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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 07, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 07, 2010New ProjectsAlgorithminator: Universal .NET algorithm visualizer, which helps you to illustrate any algorithm, written in any .NET language. Still in development.ALToolkit: Contains a set of handy .NET components/classes. Currently it contains: * A Numeric Text Box (an Extended NumericUpDown) * A Splash Screen base fo...Automaton Home: Automaton is a home automation software built with a n-Tier, MVVM pattern utilzing WCF, EF, WPF, Silverlight and XBAP.Developer Controls: Developer Controls contains various controls to help build applications that can script/write code.Dynamic Reference Manager: Dynamic Reference Manager is a set (more like a small group) of classes and attributes written in C# that allows any .NET program to reference othe...indiologic: Utilities of an IndioNeural Cryptography in F#: This project is my magistracy resulting work. It is intended to be an example of using neural networks in cryptography. Hashing functions are chose...Particle Filter Visualization: Particle Filter Visualization Program for the Intel Science and Engineering FairPólya: Efficient, immutable, polymorphic collections. .Net lacks them, we provide them*. * By we, we mean I; and by efficient, I mean hopefully so.project euler solutions from mhinze: mhinze project euler solutionsSilverlight 4 and WCF multi layer: Silverlight 4 and WCF multi layersqwarea: Project for a browser-based, minimalistic, massively multiplayer strategy game. Part of the "Génie logiciel et Cloud Computing" course of the ENS (...SuperSocket: SuperSocket, a socket application framework can build FTP/SMTP/POP server easilyToast (for ASP.NET MVC): Dynamic, developer & designer friendly content injection, compression and optimization for ASP.NET MVCNew ReleasesALToolkit: ALToolkit 1.0: Binary release of the libraries containing: NumericTextBox SplashScreen Based on the VB.NET code, but that doesn't really matter.Blacklist of Providers: 1.0-Milestone 1: Blacklist of Providers.Milestone 1In this development release implemented - Main interface (Work Item #5453) - Database (Work Item #5523)C# Linear Hash Table: Linear Hash Table b2: Now includes a default constructor, and will throw an exception if capacity is not set to a power of 2 or loadToMaintain is below 1.Composure: CassiniDev-Trunk-40745-VS2010.rc1.NET4: A simple port of the CassiniDev portable web server project for Visual Studio 2010 RC1 built against .NET 4.0. The WCF tests currently fail unless...Developer Controls: DevControls: These are the version 1.0 releases of these controls. Download the individually or all together (in a .zip file). More releases coming soon!Dynamic Reference Manager: DRM Alpha1: This is the first release. I'm calling it Alpha because I intend implementing other functions, but I do not intend changing the way current functio...ESB Toolkit Extensions: Tellago SOA ESB Extenstions v0.3: Windows Installer file that installs Library on a BizTalk ESB 2.0 system. This Install automatically configures the esb.config to use the new compo...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.1 Alpha: 0.1 AlphaHome Access Plus+: v3.0.3.0: Version 3.0.3.0 Release Change Log: Added Announcement Box Removed script files that aren't needed Fixed & issue in directory path Stylesheet...Icarus Scene Engine: Icarus Scene Engine 1.10.306.840: Icarus Professional, Icarus Player, the supporting software for Icarus Scene Engine, with some included samples, and the start of a tutorial (with ...mavjuz WndLpt: wndlpt-0.2.5: New: Response to 5 LPT inputs "test i 1" New: Reaction to 12 LPT outputs "test q 8" New: Reaction to all LPT pins "test pin 15" New: Syntax: ...Neural Cryptography in F#: Neural Cryptography 0.0.1: The most simple version of this project. It has a neural network that works just like logical AND and a possibility to recreate neural network from...Password Provider: 1.0.3: This release fixes a bug which caused the program to crash when double clicking on a generic item.RoTwee: RoTwee 6.2.0.0: New feature is as next. 16649 Add hashtag for tweet of tune.Now you can tweet your playing tune with hashtag.Visual Studio DSite: Picture Viewer (Visual C++ 2008): This example source code allows you to view any picture you want in the click of a button. All you got to do is click the button and browser via th...WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.8.00: Whats New File Browser: Folders & Files View reworked File Browser: Folders & Files View reworked File Browser: Folders are displayed as TreeVi...WSDLGenerator: WSDLGenerator 0.0.0.4: - replaced CommonLibrary.dll by CommandLineParser.dll - added better support for custom complex typesMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryAll-In-One Code FrameworkWindows 7 USB/DVD Download Toolニコ生アラートWindows Double ExplorerVirtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2Caliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightArkSwitchMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterFarseer Physics EngineFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIFluent Assertions

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• Rob Blackwell on interoperability and Azure

  - by Eric Nelson

  At QCon in March we had a sample Azure application implemented in both Java and Ruby to demonstrate that the Windows Azure Platform is not just about .NET. The following is an interesting interview with Rob Blackwell, the R&D director of the partner who implemented the application. UK Interoperability Team Interviews Rob Blackwell, R&D Director at Active Web Solutions. Is Microsoft taking interoperability seriously? Yes. In the past, I think Microsoft has, quite rightly come in for criticism, but architects and developers should look at this again. The Interoperability Bridges site (http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/ ) shows a wide range of projects that allow interoperability from Java, Ruby and PHP for example. The Windows Azure platform has been architected with interoperable APIs in mind. It's straightforward to access the various storage facilities from just about any language or platform. Azure compute is capable of running more than just C# applications! Why is interoperability important to you? My company provides consultancy and bespoke development services. We're a Microsoft Gold Partner, but we live in the real world where companies have a mix of technologies provided by a variety of vendors. When developing an enterprise software solution, you rarely have a completely blank canvas. We often see integration scenarios where we need to exchange data with legacy systems. It's not unusual to see modern Silverlight applications being built on top of Java or Mainframe based back ends. Could you give us some examples of where interoperability has been important for your projects? We developed an innovative Sea Safety system for the RNLI Lifeboats here in the UK. Commercial Fishing is one of the most dangerous professions and we helped developed the MOB Guardian System which uses satellite technology and man overboard devices to raise the alarm when a fisherman gets into trouble. The solution is implemented in .NET running on Windows, but without interoperable standards, it would have been impossible to communicate with the satellite gateway technology. For more information, please see the case study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005892 More recently, we were asked to build a web site to accompany the QCon 2010 conference in London to help demonstrate and promote interoperability. We built the site using Java and Restlet and hosted it in Windows Azure Compute. The site accepts feedback from visitors and all the data is stored in Windows Azure Storage. We also ported the application to Ruby on Rails for demonstration purposes. Visitors to the stand were surprised that this was even possible. Why should Java developers be interested in Windows Azure? Windows Azure Storage consists of Blobs, Queues and Tables. The storage is scalable, durable, secure and cost-effective. Using the WindowsAzure4j library, it's easy to use, and takes just a few lines of code. If you are writing an application with large data storage requirements, or you want an offsite backup, it makes a lot of sense. Running Java applications in Azure Compute is straightforward with tools like the Tomcat Solution Accelerator (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/winazuretomcat )and AzureRunMe (http://azurerunme.codeplex.com/ ). The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus can also be used to connect heterogeneous systems running on different networks and in different data centres. How can The Service Bus be considered an interoperability solution? I think that the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus is one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets. Think of it as “a globally scalable application plumbing kit in the sky”. If you have used Enterprise Service Buses before, you’ll be familiar with the concept. Applications can connect to the service bus to securely exchange data – these can be point to point or multicast links. With the AppFabric Service Bus, the applications can exist anywhere that has access to the Internet and the connections can traverse firewalls. This makes it easy to extend or scale your application or reach out to other networks and technologies. For example, let’s say you have a SQL Server database running on premises and you want to expose the data to a Java application running in the cloud. You could set up a point to point Service Bus connection and use JDBC. Traditionally this would have been difficult or impossible without punching holes in firewalls and compromising security. Rob Blackwell is R&D Director at Active Web Solutions, www.aws.net , a Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in leading edge software solutions. He is an occasional writer and conference speaker and blogs at www.robblackwell.org.uk Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure

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• Add Hotmail & Live Email Accounts to Outlook 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Microsoft has recently been promoting upcoming updates to their Hotmail service, promising to make it an even better webmail service. But Microsoft’s revamped Outlook 2010 is already here. Here’s how to integrate Hotmail with Outlook. Outlook 2010 works with a wide variety of email accounts, including POP3, IMAP, and Exchange accounts.  The only problem with POP3 and IMAP accounts is that they only sync email, but not your calendar and contacts like Exchange does.  Hotmail, however, lets you sync your email, contacts, and calendar with Outlook with the Hotmail Connector.  This lets you keep all of your PIM data accessible from everywhere.  Let’s look at how we can set this up on our account. Getting Started The easiest way to add Hotmail to Outlook is to first install the Outlook Hotmail Connector (link below).  Make sure Outlook is closed first, and then proceed with the installation as usual. If you enter your Hotmail account into the New Account setup in Outlook before installing the Hotmail Connector, Outlook will prompt you to download the Hotmail Connector.  However, you’ll have to exit Outlook before you can install the Connector, and then will have to re-enter your information when you restart Outlook, so it’s easier to just install it first. Add Your Hotmail Account to Outlook Now you’re ready to add your Hotmail account to Outlook.  If this is the first time you’ve run Outlook 2010, you’ll be greeted with the following screen.  Click Next to proceed with setup. Then select Yes and click Next again. If you’ve already got an email account setup in Outlook, you can add a new account by clicking File and then selecting Add account. Now, enter your Hotmail account information, and click Next. Outlook will search for your account settings and automatically setup your account with the Hotmail connector we previously installed. If you entered your password incorrectly previously, you may see the following popup.  Re-enter your password and click OK, and Outlook will re-verify your settings. Once everything’s finished and setup, you’ll see the following completion screen.  Click Finish to complete the setup and check out your Hotmail in Outlook. Welcome to your Hotmail account in Outlook 2010.  You’ll notice a small notification at the bottom of the window notifying you that you’re connected to Windows Live Hotmail.  Now your email will synchronize with your Hotmail account, and your Outlook calendar and contacts will be synced with your Live calendar and contacts, respectively.  This is the closest you can get to full Exchange without an Exchange account, and in our experience it works great.  In fact, Hotmail Sync seems to work faster than IMAP sync for us. Setup Hotmail With POP3 Access If you need to access your Hotmail email account but don’t want to install the Outlook Connector, then you can add it with POP3 sync.  We recommend going with the Outlook Connector for the best experience, but if you can’t install it (eg. you’re not allowed to install applications on your work PC) then this is a good alternative. To do this, follow our tutorial on setting up a Gmail POP3 account in Outlook. Although the article concentrates on Gmail, the settings are essentially the same. The only thing you’ll want to change is the Incoming and Outgoing mail server. Incoming mail server – pop3.live.com Outgoing mail server – smtp.live.com User name – your Hotmail or Live email address Incoming Server (POP3) – 995 Outgoing Server (SMTP) – 587 Also, check This server requires and encrypted connection Just as in the Gmail example, select TLS for the type of encrypted connection.  Then, on the bottom, make sure to uncheck the box to Remove messages from the server after a number of days.  This way your messages will still be accessible from your Hotmail account online. Conclusion Even though Hotmail is generally not as popular as Gmail, it works great with Outlook integration.  If you’re a heavy user of Windows Live services, or want to try them out, Outlook Connector is the easiest way to keep your desktop activity synced with the cloud.  If you’re just one of the millions of Hotmail users who want to access their old Hotmail account alongside their other accounts, this method works great for you too. If you’re using Outlook 2003 or 2007, check out our article on using Hotmail from Microsoft Outlook. Links Download Outlook Hotmail Connector 32-bit Download Outlook Hotmail Connector 64-bit – note, only for users of Office 2010 x64 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use Hotmail from Microsoft OutlookHow to add any POP3 Email Account to HotmailHow to Send and Receive Hotmail from Your Gmail AccountAdd Your Gmail To Windows Live MailManage Your Windows Live Account in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes

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• What’s New for Oracle Commerce? Executive QA with John Andrews, VP Product Management, Oracle Commerce

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Oracle Commerce was for the fifth time positioned as a leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce. This inspired me to sit down with Oracle Commerce VP of Product Management, John Andrews to get his perspective on what continues to make Oracle a leader in the industry and what’s new for Oracle Commerce in 2013. Q: Why do you believe Oracle Commerce continues to be a leader in the industry? John: Oracle has a great acquisition strategy – it brings best-of-breed technologies into the product fold and then continues to grow and innovate them. This is particularly true with products unified into the Oracle Commerce brand. Oracle acquired ATG in late 2010 – and then Endeca in late 2011. This means that under the hood of Oracle Commerce you have market-leading technologies for cross-channel commerce and customer experience, both designed and developed in direct response to the unique challenges online businesses face. And we continue to innovate on capabilities core to what our customers need to be successful – contextual and personalized experience delivery, merchant-inspired tools, and architecture for performance and scalability. Q: It’s not a slow moving industry. What are you doing to keep the pace of innovation at Oracle Commerce? John: Oracle owes our customers the most innovative commerce capabilities. By unifying the core components of ATG and Endeca we are delivering on this promise. Oracle Commerce is continuing to innovate and redefine how commerce is done and in a way that drive business results and keeps customers coming back for experiences tailored just for them. Our January and May 2013 releases not only marked the seventh significant releases for the solution since the acquisitions of ATG and Endeca, we also continue to demonstrate rapid and significant progress on the unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities of the two commerce technologies. Q: Can you tell us what was notable about these latest releases under the Oracle Commerce umbrella? John: Specifically, our latest product innovations give businesses selling online the ability to get to market faster with more personalized commerce experiences in the following ways: Mobile: the latest Commerce Reference Application in this release offers a wider range of examples for online businesses to leverage for iOS development and specifically new iPad reference capabilities. This release marks the first release of the iOS Universal application that serves both the iPhone and iPad devices from a single download or binary. Business users can now drive page content management and layout of search results and category pages, as well as create additional storefront elements such as categories, facets / dimensions, and breadcrumbs through Experience Manager tools. Cross-Channel Commerce: key commerce platform capabilities have been added to support cross-channel commerce, including an expanded inventory model to maintain inventory for stores, pickup in stores and Web-based returns. Online businesses with in-store operations can now offer advanced shipping options on the web and make returns and exchange logic easily available on the web. Multi-Site Capabilities: significant enhancements to the Commerce Platform multi-site architecture that allows business users to quickly launch and manage multiple sites on the same cluster and share data, carts, and other components. First introduced in 2010, with this latest release business users can now partition or share customer profiles, control users’ site-based access, and manage personalization assets using site groups. Internationalization: continued language support and enhancements for business user tools as well and search and navigation. Guided Search now supports 35 total languages with 11 new languages (including Danish, Arabic, Norwegian, Serbian Cyrillic) added in this release. Commerce Platform tools now include localized support for 17 locales with 4 new languages (Danish, Portuguese (European), Finnish, and Thai). No development or customization is required in order for business users to use the applications in any of these supported languages. Business Tool Experience: valuable new Commerce Merchandising features include a new workflow for making emergency changes quickly and increased visibility into promotions rules and qualifications in preview mode. Oracle Commerce business tools continue to become more and more feature rich to provide intuitive, easy- to-use (yet powerful) capabilities to allow business users to manage content and the shopping experience. Commerce & Experience Unification: demonstrable unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities include – productized cartridges that provide supported integration between the Commerce Platform and Experience Management tools, cross-channel returns, Oracle Service Cloud integration, and integrated iPad application. The mission guiding our product development is to deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences across any device in a contextual manner – and to give the business the best tools to tune and optimize those user experiences to meet their business objectives. We also need to do this in a way that makes it operationally efficient for the business, keeping the overall total cost of ownership low – yet also allows the business to expand, whether it be to new business models, geographies or brands. To learn more about the latest Oracle Commerce releases and mission, visit the links below: • Hear more from John about the Oracle Commerce mission • Hear from Oracle Commerce customers • Documentation on the new releases • Listen to the Oracle ATG Commerce 10.2 Webcast • Listen to the Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 Webcast

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• Nerdstock 2012: A photo review of Microsoft TechEd North America 2012

  - by The Un-T Guy

  Not only could I not fathom that I would ever be attending a tech event of the magnitude of TechEd, neither could any of my co-workers.  As the least technical person in the history of Information Technology ever, I felt as though I were walking into the belly of the beast, fearing I’d not be allowed out until I could write SSIS packages, program in Visual Basic, or at least arm wrestle a DBA.  Most of my fears were unrealized.   But I made it.  I was here.  I even got to wear the Mark of the Geek neck package with schedule, eyeglass cleaners, name badge (company name obfuscated so they don’t fire me), and a pen.  The name  badge was seemingly the key element, as every vendor in the place wanted to scan it to capture name, email address, and numbers to show their bosses back home.  It also let me eat the food and drink the coffee so that’s a fair trade.   A recurring theme throughout the presentations and vendor demos was “the Cloud” and BYOD (bring your own device).  The below was a common site throughout the week, as attendees from all over the world brought their own devices and were able to (seemingly) seamlessly connect to the Worldwide Innerwebs.  Apparently proof that Microsoft and the event organizers were practicing what they were preaching.   “Cavernous” is one way to describe the downstairs facility itself.  “Freaking cavernous” might be more accurate.  Work sessions were held in classrooms on the second and third floors but the real action was happening downstairs.  Microsoft bookstore, blogger hub (shoutout to Geekswithblogs.net), The Wall (sans Pink Floyd, sadly), couches, recharging stations…   …a game zone with pool and air hockey tables, pinball machines, foosball…   …vintage video games…           …and a even giant chess board.  Looked like this guy was opening with the Kaspersky parry.   The blend of technology and fantasy even went so far as to bring childhood favorites to life.  Assuming, of course, your childhood was pre-video games (like mine) and you were stuck with electric football and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots:   And, lest the “combatants” become unruly or – God forbid – afternoon snacks were late, Orange County’s finest was on the scene to keep the peace.  On a high-tech mode of transport, of course.   She wasn’t the only one to think this was a swell way to transition from one concourse to the next.  Given the level of support provided by the entire Orange County Convention Center staff, I knew they had to have some secret.   Here’s one entrance to the vendor zone/”Technical Learning Center.”  Couldn’t help but think of them as the remora attached to the Whale Shark that is Microsoft…   …or perhaps planets orbiting the sun. Microsoft is just that huge and it seemed like every vendor in the industry looks forward to partnering with the tech behemoth.   Aside from the free stuff from the vendors, probably the most popular place in the house was the dining area.  Amazing spreads every day, multiple times a day.  While no attendance numbers were available at press time, literally thousands of attendees were fed, and fed well, every day.  And lest you think my post from earlier in the week exaggerated about the backpacks…   …or that I’m exaggerating about the lunch crowds.  This represents only about between 25-30% of the lunch crowd – it was all my camera could capture at once.  No one went away hungry.   The only thing missing was a a vat of Red Bull but apparently organizers went old school, with probably 100 urns of the original energy drink – coffee – all around the venue.   Of course, following lunch and afternoon sessions, some preferred the even older school method of re-energizing.  There were rumors that Microsoft was serving graham crackers and milk in this area.  But they were only rumors.   Cannot overstate the wonderful service provided by the Orange County Convention Center staff.  Coffee, soft drinks, juice, and water were available always.  Buffet meals were delicious with a wide range of healthy options available, in addition to hundreds (at least) special meal requests supported every day.  Ever tried to keep up with an estimated 9,000 hungry and thirsty IT-ers?  These folks did.  Kudos to all of the staff and many thanks!   And while I occasionally poke fun at the Whale Shark, if nothing else this experience convinced me of one thing:  Microsoft knows how to put on a professional event.  Hundreds of informative, professionally delivered sessions, covering a wide range of topics set at varying levels of expertise (some that even I was able to follow), social activities, vendor partnerships…they brought everything you could ask for to inform, educate, and inspire an entire IT industry.   So as I depart the belly of the beast, I can both take pride in the fact that I survived the week and marvel at the brilliance surrounding me.  The IT industry – or at least the segment associated with Microsoft – is in good, professional hands.  And what won’t fit in their hands can be toted in the Microsoft provided backpacks.  Win-win.   Until New Orleans…

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• Information Indepth Newsletter - Linux Edition

  - by Paulo Folgado

  INFORMATION INDEPTH NEWSLETTERLinux Edition February 2011 Stay Connected:  NEWS Now Available: Oracle Linux 6 Get the latest release of Oracle Linux 6, which includes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.Download Oracle Linux 6 Read More Customers Succeed by Using Oracle Exadata with Oracle Linux Watch IT executives from Bank of America, Linkshare, and Johns Hopkins as they talk about the business challenges they faced and why they chose to use Oracle Linux along with Oracle Exadata as the solution. Watch Now Video Interview: Oracle Senior Vice President Wim Coekaerts Watch Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, as he talks about use cases for Oracle VM Templates as well as the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Linux.Watch Now Hot Off the Press: Migrate Your IBM AIX Environment to Oracle Linux This new white paper provides recommendations for planning and implementing the migration of applications from an IBM Power System running AIX to Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 Server with Intel Xeon 7560 Processor running Oracle Linux 5.5.Read More  Back to Top BLOGOSPHERE Just Launched: The Oracle Linux Blog Follow our new Oracle Linux blog  to hear the latest updates, product news, upcoming events, and all the latest happenings, directly from the Linux team at Oracle. Back to Top TECH DIVE NEW: Linux/Oracle Solaris CommandComparo Site from Oracle Technology NetworkThis site gives equivalent command syntax in Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 for common administrative tasks--focusing particularly on tasks that have tricky syntax or that you frequently need to double check. It acts as a quick reference for administrators who operate in these two OS environments. Free Download: Oracle Linux Release 5.6Did you know that by using Oracle Linux 5.5 or 5.6 along with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, you can get all the benefits of Linux mainline kernel 2.6.32 and more, right now, without the need to reinstall or migrate to a new operating system such as RHEL6?Read Release NotesDownload Oracle Linux 5.6 LSB 4.0 Certification Completed for Oracle Linux 5.5Oracle Linux 5.5 with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel successfully completed the LSB 4.0 certification.  Back to Top WEBCASTS Boost Your Linux Performance with Oracle's Enhancements in Infiniband and RDSRegister to hear Director of Kernel Engineering Chris Mason cover scalability and performance improvements in Linux environment. Get the Facts Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise KernelSVP Wim Coekaerts and Senior Director Monica Kumar cover the facts about and benefits of using Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.  View Other Webcasts on Demand   Back to Top EVENTS Collaborate 2011April 10-14 Orlando, Florida Cloud Summit Events, WorldwideVarious dates (check the city for date/time of event) Datacenter Efficiency Events WorldwideThese events include Linux and Oracle VM sessions.Various dates (check the city for date/time of event) Virtualization Events in North America Find an Oracle Event  Back to Top EDUCATION Get Oracle Linux Certified from Oracle University Oracle University offers courses in both Oracle Linux and the administration of Oracle Database on Linux.  Back to Top CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Pella Corporation Improves IT Performance and Efficiency with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM To improve IT performance and efficiency and lower operational costs, Pella Corporation, has standardized on Oracle VM and Oracle Linux. Read More Disney Store Deploys POS in 330 Stores and 7 Countries on Oracle Linux Disney Store is running 1,500 registers worldwide on a broad Oracle technology software stack including Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Linux. Read More Back to Top PARTNER SPOTLIGHT Emulex and Oracle Announce Data Integrity Features The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel provides data integrity checking between Oracle Database applications and Emulex 8Gb/s LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters. Read More Dell Inc. Dell Inc. tested and validated configurations support Oracle Linux. Back to Top STAY IN TOUCH Follow @ORCL_Linux on Twitter for the latest penguin tweets Bookmark Oracle.com/Linux Read the Oracle Linux blog Back to Top  Oracle Information InDepth newsletters bring targeted news, articles, customer stories, and special offers to business people who want to find out how to streamline enterprise information management, measure results, improve business processes, and communicate a single truth to their constituents. Please send questions or comments to [email protected]. For answers to questions about subscribing, unsubscribing, and managing your Oracle e-mail communications preferences, please see the Oracle E-Mail Communications page. Copyright © 2011, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor is it subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. 

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• Oracle Database 12c: Oracle Multitenant Option

  - by hamsun

  1. Why ? 2. What is it ? 3. How ? 1. Why ? The main idea of the 'grid' is to share resources, to make better use of storage, CPU and memory. If a database administrator wishes to implement this idea, he or she must consolidate many databases to one database. One of the concerns of running many applications together in one database is: ‚what will happen, if one of the applications must be restored because of a human error?‘ Tablespace point in time recovery can be used for this purpose, but there are a few prerequisites. Most importantly the tablespaces are strictly separated for each application. Another reason for creating separated databases is security: each customer has his own database. Therefore, there is often a proliferation of smaller databases. Each of them must be maintained, upgraded, each allocates virtual memory and runs background processes thereby wasting resources. Oracle 12c offers another possibility for virtualization, providing isolation at the database level: the multitenant container database holding pluggable databases. 2. What ? Pluggable databases are logical units inside a multitenant container database, which consists of one multitenant container database and up to 252 pluggable databases. The SGA is shared as are the background processes. The multitenant container database holds metadata information common for pluggable databases inside the System and the Sysaux tablespace, and there is just one Undo tablespace. The pluggable databases have smaller System and Sysaux tablespaces, containing just their 'personal' metadata. New data dictionary views will make the information available either on pdb (dba_views) or container level (cdb_views). There are local users, which are known in specific pluggable databases and common users known in all containers. Pluggable databases can be easily plugged to another multitenant container database and converted from a non-CDB. They can undergo point in time recovery. 3. How ? Creating a multitenant container database can be done using the database configuration assistant: There you find the new option: Create as Container Database. If you prefer ‚hand made‘ databases you can execute the command from a instance in nomount state: CREATE DATABASE cdb1 ENABLE PLUGGABLE DATABASE …. And of course this can also be achieved through Enterprise Manager Cloud. A freshly created multitenant container database consists of two containers: the root container as the 'rack' and a seed container, a template for future pluggable databases. There are 4 ways to create other pluggable databases: 1. Create an empty pdb from seed 2. Plug in a non-CDB 3. Move a pdb from another pdb 4. Copy a pdb from another pdb We will discuss option2: how to plug in a non_CDB into a multitenant container database. Three different methods are available : 1. Create an empty pdb and use Datapump in traditional export/import mode or with Transportable Tablespace or Database mode. This method is suitable for pre 12c databases. 2. Create an empty pdb and use GoldenGate replication. When the pdb catches up with the non-CDB, you fail over to the pdb. 3. Databases of Version 12c or higher can be plugged in with the help of the new dbms_pdb Package. This is a demonstration for method 3: Step1: Connect to the non-CDB to be plugged in and create an xml File with description of the database. The xml file is written to $ORACLE_HOME/dbs per default and contains mainly information about the datafiles. Step 2: Check if the non-CDB is pluggable in the multitenant container database: Step 3: Create the pluggable database, connected to the Multitenant container database. With nocopy option the files will be reused, but the tempfile is created anew: A service is created and registered automatically with the listener: Step 4: Delete unnecessary metadata from PDB SYSTEM tablespace: To connect to newly created pdb, edit tnsnames.ora and add entry for new pdb. Connect to plugged-in non_CDB and clean up Data Dictionary to remove entries now maintained in multitenant container database. As all kept objects have to be recompiled it will take a few minutes. Step 5: The plugged-in database will be automatically synchronised by creating common users and roles when opened the first time in read write mode. Step 6: Verify tablespaces and users: There is only one local tablespace (users) and one local user (scott) in the plugged-in non_CDB pdb_orcl. This method of creating plugged_in non_CDB from is fast and easy for 12c databases. The method for deplugging a pluggable database from a CDB is to create a new non_CDB and use the the new full transportable feature of Datapump and drop the pluggable database. About the Author: Gerlinde has been working for Oracle University Germany as one of our Principal Instructors for over 14 years. She started with Oracle 7 and became an Oracle Certified Master for Oracle 10g and 11c. She is a specialist in Database Core Technologies, with profound knowledge in Backup & Recovery, Performance Tuning for DBAs and Application Developers, Datawarehouse Administration, Data Guard and Real Application Clusters.

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• Going to the Score Cards - Exceptional DBA Awards 2011

  - by Rodney

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

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• Winners of the Oracle Excellence Award—Eco-Enterprise Innovation

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  Did you get a chance to attend Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco? With 60,000 attendees and hundreds of sessions to choose from—there was a lot going on. One of my favorite sessions was the Eco-Enterprise Awards and Sustainability Executive Panel Discussion. During this session, Jeff Henley, Oracle Chairman of the Board, announced the winners of the 2013 Oracle Excellence Award—Eco-Enterprise Innovation. It was an enlightening session as we heard several of the winning customers discuss the importance of sustainability to their company and how they’re using various Oracle products to help with their sustainability initiatives. The winning customers include: Centennial Coal, Indaver nv, Korea Enterprise Data, National Guard Health Affairs, Schneider National, SThree, Telstra International Group, Trex Company, University of Salzburg, Walmart, and Yeoncheon County Office. Stay tuned for additional blogs where you’ll learn more about these winning companies’ environmental best practices and why they won this award. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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;} Several partners were also recognized for helping these customers with their sustainability initiatives. Those partners include: CSS International, Daesang Information Technology, i4BI, Infosys, Knowledge Global, Solutions for Retails Brands Limited, and SysGen. During this same session, Jeff Henley also awarded Robert Kaplan, Director of Sustainability at Walmart, with Oracle’s Chief Sustainability Officer of the Year award. Robert was honored for helping improve Walmart’s supply chain efficiency with their Sustainability Hub. The Sustainability Hub, powered by Oracle Service Cloud, is a central location for Walmart suppliers, associates and business partners to learn, connect, inspire and drive sustainability through collaboration. While at Oracle OpenWorld, I also got a chance to hear Robert Kaplan discuss their Sustainability Hub during an Oracle OpenWorld Live taping. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

  - by Rob Farley

  Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

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

  - by Jeff

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

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• JavaOne Afterglow by Simon Ritter

  - by JuergenKress

  Last week was the eighteenth JavaOne conference and I thought it would be a good idea to write up my thoughts about how things went. Firstly thanks to Yoshio Terada for the photos, I didn't bother bringing a camera with me so it's good to have some pictures to add to the words. Things kicked off full-throttle on Sunday.  We had the Java Champions and JUG leaders breakfast, which was a great way to meet up with a lot of familiar faces and start talking all things Java.  At midday the show really started with the Strategy and Technical Keynotes.  This was always going to be tougher job than some years because there was no big shiny ball to reveal to the audience.  With the Java EE 7 spec being finalised a few months ago and Java SE 8, Java ME 8 and JDK8 not due until the start of next year there was not going to be any big announcement.  I thought both keynotes worked really well each focusing on the things most important to Java developers: Strategy One of the things that is becoming more and more prominent in many companies marketing is the Internet of Things (IoT).  We've moved from the conventional desktop/laptop environment to much more mobile connected computing with smart phones and tablets.  The next wave of the internet is not just billions of people connected, but 10s or 100s of billions of devices connected to the network, all generating data and providing much more precise control of almost any process you can imagine.  This ties into the ideas of Big Data and Cloud Computing, but implementation is certainly not without its challenges.  As Peter Utzschneider explained it's about three Vs: Volume, Velocity and Value.  All these devices will create huge volumes of data at very high speed; to avoid being overloaded these devices will need some sort of processing capabilities that can filter the useful data from the redundant.  The raw data then needs to be turned into useful information that has value.  To make this happen will require applications on devices, at gateways and on the back-end servers, all very tightly integrated.  This is where Java plays a pivotal role, write once, run everywhere becomes essential, having nine million developers fluent in the language makes it the defacto lingua franca of IoT.  There will be lots more information on how this will become a reality, so watch this space. Technical How do we make the IoT a reality, technically?  Using the game of chess Mark Reinhold, with the help of people like John Ceccarelli, Jasper Potts and Richard Bair, showed what you could do.  Using Java EE on the back end, Java SE and JavaFX on the desktop and Java ME Embedded and JavaFX on devices they showed a complete end-to-end demo. This was really impressive, using 3D features from JavaFX 8 (that's included with JDK8) to make a 3D animated Duke chess board.  Jasper also unveiled the "DukePad" a home made tablet using a Raspberry Pi, touch screen and accelerometer. Although the Raspberry Pi doesn't have earth shattering CPU performance (about the same level as a mid 1990s Pentium), it does have really quite good GPU performance so the GUI works really well.  The plans are all open sourced and available here.  One small, but very significant announcement was that Java SE will now be included with the NOOB and Raspbian Linux distros provided by the Raspberry Pi foundation (these can be found here).  No more hassle having to download and install the JDK after you've flashed your SD card OS image.  The finale was the Raspberry Pi powered chess playing robot.  Really very, very cool.  I talked to Jasper about this and he told me each of the chess pieces had been 3D printed and then he had to use acetone to give them a glossy finish (not sure what his wife thought of him spending hours in the kitchen in a gas mask!)  The way the robot arm worked was very impressive as it did not have any positioning data (like a potentiometer connected to each motor), but relied purely on carefully calibrated timings to get the arm to the right place.  Having done things like this myself in the past I know how easy it is to find a small error gets magnified into very big mistakes. Here's some pictures from the keynote: The "Dukepad" architecture Nice clear perspex case so you can see the innards. The very nice 3D chess set.  Maya's obviously a great tool. Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Simon Ritter,Java One,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – March 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity PeterPaul ? RT @JDeveloper: EJB 3 Deployment guide for WebLogic Server Version: 10.3.4.0 dlvr.it/1J5VcV Andrejus Baranovskis ?Open ADF PopUp on Page Load fb.me/1Rx9LP3oW Sten Vesterli ? RT @OracleBlogs: Using the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java on ADF Applications ow.ly/1hVKbB <- Neat! No more WS calls Java Buddy ?JavaFX 2.0: Example of MediaPlay java-buddy.blogspot.com/2012/03/javafx… Georges Saab Build improvements coming to #openJDK for #jdk8 mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/buil… NetBeans Team Share your #Java experience! JavaOne 2012 India call for papers: ow.ly/9xYg0 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 Screencasts & Videos – bit.ly/zmQjn2 chriscmuir ?G+: New blog post: ADF Runtimes vs WLS versions as of JDeveloper 11.1.1.6.0 – bit.ly/y8tkgJ Michael Heinrichs New article: Creating a Sprite Animation with JavaFX blog.netopyr.com/2012/03/09/cre… Oracle WebLogic ? #WebLogic Devcast Webinar Series for March: Enterprise Java Scale Out, JPA, Distributed Grid Data Cache bit.ly/zeUXEV #Coherence Andrejus Baranovskis ?Extending Application Module for ADF BC Proxy User DB Connection fb.me/Bj1hLUqm OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7 | Mark Nelson bit.ly/w7IroZ OTNArchBeat ? Java Champion Jonas Bonér Explains the Akka Platform bit.ly/x2GbXm Adam Bien ? (Java) FX Experience Tools–Feels Like Native Mac App: FX Experience Tools application comes with a native Mac O… bit.ly/waHF3H GlassFish ? GlassFish new recruit and Eclipse integration progress – bit.ly/y5eEkk JDeveloper & ADF Prototyping ADF Libraries dlvr.it/1Hhnw0 Eric Elzinga ?Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7, bit.ly/xkphFQ ADF EMG ? Working with ADF in Arabic, Hebrew or other right-to-left-written language? Oracle UX asks for your help. groups.google.com/forum/?fromgro… Java ? A simple #JavaFX Login Form with a TRON like effect ow.ly/9n9AG JDeveloper & ADF ? Logging in Oracle ADF Applications dlvr.it/1HZhcX OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Cloud Conference: dates and locations worldwide bit.ly/ywXydR UK Oracle User Group ? Simon Haslam, ACE Director present on #WebLogic for DBAs at #oug_ire2012 j.mp/zG6vz3 @oraclewebcenter @oracleace #dublin Steven Davelaar ? Working with ADF and not a member of ADF EMG? You miss lots of valuable info, join now! sites.google.com/site/oracleemg… Simon Haslam @MaciejGruszka: Oracle plans to provide Forms & Reports plug-in for OVAB next year to help deployment. #ukoug MW SIG GlassFish ? Introducing JSR 357: Social Media API – bit.ly/yC8vez JAX London ? Are you coming to Java EE workshops by @AdamBien at JAX Days? Save £100 by registering today. #jaxdays #javaee jaxdays.com WebLogic Community ?Welcome to our Munich WebLogic 12c Bootcamp in Munich! If you also want to attend a training register for the Community oracle.com/partners/goto/… chriscmuir ? My first webcast for Oracle! (be kind) Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object bit.ly/ArKija OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Weblogic Server 12c is available on Oracle Solaris 11 (SPARC and x86) bit.ly/xE3TLg JDeveloper & ADF ? Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object – YouTube dlvr.it/1H93Qr OTNArchBeat ? Application-Driven Virtualization with Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder | Ronen Kofman bit.ly/wF1C1N Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server Singleton Services ow.ly/1hOu4U Barbara Ann May ?@oracledevtools: New update: #NetBeans IDE 7.1.1, with support for #GlassFish 3.1.2 bit.ly/mOLcQd #java #developer OTNArchBeat ? Using Coherence with JDeveloper: bit.ly/AkoEQb WebLogic Community ? WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter February 2012 wp.me/p1LMIb-f3 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 – new Podcast episode : bit.ly/wc6oBE Frank Nimphius ?Cool! Open JDeveloper 11.1.1.5, go help–>check for updates. First thing shown is that 11.1.1.6 is available. Never miss a new release Adam Bien ?5 Minutes (Video) With Java EE …Or With NetBeans + GlassFish: This screencast covers a 5-minute development of a… bit.ly/xkOJMf WebLogic Community ? Free Oracle WebLogic Certification Application Grid Implementation Specialist wp.me/p1LMIb-eT OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Coherence: First Steps Using Clusters and Basic API Usage | Ricardo Ferreira bit.ly/yYQ3Wz GlassFish ? JMS 2.0 Early Draft is here – bit.ly/ygT1VN OTNArchBeat ? Exalogic Networking Part 2 | The Old Toxophilist bit.ly/xuYMIi OTNArchBeat ?New Release: GlassFish Server 3.1.2. Read All About It! | Paul Davies bit.ly/AtlGxo Oracle WebLogic ?OTN Virtual Developer Day: #WebLogic 12c & #Coherence ost-conference on-demand page live with bonus #Virtualbox lab – bit.ly/xUy6BJ Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server 11g (10.3.6) Documentation ow.ly/1hJgUB Lucas Jellema ? Just published an article on the AMIS blog: technology.amis.nl/2012/03/adf-11… ADF 11g – programmatically sorting rich table columns. Java Certification ? New Course! Learn how to create mobile applications using Java ME: bit.ly/xZj1Jh Simon Haslam ? @MaciejGruszka WebLogic 12c can run against 11g domain config without changes …and can rollback to 11. #ukoug MW SIG Justin Kestelyn ? Learn Advanced ADF, free and online bit.ly/wEKSRc WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress,WebLogic 12c

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• Auto DOP and Concurrency

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  After spending some time in the cloud, I figured it is time to come down to earth and start discussing some of the new Auto DOP features some more. As Database Machines (the v2 machine runs Oracle Database 11.2) are effectively selling like hotcakes, it makes some sense to talk about the new parallel features in more detail. For basic understanding make sure you have read the initial post. The focus there is on Auto DOP and queuing, which is to some extend the focus here. But now I want to discuss the concurrency a little and explain some of the relevant parameters and their impact, specifically in a situation with concurrency on the system. The goal of Auto DOP The idea behind calculating the Automatic Degree of Parallelism is to find the highest possible DOP (ideal DOP) that still scales. In other words, if we were to increase the DOP even more  above a certain DOP we would see a tailing off of the performance curve and the resource cost / performance would become less optimal. Therefore the ideal DOP is the best resource/performance point for that statement. The goal of Queuing On a normal production system we should see statements running concurrently. On a Database Machine we typically see high concurrency rates, so we need to find a way to deal with both high DOP’s and high concurrency. Queuing is intended to make sure we Don’t throttle down a DOP because other statements are running on the system Stay within the physical limits of a system’s processing power Instead of making statements go at a lower DOP we queue them to make sure they will get all the resources they want to run efficiently without trashing the system. The theory – and hopefully – practice is that by giving a statement the optimal DOP the sum of all statements runs faster with queuing than without queuing. Increasing the Number of Potential Parallel Statements To determine how many statements we will consider running in parallel a single parameter should be looked at. That parameter is called PARALLEL_MIN_TIME_THRESHOLD. The default value is set to 10 seconds. So far there is nothing new here…, but do realize that anything serial (e.g. that stays under the threshold) goes straight into processing as is not considered in the rest of this post. Now, if you have a system where you have two groups of queries, serial short running and potentially parallel long running ones, you may want to worry only about the long running ones with this parallel statement threshold. As an example, lets assume the short running stuff runs on average between 1 and 15 seconds in serial (and the business is quite happy with that). The long running stuff is in the realm of 1 – 5 minutes. It might be a good choice to set the threshold to somewhere north of 30 seconds. That way the short running queries all run serial as they do today (if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it) and allows the long running ones to be evaluated for (higher degrees of) parallelism. This makes sense because the longer running ones are (at least in theory) more interesting to unleash a parallel processing model on and the benefits of running these in parallel are much more significant (again, that is mostly the case). Setting a Maximum DOP for a Statement Now that you know how to control how many of your statements are considered to run in parallel, lets talk about the specific degree of any given statement that will be evaluated. As the initial post describes this is controlled by PARALLEL_DEGREE_LIMIT. This parameter controls the degree on the entire cluster and by default it is CPU (meaning it equals Default DOP). For the sake of an example, let’s say our Default DOP is 32. Looking at our 5 minute queries from the previous paragraph, the limit to 32 means that none of the statements that are evaluated for Auto DOP ever runs at more than DOP of 32. Concurrently Running a High DOP A basic assumption about running high DOP statements at high concurrency is that you at some point in time (and this is true on any parallel processing platform!) will run into a resource limitation. And yes, you can then buy more hardware (e.g. expand the Database Machine in Oracle’s case), but that is not the point of this post… The goal is to find a balance between the highest possible DOP for each statement and the number of statements running concurrently, but with an emphasis on running each statement at that highest efficiency DOP. The PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET parameter is the all important concurrency slider here. Setting this parameter to a higher number means more statements get to run at their maximum parallel degree before queuing kicks in.  PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET is set per instance (so needs to be set to the same value on all 8 nodes in a full rack Database Machine). Just as a side note, this parameter is set in processes, not in DOP, which equates to 4* Default DOP (2 processes for a DOP, default value is 2 * Default DOP, hence a default of 4 * Default DOP). Let’s say we have PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET set to 128. With our limit set to 32 (the default) we are able to run 4 statements concurrently at the highest DOP possible on this system before we start queuing. If these 4 statements are running, any next statement will be queued. To run a system at high concurrency the PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET should be raised from its default to be much closer (start with 60% or so) to PARALLEL_MAX_SERVERS. By using both PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET and PARALLEL_DEGREE_LIMIT you can control easily how many statements run concurrently at good DOPs without excessive queuing. Because each workload is a little different, it makes sense to plan ahead and look at these parameters and set these based on your requirements.

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• 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards - Part 2

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Moazzam Chaudry Continuing from Friday's blog on 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards, this blog (Part 2) will provide more details around the customers. It was a tremendous honor to be in single room of winners. We only wish we could have had more time to share stories from all the winners.  We received great insight from all the innovative solutions that our customers deploy and would like to share them broadly, so that others can benefit from best practices. There was a customer panel session joined by Ingersoll Rand, Nike and Motability and here is what was discussed: Barry Bonar, Enterprise Architect from Ingersoll Rand shared details around their solution, comprised of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite. This combined solutoin enabled their business transformation to increase decision-making, speed and efficiency, resulting in 40% reduced IT spend, 41X Faster response time and huge cost savings. Ashok Balakrishnan, Architect from Nike shared how they leveraged Oracle Coherence to analyze their digital "footprint" of activities. This helps them compete, collaborate and compare athletic data over time. Lastly, Ashley Doodly, Head of IT from Motability shared details around their solution compromised of Oracle SOA Suite, Service Bus, ADF, Coherence, BO and E-Business Suite. This solution helped Motability achieve 100% ROI within the first few months, performance in seconds vs. 10's of minutes and tremendous improvement in throughput that increased up to 50%.  This year's winners by category are: Oracle Exalogic Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Netshoes ATG on Exalogic: 6X Reduced H/W foot print, 6.2X increased throughput and 3 weeks time to market Claro Part of America Movil, running mission critical Java Application on Exalogic with 35X Faster Java response time, 5X Throughput Underwriters Laboratories Exalogic as an Apps Consolidation platform to power tremendous growth Ingersoll Rand EBS on Exalogic: Up to 40% Reduction in overall IT budget, 3x reduced foot print Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  Mazda Motor Corporation Tuxedo ART Batch runtime environment to migrate their batch apps on new open environment and reduce main frame cost. HOTELBEDS Technology Open Source to WebLogic transformation Globalia Corporation Introduced Oracle Coherence to fully reengineer DTH system and provide multiple business and technical benefits Nike Nike+, digital sports platform, has 8M users and is expecting an 5X increase in users, many of who will carry multiple devices that frequently sync data with the Digital Sport platform Comcast Corporation The solution is expected to increase availability, continuity, performance, and simplify and make the code at the application layer more flexible. Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM Customer Results using Fusion Middleware NTT Docomo Network traffic solution based on Oracle event processing and coherence - massive in scale: 12M users (50M in future) - 800,000 events/sec. Schneider National, Inc. SOA/B2B/ADF/Data Integration to orchestrate key order processes across Siebel, OTM & EBS.  Platform runs 60M trans/day and  50 million composite SOA instances per day across 10G and 11G Amadeus Oracle BPM solution: Business Rules and processes vary across local (80), regional (~10) and corporate approval process. Up to 10 levels of approval. Plans to deploy across 20+ markets Navitar SOA solution integrates a fully non-Oracle legacy application/ERP environment using Oracle’s SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Motability Uses SOA Suite to synchronize data across the systems and to manage the vehicle remarketing process Oracle WebCenter Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  News Limited Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers University of Louisville “Facebook for Medicine”: Oracle Webcenter platform and Oracle BIEE to analyze patient test data and uncover potential health issues. Expecting annualized ROI of 277% China Mobile Jiangsu Company portal (25k users) to drive collaboration & productivity Life Technologies Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments LA Dept. of Water & Power Oracle WebCenter Portal to power ladwp.com on desktop and mobile for 1.6million users Oracle Identity Management Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Education Testing Service Identity Management platform for provisioning & SSO of 6 million GRE, GMAT, TOEFL customers Avea Oracle Identity Manager allowing call center personnel to quickly change Identity Profile to handle varying call loads based on a user self service interface. Decreased Admin Cost by 30% Oracle Data Integration Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Raymond James Near real-time integration for improved systems (throughput & performance) and enhanced operational flexibility in a 24 X 7 environment Wm Morrison Supermarkets Electronic Point of Sale integration handling over 80 million transactions a day in near real time (15 min intervals) Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Development Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Qualcomm Incorporated Solution providing  immediate business value enabling a self-service model necessary for growing the new customer base, an increase in customer satisfaction, reduced “time-to-deliver” Micros Systems, Inc. ADF, SOA Suite, WebCenter  enables services that include managing distribution of hotel rooms availability and rates to channels such as Hotel Web-site, Expedia, etc. Marfin Egnatia Bank A new web 2.0 UI provides a much richer experience through the ADF solution with the end result being one of boosting end-user productivity    Business Analytics (Oracle BI, Oracle EPM, Oracle Exalytics) Customer Results using Fusion Middleware INC Research Self-service customer portal delivering 5–10% of the overall revenue - expected to grow fast with the BI solution Experian Reduction in Time to Complete the Financial Close Process Hologic Inc Solution, saving months of decision-making uncertainty! We look forward to seeing many more innovative nominations. The nominatation process for 2013 begins in April 2013.    Additional Information: Blog: Oracle WebCenter Award Winners Blog: Oracle Identity Management Winners Blog: Oracle Exalogic Winners Blog: SOA, BPM and Data Integration will be will feature award winners in its respective areas this week Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

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• OpenWorld: Spotlight on Fusion CRM

  - by Tony Berk

  Oracle OpenWorld is less than 2 weeks away, so you need to start figuring out how you are going to maximize your week. I don't want to discourage you, but I'm pretty sure it is impossible to attend all 2000+ sessions. So you need to focus on what's important to you. Many of our CRM customers will be interested in Fusion CRM, since they have already started Fusion implementations or determining when to start. If that's you, or you are just looking for an overview of Fusion CRM, we've got you covered! Let's start at the top! For an overview of what is in Fusion CRM and where it is going, you should attend the general session and roadmap session: General Session: Oracle Fusion CRM—Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use (Session ID: GEN9674) - Oct 2, 11:45 AM. Anthony Lye, Senior VP, Oracle leads this general session focused on Oracle Fusion CRM. Oracle Fusion CRM optimizes territories, combines quota management and incentive compensation, integrates sales and marketing, and cleanses and enriches data—all within a single application platform. Oracle Fusion can be configured, changed, and extended at runtime by end users, business managers, IT, and developers. Oracle Fusion CRM can be used from the Web, from a smartphone, from Microsoft Outlook, or from an iPad. Deloitte, sponsor of the CRM Track, will also present key concepts on CRM implementations. Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap (CON9407) - Oct 1, 3:15PM. In this session, learn how Oracle Fusion CRM enables companies to create better sales plans, generate more quality leads, and achieve higher win rates and find out why customers are adopting Oracle Fusion CRM. Gain a deeper understanding of the unique capabilities only Oracle Fusion CRM provides, and learn how Oracle’s commitment to CRM innovation is driving a wide range of future enhancements. There is also a General Session for all Fusion Applications providing insight into the current strategy of the full product line and a high-level roadmap for each product area: Oracle Fusion Applications—Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap (GEN9433) - Oct 1, 10:45AM. This session will be repeated on Oct 3, 10:15AM. Now, if you want to drill down into some more detail, there are a lot more sessions with Oracle product management and customers. I'll highlight a few, but suggest you review the Fusion CRM Focus On document, or the search in the Content Catalog or Session Builder.  Driving Sales Performance with Oracle Fusion CRM (CON9744) - Oct 3, 10:15AM. Demonstrates how sales executives can gain instant visibility into their business, deliver pervasive coaching to their reps, maximize their sales pipeline, and drive team alignment. The result is increased sales performance that enables sales executives to deliver more revenue without increasing their resources or expenses. Maximize Your Revenue Potential with Oracle Fusion CRM Sales Planning (CON9751) - Oct 2, 1:15PM. Learn how Oracle Fusion CRM helps companies intelligently optimize sales planning and manage sales performance including the ability to predict their future sales opportunities and use those predictions in conjunction with past sales data to optimally define their sales territories, sales quotas, and incentive compensation plans. Boost Marketing’s Contribution to Revenue with Oracle Fusion CRM Marketing (CON9746) - Oct 3, 11:45AM. Learn how Oracle Fusion CRM can help your organization integrate sales and marketing, using one CRM platform. See how Oracle Fusion CRM can help your organization learn where to invest its precious marketing dollars; drive more revenue with cross-channel marketing and prospecting capabilities, including and not limited to e-mail, Web, and social media; improve lead conversion with integrated lead management functionality; and do more with less by automating many manual tasks. Oracle Fusion CRM: Social Marketing (CON11559) - Oct 1, 3:15PM. Learn how Oracle’s acquisition of Collective Intellect, Vitrue, and Involver extends Oracle Fusion Marketing as a world-class social marketing solution. Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement (CON9750) - Oct 4, 11:15AM. Hear how Oracle can help you know your customers better, encourage brand affinity, and improve collaboration within your ecosystem. This session reviews Oracle's social media solution and shows how you can discover hidden insights buried in your enterprise and social data. Also learn how Oracle Social Network revolutionizes how enterprise users work, collaborate, and share to achieve successful outcomes. Of course, we recommend you hear from the current Fusion CRM customers too. So, don't miss Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Customer Adoption and Experiences (CON9415) on Oct 3 at 10:15AM for panel of customers discussing implementation experiences, best practices and benefits.  After listening to all of this great information, you are probably going to have questions. Well, the experts will be on hand to help answer your questions and plan how your organization can get going with Fusion CRM. Be sure to head down to the DEMOgrounds and CRM Pavilion in the Moscone West Exhibit Hall. And finally, there is the always popular Meet the Experts session focused on Fusion CRM (MTE9658) on Oct 2 at 5PM (pre-registration via Schedule Builder is recommended.) In addition, there are more sessions on Mobility, Extensibility, Incentive Compensation, Fusion Customer Hub and other key components of the Fusion Applications infrastructure, Oracle Cloud and much, much more! For a full list, utilize the Fusion CRM Focus On document and Content Catalog. Enjoy!

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• Happy 3rd Birthday SilverlightCream!

  - by Dave Campbell

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

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• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Winners

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Now that OpenWorld 2012 has wrapped, I have time to tell you all about what happened. Maybe you recall that Noel (@noelportugal) and I were running a modified hackathon during the show, the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge. Without further ado, congratulations to Dimitri Gielis (@dgielis) and Martin Giffy D’Souza (@martindsouza) on their winning entry, an integration between Oracle APEX and Oracle Social Network that integrates feedback and bug submission with Oracle Social Network Conversations, allowing developers, end-users and project leaders to view and discuss the feedback on their APEX applications from within Oracle Social Network. Update: Bob Rhubart of OTN (@brhubart) interviewed Dimitri and Martin right after their big win. Money quote from Dimitri when asked what he’d buy with the $500 in Amazon gift cards, “Oracle Social Network.” Nice one. In their own words: In the developers perspective it’s important to get feedback soon, so after a first iteration and end-users start to test, they can give feedback of the application. Previously it stopped there, and it was up to the developer to communicate further with email, phone etc. With OSN every feedback and communication gets logged and other people can see the discussion immediately as well. For the end users perspective he can now communicate in a more efficient way to not only the developers, but also between themselves. Maybe many end-users (in different locations) would like to change some behaviour, by using OSN they can see the entry somebody put in with a screenshot and they can just start to chat about it. Some key technical end users can have lighten the tasks of the development team by looking at the feedback first and start to communicate with their peers. For the project manager he has now the ability to really see what communication has taken place in certain areas and can make decisions on that. Later, if things come up again, he can always go back in OSN and see what was said at that moment in time. Integrating OSN in the APEX applications enhances the user experience, makes the lives of the developers easier and gives a better overview to project managers. Incidentally, you may already know Dimitri and Martin, since both are Oracle Ace Directors. I ran into Martin at the Ace Director briefings Friday before the conference started, and at that point, he wasn’t sure he’d have time to enter the Challenge. After some coaxing, he and Dimitri agreed to give it a go and banged out their entry on Tuesday night, or more accurately, very early Wednesday morning, the day of the Challenge judging. I think they said it took them about four hours of hardcore coding to get it done, very much like a traditional hackathon, which is essentially a code sprint from idea to finished product. Here are some screenshots of the workflow they built. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } I love this idea, i.e. closing the loop between web developers and users, a very common pain point, and so did our judges. Speaking of, special thanks to our panel of three judges: Reggie Bradford (@reggiebradford), serial entrepreneur, founder of Vitrue and SVP of Cloud Product Development at Oracle Robert Hipps (@roberthipps), VP of Development for Oracle Social Network and my former boss Roland Smart (@rsmartx), VP of Social Marketing and the brains behind the Oracle Social Developer Community Finally, thanks to everyone who made this possible, including: The three other teams from HarQen (@harqen), TEAM Informatics (@teaminformatics) and Fishbowl Solutions (@fishbowle20) featuring Friend of the ‘Lab John Sim (@jrsim_uix), who finished and presented entries. I’ll be posting the details of their work this week. The one guy who finished an entry, but couldn’t make the judging, Bex Huff (@bex). Bex rallied from a hospitalization due to an allergic reaction during the show; he’s fine, don’t worry. I’ll post details of his work next week, too. The 40-plus people who registered to compete in the Challenge. Noel for all his hard work, sample code, and flying monkey target, more on that to come. The Oracle Social Network development team for supporting this event. Everyone in legal and the beta program office for their help. And finally, the Oracle Technology Network (@oracletechnet) for hosting the event and providing countless hours of operational and moral support. Sorry if I’ve missed some people, since this was a huge team effort. This event was a big success, and we plan to do similar events in the future. Stay tuned to this channel for more. 

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• Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – RDBMS and NoSQL – Day 12 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Cloud in the Big Data Story. In this article we will understand the role of Operational Databases Supporting Big Data Story. Even though we keep on talking about Big Data architecture, it is extremely crucial to understand that Big Data system can’t just exist in the isolation of itself. There are many needs of the business can only be fully filled with the help of the operational databases. Just having a system which can analysis big data may not solve every single data problem. Real World Example Think about this way, you are using Facebook and you have just updated your information about the current relationship status. In the next few seconds the same information is also reflected in the timeline of your partner as well as a few of the immediate friends. After a while you will notice that the same information is now also available to your remote friends. Later on when someone searches for all the relationship changes with their friends your change of the relationship will also show up in the same list. Now here is the question – do you think Big Data architecture is doing every single of these changes? Do you think that the immediate reflection of your relationship changes with your family member is also because of the technology used in Big Data. Actually the answer is Facebook uses MySQL to do various updates in the timeline as well as various events we do on their homepage. It is really difficult to part from the operational databases in any real world business. Now we will see a few of the examples of the operational databases. Relational Databases (This blog post) NoSQL Databases (This blog post) Key-Value Pair Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Document Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Columnar Databases (The Day After’s post) Graph Databases (The Day After’s post) Spatial Databases (The Day After’s post) Relational Databases We have earlier discussed about the RDBMS role in the Big Data’s story in detail so we will not cover it extensively over here. Relational Database is pretty much everywhere in most of the businesses which are here for many years. The importance and existence of the relational database are always going to be there as long as there are meaningful structured data around. There are many different kinds of relational databases for example Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and many others. If you are looking for Open Source and widely accepted database, I suggest to try MySQL as that has been very popular in the last few years. I also suggest you to try out PostgreSQL as well. Besides many other essential qualities PostgreeSQL have very interesting licensing policies. PostgreSQL licenses allow modifications and distribution of the application in open or closed (source) form. One can make any modifications and can keep it private as well as well contribute to the community. I believe this one quality makes it much more interesting to use as well it will play very important role in future. Nonrelational Databases (NOSQL) We have also covered Nonrelational Dabases in earlier blog posts. NoSQL actually stands for Not Only SQL Databases. There are plenty of NoSQL databases out in the market and selecting the right one is always very challenging. Here are few of the properties which are very essential to consider when selecting the right NoSQL database for operational purpose. Data and Query Model Persistence of Data and Design Eventual Consistency Scalability Though above all of the properties are interesting to have in any NoSQL database but the one which most attracts to me is Eventual Consistency. Eventual Consistency RDBMS uses ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) as a key mechanism for ensuring the data consistency, whereas NonRelational DBMS uses BASE for the same purpose. Base stands for Basically Available, Soft state and Eventual consistency. Eventual consistency is widely deployed in distributed systems. It is a consistency model used in distributed computing which expects unexpected often. In large distributed system, there are always various nodes joining and various nodes being removed as they are often using commodity servers. This happens either intentionally or accidentally. Even though one or more nodes are down, it is expected that entire system still functions normally. Applications should be able to do various updates as well as retrieval of the data successfully without any issue. Additionally, this also means that system is expected to return the same updated data anytime from all the functioning nodes. Irrespective of when any node is joining the system, if it is marked to hold some data it should contain the same updated data eventually. As per Wikipedia - Eventual consistency is a consistency model used in distributed computing that informally guarantees that, if no new updates are made to a given data item, eventually all accesses to that item will return the last updated value. In other words -  Informally, if no additional updates are made to a given data item, all reads to that item will eventually return the same value. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various other Operational Databases supporting Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Identity R2 - Experts Podcast Series

  - by Tanu Sood

  To follow up on the Identity Management R2 launch, a series of podcasts were recorded with subject matter experts from customer organizations, our partners and Oracle’s PM team to discuss key trends, R2 capabilities, implementation best practices and more. Below is a roll-up of the podcast series that is available on Fusion Middleware radio. R2 Podcasts:   ·         Designing the Next-Generation Identity Platform Vadim Lander, Oracle Highlights: Common architecture model, integration, interoperability and the driving factors behind R2 innovation IT Departments are shifting their Identity Management strategy to be able to support mobile, cloud and social applications. Oracle has anticipated this shift and has built a product roadmap to take advantage of this focus. Join Vadim as he discusses the design strategy behind the latest 11gR2 release and talks about how IDM services have to evolve to meet this new challenge.   ·         BETA Customer Perspective on R2 Ravi Meduri, Kaiser Permanente Highlights: R2 scalability and high availability In this podcast Ravi discusses the new features in 11gR2 that he is most interested in, including High Availability options for Access Management, multi-datacenter architecture, and what it was like working with the Oracle product team during the BETA program.   ·         Partner Perspective on R2 Rex Thexton, PricewaterhouseCoopers Highlights: Usability Enhancements for Users and Administrators A lot of new usability features went into the 11gR2 release making this the most business friendly IDM release to date. In this podcast Rex Thexton, Managing Director from PwC, talks about some of the new UI changes for both end users and administrators, and also about the new connector creation framework.   Access Request Updates in R2 Marc Boroditsky, Oracle Highlights: Access request User Interface innovations A lot of changes have been made to the Access Request user interface in the latest version of Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. A real focus has been put on making the request process more business user friendly, and a lot of new customization capability has been added for the IT administrators. Hear Marc discuss the updated UI, and explain how administrators will be able to customize OIM to meet their company's requirements   ·         Oracle Optimized System for Oracle Unified Directory (OOS4OUD) Nick Kloski, Oracle Highlights: New Optimized System configuration for Unified Directory One of the new features in 11gR2 is the availability of an Optimized System configuration for Oracle Unified Directory. Oracle engineers installed the OUD software onto off the shelf hardware and then created a performance tuned configuration. Join us as we talk to Nick Kloski, Infrastructure Solutions Manager, all about the testing process and the resulting performance metrics.   Privileged Account Management Mark Wilcox, Oracle Highlights: Oracle Privileged Account Manager key capabilities, use cases The new release of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 includes the capability to manage privileged accounts. Privileged accounts, if compromised, create a risk for fraud in the enterprise and as a result controlling access to privileged accounts is critical. Hear what Mark Wilcox, Principal Product Manager of Oracle Privileged Account Manager has to say about the capabilities of the offering in this podcast.   ·         Browser-based User Interface (UI) Customization Clayton Donley, Oracle Highlights: Benefits of Durable UI Configuration framework Business users need user interfaces that are not only friendly but also easily customizable. However the downside of any customization project is the cost and complexity involved in developing, testing, deploying and managing custom code. In this podcast, we examine how a new capability in Oracle Identity Management around browser based UI customization can reduce costs and complexity of customization while simplifying self service integration with corporate portal strategies.   ·         Simplifying Mobile and Social Sign-On Dan Killmer, Oracle Highlights: Secure mobile sign-on and consumption of social identities with Oracle Access Management The proliferation of mobile devices has spurred a new trend where employees tend to bring their own mobile devices to work and access corporate applications the same way they would access from a desktop or laptop. In this podcast, we examine how Oracle's latest innovation in Identity Management around Mobile and Social Sign On can simplify security and access management challenges posed by the widespread adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. ·         Enabling Your Business with IDM R2 Scott Bonnell, Oracle Highlights: Self service, mobile access, personalization Gone are the days when Identity Management was just about stopping unauthorized users in their tracks. Identity Management if done right, can also enable your business. Join Scott Bonnell as he discusses how the IDM 11gR2 release enables the enterprise by providing self service, personalization and mobile access to corporate resources.

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• Backup Your Windows Home Server Off-Site with Asus Webstorage

  - by Mysticgeek

  Windows Home Server lets you backup machines on your network easily. But what about backing up the server data? Today we take a look at ASUS WebStorage for Windows Home Server, which provides you with secure off-site backup for WHS. To use the ASUS WebStorage service you’ll need to sign up for a free account. It offers 1GB of free storage, then you can purchase an unlimited backup package for $39.99 for a year subscription. Note: They also offer online storage for individual PCs as well. Install ASUS WebStorage for WHS Browse to your shared folders on the server and open the Add-Ins folder and copy over the WHSConnectorSetup2.2.4.088.msi file (link below) then close out of the folder. Now launch Windows Home Server Console from one of the computers on your network, click Settings, then Add-ins. Under Available Add-ins click the Available tab and you’ll see the Asus WebStorage installer file we just copied over. Click the Install button. Installation kicks off and when it’s complete, you’ll need to close out of the console and reconnect. Using ASUS WebStorage WHS Connector  When you reconnect to WHS Console, scroll over to the ASUS WebStorage icon and click on Settings. Now log into your ASUS account… Now select the folders you want to backup to the WebStorage service. Select the radio button next to Enable to initialize the backup process… The backup process begins. You can change which folders are backed up simply by disabling the backup process, uncheck the folder(s), then enable the backup again. ASUS WebStorage Site After you have files backed up to the ASUS site, log into your account, and your presented with an overview of the amount of storage you’re using. It also shows what type of files are taking certain amounts of space.   You can browse through your backed up files and folders. It allows you to share and sync backed up data as well. Navigate to the file you want and you can easily download it by clicking on it, or share it out by clicking the share link below it. If you choose to share it, you’re provided with a link to the file to send out to other users.   Conclusion Users of Windows Home Server have been looking for an inexpensive cloud backup solution for quite some time. There are services such as JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala…etc. These services probably do a better job, but can start getting expensive once you start uploading a GBs of data. Another disappointment of ASUS WebStorage is you can only backup your WHS shares (from what we’ve been able to determine), it’s an “all or nothing” type of thing. You cannot go in and select individual files and folders. The initial upload speeds can be a bit slow as well, although that might have something to do with limited upload speeds on the DSL connection we used to test it. Retrieving your data from the ASUS site is a breeze though, and all the data files are organized quite well. The WHS Addin is very easy to install and use. If you’re looking for an off-site solution to backup your WHS data, you can test out ASUS WebStorage for free with a 1GB limit. This is good for testing the service and it might be exactly what you’re looking for. Other users may want a more advanced solution like KeepVault or CloudBerry…which is a front end for Amazon S3 storage. Download ASUS WebStorage WHS Addin Other WHS Offsite Backup Solutions CloudBerry, JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Files from Backups on Windows Home ServerGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerCreate A Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore DiscRemove a Network Computer from Windows Home ServerShare Ubuntu Home Directories using Samba TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• Silverlight Cream for December 18, 2010 -- #1012

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mark Monster, Kevin Dockx, Jeremy Likness(-2-,-3-), Timmy Kokke, Den Delimarsky, Mike Snow, Samuel Jack(-2-), and Renuka Prasad(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes" Mark Monster WP7: "Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7" Renuka Prasad Shoutouts: SilverlightGal sent me the link to The Silverlight Dossier ... I think it's a pretty good start... additions I'd like to see are ways to submit to the various areas. Michael Crump put up a contest that runs from now to January 1st... Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!... pretty cool, Michael! If you visit WynApse.com, you'll see I have a subscription to LearnVisualStudio.net... and now they have posted a batch of WP7 videos... 64 of them to be exact... wow!: New video series From SilverlightCream.com: Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes Mark Monster has a great post up about triggering Storyboard on ViewModel changes using the DataTrigger from Blend... cool stuff, and you can also do GoToStateAction or other actions or build yourowndang Trigger Action... fun awaits! ... sorry it took a while to post, Mark... been a tad overloaded here! Working with the Silverlight Rich Text Box control Kevin Dockx has had a post up for a while at SilverlightShow where he takes a good look at the RichText control and it's various capabilities, including source so you can give it a dance yourself. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 3: Custom Panel and Listbox Jeremy Likness's part 3 of his Personal Web Page lessons learned is covering the tres-cool 3D Panel he did... and he's got it all explained out... building from scratch via a custom panel and a Listbox control... A Silverlight MVVM Feed Reader from Scratch in 30 Minutes Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial showing building an MVVM/Silverlight feedreader in 30 minutes ... plus a couple mods that he noticed after the fact... beat that HTML5 :) Jounce Part 8: Raising Property Changed In Jeremy Likness's latest post, he has number 8 in his series on his MVVM platform, Jounce. This time he's explaining the property changed notification, has a very cool way of doing it, and some interesting comments from readers. Dependency Injection, MVVM, Ninject and Silverlight Timmy Kokke has a great tutorial up with associated demo project on Dependency Injection in MVVM and Silverlight. Some hidden features in the Windows Phone 7 emulator Den Delimarsky shows how to get some of the hidden features on your WP7 emulator like the Call History, Call Settings, and Details about the numbers. Playing sound effects on Windows Phone 7 Mike Snow's latest tip is playing sound effects on your WP7 ... a little bit of XNA here and there, and badabing, badaboom, you got sound! Day 3 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack has a couple more posts up about his 'Build a WP7 game in 3 Days' challenge... first up is Day 3 from 8:50 to 22:30 ... wow... long day! ... but he's got something good going now... some good external links also Day 3.5 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack's 3rd day ended with another half-day added on to put on some finishing touches... again, some good external links... and he finished with this Say hello to Simon Squared, my 3.5 day old WP7 Game Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has a bunch of material up that I've not been aware of (how did that happen, people??) ... here's the first of a couple of his posts on Code Project ... a very nice tutorial on the Push Notification process... great diagrams and external links. Windows Phone 7 – Toast Notification Using Windows Azure Cloud Service Renuka Prasad has another WP7 post on CodeProject... this one on Toast Notification... and he's using Azure and WCF all rolled into it as well... great diagrams, descriptions and all the code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore

  - by sathya

  Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore   I was really excited on attending the day 1 of Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Bangalore. This is the first Teched that am attending. The event was really fun filled with lot of knowledge sharing sessions and lots of goodies and gifts by the partners Initially the Event Started by Murthy's Session. He explained about the Developers relating to the 5 elements of nature (Pancha Boothaas) 1. Fire - Passion 2. Wave (Water) - Catch the right wave which we need to apply. 3. Earth - Connections and lots of opportunities around the world 4. Air -  Its whatever we breathe. Developers.. Without them nothing is possible. they are like the air 5. Sky - Cloud based applications   Next the Keynote and the announcement of Visual Studio by SomaSegar. List of things that he delivered his speech on : 1. Announcement of Visual Studio 2010 2. Announcement of .NET 4.0 3. Announcement of Silverlight later this week 4. What is the current Trend? Microsoft has done a research with many developers across the globe and have got the following feedback from the users. Get Lost (interrupted) - When we do some work and somebody is calling or interrepting by someother way we lose track of what we were doing and we need to do from the start Falling Behind- Technology gets updated  phenomenally over a period of time and developers always have a scenario like they are not in the state of the art technology and they always have a doubt whether they are staying updated. Lack of Collobaration - When a Manager asks a person what the team members have done and some might be done and some might not be and finally all are into a state like we dont know where we are. So they have addressed these 3 points in the VS 2010 by the following features : Get Lost - Some cool features which could overcome this. We have some Graphical interface. which could show what we have done and where we are. Some Zoom features in the code level. Falling Behind - Everything is based on .NET language base. 2010 has been built in such a way that if developers know the native language that's enough for building good applications. Lack of Collobaration - Some Dashboard Features which would show where exactly the project is. And a graphical user interface is shown on clicking which it directly drills down even to the code level. 5. An overview on all new features in VS 2010. 6. Some good demos of new features in VS 2010 by Polita and one more girl. Some of the new features included : 1. Team Explorer 2. Zoom in Code 3. Ribbon Development 4. Development in Single Platform for Windows Phone, XBox, Zune, Azure, Web Based and Windows based applications 5. Sequence Diagram Generation directly from code 6. Dashboards to show project status 7. Javascript and JQuery intellisense 8. Native support for JQuery 9. Packaging feature while deploying. 10. Generation of different versions of web.config like Web.Config.Production, Web.Config.Staging, etc. 11. IntelliTrace - Eliminating the "Not Reproducible" statement. 12. Automated User Interface Testing. At last in the closing of the day we had a great event called Demo Extravaganza, where lot of cool projects that were launched by Microsoft and also the projects that are under research were also shown. I got a lot of info about Bing today. BING really rocks!!! It has the following : 1. Visual Search 2. Product based search. For each product different menu filters were provided to make an advanced search 3. BING Maps was awesome!! It zoomed in to the street level and we can assume that we are the persons who are walking or running on the road and we can see the real objects like buildings moving by our side. 4. PhotoSynth was used in BING to show up all the images taken around the globe in a 3D format. 5. Formula - If we give some formula it automatically gives the value for the variable or derivation of expression Also some info about some kool touch apps which does an authentication and computation of Teched Attendee's Points that they have scored and the sessions attended. One guy won an XBOX in lucky draw as a gift. There were lot of Partner Stalls like Accenture,Intel,Citrix,MicroFocus,Telerik,infragistics,Sapient etc. Some Offers were provided for us like 50% off on Certifications, 1 free Elearning Course, etc. Stay tuned!! Wil update you on other events too..

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• 7 Reasons for Abandonment in eCommerce and the need for Contextual Support by JP Saunders

  - by Tuula Fai

  Shopper confidence, or more accurately the lack thereof, is the bane of the online retailer. There are a number of questions that influence whether a shopper completes a transaction, and all of those attributes revolve around knowledge. What products are available? What products are on offer? What would be the cost of the transaction? What are my options for delivery? In general, most online businesses do a good job of answering basic questions around the products as the shopper engages in the online journey, navigating the product catalog and working through the checkout process. The needs that are harder to address for the shopper are those that are less concerned with product specifics and more concerned with deciding whether the transaction met their needs and delivered value. A recent study by the Baymard Institute [1] finds that more than 60% of ecommerce site visitors will abandon their shopping cart. The study also identifies seven reasons for abandonment out of the commerce process [2]. Most of those reasons come down to poor usability within the commerce experience. Distractions. External distractions within the shopper’s external environment (TV, Children, Pets, etc.) or distractions on the eCommerce page can drive shopper abandonment. Ideally, the selection and check-out process should be straightforward. One common distraction is to drive the shopper away from the task at hand through pop-ups or re-directs. The shopper engaging with support information in the checkout process should not be directed away from the page to consume support. Though confidence may improve, the distraction also means abandonment may increase. Poor Usability. When the experience gets more complicated, buyer’s remorse can set in. While knowledge drives confidence, a lack of understanding erodes it. Therefore it is important that the commerce process is streamlined. In some cases, the number of clicks to complete a purchase is lengthy and unavoidable. In these situations, it is vital to ensure that the complexity of your experience can be explained with contextual support to avoid abandonment. If you can illustrate the solution to a complex action while the user is engaged in that action and address customer frustrations with your checkout process before they arise, you can decrease abandonment. Fraud. The perception of potential fraud can be enough to deter a buyer. Does your site look credible? Can shoppers trust your brand? Providing answers on the security of your experience and the levels of protection applied to profile information may play as big a role in ensuring the sale, as does the support you provide on the product offerings and purchasing process. Does it fit? If it is a clothing item or oversized furniture item, another common form of abandonment is for the shopper to question whether the item can be worn by the intended user. Providing information on the sizing applied to clothing, physical dimensions, and limitations on delivery/returns of oversized items will also assist the sale. A photo alone of the item will help, as it answers some of those questions, but won’t assuage all customer concerns about sizing and fit. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want to buy. Prospective buyers might be browsing through your catalog to kill time, or just might not have the money to purchase the item! You are unlikely to provide any information in contextual support to increase the likelihood to buy if the shopper already has no intentions of doing so. The customer will still likely abandon. Ensuring that any questions are proactively answered as they browse through your site can only increase their likelihood to return and buy at a future date. Can’t Buy. Errors or complexity at checkout can be another major cause of abandonment. Good contextual support is unlikely to help with severe errors caused by technical issues on your site, but it will have a big impact on customers struggling with complexity in the checkout process and needing a question answered prior to completing the sale. Embedded support within the checkout process to patiently explain how to complete a task will help increase conversion rates. Additional Costs. Tax, shipping and other costs or duties can dramatically increase the cost of the purchase and when unexpected, can increase abandonment, particularly if they can’t be adequately explained. Again, a lack of knowledge erodes confidence in the purchase, and cost concerns in particular, erode the perception of your brand’s trustworthiness. Again, providing information on what costs are additive and why they are being levied can decrease the likelihood that the customer will abandon out of the experience. Knowledge drives confidence and confidence drives conversion. If you’d like to understand best practices in providing contextual customer support in eCommerce to provide your shoppers with confidence, download the Oracle Cloud Service and Oracle Commerce - Contextual Support in Commerce White Paper. This white paper discusses the process of adding customer support, including a suggested process for finding where knowledge has the most influence on your shoppers and practical step-by-step illustrations on how contextual self-service can be added to your online commerce experience. Resources: [1] http://baymard.com/checkout-usability [2] http://baymard.com/blog/cart-abandonment

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