ IAnimatedMesh* mesh = smgr->getMesh("/Users/dbocksteger/Desktop/test/media/sydney.md2"); if (!mesh) { device->drop(); if (!errorLabel) { errorLabel = [[UILabel alloc] init]; } errorLabel.text = @"Konnte Mesh nicht laden."; return; } IAnimatedMeshSceneNode* node = smgr->addAnimatedMeshSceneNode( mesh ); /* To let the mesh look a little bit nicer, we change its material. We disable lighting because we do not have a dynamic light in here, and the mesh would be totally black otherwise. Then we set the frame loop, such that the predefined STAND animation is used. And last, we apply a texture to the mesh. Without it the mesh would be drawn using only a color. */ if (node) { node->setMaterialFlag(EMF_LIGHTING, false); node->setMD2Animation(scene::EMAT_STAND); node->setMaterialTexture( 0, driver->getTexture("/Users/dbocksteger/Desktop/test/media/sydney.bmp") ); } /* To look at the mesh, we place a camera into 3d space at the position (0, 30, -40). The camera looks from there to (0,5,0), which is approximately the place where our md2 model is. */ smgr->addCameraSceneNode(0, vector3df(0,30,-40), vector3df(0,5,0)); /* Ok, now we have set up the scene, lets draw everything: We run the device in a while() loop, until the device does not want to run any more. This would be when the user closes the window or presses ALT+F4 (or whatever keycode closes a window). */ while(device->run()) { /* Anything can be drawn between a beginScene() and an endScene() call. The beginScene() call clears the screen with a color and the depth buffer, if desired. Then we let the Scene Manager and the GUI Environment draw their content. With the endScene() call everything is presented on the screen. */ driver->beginScene(true, true, SColor(255,100,101,140)); smgr->drawAll(); guienv->drawAll(); driver->endScene(); } /* After we are done with the render loop, we have to delete the Irrlicht Device created before with createDevice(). In the Irrlicht Engine, you have to delete all objects you created with a method or function which starts with 'create'. The object is simply deleted by calling ->drop(). See the documentation at irr::IReferenceCounted::drop() for more information. */ device->drop(); } - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib. } - (void)viewDidUnload { [super viewDidUnload]; // Release any retained subviews of the main view. } - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { return (interfaceOrientation != UIInterfaceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown); } @end Sadly the result is just a black View in the Simulator. :( Hope here is anyone who can explain me how i draw the scene in a UIView. Furthermore I'm getting this Error: Could not load sprite bank because the file does not exist: #DefaultFont How can i fix it ?

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  • World Backup Day

    - by red(at)work
    Here at Red Gate Towers, the SQL Backup development team have been hunkered down in their shed for the last few months, with the toolbox, blowtorch and chamois leather out, upgrading SQL Backup. When we started, autumn leaves were falling. Now we're about to finish, spring flowers are budding. If not quite a gleaming new machine, at the very least a familiar, reliable engine with some shiny new bits on it will trundle magnificently out of the workshop. One of the interesting things I've noticed about working on software development teams is that the team is together for so long 'implementing' stuff - designing, coding, testing, fixing bugs and so on - that you occasionally forget why you're doing what you're doing. Doubt creeps in. It feels like a long time since we launched this project in a fanfare of optimism and enthusiasm, and all that clarity of purpose and mission "yee-haw" has dissipated with the daily pressures of development. Every now and again, we look up from our bunker and notice all those thousands of users out there, with their different configurations and working practices and each with their own set of problems and requirements, and we ask ourselves "does anyone care about what we're doing?" Has the world moved on while we've been busy? Could we have been doing something more useful with the time and talent of all these excellent people we've assembled? In truth, you can research and test and validate all you like, but you never really know if you've done the right thing (or at least, something valuable for some users) until you release. All projects suffer this insecurity. If they don't, maybe you're not worrying enough about what you're building. The two enemies of software development are certainty and complacency. Oh, and of course, rival teams with Nerf guns. The goal of SQL Backup 7 is to make it so easy to schedule regular restores of your backups that you have no excuse not to. Why schedule a restore? Because your data is not as good as your last backup. It's only as good as your last successful restore. If you're not checking your backups by restoring them and running an integrity check on the database, you're only doing half the job. It seems that most DBAs know that this is best practice, but it can be tricky and time-consuming to set up, so it's one of those tasks that can get forgotten in the midst all the other demands on their time. Sometimes, they're just too busy firefighting. But if it was simple to do? That was our inspiration for SQL Backup 7. So it was heartening to read Brent Ozar's blog post the other day about World Backup Day. To be honest, I'd never heard of World Backup Day (Talk Like a Pirate Day, yes, but not this one); however, its emphasis on not just backing up your data but checking the validity of those backups was exactly the same message we had in mind when building SQL Backup 7. It's printed on a piece of A3 above our planning board - "Make backup verification so easy to do that no DBA has an excuse for not doing it" It's the missing piece that completes the puzzle. Simple idea, great concept, useful feature, but, as it turned out, far from straightforward to implement. The problem is the future. As Marty McFly discovered over the course of three movies, the future is uncertain and hard to predict - so when you are scheduling a restore to take place an hour, day, week or month after the backup, there are all kinds of questions that you wouldn't normally have to consider. Where will this backup live? Will it even exist at the time? Will it be split into multiple files? What will the file names be? Will it be encrypted? What files should it be restored to? SQL Backup needs to know what to expect at the time the restore job is actually run. Of course, a DBA will know the answer to all these questions, but to deliver the whole point of version 7, we wanted to make it easy for them to input that information into SQL Backup. We think we've done that. When you create your scheduled backup job, there is now an option to create a "reminder" to follow it up with a scheduled restore to verify the resulting backups. Actually, it's much more than a reminder, as it stores all the relevant data so you can click it and pre-populate the wizard with all the right settings to set up your verification restores. Simple. But, what do you think? We'd love you to try it. Post by Brian Harris

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  • WMemoryProfiler is Released

    - by Alois Kraus
    What is it? WMemoryProfiler is a managed profiling Api to aid integration testing. This free library can get managed heap statistics and memory usage for your own process (remember testing) and other processes as well. The best thing is that it does work from .NET 2.0 up to .NET 4.5 in x86 and x64. To make it more interesting it can attach to any running .NET process. The reason why I do mention this is that commercial profilers do support this functionality only for their professional editions. An normally only since .NET 4.0 since the profiling API only since then does support attaching to a running process. This thing does differ in many aspects from “normal” profilers because while profiling yourself you can get all objects from all managed heaps back as an object array. If you ever wanted to change the state of an object which does only exist a method local in another thread you can get your hands on it now … Enough theory. Show me some code /// <summary> /// Show feature to not only get statisics out of a process but also the newly allocated /// instances since the last call to MarkCurrentObjects. /// GetNewObjects does return the newly allocated objects as object array /// </summary> static void InstanceTracking() { using (var dumper = new MemoryDumper()) // if you have problems use to see the debugger windows true,true)) { dumper.MarkCurrentObjects(); Allocate(); ILookup<Type, object> newObjects = dumper.GetNewObjects() .ToLookup( x => x.GetType() ); Console.WriteLine("New Strings:"); foreach (var newStr in newObjects[typeof(string)] ) { Console.WriteLine("Str: {0}", newStr); } } } … New Strings: Str: qqd Str: String data: Str: String data: 0 Str: String data: 1 … This is really hot stuff. Not only you can get heap statistics but you can directly examine the new objects and make queries upon them. When I do find more time I can reconstruct the object root graph from it from my own process. It this cool or what? You can also peek into the Finalization Queue to check if you did accidentally forget to dispose a whole bunch of objects … /// <summary> /// .NET 4.0 or above only. Get all finalizable objects which are ready for finalization and have no other object roots anymore. /// </summary> static void NotYetFinalizedObjects() { using (var dumper = new MemoryDumper()) { object[] finalizable = dumper.GetObjectsReadyForFinalization(); Console.WriteLine("Currently {0} objects of types {1} are ready for finalization. Consider disposing them before.", finalizable.Length, String.Join(",", finalizable.ToLookup( x=> x.GetType() ) .Select( x=> x.Key.Name)) ); } } How does it work? The W of WMemoryProfiler is a good hint. It does employ Windbg and SOS dll to do the heavy lifting and concentrates on an easy to use Api which does hide completely Windbg. If you do not want to see Windbg you will never see it. In my experience the most complex thing is actually to download Windbg from the Windows 8 Stanalone SDK. This is described in the Readme and the exception you are greeted with if it is missing in much greater detail. So I will not go into this here.   What Next? Depending on the feedback I do get I can imagine some features which might be useful as well Calculate first order GC Roots from the actual object graph Identify global statics in Types in object graph Support read out of finalization queue of .NET 2.0 as well. Support Memory Dump analysis (again a feature only supported by commercial profilers in their professional editions if it is supported at all) Deserialize objects from a memory dump into a live process back (this would need some more investigation but it is doable) The last item needs some explanation. Why on earth would you want to do that? The basic idea is to store in your live process some logging/tracing data which can become quite big but since it is never written to it is very fast to generate. When your process crashes with a memory dump you could transfer this data structure back into a live viewer which can then nicely display your program state at the point it did crash. This is an advanced trouble shooting technique I have not seen anywhere yet but it could be quite useful. You can have here a look at the current feature list of WMemoryProfiler with some examples.   How To Get Started? First I would download the released source package (it is tiny). And compile the complete project. Then you can compile the Example project (it has this name) and uncomment in the main method the scenario you want to check out. If you are greeted with an exception it is time to install the Windows 8 Standalone SDK which is described in great detail in the exception text. Thats it for the first round. I have seen something more limited in the Java world some years ago (now I cannot find the link anymore) but anyway. Now we have something much better.

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  • The Best BPM Journey: More Exciting Destinations with Process Accelerators

    - by Cesare Rotundo
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Open World (OOW) earlier this month has been a great occasion to discuss with our BPM customers. It was interesting to hear definite patterns emerging from those conversations: “BPM is a journey”, “experiences to share”, “our organization now understands what BPM is”, and my favorite (with some caveats): “BPM is like wine tasting, once you start, you want to try more”. These customers have started their journey, climbed up the learning curve, and reached a vantage point that allows them to see their next BPM destination. They see the next few processes they are going to tackle and improve with BPM. These processes/destinations target both horizontal processes where BPM replaces or coordinates manual activities, and critical industry processes that the company needs to improve to compete and deliver increasing value. Each new destination generates value, allowing the organization to reduce the cost of manual processes that were not supported by apps/custom development, and increase efficiency of end-to-end processes partially covered by apps/custom dev. The question we wanted to answer is how to help organizations experience deeper success with BPM, by increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and equipping them with the right tools. We decided that we needed to identify destinations, and plot routes to show the fastest path to those destinations. In the end we want to enable customers to reach “Process Excellence”: continuously set new targets and consistently and efficiently reach them. The result is Oracle Process Accelerators (PA), solutions built using the rich functionality in Oracle BPM Suite. PAs offers a rapidly expanding list of exciting destinations. Our launch of the latest installment of Process Accelerators at Oracle Open World includes new Industry-focused solutions such as Public Sector Incident Reporting and Financial Services Loan Origination, and improved other horizontal PAs, including Travel Request Management, Document Routing and Approval, and Internal Service Requests. Just before OOW we had extended the Oracle deployment of Travel Request Management, riding the enthusiastic response from early adopters among travelers (employees), management and support (approvers). “Getting there first” means being among the first to extract value from the PA approach, while acquiring deeper insights into the customers’ perspective. This is especially noteworthy when it comes to PAs, a set of solutions designed to be quickly deployed and iteratively improved by customers. The OOW launch has generated immediate feedback from customers, non-customers, analysts, and partners. They all confirmed that both Business and IT at organizations benefit from PAs when it comes to exploring the potential for BPM to improve their business processes. PAs help customers visualize what can be done with BPM, and PAs are made to be extended: you can see your destination, change the path to fit your needs, and deploy. We're discovering new destinations/processes that the market wants us to support, generic enough across industries and within industries. We'll keep on building sets of requirements, deliver functional design, construct solutions using Oracle BPM, and test them not only functionally but for performance, scalability, clustering, making them robust, product-quality. Delivering BPM solutions with product-grade quality is the equivalent of following a tried-and-tested path on a map. Do you know of existing destinations in your industry? If yes, we can draw a path to innovative processes together.

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  • Extending Expression Blend 4 &amp; Blend for Visual Studio 2012

    - by Chris Skardon
    Just getting this off the bat, I presume this will also work for Blend 5, but I can’t confirm it… Anyhews, I imagine you’re here because you want to know how to create an addin for Blend, so let’s jump right in there! First, and foremost, we’re going to need to ensure our development environment has the right setup, so the checklist: Visual Studio 2012 Blend for Visual Studio 2012 OK, let’s create a new project (class library, .NET 4.5): Hello.Extension The ‘.Extension’ bit is very very important. The addin will not work unless it is named in this way. You can put whatever you want at the front, but it has to have the extension bit. OK, so now we have a solution with one project. To this project we need to add references to the following things: Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility (from c:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Blend\   -- x86 folder if you are on an x64 windows install) Microsoft.Expression.Framework (same location as above) PresentationCore PresentationFramework WindowsBase System.ComponentModel.Composition Got them? ACE. Let’s now add a project to contain our control, so, create a new WPF Application project, cunningly named something like ‘Hello.Control’… (I’m creating a WPF application here, because I’m too lazy to dig up the correct references, and this will add all the ones I need ) Once that is created, delete the App.xaml and MainWindow.xaml files, we won’t be needing them. You will also need to change the properties of the project itself, so it is only a class library. Once that is done, let’s add a new UserControl, which will be this: <UserControl x:Class="Hello.Control.HelloControl" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="300"> <Grid> <TextBlock Text="HELLO!!!"/> </Grid> </UserControl> Impressive eh? Now, let’s reference the WPF project from the Extension library. All that’s left now is to code up our extension… So, add a class to the Extension project (name wise doesn’t matter), and make it implement the IPackage interface from the Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility library: public class HelloExtension : IPackage { /**/ } We’ll implement the two methods we need to: public class HelloExtension : IPackage { public void Load(IServices services) { } public void Unload() { } } We’re only really concerned about the Load method in this case, as let’s face it, the extension we have doesn’t need to do a lot to bog off. The interesting thing about the Load method is that it receives an IServices instance. This allows us to get access to all the services that Expression provides, in this case we’re interested in one in particular, the ‘IWindowService’ So, let’s get that bad boy… private IWindowService _windowService; public void Load(IServices services) { _windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); } Nailed it… But why? The WindowService allows us to register our UserControl with Blend, which in turn allows people to activate and see it, which is a big plus point. So, let’s do that… We’ll create an ‘Initialize’ method to create our new control, and add it to the WindowService: private HelloControl _helloControl; public void Initialize() { _helloControl = new HelloControl(); if (_windowService.PaletteRegistry["HelloPanel"] == null) _windowService.RegisterPalette("HelloPanel", _helloControl, "Hello Window"); } First we check that we’re not already registered, and if we’re not we register, the first argument is the identifier used by the service to, well, identify your extension. The second argument is the actual control, the third argument is the name that people will see in the ‘Windows’ menu of Blend itself (so important note here – don’t put anything embarrassing or (need I say it?) sweary…) There are only two things to do now - Call ‘Initialize()’ from our Load method, and Export the class This is easy money – add [Export(typeof(IPackage))] to the top of our class… The full code will (should) look like this: [Export(typeof (IPackage))] public class HelloExtension : IPackage { private HelloControl _helloControl; private IWindowService _windowService; public void Load(IServices services) { _windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); Initialize(); } public void Unload() { } public void Initialize() { _helloControl = new HelloControl(); if (_windowService.PaletteRegistry["HelloControl"] == null) _windowService.RegisterPalette("HelloControl", _helloControl, "Hello Window"); } } If you build this and copy it to your ‘Extensions’ folder in Blend (c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 11.0\blend\) and start Blend, you should see ‘Hello Window’ listed in the Window menu: That as they say is it!

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  • Cloud Computing Forces Better Design Practices

    - by Herve Roggero
    Is cloud computing simply different than on premise development, or is cloud computing actually forcing you to create better applications than you normally would? In other words, is cloud computing merely imposing different design principles, or forcing better design principles?  A little while back I got into a discussion with a developer in which I was arguing that cloud computing, and specifically Windows Azure in his case, was forcing developers to adopt better design principles. His opinion was that cloud computing was not yielding better systems; just different systems. In this blog, I will argue that cloud computing does force developers to use better design practices, and hence better applications. So the first thing to define, of course, is the word “better”, in the context of application development. Looking at a few definitions online, better means “superior quality”. As it relates to this discussion then, I stipulate that cloud computing can yield higher quality applications in terms of scalability, everything else being equal. Before going further I need to also outline the difference between performance and scalability. Performance and scalability are two related concepts, but they don’t mean the same thing. Scalability is the measure of system performance given various loads. So when developers design for performance, they usually give higher priority to a given load and tend to optimize for the given load. When developers design for scalability, the actual performance at a given load is not as important; the ability to ensure reasonable performance regardless of the load becomes the objective. This can lead to very different design choices. For example, if your objective is to obtains the fastest response time possible for a service you are building, you may choose the implement a TCP connection that never closes until the client chooses to close the connection (in other words, a tightly coupled service from a connectivity standpoint), and on which a connection session is established for faster processing on the next request (like SQL Server or other database systems for example). If you objective is to scale, you may implement a service that answers to requests without keeping session state, so that server resources are released as quickly as possible, like a REST service for example. This alternate design would likely have a slower response time than the TCP service for any given load, but would continue to function at very large loads because of its inherently loosely coupled design. An example of a REST service is the NO-SQL implementation in the Microsoft cloud called Azure Tables. Now, back to cloud computing… Cloud computing is designed to help you scale your applications, specifically when you use Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. However it’s not automatic. You can design a tightly-coupled TCP service as discussed above, and as you can imagine, it probably won’t scale even if you place the service in the cloud because it isn’t using a connection pattern that will allow it to scale [note: I am not implying that all TCP systems do not scale; I am just illustrating the scalability concepts with an imaginary TCP service that isn’t designed to scale for the purpose of this discussion]. The other service, using REST, will have a better chance to scale because, by design, it minimizes resource consumption for individual requests and doesn’t tie a client connection to a specific endpoint (which means you can easily deploy this service to hundreds of machines without much trouble, as long as your pockets are deep enough). The TCP and REST services discussed above are both valid designs; the TCP service is faster and the REST service scales better. So is it fair to say that one service is fundamentally better than the other? No; not unless you need to scale. And if you don’t need to scale, then you don’t need the cloud in the first place. However, it is interesting to note that if you do need to scale, then a loosely coupled system becomes a better design because it can almost always scale better than a tightly-coupled system. And because most applications grow overtime, with an increasing user base, new functional requirements, increased data and so forth, most applications eventually do need to scale. So in my humble opinion, I conclude that a loosely coupled system is not just different than a tightly coupled system; it is a better design, because it will stand the test of time. And in my book, if a system stands the test of time better than another, it is of superior quality. Because cloud computing demands loosely coupled systems so that its underlying service architecture can be leveraged, developers ultimately have no choice but to design loosely coupled systems for the cloud. And because loosely coupled systems are better… … the cloud forces better design practices. My 2 cents.

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  • Clouds, Clouds, Clouds Everywhere, Not a Drop of Rain!

    - by sxkumar
    At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2012, the center of discussion was clearly Cloud. Over the five action packed days, I got to meet a large number of customers and most of them had serious interest in all things cloud.  Public Cloud - particularly the Oracle Cloud - clearly got a lot of attention and interest. I think the use cases and the value proposition for public cloud is pretty straight forward. However, when it comes to private cloud, there were some interesting revelations.  Well, I shouldn’t really call them revelations since they are pretty consistent with what I have heard from customers at other conferences as well as during 1:1 interactions. While the interest in enterprise private cloud remains to be very high, only a handful of enterprises have truly embarked on a journey to create what the purists would call true private cloud - with capabilities such as self-service and chargeback/show back. For a large majority, today's reality is simply consolidation and virtualization - and they are quite far off from creating an agile, self-service and transparent IT infrastructure which is what the enterprise cloud is all about.  Even a handful of those who have actually implemented a close-to-real enterprise private cloud have taken an infrastructure centric approach and are seeing only limited business upside. Quite a few were frank enough to admit that chargeback and self-service isn’t something that they see an immediate need for.  This is in quite contrast to the picture being painted by all those surveys out there that show a large number of enterprises having already implemented an enterprise private cloud.  On the face of it, this seems quite contrary to the observations outlined above. So what exactly is the reality? Well, the reality is that there is undoubtedly a huge amount of interest among enterprises about transforming their legacy IT environment - which is often seen as too rigid, too fragmented, and ultimately too expensive - to something more agile, transparent and business-focused. At the same time however, there is a great deal of confusion among CIOs and architects about how to get there. This isn't very surprising given all the buzz and hype surrounding cloud computing. Every IT vendor claims to have the most unique solution and there isn't a single IT product out there that does not have a cloud angle to it. Add to this the chatter on the blogosphere, it will get even a sane mind spinning.  Consequently, most  enterprises are still struggling to fully understand the concept and value of enterprise private cloud.  Even among those who have chosen to move forward relatively early, quite a few have made their decisions more based on vendor influence/preferences rather than what their businesses actually need.  Clearly, there is a disconnect between the promise of the enterprise private cloud and the current adoption trends.  So what is the way forward?  I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. But here is a perspective that many cloud practitioners have found useful and thus worth sharing. To take a step back, the fundamental premise of the enterprise private cloud is IT transformation. It is the quest to create a more agile, transparent and efficient IT infrastructure that is driven more by business needs rather than constrained by operational and procedural inefficiencies. It is the new way of delivering and consuming IT services - where the IT organizations operate more like enablers of  strategic services rather than just being the gatekeepers of IT resources. In an enterprise private cloud environment, IT organizations are expected to empower the end users via self-service access/control and provide the business stakeholders a transparent view of how the resources are being used, what’s the cost of delivering a given service, how well are the customers being served, etc.  But the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just remember how the business users have been at the forefront of public cloud adoption within enterprises and private cloud is no exception.   Such a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative. It requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. In my next blog,  I will share how essential it is for enterprise cloud technology to go hand-in hand with process re-engineering and organization changes to unlock true value of  enterprise cloud. I am sharing a short video from my session "Managing your private Cloud" at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. More videos from this session will be posted at the recently introduced Zero to Cloud resource page. Many other experts of Oracle enterprise private cloud solution will join me on this blog "Zero to Cloud"  and share best practices , deployment tips and information on how to plan, build, deploy, monitor, manage , meter and optimize the enterprise private cloud. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and having an engaging conversion with you on this blog.

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  • The sign of a true manager is delegation (C# style)

    - by MarkPearl
    Today I thought I would write a bit about delegates in C#. Up till recently I have managed to side step any real understanding of what delegates do and why they are useful – I mean, I know roughly what they do and have used them a lot, but I have never really got down dirty with them and mucked about. Recently however with my renewed interest in Silverlight delegates came up again as a possible solution to a particular problem, and suddenly I found myself opening a bland little console application to just see exactly how far I could take delegates with my limited knowledge. So, let’s first look at the MSDN definition of delegates… A delegate declaration defines a reference type that can be used to encapsulate a method with a specific signature. A delegate instance encapsulates a static or an instance method. Delegates are roughly similar to function pointers in C++; however, delegates are type-safe and secure. Well, don’t you love MSDN for such a useful definition. I must give it credit though… later on it really explains it a bit better by saying “A delegate lets you pass a function as a parameter. The type safety of delegates requires the function you pass as a delegate to have the same signature as the delegate declaration.” A little more reading up on delegates mentions that delegates are similar to interfaces in that they enable the separation of specification and implementation. A delegate declares a single method, while an interface declares a group of methods. So enough reading - lets look at some code and see a basic example of a delegate… Let’s assume we have a console application with a simple delegate declared called AdjustValue like below… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); static void Main(string[] args) { } } In a sense, all we have said is that we will be creating one or more methods that follow the same pattern as AdjustValue – i.e. they will take one input value of type int and return an integer. We could then expand our code to have various methods that match the structure of our delegate AdjustValue (remember the structure is int xxx (int xxx)) class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); private static int Dbl(int val) { return val * 2; } private static int AlwaysOne(int val) { return 1; } static void Main(string[] args) { } }  Above I have expanded my project to have two methods, one called Dbl and the other AlwaysOne. Dbl always returns double the input val and AlwaysOne always returns 1. I could now declare a variable and assign it to be one of those functions, like the following… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); private static int Dbl(int val) { return val * 2; } private static int AlwaysOne(int val) { return 1; } static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } } In this instance I have declared an instance of the AdjustValue delegate called myDelegate; I have then told myDelegate to point to the method Dbl, and then called myDelegate(1). What would the result be? Yes, in this instance it would be exactly the same as me calling the following code… static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(Dbl(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); }   So why all the extra work for delegates when we could just do what we did above and call the method directly? Well… that separation of specification to implementation comes to mind. So, this all seems pretty simple. Let’s take a slightly more complicated variation to the console application. Assume that my project is the same as the one previously except that my main method is adjusted as follows… static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; myDelegate = AlwaysOne; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } What would happen in this scenario? Quite simply “1” would be written to the console, the reason being that myDelegate was last pointing to the AlwaysOne method before it was called. Make sense? In a way, the myDelegate is a variable method that can be swapped and changed when needed. Let’s make the code a little more confusing by using a delegate in the declaration of another delegate as shown below… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(InputValue val); private delegate int InputValue(); private static int Dbl(InputValue val) { return val()*2; } private static int GetInputVal() { Console.WriteLine("Enter a whole number : "); return Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); } static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(GetInputVal).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } }   Now it gets really interesting because it looks like we have passed a method into a function in the main method by declaring… Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(GetInputVal).ToString()); So, what it the output? Well, try take a guess on what will happen – then copy the code and see if you got it right. Well that brings me to the end of this short explanation of Delegates. Hopefully it made sense!

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