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• BPM 11g Hands on Training

  - by mseika

  BPM 11g Hands on Training11-14 December 2012, Birmingham (UK) DescriptionThis free hands-on workshop covers the life cycle of a business process from analysis, modeling, simulation, process customization and monitoring using Oracle BPM Suite 11g. The process modeled in the workshop includes integrating with web services, creating complex human workflows with user interfaces for task forms and incorporating rule engine-based decision services. After taking this course on Oracle BPM Suite 11g, you can go onto build industry-focused solutions, customer-facing demos, proof-of-concepts (POCs), pilot implementations and reference architectures. REGISTER NOW Partner Registration Guide Price: FREE Address:Hockley Suite - Oracle OfficesBlythe Valley Business ParkShirley, SolihullWest Midlands B90 8ADUnited Kingdom 11 - 14 December 2012 You will also be able to extend your current SOA implementations with BPMN based business processes.You will have the opportunity to sit the BPM 11g Implementation Specialization exam at the end of the boot camp. The training will finish at 3pm on Friday 14th to allow time for the on-line exam to take place. AgendaThis workshop is 4 days long. 08:30 am: Arrival and sign-in09:00 am: Workshop begins 17:30 pm: Workshop ends (more detail to be provided) Workstation RequirementsAttendees must use their own laptops and it is essential they have the following:           · Minimum 8GB RAM. 40GB free disk space           · VirtualBox (latest version)           ·7zip (required for extracting the VirtualBox image) For more information please contact [email protected].

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• A new day has dawned in my SharePoint world.

  - by SPTales

  Until I started working with SharePoint, I never thought I would be blogging.  I am usually a pretty private individual, but this thing called the SharePoint community pulls you in and makes you feel like you should be a part of it, contributing to it and giving something back.  So here I am blogging for the first time – and so begins my tale. I started my work life as a Systems admin, but was given a chance to start working with SharePoint 2007 back in - ironically enough - January of 2007.  It has been downhill from there or uphill depending on your perspective!  I jumped in with both feet and haven’t looked back.  Lucky for me Microsoft gave us a new version to work with.  A new job a couple years ago gave me the chance to work with that new version.  Now I spend my days weaving a tale of SharePoint for a Sales based organization. So why this blog?  To give something back. I spend most days toggling between administration, InfoPath, Branding and design, HTML, JQuery, and XSLT depending on the need.  The blog will detail these projects and solutions as best I can.  Hopefully they will be of use to someone who may be trying to accomplish similar things, just as many of the blogs that I have referenced over the last 5 years have been a huge help and resource for me.

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• Partner Showcase

  - by rituchhibber

  Building a High Performance Employee Self Service Portal with Oracle WebCenter Free Half Day Technical Workshop Organisations started with static corporate intranets at the beginning of the “Noughties”, these have been evolving to the Intranet Portal that is common today. The rise in Employee Self Service leverages off this evolution to transform the intranet as a resource in order to deliver the “Contextual workers control panel”. This empowers employees to do their complete job from a single environment covering transactions, document handling, form completion, watching presentations, participating in discussions through to utilising search functionality. Ether Solutions - the Enterprise Portal specialists, together with C2B2 - the independent middleware experts, will deliver this workshop to you, allowing you to discover how Oracle WebCenter provides a high performance, highly scalable platform for social intranets and EmployeeSelf Service Portals. To register, please click here. When? Wednesday, 12th of December 2012 Where? Institute of Directors, 116 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5ED Who should attend? Lead Developers, Technical Architects, Solution Architects, Technical Leads and other Technical team member interested in learning about WebCenter. Lingotek - Collaborative Translation Technology Lingotek is the leading provider of Collaborative Translation Technology designed to meet the requirements of organizations challenged with communicating, interacting, and commercializing a global audience. Lingotek software helps companies achieve unprecedented control over the translation process and enables companies to capture, grow, and reuse their linguistic assets. Lingotek has deployed systems for some of the most innovative organizations in the United States and has enabled the success of large Fortune 500 corporations, small professional firms, and companies of every size in between. For further information, please click here.

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• Dynamic object creation with HashMap

  - by Salor

  I want to use a HashMap to dynamically create objects based on the key. I have a Random Map Generator that stores the maps in 3D Arrays of Type Integer[][][]. Upon creation of the actual map I iterate through this array and based on the Integer I want to create the right block. Example: Integer[][][] map ... map[6][6][6] = 3; 3 is a Earth-Block and now I want to initialize a new Block of this type and give it the right coordinates. Currently I store my Bindings from Integer to Class in a HashMap(Integer, String) and create my objects like that: int id = array[x][y][z]; String block_name = Blocks.map.get(id); Block block = (Block) Class.forName(block_name).newInstance(); block.setPosition(x,y,z); But I want to avoid newInstance() if possible. I've never worked that dynamically with Java before and I couldn't find a solution like changing the HashMap to (Integer, Class) or something. I just need to create a new Object based upon the Integer. Any ideas/solutions? Thanks in advance and have a wonderful day!

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• knowing all available entity types

  - by plofplof

  I'm making a game where at some point the game will create enemies of random types. Each type of enemy available is defined on its own class derived from an enemy superclass. To do this, obviously the different types of enemies should be known. This is what I have thought of: Just make a list manually. Very simple to do, but I don't like it because I'll be adding more enemy types over time, so any time I add a new class I have to remember to update this (same if I remove an enemy). I would like some kind of auto-updating list. A completely component based system. There are no different classes for each enemy, but definitions of enemies in some file where all enemy types can be found. I really don't need that level of complexity for my game. I'm still using a component based model to some degree, but each Enemy type gets defined on its own class. Java Annotation processing. Give each enemy subclass an annotation like @EnemyType("whatever"), then code an annotation processor that writes in a file all available enemy types. Any time a new class is added the file gets updated after compilation.This gives me a feeling of failure even if its a good solution, it's very dependant on Java, so it means I cant think of a general design good for any kind of language. Also I think that this would be too much work for something so simple. I would like to see comments on these ideas and other possible solutions Thanks

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• Associate a texture to an object (from a data-model, not graphical point of view).

  - by Raveline

  I'm writing a roguelike where objects and floor can be made of different materials. For instance, let's say we can have a wooden chair, an iron chair, a golden chair, and so on. I've got an Object class (I know, the name is terrible), which is more or less using a composite pattern, and a Material class. Material have different important properties (noise, color...). For the time being, there are 5 different instances of materials, created at the initialization of the game. How would connect an instance of Object with one of the 5 instances of materials ? I see three simple solutions : Using a pointer. Simple and brutal. Using an integer material-id, then get the materials out of a table when engine manipulates the object for various purposes (display, attack analysis, etc.). Not very beautiful, I think, and not very flexible. Using an integer material-id, then get the materials out of a std::map. A bit more flexible, but still not perfect. Do you see other possibilities ? If not, what would you choose (and why) ? Thanks in advance !

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• Customer Highlight: NTT DOCOMO

  - by jeckels

  NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile operator in Japan, and serves over 13 million smartphone customers. Due to their growing data processing and scalability needs, they turned to Oracle's Cloud Application Foundation products for an integral soultion. At Oracle OpenWorld 2012, we first showcased NTT DOCOMO as a customer who was utilizing Oracle Coherence to process mobile data at a rate of 700,000 events per second (and then using Hadoop for distributed processing of big data). Overall, this Led to a 50% cost reduction due to the ultra-high velocity traffic processing of their customers' events. Recently, on October 7th, 2013, Oracle and NTT DOCOMO were proud to again announce a partnership around another key component of Oracle CAF: WebLogic Server. WebLogic was recently deployed as the application platform of choice to run DOCOMO's mission-critical data system ALADIN, which connects nationwide shops and information centers. ALADIN, which also utilizes Oracle Database and Oracle Tuxedo, is based on Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE), which has allowed the company to operate smoothly while minimizing additional development and modification associated with the migration of application server products. We look forward to continuing to partner with NTT DOCOMO, and are proud that Oracle Cloud Application Foundation products are providing the mission-critical solutions - at scale - that DOCOMO requires. Want to learn more about how CAF products are working in the real world? Join us for a FREE Virtual Developer Day on November 5th from 9am-1pm Pacific Time!REGISTER NOW

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• Binding menu items to a sitemap.

  - by Ricardo Deano

  Hello all..this is driving me nuts. I have a navigation menu I would like to display based upon user roles (using.net membership) After several hours and headaches (from banging my head against the desk) I was wondering if someone can point me in the error of my ways. Page: <body> <form runat="server"> <div class="page"> <div class="header"> <div class="loginDisplay"> <asp:LoginView ID="HeadLoginView" runat="server" EnableViewState="false"> <AnonymousTemplate> <a href="~/Login.aspx" ID="HeadLoginStatus" runat="server">Log In</a> </AnonymousTemplate> <LoggedInTemplate> Welcome <span class="bold"><asp:LoginName ID="HeadLoginName" runat="server" /></span>! [ <asp:LoginStatus ID="HeadLoginStatus" runat="server" LogoutAction="Redirect" LogoutText="Log Out" LogoutPageUrl="~/Open/Close.aspx"/> ] </LoggedInTemplate> </asp:LoginView> </div> <div class="clear hideSkiplink"> <asp:Menu ID="NavigationMenu" runat="server" CssClass="menu" IncludeStyleBlock="False" Orientation="Horizontal" DataSourceID="AugustSiteMap" /> <asp:SiteMapDataSource ID="AugustSiteMap" runat="server" ShowStartingNode="false"/> </div> </div> SiteMap: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" > <siteMapNode url="~/Default.aspx" title="Home" description="Home"> <siteMapNode title="Open Pages" description="Open Pages"> <siteMapNode url="~/Open/Login.aspx" title="Login Page" description="Login Page" roles="*"/> <siteMapNode url="~/Open/Close.aspx" title="Thank you for using Valpak Data Solutions Online Reporting" description="Thank you for using Valpak Data Solutions Online Reporting" roles="*"/> </siteMapNode> <siteMapNode title="Logged In Open Pages" description="Logged In Open Pages"> <siteMapNode url="~/Landing.aspx" title="Landing Page" description="Landing Page" roles="*"/> <siteMapNode url="~/ContactUs.aspx" title="Contact Us" description="Contact Us" roles="*"/> </siteMapNode> <siteMapNode title="Restricted Pages" description="Resticted Pages"> <siteMapNode url="~/Restricted/ProductSearch.aspx" title=" Product Search" description=" Product Search" roles="*"/> <siteMapNode url="~/Restricted/ReportOutput.aspx" title="Report Output" description="Report Output" roles="Admin"/> </siteMapNode> </siteMapNode> </siteMap> Webconfig: <roleManager enabled="true" /> <siteMap defaultProvider="XmlSiteMapProvider" enabled="true"> <providers> <add name="XmlSiteMapProvider" description="AugustSiteMap" type="System.Web.XmlSiteMapProvider " siteMapFile="AugustSiteMap.sitemap" securityTrimmingEnabled="true" /> </providers> </siteMap> How can I ensure that when the user is logged in, the appropriate menu items are displayed on the Landing page? Please excuse my ignorance. Still new to all of this and my current method of 'trial and error' has seen me reach suicide levels this morning!

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• How to write a Mork File Format file in Java?

  - by Sumit Ghosh

  Iam working on a project which involves writing a Mork File (Mork is a database format used by Mozilla to store url history and other information.) It has been replaced by an enhanced version of SQLite in latest Mozilla 3.0. Now I have the code for parsing a Mork File , but Iam struggling a bit with this part of the the file. <(A9=3)(81=)([email protected])(80=0)(85=2)(86=4ac18267)(83=1) (87=Mark)(88=Colbath)(89=Mark Colbath)([email protected])(8B [email protected])(8C=512-282-2509)(8D=+504-9907-1342)(8E=512-282-2510) (8F=512-282-2511)(90=512-282-2512)(91=Two Blocks Past Oxen Team)(92 =Villa Alicia)(93=Siguatepeque)(94=Comayagua)(95=NA)(96=Honduras) (97=9309 Heatherwood Dr)(98=Apartment 1)(99=Austin)(9A=TX)(9B=78748) (9C=USA)(9D=Programmer)(9E=Programming)(9F=MPC Solutions)(A0 =rentaprogrammer)(A1=http://www.mpcsol.com)(A2 =http://www.jesuslovesthelittlechildren.org)(A3=Hannah)(A4=John) (A5=Faith)(A6=Timothy)(A7=Some notes go here.)(A8 [email protected])> {1:^80 {(k^C0:c)(s=9)} [1:^82(^BF=3)] [1(^83=)(^84=)(^85=)(^86=)(^87=)(^88=)(^89^82)(^8A^82)(^8B=)(^8C=) (^8D=)(^8E=0)(^8F=2)(^90=0)(^91=)(^92=)(^93=)(^94=)(^95=)(^96=) (^97=)(^98=)(^99=)(^9A=)(^9B=)(^9C=)(^9D=)(^9E=)(^9F=)(^A0=)(^A1=) (^A2=)(^A3=)(^A4=)(^A5=)(^A6=)(^A7=)(^A8=)(^A9=)(^AA=)(^AB=)(^AC=) (^AD=)(^AE=)(^AF=)(^B0=)(^B1=)(^B2=)(^B3=)(^B4=)(^B5=)(^B6=)(^B7=) (^B8=)(^B9=)(^BA=)(^BB=)(^BC^86)(^BD=1)] [2(^83^87)(^84^88)(^85=)(^86=)(^87^89)(^88=)(^89^8A)(^8A^8A)(^8B^8B) (^8C=)(^8D=)(^8E=2)(^8F=0)(^90=1)(^91^8C)(^92^8D)(^93^8E)(^94^8F) (^95^90)(^96=)(^97=)(^98=)(^99=)(^9A=)(^9B^91)(^9C^92)(^9D^93)(^9E^94) (^9F=NA)(^A0^96)(^A1^97)(^A2^98)(^A3^99)(^A4=TX)(^A5^9B)(^A6^9C) (^A7^9D)(^A8^9E)(^A9^9F)(^AA^A0)(^AB=)(^AC=)(^AD=)(^AE=)(^AF=)(^B0=) (^B1=)(^B2^A1)(^B3^A2)(^B4=)(^B5=)(^B6=)(^B7^A3)(^B8^A4)(^B9^A5) (^BA^A6)(^BB^A7)(^BC=0)(^BD=2)] [3(^83=)(^84=)(^85=)(^86=)(^87=)(^88=)(^89^A8)(^8A^A8)(^8B=)(^8C=) (^8D=)(^8E=0)(^8F=0)(^90=0)(^91=)(^92=)(^93=)(^94=)(^95=)(^96=) (^97=)(^98=)(^99=)(^9A=)(^9B=)(^9C=)(^9D=)(^9E=)(^9F=)(^A0=)(^A1=) (^A2=)(^A3=)(^A4=)(^A5=)(^A6=)(^A7=)(^A8=)(^A9=)(^AA=)(^AB=)(^AC=) (^AD=)(^AE=)(^AF=)(^B0=)(^B1=)(^B2=)(^B3=)(^B4=)(^B5=)(^B6=)(^B7=) (^B8=)(^B9=)(^BA=)(^BB=)(^BC=0)(^BD=3)]} Can someone tell me how this part of the Mork file relates to the data given below? run: NickName=,LastModifiedDate=4ac18267,FaxNumberType=,BirthMonth=,LastName=,HomePhone=,WorkCountry=,HomePhoneType=,PreferMailFormat=0,CellularNumber=,FamilyName=,[email protected],AnniversaryMonth=,HomeCity=,WorkState=,HomeCountry=,PhoneticFirstName=,PhoneticLastName=,HomeState=,WorkAddress=,WebPage1=,WebPage2=,HomeAddress2=,WorkZipCode=,_AimScreenName=,AnniversaryYear=,WorkPhoneType=,Notes=,WorkAddress2=,WorkPhone=,Custom3=,Custom4=,Custom1=,Custom2=,PagerNumber=,AnniversaryDay=,WorkCity=,AllowRemoteContent=0,CellularNumberType=,FaxNumber=,PopularityIndex=2,FirstName=,SpouseName=,CardType=,Department=,Company=,HomeAddress=,BirthDay=,SecondEmail=,RecordKey=1,DisplayName=,DefaultEmail=,DefaultAddress=,BirthYear=,Category=,PagerNumberType=,[email protected],JobTitle=,HomeZipCode=, NickName=,LastModifiedDate=0,FaxNumberType=,BirthMonth=,LastName=Colbath,HomePhone=+504-9907-1342,WorkCountry=USA,HomePhoneType=,PreferMailFormat=2,CellularNumber=512-282-2512,FamilyName=,[email protected],AnniversaryMonth=,HomeCity=Siguatepeque,WorkState=TX,HomeCountry=Honduras,PhoneticFirstName=,PhoneticLastName=,HomeState=Comayagua,WorkAddress=9309 HeatherwoodDr,WebPage1=http://www.mpcsol.com,WebPage2=http://www.jesuslovesthelittlechildren.org,HomeAddress2=VillaAlicia,WorkZipCode=78748,_AimScreenName=rentaprogrammer,AnniversaryYear=,WorkPhoneType=,Notes=Some notes go here.,WorkAddress2=Apartment 1,WorkPhone=512-282-2509,Custom3=Faith,Custom4=Timothy,Custom1=Hannah,Custom2=John,PagerNumber=512-282-2511,AnniversaryDay=,WorkCity=Austin,AllowRemoteContent=1,CellularNumberType=,FaxNumber=512-282-2510,PopularityIndex=0,FirstName=Mark,SpouseName=,CardType=,Department=Programming,Company=MPC Solutions,HomeAddress=Two Blocks Past Oxen Team,BirthDay=,[email protected],RecordKey=2,DisplayName=Mark Colbath,DefaultEmail=,DefaultAddress=,BirthYear=,Category=,PagerNumberType=,[email protected],JobTitle=Programmer,HomeZipCode=NA, NickName=,LastModifiedDate=0,FaxNumberType=,BirthMonth=,LastName=,HomePhone=,WorkCountry=,HomePhoneType=,PreferMailFormat=0,CellularNumber=,FamilyName=,[email protected],AnniversaryMonth=,HomeCity=,WorkState=,HomeCountry=,PhoneticFirstName=,PhoneticLastName=,HomeState=,WorkAddress=,WebPage1=,WebPage2=,HomeAddress2=,WorkZipCode=,_AimScreenName=,AnniversaryYear=,WorkPhoneType=,Notes=,WorkAddress2=,WorkPhone=,Custom3=,Custom4=,Custom1=,Custom2=,PagerNumber=,AnniversaryDay=,WorkCity=,AllowRemoteContent=0,CellularNumberType=,FaxNumber=,PopularityIndex=0,FirstName=,SpouseName=,CardType=,Department=,Company=,HomeAddress=,BirthDay=,SecondEmail=,RecordKey=3,DisplayName=,DefaultEmail=,DefaultAddress=,BirthYear=,Category=,PagerNumberType=,[email protected],JobTitle=,HomeZipCode=, I have been breaking my head for almost 2 days now, please someone who is part of the mozilla team can help, it would be really appreciated.

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• What do I need to write a small game on Linux?

  - by Michas

  I want to make a simple game: 2d, single-player, without tons of animations and special effects. I am not interested in ready to use game engines, I want to learn to write some code in a quite universal language. I am using Linux (AMD64) and looking for something easy with nice library for games. I do not want to mix few languages, most of them are in fact fast enough themselves for my needs. Cross platform would be an advantage, however all I need is a good Linux support. I have been considering few solutions. Ruby + Language looks very nice. + I am going to learn Ruby. - I am afraid I can have problems with additional libraries. - This thread about game libraries for Ruby could be longer. SDL + C + It is used for games. + It is very easy to set up. + There is a lot of additional libraries. + It is cross-platform. - The solution is quite low level. - The language is sometimes quite hard to read. QT + C++ + It is very easy to set up. + The standard QT libraries supports everything I can possibly need. + It is cross-platform. + The documentation is good. - The compilation is slow. - The language looks horrible. - The size of standard QT libraries is too big to comprehend. Environment of web browser + I am going to learn something more about this environment. + It is somewhat used for games. + It is quite cross-platform. - It would be too much experimental. Java + It is used for games. + The standard Java libraries supports everything I can possibly need. + It is cross-platform. - It is quite hard to set up. - The size of standard Java libraries is too big to comprehend. - The source code in Java could look better. - I think I do not want to learn Java. Google Go + I am going to learn Google Go. - There is big problem with libraries. - The solution would be quite low level. Python + It looks some people do games in Python, according to this thread. + It looks there are probably more libraries than for Ruby. - The Ruby language looks better. - I think I do not want to learn Python. C++ + something else + It is used for games. + It would be probably cross-platform. + There is a lot of libraries. - I do not need C++ extensions over C. - Compilation could be slow, there are fast compilers for C, not for C++. Haskell + I am going to learn Haskell. - Many things about programming computer games looks too much imperative. - It looks I can have some problems with libraries. - Compilation (GHC) looks slow. There is probably something more to consider. Does anyone have experience in making small games for Linux in non mainstream solutions? Does anyone have an advice for me?

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• Code golf: Word frequency chart

  - by ChristopheD

  The challenge: Build an ASCII chart of the most commonly used words in a given text. The rules: Only accept a-z and A-Z (alphabetic characters) as part of a word. Ignore casing (She == she for our purpose). Ignore the following words (quite arbitary, I know): the, and, of, to, a, i, it, in, or, is Clarification: considering don't: this would be taken as 2 different 'words' in the ranges a-z and A-Z: (don and t). Optionally (it's too late to be formally changing the specifications now) you may choose to drop all single-letter 'words' (this could potentially make for a shortening of the ignore list too). Parse a given text (read a file specified via command line arguments or piped in; presume us-ascii) and build us a word frequency chart with the following characteristics: Display the chart (also see the example below) for the 22 most common words (ordered by descending frequency). The bar width represents the number of occurences (frequency) of the word (proportionally). Append one space and print the word. Make sure these bars (plus space-word-space) always fit: bar + [space] + word + [space] should be always <= 80 characters (make sure you account for possible differing bar and word lenghts: e.g.: the second most common word could be a lot longer then the first while not differing so much in frequency). Maximize bar width within these constraints and scale the bars appropriately (according to the frequencies they represent). An example: The text for the example can be found here (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll). This specific text would yield the following chart: _________________________________________________________________________ |_________________________________________________________________________| she |_______________________________________________________________| you |____________________________________________________________| said |____________________________________________________| alice |______________________________________________| was |__________________________________________| that |___________________________________| as |_______________________________| her |____________________________| with |____________________________| at |___________________________| s |___________________________| t |_________________________| on |_________________________| all |______________________| this |______________________| for |______________________| had |_____________________| but |____________________| be |____________________| not |___________________| they |__________________| so For your information: these are the frequencies the above chart is built upon: [('she', 553), ('you', 481), ('said', 462), ('alice', 403), ('was', 358), ('that ', 330), ('as', 274), ('her', 248), ('with', 227), ('at', 227), ('s', 219), ('t' , 218), ('on', 204), ('all', 200), ('this', 181), ('for', 179), ('had', 178), (' but', 175), ('be', 167), ('not', 166), ('they', 155), ('so', 152)] A second example (to check if you implemented the complete spec): Replace every occurence of you in the linked Alice in Wonderland file with superlongstringstring: ________________________________________________________________ |________________________________________________________________| she |_______________________________________________________| superlongstringstring |_____________________________________________________| said |______________________________________________| alice |________________________________________| was |_____________________________________| that |______________________________| as |___________________________| her |_________________________| with |_________________________| at |________________________| s |________________________| t |______________________| on |_____________________| all |___________________| this |___________________| for |___________________| had |__________________| but |_________________| be |_________________| not |________________| they |________________| so The winner: Shortest solution (by character count, per language). Have fun! Edit: Table summarizing the results so far (2012-02-15) (originally added by user Nas Banov): Language Relaxed Strict ========= ======= ====== GolfScript 130 143 Perl 185 Windows PowerShell 148 199 Mathematica 199 Ruby 185 205 Unix Toolchain 194 228 Python 183 243 Clojure 282 Scala 311 Haskell 333 Awk 336 R 298 Javascript 304 354 Groovy 321 Matlab 404 C# 422 Smalltalk 386 PHP 450 F# 452 TSQL 483 507 The numbers represent the length of the shortest solution in a specific language. "Strict" refers to a solution that implements the spec completely (draws |____| bars, closes the first bar on top with a ____ line, accounts for the possibility of long words with high frequency etc). "Relaxed" means some liberties were taken to shorten to solution. Only solutions shorter then 500 characters are included. The list of languages is sorted by the length of the 'strict' solution. 'Unix Toolchain' is used to signify various solutions that use traditional *nix shell plus a mix of tools (like grep, tr, sort, uniq, head, perl, awk).

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• Break a class in twain, or impose an interface for restricted access?

  - by bedwyr

  What's the best way of partitioning a class when its functionality needs to be externally accessed in different ways by different classes? Hopefully the following example will make the question clear :) I have a Java class which accesses a single location in a directory allowing external classes to perform read/write operations to it. Read operations return usage stats on the directory (e.g. available disk space, number of writes, etc.); write operations, obviously, allow external classes to write data to the disk. These methods always work on the same location, and receive their configuration (e.g. which directory to use, min disk space, etc.) from an external source (passed to the constructor). This class looks something like this: public class DiskHandler { public DiskHandler(String dir, int minSpace) { ... } public void writeToDisk(String contents, String filename) { int space = getAvailableSpace(); ... } public void getAvailableSpace() { ... } } There's quite a bit more going on, but this will do to suffice. This class needs to be accessed differently by two external classes. One class needs access to the read operations; the other needs access to both read and write operations. public class DiskWriter { DiskHandler diskHandler; public DiskWriter() { diskHandler = new DiskHandler(...); } public void doSomething() { diskHandler.writeToDisk(...); } } public class DiskReader { DiskHandler diskHandler; public DiskReader() { diskHandler = new DiskHandler(...); } public void doSomething() { int space = diskHandler.getAvailableSpace(...); } } At this point, both classes share the same class, but the class which should only read has access to the write methods. Solution 1 I could break this class into two. One class would handle read operations, and the other would handle writes: // NEW "UTILITY" CLASSES public class WriterUtil { private ReaderUtil diskReader; public WriterUtil(String dir, int minSpace) { ... diskReader = new ReaderUtil(dir, minSpace); } public void writeToDisk(String contents, String filename) { int = diskReader.getAvailableSpace(); ... } } public class ReaderUtil { public ReaderUtil(String dir, int minSpace) { ... } public void getAvailableSpace() { ... } } // MODIFIED EXTERNALLY-ACCESSING CLASSES public class DiskWriter { WriterUtil diskWriter; public DiskWriter() { diskWriter = new WriterUtil(...); } public void doSomething() { diskWriter.writeToDisk(...); } } public class DiskReader { ReaderUtil diskReader; public DiskReader() { diskReader = new ReaderUtil(...); } public void doSomething() { int space = diskReader.getAvailableSpace(...); } } This solution prevents classes from having access to methods they should not, but it also breaks encapsulation. The original DiskHandler class was completely self-contained and only needed config parameters via a single constructor. By breaking apart the functionality into read/write classes, they both are concerned with the directory and both need to be instantiated with their respective values. In essence, I don't really care to duplicate the concerns. Solution 2 I could implement an interface which only provisions read operations, and use this when a class only needs access to those methods. The interface might look something like this: public interface Readable { int getAvailableSpace(); } The Reader class would instantiate the object like this: Readable diskReader; public DiskReader() { diskReader = new DiskHandler(...); } This solution seems brittle, and prone to confusion in the future. It doesn't guarantee developers will use the correct interface in the future. Any changes to the implementation of the DiskHandler could also need to update the interface as well as the accessing classes. I like it better than the previous solution, but not by much. Frankly, neither of these solutions seems perfect, but I'm not sure if one should be preferred over the other. I really don't want to break the original class up, but I also don't know if the interface buys me much in the long run. Are there other solutions I'm missing?

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• Join and sum not compatible matrices through data.table

  - by leodido

  My goal is to "sum" two not compatible matrices (matrices with different dimensions) using (and preserving) row and column names. I've figured this approach: convert the matrices to data.table objects, join them and then sum columns vectors. An example: > M1 1 3 4 5 7 8 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 7 0 0 0 0 1 0 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 > M2 1 3 4 5 8 1 0 0 1 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 8 0 0 0 0 0 > M1 %ms% M2 1 3 4 5 7 8 1 0 0 2 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 2 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 7 0 0 0 0 1 0 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 This is my code: M1 <- matrix(c(0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0), byrow = TRUE, ncol = 6) colnames(M1) <- c(1,3,4,5,7,8) M2 <- matrix(c(0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0), byrow = TRUE, ncol = 5) colnames(M2) <- c(1,3,4,5,8) # to data.table objects DT1 <- data.table(M1, keep.rownames = TRUE, key = "rn") DT2 <- data.table(M2, keep.rownames = TRUE, key = "rn") # join and sum of common columns if (nrow(DT1) > nrow(DT2)) { A <- DT2[DT1, roll = TRUE] A[, list(X1 = X1 + X1.1, X3 = X3 + X3.1, X4 = X4 + X4.1, X5 = X5 + X5.1, X7, X8 = X8 + X8.1), by = rn] } That outputs: rn X1 X3 X4 X5 X7 X8 1: 1 0 0 2 0 0 0 2: 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 3: 4 2 0 0 0 0 0 4: 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 5: 7 0 0 0 0 1 0 6: 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 Then I can convert back this data.table to a matrix and fix row and column names. The questions are: how to generalize this procedure? I need a way to automatically create list(X1 = X1 + X1.1, X3 = X3 + X3.1, X4 = X4 + X4.1, X5 = X5 + X5.1, X7, X8 = X8 + X8.1) because i want to apply this function to matrices which dimensions (and row/columns names) are not known in advance. In summary I need a merge procedure that behaves as described. there are other strategies/implementations that achieve the same goal that are, at the same time, faster and generalized? (hoping that some data.table monster help me) to what kind of join (inner, outer, etc. etc.) is assimilable this procedure? Thanks in advance. p.s.: I'm using data.table version 1.8.2 EDIT - SOLUTIONS @Aaron solution. No external libraries, only base R. It works also on list of matrices. add_matrices_1 <- function(...) { a <- list(...) cols <- sort(unique(unlist(lapply(a, colnames)))) rows <- sort(unique(unlist(lapply(a, rownames)))) out <- array(0, dim = c(length(rows), length(cols)), dimnames = list(rows,cols)) for (m in a) out[rownames(m), colnames(m)] <- out[rownames(m), colnames(m)] + m out } @MadScone solution. Used reshape2 package. It works only on two matrices per call. add_matrices_2 <- function(m1, m2) { m <- acast(rbind(melt(M1), melt(M2)), Var1~Var2, fun.aggregate = sum) mn <- unique(colnames(m1), colnames(m2)) rownames(m) <- mn colnames(m) <- mn m } BENCHMARK (100 runs with microbenchmark package) Unit: microseconds expr min lq median uq max 1 add_matrices_1 196.009 257.5865 282.027 291.2735 549.397 2 add_matrices_2 13737.851 14697.9790 14864.778 16285.7650 25567.448 No need to comment the benchmark: @Aaron solution wins. I'll continue to investigate a similar solution for data.table objects. I'll add other solutions eventually reported or discovered.

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• How to cope with developing against a poor 3rd party API/application?

  - by wsanville

  I'm a web developer, and my organization has recently started to use a proprietary ASP.NET CMS for our web sites. I was excited to get started using the CMS, thinking it would bring a lot of value to our end users and be fun to work with, since my skills are a good match for the types of projects we're using it for. That was about a year ago. Since then, we've ran into all kinds of issues, from blatant bugs in the product, to nasty edge cases in the APIs, to extremely poor documentation for developers. On about a weekly basis, we are forced to pursue workarounds and rewrite some of the out of the box functionality, and even find some of the basic features unusable. In many cases, since this is a closed source application (and obfuscated of course), there's nothing we can do as developers to solve these issues. So my question is, how does one attempt to develop a good application in such a scenario? The application mostly works when using the the exact out of the box behavior, or using one of the company's starter sites. However, my attempts to use the underlying APIs to implement slightly different, yet reasonable behavior has proved to be extremely time consuming (not to mention just as buggy), given the lack of good information about the APIs. I've given this a lot of thought, and my conflicting viewpoints are the following: Strongly advise against any customization to the CMS, as development time will rise exponentially, or even have an extremely high chance of failing. While this is accurate, I do not want to give the impression that I am not willing to code my own solutions to problems and take the initiative to implement something difficult or complex. I don't want to be perceived as someone who is not motivated, lazy, or not knowledgeable to do anything complex, because this is simply not the case. I love coding my own solutions, trying new/difficult things, I just dislike the vendor app we're using. Continue on the path I'm on now, which is hacking my way past all issues I encounter and try my best to deliver an application that meets the needs and specs exactly. My goals are to make it as seamless and easy to use as possible to the end user, even when integrating the CMS with our other applications internally. The problem I'm finding with this approach is it is very time consuming. I open support cases with the vendor on a regular basis to solve issues and to gain knowledge of their APIs, but this is extremely time consuming, and in some cases it leads to dead ends. I post on the vendors forums on a regular basis but have become frustrated as most of my posts get 0 replies. So, what would you, a reasonable developer, do in this case? How can I make the best of the situation? And just for fun, here are some of the code smells and anti-patterns I've dealt with using the product (aside from their own code blatantly failing): Use of StringBuilder to concatenate a giant string that is hard coded and does not change. They use it to concatenate their Javascript and write it out into the body tags of their pages. Methods that accept object or Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection as the parameters. In the case of the VB Collection, the data is not a list of any kind, it's used instead of making a class. Methods that return a Hashtable of VB Collections Method names of the form MethodName_v45, MethodName_v20, etc... Multiple classes with the same name in different namespaces with different functionality/behavior. Intellisense that reads "Note: this parameter is non functional" Complete lack of coding standards, API is filled with magic numbers and magic strings. Properties with a getter of type object that accepts totally different things, like enum or strings, and throw exceptions at runtime when you pass in something not supported. And much, much, more...

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• Where are the function address literals in c++?

  - by academicRobot

  First of all, maybe literals is not the right term for this concept, but its the closest I could think of (not literals in the sense of functions as first class citizens). <UPDATE> After some reading with help from answer by Chris Dodd, what I'm looking for is literal function addresses as template parameters. Chris' answer indicates how to do this for standard functions, but how can the addresses of member functions be used as template parameters? Since the standard prohibits non-static member function addresses as template parameters (c++03 14.3.2.3), I suspect the work around is quite complicated. Any ideas for a workaround? Below the original form of the question is left as is for context. </UPDATE> The idea is that when you make a conventional function call, it compiles to something like this: callq <immediate address> But if you make a function call using a function pointer, it compiles to something like this: mov <memory location>,%rax callq *%rax Which is all well and good. However, what if I'm writing a template library that requires a callback of some sort with a specified argument list and the user of the library is expected to know what function they want to call at compile time? Then I would like to write my template to accept a function literal as a template parameter. So, similar to template <int int_literal> struct my_template {...};` I'd like to write template <func_literal_t func_literal> struct my_template {...}; and have calls to func_literal within my_template compile to callq <immediate address>. Is there a facility in C++ for this, or a work around to achieve the same effect? If not, why not (e.g. some cataclysmic side effects)? How about C++0x or another language? Solutions that are not portable are fine. Solutions that include the use of member function pointers would be ideal. I'm not particularly interested in being told "You are a <socially unacceptable term for a person of low IQ>, just use function pointers/functors." This is a curiosity based question, and it seems that it might be useful in some (albeit limited) applications. It seems like this should be possible since function names are just placeholders for a (relative) memory address, so why not allow more liberal use (e.g. aliasing) of this placeholder. p.s. I use function pointers and functions objects all the the time and they are great. But this post got me thinking about the don't pay for what you don't use principle in relation to function calls, and it seems like forcing the use of function pointers or similar facility when the function is known at compile time is a violation of this principle, though a small one. Edit The intent of this question is not to implement delegates, rather to identify a pattern that will embed a conventional function call, (in immediate mode) directly into third party code, possibly a template.

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• Replace conditional with polymorphism refactoring or similar?

  - by Anders Svensson

  Hi, I have tried to ask a variant of this question before. I got some helpful answers, but still nothing that felt quite right to me. It seems to me this shouldn't really be that hard a nut to crack, but I'm not able to find an elegant simple solution. (Here's my previous post, but please try to look at the problem stated here as procedural code first so as not to be influenced by the earlier explanation which seemed to lead to very complicated solutions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2772858/design-pattern-for-cost-calculator-app ) Basically, the problem is to create a calculator for hours needed for projects that can contain a number of services. In this case "writing" and "analysis". The hours are calculated differently for the different services: writing is calculated by multiplying a "per product" hour rate with the number of products, and the more products are included in the project, the lower the hour rate is, but the total number of hours is accumulated progressively (i.e. for a medium-sized project you take both the small range pricing and then add the medium range pricing up to the number of actual products). Whereas for analysis it's much simpler, it is just a bulk rate for each size range. How would you be able to refactor this into an elegant and preferably simple object-oriented version (please note that I would never write it like this in a purely procedural manner, this is just to show the problem in another way succinctly). I have been thinking in terms of factory, strategy and decorator patterns, but can't get any to work well. (I read Head First Design Patterns a while back, and both the decorator and factory patterns described have some similarities to this problem, but I have trouble seeing them as good solutions as stated there. The decorator example seems very complicated for just adding condiments, but maybe it could work better here, I don't know. And the factory pattern example with the pizza factory...well it just seems to create such a ridiculous explosion of classes, at least in their example. I have found good use for factory patterns before, but I can't see how I could use it here without getting a really complicated set of classes) The main goal would be to only have to change in one place (loose coupling etc) if I were to add a new parameter (say another size, like XSMALL, and/or another service, like "Administration"). Here's the procedural code example: public class Conditional { private int _numberOfManuals; private string _serviceType; private const int SMALL = 2; private const int MEDIUM = 8; public int GetHours() { if (_numberOfManuals <= SMALL) { if (_serviceType == "writing") return 30 * _numberOfManuals; if (_serviceType == "analysis") return 10; } else if (_numberOfManuals <= MEDIUM) { if (_serviceType == "writing") return (SMALL * 30) + (20 * _numberOfManuals - SMALL); if (_serviceType == "analysis") return 20; } else //i.e. LARGE { if (_serviceType == "writing") return (SMALL * 30) + (20 * (MEDIUM - SMALL)) + (10 * _numberOfManuals - MEDIUM); if (_serviceType == "analysis") return 30; } return 0; //Just a default fallback for this contrived example } } All replies are appreciated! I hope someone has a really elegant solution to this problem that I actually thought from the beginning would be really simple... Regards, Anders

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• Inheriting XML files and modifying values

  - by Veehmot

  This is a question about concept. I have an XML file, let's call it base: <base id="default"> <tags> <tag>tag_one</tag> <tag>tag_two</tag> <tag>tag_three</tag> </tags> <data> <data_a>blue</data_a> <data_b>3</data_b> </data> </base> What I want to do is to be able to extend this XML in another file, modifying individual properties. For example, I want to inherit that file and make a new one with a different data/data_a node: <base id="green" import="default"> <data> <data_a>green</data_a> </data> </base> So far it's pretty simple, it replaces the old data/data_a with the new one. I even can add a new node: <base id="ext" import="default"> <moredata> <data>extended version</data> </moredata> </base> And still it's pretty simple. The problem comes when I want to delete a node or deal with XML Lists (like the tags node). How should I reference a particular index on a list? I was thinking doing something like: <base id="diffList" import="default"> <tags> <tag index="1">this is not anymore tag_two</tag> </tags> </base> And for deleting a node / array index: <base id="deleting" import="default"> <tags> <tag index="2"/> </tags> <data/> </base> <!-- This will result in an XML containing these values: --> <base> <tag>tag_one</tag> <tag>tag_two</tag> </base> But I'm not happy with my solutions. I don't know anything about XSLT or other XML transformation tools, but I think someone must have done this before. The key goal I'm looking for is ease to write the XML by hand (both the base and the "extended"). I'm open to new solutions besides XML, if they are easy to write manually. Thanks for reading.

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• Gap between Navbar and Jumbotron

  - by DDK

  I am building I suppose you could call a template for the site I am going to build however I am still pretty new to bootstrap and thus have trouble figuring which CSS rules are affecting elements etc. The problem I am having is I cannot get the Jumbotron unit to sit flush with the bottom of the navbar. I have found a few questions on here about the same problem but the solutions did not work. Here is my code </head> <body> <div class="row"> <div> <img src="http://placehold.it/1600x300" width="100%"> </div> <!-- Static navbar --> <div class="navbar navbar-default navbar-static-top" role="navigation"> <div class="container"> <div class="navbar-header"> <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".navbar-collapse"> <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> </button> </div> <div class="navbar-collapse collapse"> <ul class="nav nav-justified" id="myNav"> <li class="active"><a href="#">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#about">About</a></li> <li><a href="#contact">Contact</a></li> <li><a href="#contact">Services</a></li> </ul> </div><!--/.nav-collapse --> </div> </div> <div class="jumbotron" id="openingtext"> This is where the opening sale text will go </div> <div class="container"> <!-- Example row of columns --> <div class="row"> <div class="col-md-4"> <h2>Heading</h2> <p>Donec id elit non mi porta gravida at eget metus. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo, tortor mauris condimentum nibh, ut fermentum massa justo sit amet risus. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod. Donec sed odio dui. </p> <p><a class="btn btn-default" href="#" role="button">View details &raquo;</a></p> </div> <div class="col-md-4"> <h2>Heading</h2> I would provide the css but as it is all being pulled from an unchanged version of bootstrap and my stylesheet.css has nothing relating to any of these ids etc it seems pointless to do so. I look forward to hearing your solutions guys and girls

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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Implementing History Support using jQuery for AJAX websites built on asp.net AJAX

  - by anil.kasalanati

  Problem Statement: Most modern day website use AJAX for page navigation and gone are the days of complete HTTP redirection so it is imperative that we support back and forward buttons on the browser so that end users navigation is not broken. In this article we discuss about solutions which are already available and problems with them. Microsoft History Support: Post .Net 3.5 sp1 Microsoft’s Script manager supports history for websites using Update panels. This is achieved by enabling the ENABLE HISTORY property for the script manager and then the event “Page_Browser_Navigate” needs to be handled. So whenever the browser buttons are clicked the event is fired and the application can write code to do the navigation. The following articles provide good tutorials on how to do that http://www.asp.net/aspnet-in-net-35-sp1/videos/introduction-to-aspnet-ajax-history http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ajaxhistorymanagement.aspx And Microsoft api internally creates an IFrame and changes the bookmark of the url. Unfortunately this has a bug and it does not work in Ie6 and 7 which are the major browsers but it works in ie8 and Firefox. And Microsoft has apparently fixed this bug in .Net 4.0. Following is the blog http://weblogs.asp.net/joshclose/archive/2008/11/11/asp-net-ajax-addhistorypoint-bug.aspx For solutions which are still running on .net 3.5 sp1 there is no solution which Microsoft offers so there is  are two way to solve this o   Disable the back button. o   Develop custom solution.   Disable back button Even though this might look like a very simple thing to do there are issues around doing this  because there is no event which can be manipulated from the javascript. The browser does not provide an api to do this. So most of the technical solution on internet offer work arounds like doing a history.forward(1) so that even if the user clicks a back button the destination page redirects the user to the original page. This is not a good customer experience and does not work for asp.net website where there are different views in the same page. There are other ways around detecting the window unload events and writing code there. So there are 2 events onbeforeUnload and onUnload and we can write code to show a confirmation message to the user. If we write code in onUnLoad then we can only show a message but it is too late to stop the navigation. And if we write on onBeforeUnLoad we can stop the navigation if the user clicks cancel but this event would be triggered for all AJAX calls and hyperlinks where the href is anything other than #. We can do this but the website has to be checked properly to ensure there are no links where href is not # otherwise the user would see a popup message saying “you are leaving the website”. Believe me after doing a lot of research on the back button disable I found it easier to support it rather than disabling the button. So I am going to discuss a solution which work  using jQuery with some tweaking. Custom Solution JQuery already provides an api to manage the history of a AJAX website - http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history We need to integrate this with Microsoft Page request manager so that both of them work in tandem. The page state is maintained in the cookie so that it can be passed to the server and I used jQuery cookie plug in for that – http://plugins.jquery.com/node/1386/release Firstly when the page loads there is a need to hook up all the events on the page which needs to cause browser history and following is the code to that. jQuery(document).ready(function() {             // Initialize history plugin.             // The callback is called at once by present location.hash.             jQuery.history.init(pageload);               // set onlick event for buttons             jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() {                 //                 var hash = this.page;                 hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, '');                 isAsyncPostBack = true;                 // moves to a new page.                 // pageload is called at once.                 jQuery.history.load(hash);                 return true;             });         }); The above scripts basically gets all the DOM objects which have the attribute rel=”history” and add the event. In our test page we have the link button  which has the attribute rel set to history. <asp:LinkButton ID="Previous" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="PreviousOnClick">Previous</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="AsyncPostBack" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="NextOnClick">Next</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="HistoryLinkButton" runat="server" style="display:none" onclick="HistoryOnClick"></asp:LinkButton>   And you can see that there is an hidden HistoryLinkButton which used to send a sever side postback in case of browser back or previous buttons. And note that we need to use display:none and not visible= false because asp.net AJAX would disallow any post backs if visible=false. And in general the pageload event get executed on the client side when a back or forward is pressed and the function is shown below function pageload(hash) {                   if (hash) {                         if (!isAsyncPostBack) {                           jQuery.cookie("page", hash);                     __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", "");                 }                isAsyncPostBack = false;                             } else {                 // start page             jQuery("#load").empty();             }         }   As you can see in case there is an hash in the url we are basically do an asp.net AJAX post back using the following statement __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", ""); So whenever the user clicks back or forward the post back happens using the event statement we provide and Previous event code is invoked in the code behind.  We need to have the code to use the pageId present in the url to change the page content. And there is an important thing to note – because the hash is worked out using the pageId’s there is a need to recalculate the hash after every AJAX post back so following code is plugged in function ReWorkHash() {             jQuery("a[@rel='history']").unbind("click");             jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() {                 //                 var hash = jQuery(this).attr("page");                 hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, '');                 jQuery.cookie("page", hash);                 isAsyncPostBack = true;                                   // moves to a new page.                 // pageload is called at once.                 jQuery.history.load(hash);                 return true;             });        }   This code is executed from the code behind using ScriptManager RegisterClientScriptBlock as shown below –       ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(_Default), "Recalculater", "ReWorkHash();", true);   A sample application is available to be downloaded at the following location – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Source/HistoryTest.zip And a working sample is available at – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Samples/Default.aspx

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• SQL SERVER – Securing TRUNCATE Permissions in SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  Download the Script of this article from here. On December 11, 2010, Vinod Kumar, a Databases & BI technology evangelist from Microsoft Corporation, graced Ahmedabad by spending some time with the Community during the Community Tech Days (CTD) event. As he was running through a few demos, Vinod asked the audience one of the most fundamental and common interview questions – “What is the difference between a DELETE and TRUNCATE?“ Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Expert Nakul Vachhrajani has come up with excellent solutions of the same. I must congratulate Nakul for this excellent solution and as a encouragement to User Group member, I am publishing the same article over here. Nakul Vachhrajani is a Software Specialist and systems development professional with Patni Computer Systems Limited. He has functional experience spanning legacy code deprecation, system design, documentation, development, implementation, testing, maintenance and support of complex systems, providing business intelligence solutions, database administration, performance tuning, optimization, product management, release engineering, process definition and implementation. He has comprehensive grasp on Database Administration, Development and Implementation with MS SQL Server and C, C++, Visual C++/C#. He has about 6 years of total experience in information technology. Nakul is an member of the Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Groups, and actively contributes to the community by actively participating in multiple forums and websites like SQLAuthority.com, BeyondRelational.com, SQLServerCentral.com and many others. Please note: The opinions expressed herein are Nakul own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. All data from everywhere here on Earth go through a series of  four distinct operations, identified by the words: CREATE, READ, UPDATE and DELETE, or simply, CRUD. Putting in Microsoft SQL Server terms, is the process goes like this: INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE/TRUNCATE. Quite a few interesting responses were received and evaluated live during the session. To summarize them, the most important similarity that came out was that both DELETE and TRUNCATE participate in transactions. The major differences (not all) that came out of the exercise were: DELETE: DELETE supports a WHERE clause DELETE removes rows from a table, row-by-row Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it acquires a row-level lock Depending upon the recovery model of the database, DELETE is a fully-logged operation. Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it can fire off triggers TRUNCATE: TRUNCATE does not support a WHERE clause TRUNCATE works by directly removing the individual data pages of a table TRUNCATE directly occupies a table-level lock. (Because a lock is acquired, and because TRUNCATE can also participate in a transaction, it has to be a logged operation) TRUNCATE is, therefore, a minimally-logged operation; again, this depends upon the recovery model of the database Triggers are not fired when TRUNCATE is used (because individual row deletions are not logged) Finally, Vinod popped the big homework question that must be critically analyzed: “We know that we can restrict a DELETE operation to a particular user, but how can we restrict the TRUNCATE operation to a particular user?” After returning home and having a nice cup of coffee, I noticed that my gray cells immediately started to work. Below was the result of my research. As what is always said, the devil is in the details. Upon looking at the Permissions section for the TRUNCATE statement in Books On Line, the following jumps right out: “The minimum permission required is ALTER on table_name. TRUNCATE TABLE permissions default to the table owner, members of the sysadmin fixed server role, and the db_owner and db_ddladmin fixed database roles, and are not transferable. However, you can incorporate the TRUNCATE TABLE statement within a module, such as a stored procedure, and grant appropriate permissions to the module using the EXECUTE AS clause.“ Now, what does this mean? Unlike DELETE, one cannot directly assign permissions to a user/set of users allowing or revoking TRUNCATE rights. However, there is a way to circumvent this. It is important to recall that in Microsoft SQL Server, database engine security surrounds the concept of a “securable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). urable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT – (01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. By the end of this demo, one will be able to do all the CRUD operations, except the TRUNCATE, and the other will only be able to execute the TRUNCATE. All you will need for this test is any edition of SQL Server 2008. (With minor changes, these scripts can be made to work with SQL 2005.) We begin by creating the following: 1.       A test database 2.        Two database roles: associated logins and users 3.       Switch over to the test database and create a test table. Then, add some data into it. I am using row constructors, which is new to SQL 2008. Creating the modules that will be used to enforce permissions 1.       We have already created one of the modules that we will be assigning permissions to. That module is the table: TruncatePermissionsTest 2.       We will now create two stored procedures; one is for the DELETE operation and the other for the TRUNCATE operation. Please note that for all practical purposes, the end result is the same – all data from the table TruncatePermissionsTest is removed Assigning the permissions Now comes the most important part of the demonstration – assigning permissions. A permissions matrix can be worked out as under: To apply the security rights, we use the GRANT and DENY clauses, as under: That’s it! We are now ready for our big test! THE TEST (01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. I will now need two separate SSMS connections, one with the login AllowedTruncate and the other with the login RestrictedTruncate. Running the test is simple; all that’s required is to run through the script – 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql. What I will demonstrate here via screen-shots is the behavior of SQL Server when logged in as the AllowedTruncate user. There are a few other combinations than what are highlighted here. I will leave the reader the right to explore the behavior of the RestrictedTruncate user and these additional scenarios, as a form of self-study. 1.       Testing SELECT permissions 2.       Testing TRUNCATE permissions (Remember, “deny by default”?) 3.       Trying to circumvent security by trying to TRUNCATE the table using the stored procedure Hence, we have now proved that a user can indeed be assigned permissions to specifically assign TRUNCATE permissions. I also hope that the above has sparked curiosity towards putting some security around the probably “destructive” operations of DELETE and TRUNCATE. I would like to wish each and every one of the readers a very happy and secure time with Microsoft SQL Server. (Please find the scripts – 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql and 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql that have been used in this demonstration. Please note that these scripts contain purely test-level code only. These scripts must not, at any cost, be used in the reader’s production environments). 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Run through, step-by-step through the sequence till Step 08 to create a test database 2. Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows, one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and the other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Come back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 13, 2010 - NAV - Updated to add a security matrix and improve code readability when applying security December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 01: Create a new test database CREATE DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 02: Add roles and users to demonstrate the security of the Truncate operation -- 2a. Create the new roles CREATE ROLE AllowedTruncateRole; GO CREATE ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole; GO -- 2b. Create new logins CREATE LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO CREATE LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO -- 2c. Create new Users using the roles and logins created aboave CREATE USER TruncateUser FOR LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO CREATE USER NoTruncateUser FOR LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO -- 2d. Add the newly created login to the newly created role sp_addrolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_addrolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO -- Step 03: Change over to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 04: Create a test table within the test databse CREATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1), Name NVARCHAR(50)) GO -- Step 05: Populate the required data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Delhi'), (N'Mumbai'), (N'Ahmedabad') GO -- Step 06: Encapsulate the DELETE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_DeleteMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS DELETE FROM TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 07: Encapsulate the TRUNCATE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_TruncateMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS TRUNCATE TABLE TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 08: Apply Security /* *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** =================================================================================== Object                   | Permissions |                 Login |             | AllowedTruncate   |   RestrictedTruncate |             |User:NoTruncateUser|   User:TruncateUser =================================================================================== TruncatePermissionsTest  | SELECT,     |      GRANT        |      (Default) | INSERT,     |                   | | UPDATE,     |                   | | DELETE      |                   | -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- TruncatePermissionsTest  | ALTER       |      DENY         |      (Default) -------------------------+-------------+----*/----------------+----------------------- proc_DeleteMyTable | EXECUTE | GRANT | DENY -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- proc_TruncateMyTable | EXECUTE | DENY | GRANT -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** */ /* Table: TruncatePermissionsTest*/ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY ALTER ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_DeleteMyTable*/ GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO TruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_TruncateMyTable*/ DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO TruncateUser GO -- Step 09: Test --Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows: --    1. one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and --    2. the other as 'AllowedTruncate' -- Step 10: Cleanup sp_droprolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_droprolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO DROP USER TruncateUser GO DROP USER NoTruncateUser GO DROP LOGIN AllowedTruncate GO DROP LOGIN RestrictedTruncate GO DROP ROLE AllowedTruncateRole GO DROP ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Switch over to this from "Truncate Table Permissions.sql", Step #09 2. Execute this step-by-step in two different SSMS windows a. One where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and b. The other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 09A: Switch to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 09B: Ensure that we have valid data SELECT * FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09C: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table without using the stored procedure TRUNCATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur) --  Msg 1088, Level 16, State 7, Line 2 --  Cannot find the object "TruncatePermissionsTest" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. -- Step 09D:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'London'), (N'Paris'), (N'Berlin') GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The INSERT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09E: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_TruncateMyTable GO -- (Expected: Will execute successfully with 'AllowedTruncate' user, will error out as under with 'RestrictedTruncate') -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_TruncateMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_TruncateMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09F:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Madrid'), (N'Rome'), (N'Athens') GO --Step 09G: Attempt to Delete Data from the table without using the stored procedure DELETE FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 2 -- The DELETE permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09H:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Spain'), (N'Italy'), (N'Greece') GO --Step 09I: Attempt to Delete Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_DeleteMyTable GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_DeleteMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_DeleteMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09J: Close this SSMS window and return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" Thank you Nakul to take up the challenge and prove that Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Group has talent to solve difficult problems. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 16, 2010New ProjectsAAPL-MySQL (a MySql implementation of the Agile ADO.Net Persistence Layer): Using the code conventions and code of the Agile ADO.Net Persistence Layer to build a MySql implementationAddress Book: Address Book is simple and easy to use application for storing and editing contacts. It has many features like search and grouping. It's developed ...Airplanes: Airplanes GameAJAX Fax document viewer: The AJAX Fax document viewer is an ASP.net 4.0 project which uses a Seadragon control to display Tiff/Tif files inside the browser. Since it's base...AxeFrog Core: This project contains the foundational code used in several other projects.Bolão: O objetivo deste projeto é estimular a troca de informações e experiências sobre arquitetura e desenvolvimento de software na prática, através do d...Caramel Engine: This is designed to be a logic engine for developing a wide variety of games. To include card logic, dice logic, territories, players, and even man...DotNetNuke® Skin BrandWorks: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by M Perakakis & M Siganou (e-bilab). A very minimal look sk...DotNetNuke® Skin Reasonable: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by Ralph Williams of Architech Solutions. A clean, classy, professi...DotNetNuke® Skin Seasons: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by Atul Handa and Kevin McCusker of Mercer. This skin is a generic ...File Eraser: File Eraser make it esasier for IT Administrator or Advanced Users to administer files and eliminate long addresses, even UNC. It's developed in VB...GreenEyes: My project for IT personalHulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher is a simple Windows Media Center add-in that attempts to launch Hulu Desktop and manage the windows as seamlessly as possible.Imenik: Imenik makes it easier for users to organise their contacts!KharaPOS: KharaPOS is an Exemplar application for Silverlight 4, WCF RIA Services and .NET Framework 4.Mantas Cryptography: Pequena biblioteca de criptografia com suporte aos algorítmos DES, RC2, Rexor e TripleDES. Gera hashes HMAC-MD5, HMAC-RIPEMD160, HMAC-SHA (SHA1, S...MapWindow3D: A C# DirectX library that extends the MapWindow 6.0 geospatial software library by adding an external map. The map supports rotation and tilting i...Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework: Extensible Web Analytics Framework for Microsoft Silverlight Applications.Moq Examples: Unit tests demonstrating Moq features.Ncqrs: Framework that helps you to create Command-Query Responsibility Segregation based applications easily.NoLedge - Notetaking and knowledge database: NoLedge is an easy knowledge gathering and notetaking freeware with a simple interface. You can link a note with different titles and can retrieve ...Numina Application Framework: The framework is a set of tools that help facilitate authentication, authorization, and access control. It is much more than a SSO. It is a central...OData SDK for PHP: OData SDK for PHP is a library to facilitate the connection with OData Services.patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: p&p site for Windows Azure related guidance.projecteuler.net: Exploring projecteuler.net using F#ResumeTracker: Small and easy to use tool that helps to track your job applications. To report bugs or for suggestions please email kirunchik@gmail.com.Selection Maker: Have you ever create a collection of music files? Imagine you just want to pick best of them by your choice. you should go to several folder,play...ShureValidation: Multilingual model validation library. Supports fluent validations, attribute validations and own custom validations.Simple Phonebook: Simple phonebook allows you to store contacts. It also allows you to export the contacts to .txt or .csv. This application is written in C#, but it...SoftUpd: A usefull library which provides an Update feature to any .Net software.sTASKedit: This program can modify and export Perfect World tasks.data files...Tigie: Tigie is a simple CMS system for basic website. It's simple, easy to customize. you'll have a very basic cms to start with and expand for it. All c...toapp: ap hwUltiLogger: UltiLogger is a fast, lightweight logging library programmed in C#. It is meant as a fast, easy, and efficient way for developers to access a relia...Unnme: UnnmeVisual Studio 2008 NUnit snippets: A simple set of useful NUnit snippets, for Visual studio 2008.webdama: italian checkers game c#XBrowser - Headless Browser for .Net: XBrowser is a "headless" web browser written for .Net applications using C#. It is designed to allow automated, remote controlled and test-based br...XML Integrator: XML integration, collaborative toolNew ReleasesAddress Book: Address Book: Address BookAddress Book: Address Book - Source: Address Book source code.AJAX Fax document viewer: AJAXTiff_Source 1.0: Source project for the AJAX Tiff viewer v1.0. Written in Visual Studio 2010 RC using ASP.net 4.0ASP.Net Routing Configuration: mal.Web.Routing v1.0.0.0: mal.Web.Routing v1.0.0.0ASP.NET Wiki Control: Release 1.0: Includes VS2010 Solution and Project files but targets the 3.5 framework so can still be used with VS2008 if new project files are created.BingPaper: Beta: BingPaper Beta Release This Beta release contains quite a few improvements: This Beta release contains a complate overhaul of the replacement tok...Bolão: teste: testeDotNetNuke® Skin Reasonable: Reasonable Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by Ralph Williams of Architech Solutions. A clean, classy, professi...DotNetNuke® Skin Seasons: Seasons Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by Atul Handa and Kevin McCusker of Mercer. This skin is a generic ...dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.2: In TFS Serverdylan.NET Apps: dylan.NET Apps v. 1.1: First version of dnu.dll together with v.9.2 of dylan.NETFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.1.0.0: Version 1.1.0.0 Census report now shows in bold those individuals you KNOW to be alive at the date of the census. Direct Ancestors on census repor...GLB Virtual Player Builder: 0.4.1: Minor change to reset non-major/minor attr to 8.Hulu Launcher: HuluLauncher Release 1.0.1.1: HuluLauncher Release 1.0.1.1 is the initial, barely-tested release of this Windows Media Center add-in. It should work in Vista Media Center and 7 ...Imenik: Imenik: Imenik is now available!jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services: SPServices 0.5.3: NOTE: While I work on new releases, I post alpha versions. 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It contains the logging priorities, and an interface for building logging systems from. THERE IS...Visual Studio 2008 NUnit snippets: Version 1.0: First stable release.Zeta Resource Editor: Source Code Release 2010-03-16: New source code. Binary setup is also available.Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterOData SDK for PHPRawrN2 CMSpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryDirectQBlogEngine.NETMapWindow6SharePoint Team-MailerNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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

  - by ScottGu

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

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• Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

  - by Mark Rackley

  I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding?  Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code.  Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance…   Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites.  Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid.  Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it.  :)  We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested).  Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software.  SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack. Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while. Self-Service BI Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI. This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me: PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.) Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.) One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.) Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.) Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.) This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users. It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations. Collaborative BI I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time. Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people." The Microsoft BI Stack in General A question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years. Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?" Expo Hall I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here. Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions. Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind! Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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