Search Results

Search found 4493 results on 180 pages for 'price comparison'.

Page 178/180 | < Previous Page | 174 175 176 177 178 179 180  | Next Page >

• Different behavior of functors (copies, assignments) in VS2010 (compared with VS2005)

  - by Patrick

  When moving from VS2005 to VS2010 we noticed a performance decrease, which seemed to be caused by additional copies of a functor. The following code illustrates the problem. It is essential to have a map where the value itself is a set. On both the map and the set we defined a comparison functor (which is templated in the example). #include <iostream> #include <map> #include <set> class A { public: A(int i, char c) : m_i(i), m_c(c) { std::cout << "Construct object " << m_c << m_i << std::endl; } A(const A &a) : m_i(a.m_i), m_c(a.m_c) { std::cout << "Copy object " << m_c << m_i << std::endl; } ~A() { std::cout << "Destruct object " << m_c << m_i << std::endl; } void operator= (const A &a) { m_i = a.m_i; m_c = a.m_c; std::cout << "Assign object " << m_c << m_i << std::endl; } int m_i; char m_c; }; class B : public A { public: B(int i) : A(i, 'B') { } static const char s_c = 'B'; }; class C : public A { public: C(int i) : A(i, 'C') { } static const char s_c = 'C'; }; template <class X> class compareA { public: compareA() : m_i(999) { std::cout << "Construct functor " << X::s_c << m_i << std::endl; } compareA(const compareA &a) : m_i(a.m_i) { std::cout << "Copy functor " << X::s_c << m_i << std::endl; } ~compareA() { std::cout << "Destruct functor " << X::s_c << m_i << std::endl; } void operator= (const compareA &a) { m_i = a.m_i; std::cout << "Assign functor " << X::s_c << m_i << std::endl; } bool operator() (const X &x1, const X &x2) const { std::cout << "Comparing object " << x1.m_i << " with " << x2.m_i << std::endl; return x1.m_i < x2.m_i; } private: int m_i; }; typedef std::set<C, compareA<C> > SetTest; typedef std::map<B, SetTest, compareA<B> > MapTest; int main() { int i = 0; std::cout << "--- " << i++ << std::endl; MapTest mapTest; std::cout << "--- " << i++ << std::endl; SetTest &setTest = mapTest[0]; std::cout << "--- " << i++ << std::endl; } If I compile this code with VS2005 I get the following output: --- 0 Construct functor B999 Copy functor B999 Copy functor B999 Destruct functor B999 Destruct functor B999 --- 1 Construct object B0 Construct functor C999 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Copy object B0 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Copy object B0 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct object B0 Destruct functor C999 Destruct object B0 --- 2 If I compile this with VS2010, I get the following output: --- 0 Construct functor B999 Copy functor B999 Copy functor B999 Destruct functor B999 Destruct functor B999 --- 1 Construct object B0 Construct functor C999 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Copy object B0 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Copy functor C999 Assign functor C999 Assign functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Copy object B0 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Copy functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Copy functor C999 Assign functor C999 Assign functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct functor C999 Destruct object B0 Destruct functor C999 Destruct object B0 --- 2 The output for the first statement (constructing the map) is identical. The output for the second statement (creating the first element in the map and getting a reference to it), is much bigger in the VS2010 case: Copy constructor of functor: 10 times vs 8 times Assignment of functor: 2 times vs. 0 times Destructor of functor: 10 times vs 8 times My questions are: Why does the STL copy a functor? Isn't it enough to construct it once for every instantiation of the set? Why is the functor constructed more in the VS2010 case than in the VS2005 case? (didn't check VS2008) And why is it assigned two times in VS2010 and not in VS2005? Are there any tricks to avoid the copy of functors? I saw a similar question at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2216041/prevent-unnecessary-copies-of-c-functor-objects but I'm not sure that's the same question. Thanks in advance, Patrick

  Read the article

• Suggestions for duplicate file finder algorithm (using C)

  - by Andrei Ciobanu

  Hello, I wanted to write a program that test if two files are duplicates (have exactly the same content). First I test if the files have the same sizes, and if they have i start to compare their contents. My first idea, was to "split" the files into fixed size blocks, then start a thread for every block, fseek to startup character of every block and continue the comparisons in parallel. When a comparison from a thread fails, the other working threads are canceled, and the program exits out of the thread spawning loop. The code looks like this: dupf.h #ifndef __NM__DUPF__H__ #define __NM__DUPF__H__ #define NUM_THREADS 15 #define BLOCK_SIZE 8192 /* Thread argument structure */ struct thread_arg_s { const char *name_f1; /* First file name */ const char *name_f2; /* Second file name */ int cursor; /* Where to seek in the file */ }; typedef struct thread_arg_s thread_arg; /** * 'arg' is of type thread_arg. * Checks if the specified file blocks are * duplicates. */ void *check_block_dup(void *arg); /** * Checks if two files are duplicates */ int check_dup(const char *name_f1, const char *name_f2); /** * Returns a valid pointer to a file. * If the file (given by the path/name 'fname') cannot be opened * in 'mode', the program is interrupted an error message is shown. **/ FILE *safe_fopen(const char *name, const char *mode); #endif dupf.c #include <errno.h> #include <pthread.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/stat.h> #include <unistd.h> #include "dupf.h" FILE *safe_fopen(const char *fname, const char *mode) { FILE *f = NULL; f = fopen(fname, mode); if (f == NULL) { char emsg[255]; sprintf(emsg, "FOPEN() %s\t", fname); perror(emsg); exit(-1); } return (f); } void *check_block_dup(void *arg) { const char *name_f1 = NULL, *name_f2 = NULL; /* File names */ FILE *f1 = NULL, *f2 = NULL; /* Streams */ int cursor = 0; /* Reading cursor */ char buff_f1[BLOCK_SIZE], buff_f2[BLOCK_SIZE]; /* Character buffers */ int rchars_1, rchars_2; /* Readed characters */ /* Initializing variables from 'arg' */ name_f1 = ((thread_arg*)arg)->name_f1; name_f2 = ((thread_arg*)arg)->name_f2; cursor = ((thread_arg*)arg)->cursor; /* Opening files */ f1 = safe_fopen(name_f1, "r"); f2 = safe_fopen(name_f2, "r"); /* Setup cursor in files */ fseek(f1, cursor, SEEK_SET); fseek(f2, cursor, SEEK_SET); /* Initialize buffers */ rchars_1 = fread(buff_f1, 1, BLOCK_SIZE, f1); rchars_2 = fread(buff_f2, 1, BLOCK_SIZE, f2); if (rchars_1 != rchars_2) { /* fread failed to read the same portion. * program cannot continue */ perror("ERROR WHEN READING BLOCK"); exit(-1); } while (rchars_1-->0) { if (buff_f1[rchars_1] != buff_f2[rchars_1]) { /* Different characters */ fclose(f1); fclose(f2); pthread_exit("notdup"); } } /* Close streams */ fclose(f1); fclose(f2); pthread_exit("dup"); } int check_dup(const char *name_f1, const char *name_f2) { int num_blocks = 0; /* Number of 'blocks' to check */ int num_tsp = 0; /* Number of threads spawns */ int tsp_iter = 0; /* Iterator for threads spawns */ pthread_t *tsp_threads = NULL; thread_arg *tsp_threads_args = NULL; int tsp_threads_iter = 0; int thread_c_res = 0; /* Thread creation result */ int thread_j_res = 0; /* Thread join res */ int loop_res = 0; /* Function result */ int cursor; struct stat buf_f1; struct stat buf_f2; if (name_f1 == NULL || name_f2 == NULL) { /* Invalid input parameters */ perror("INVALID FNAMES\t"); return (-1); } if (stat(name_f1, &buf_f1) != 0 || stat(name_f2, &buf_f2) != 0) { /* Stat fails */ char emsg[255]; sprintf(emsg, "STAT() ERROR: %s %s\t", name_f1, name_f2); perror(emsg); return (-1); } if (buf_f1.st_size != buf_f2.st_size) { /* File have different sizes */ return (1); } /* Files have the same size, function exec. is continued */ num_blocks = (buf_f1.st_size / BLOCK_SIZE) + 1; num_tsp = (num_blocks / NUM_THREADS) + 1; cursor = 0; for (tsp_iter = 0; tsp_iter < num_tsp; tsp_iter++) { loop_res = 0; /* Create threads array for this spawn */ tsp_threads = malloc(NUM_THREADS * sizeof(*tsp_threads)); if (tsp_threads == NULL) { perror("TSP_THREADS ALLOC FAILURE\t"); return (-1); } /* Create arguments for every thread in the current spawn */ tsp_threads_args = malloc(NUM_THREADS * sizeof(*tsp_threads_args)); if (tsp_threads_args == NULL) { perror("TSP THREADS ARGS ALLOCA FAILURE\t"); return (-1); } /* Initialize arguments and create threads */ for (tsp_threads_iter = 0; tsp_threads_iter < NUM_THREADS; tsp_threads_iter++) { if (cursor >= buf_f1.st_size) { break; } tsp_threads_args[tsp_threads_iter].name_f1 = name_f1; tsp_threads_args[tsp_threads_iter].name_f2 = name_f2; tsp_threads_args[tsp_threads_iter].cursor = cursor; thread_c_res = pthread_create( &tsp_threads[tsp_threads_iter], NULL, check_block_dup, (void*)&tsp_threads_args[tsp_threads_iter]); if (thread_c_res != 0) { perror("THREAD CREATION FAILURE"); return (-1); } cursor+=BLOCK_SIZE; } /* Join last threads and get their status */ while (tsp_threads_iter-->0) { void *thread_res = NULL; thread_j_res = pthread_join(tsp_threads[tsp_threads_iter], &thread_res); if (thread_j_res != 0) { perror("THREAD JOIN FAILURE"); return (-1); } if (strcmp((char*)thread_res, "notdup")==0) { loop_res++; /* Closing other threads and exiting by condition * from loop. */ while (tsp_threads_iter-->0) { pthread_cancel(tsp_threads[tsp_threads_iter]); } } } free(tsp_threads); free(tsp_threads_args); if (loop_res > 0) { break; } } return (loop_res > 0) ? 1 : 0; } The function works fine (at least for what I've tested). Still, some guys from #C (freenode) suggested that the solution is overly complicated, and it may perform poorly because of parallel reading on hddisk. What I want to know: Is the threaded approach flawed by default ? Is fseek() so slow ? Is there a way to somehow map the files to memory and then compare them ?

  Read the article

• Command does not execute in crontab while command itself works just fine

  - by fuzzybee

  I have this script from Colin Johnson on Github - https://github.com/colinbjohnson/aws-missing-tools/tree/master/ec2-automate-backup It seems great. I have modified it to send email to myself every time an EBS snapshot is created or deleted. The following works like a charm ec2-automate-backup.sh -v "vol-myvolumeid" -k 3 However, it does not execute at all as part of my crontab (I didn't receive any emails) #some command that got commented out */5 * * * * ec2-automate-backup.sh -v "vol-fb2fbcdf" -k 3; * * * * * date /root/logs/crontab.log; */5 * * * * date /root/logs/crontab2.log Please note that the 2nd and 3rd execute just fines as I can see the date and time in log files. What could I have missed here? The full ec2-automate-backup.sh is as follows: #!/bin/bash - # Author: Colin Johnson / [email protected] # Date: 2012-09-24 # Version 0.1 # License Type: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3 # #confirms that executables required for succesful script execution are available prerequisite_check() { for prerequisite in basename ec2-create-snapshot ec2-create-tags ec2-describe-snapshots ec2-delete-snapshot date do #use of "hash" chosen as it is a shell builtin and will add programs to hash table, possibly speeding execution. Use of type also considered - open to suggestions. hash $prerequisite &> /dev/null if [[ $? == 1 ]] #has exits with exit status of 70, executable was not found then echo "In order to use `basename $0`, the executable \"$prerequisite\" must be installed." 1>&2 | mailx -s "Error happened 0" [email protected] ; exit 70 fi done } #get_EBS_List gets a list of available EBS instances depending upon the selection_method of EBS selection that is provided by user input get_EBS_List() { case $selection_method in volumeid) if [[ -z $volumeid ]] then echo "The selection method \"volumeid\" (which is $app_name's default selection_method of operation or requested by using the -s volumeid parameter) requires a volumeid (-v volumeid) for operation. Correct usage is as follows: \"-v vol-6d6a0527\",\"-s volumeid -v vol-6d6a0527\" or \"-v \"vol-6d6a0527 vol-636a0112\"\" if multiple volumes are to be selected." 1>&2 | mailx -s "Error happened 1" [email protected] ; exit 64 fi ebs_selection_string="$volumeid" ;; tag) if [[ -z $tag ]] then echo "The selected selection_method \"tag\" (-s tag) requires a valid tag (-t key=value) for operation. Correct usage is as follows: \"-s tag -t backup=true\" or \"-s tag -t Name=my_tag.\"" 1>&2 | mailx -s "Error happened 2" [email protected] ; exit 64 fi ebs_selection_string="--filter tag:$tag" ;; *) echo "If you specify a selection_method (-s selection_method) for selecting EBS volumes you must select either \"volumeid\" (-s volumeid) or \"tag\" (-s tag)." 1>&2 | mailx -s "Error happened 3" [email protected] ; exit 64 ;; esac #creates a list of all ebs volumes that match the selection string from above ebs_backup_list_complete=`ec2-describe-volumes --show-empty-fields --region $region $ebs_selection_string 2>&1` #takes the output of the previous command ebs_backup_list_result=`echo $?` if [[ $ebs_backup_list_result -gt 0 ]] then echo -e "An error occured when running ec2-describe-volumes. The error returned is below:\n$ebs_backup_list_complete" 1>&2 | mailx -s "Error happened 4" [email protected] ; exit 70 fi ebs_backup_list=`echo "$ebs_backup_list_complete" | grep ^VOLUME | cut -f 2` #code to right will output list of EBS volumes to be backed up: echo -e "Now outputting ebs_backup_list:\n$ebs_backup_list" } create_EBS_Snapshot_Tags() { #snapshot tags holds all tags that need to be applied to a given snapshot - by aggregating tags we ensure that ec2-create-tags is called only onece snapshot_tags="" #if $name_tag_create is true then append ec2ab_${ebs_selected}_$date_current to the variable $snapshot_tags if $name_tag_create then ec2_snapshot_resource_id=`echo "$ec2_create_snapshot_result" | cut -f 2` snapshot_tags="$snapshot_tags --tag Name=ec2ab_${ebs_selected}_$date_current" fi #if $purge_after_days is true, then append $purge_after_date to the variable $snapshot_tags if [[ -n $purge_after_days ]] then snapshot_tags="$snapshot_tags --tag PurgeAfter=$purge_after_date --tag PurgeAllow=true" fi #if $snapshot_tags is not zero length then set the tag on the snapshot using ec2-create-tags if [[ -n $snapshot_tags ]] then echo "Tagging Snapshot $ec2_snapshot_resource_id with the following Tags:" ec2-create-tags $ec2_snapshot_resource_id --region $region $snapshot_tags #echo "Snapshot tags successfully created" | mailx -s "Snapshot tags successfully created" [email protected] fi } date_command_get() { #finds full path to date binary date_binary_full_path=`which date` #command below is used to determine if date binary is gnu, macosx or other date_binary_file_result=`file -b $date_binary_full_path` case $date_binary_file_result in "Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64") date_binary="macosx" ;; "ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV)"*) date_binary="gnu" ;; *) date_binary="unknown" ;; esac #based on the installed date binary the case statement below will determine the method to use to determine "purge_after_days" in the future case $date_binary in gnu) date_command="date -d +${purge_after_days}days -u +%Y-%m-%d" ;; macosx) date_command="date -v+${purge_after_days}d -u +%Y-%m-%d" ;; unknown) date_command="date -d +${purge_after_days}days -u +%Y-%m-%d" ;; *) date_command="date -d +${purge_after_days}days -u +%Y-%m-%d" ;; esac } purge_EBS_Snapshots() { #snapshot_tag_list is a string that contains all snapshots with either the key PurgeAllow or PurgeAfter set snapshot_tag_list=`ec2-describe-tags --show-empty-fields --region $region --filter resource-type=snapshot --filter key=PurgeAllow,PurgeAfter` #snapshot_purge_allowed is a list of all snapshot_ids with PurgeAllow=true snapshot_purge_allowed=`echo "$snapshot_tag_list" | grep .*PurgeAllow'\t'true | cut -f 3` for snapshot_id_evaluated in $snapshot_purge_allowed do #gets the "PurgeAfter" date which is in UTC with YYYY-MM-DD format (or %Y-%m-%d) purge_after_date=`echo "$snapshot_tag_list" | grep .*$snapshot_id_evaluated'\t'PurgeAfter.* | cut -f 5` #if purge_after_date is not set then we have a problem. Need to alter user. if [[ -z $purge_after_date ]] #Alerts user to the fact that a Snapshot was found with PurgeAllow=true but with no PurgeAfter date. then echo "A Snapshot with the Snapshot ID $snapshot_id_evaluated has the tag \"PurgeAllow=true\" but does not have a \"PurgeAfter=YYYY-MM-DD\" date. $app_name is unable to determine if $snapshot_id_evaluated should be purged." 1>&2 | mailx -s "Error happened 5" [email protected] else #convert both the date_current and purge_after_date into epoch time to allow for comparison date_current_epoch=`date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" "$date_current" "+%s"` purge_after_date_epoch=`date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" "$purge_after_date" "+%s"` #perform compparison - if $purge_after_date_epoch is a lower number than $date_current_epoch than the PurgeAfter date is earlier than the current date - and the snapshot can be safely removed if [[ $purge_after_date_epoch < $date_current_epoch ]] then echo "The snapshot \"$snapshot_id_evaluated\" with the Purge After date of $purge_after_date will be deleted." ec2-delete-snapshot --region $region $snapshot_id_evaluated echo "Old snapshots successfully deleted for $volumeid" | mailx -s "Old snapshots successfully deleted for $volumeid" [email protected] fi fi done } #calls prerequisitecheck function to ensure that all executables required for script execution are available prerequisite_check app_name=`basename $0` #sets defaults selection_method="volumeid" region="ap-southeast-1" #date_binary allows a user to set the "date" binary that is installed on their system and, therefore, the options that will be given to the date binary to perform date calculations date_binary="" #sets the "Name" tag set for a snapshot to false - using "Name" requires that ec2-create-tags be called in addition to ec2-create-snapshot name_tag_create=false #sets the Purge Snapshot feature to false - this feature will eventually allow the removal of snapshots that have a "PurgeAfter" tag that is earlier than current date purge_snapshots=false #handles options processing while getopts :s:r:v:t:k:pn opt do case $opt in s) selection_method="$OPTARG";; r) region="$OPTARG";; v) volumeid="$OPTARG";; t) tag="$OPTARG";; k) purge_after_days="$OPTARG";; n) name_tag_create=true;; p) purge_snapshots=true;; *) echo "Error with Options Input. Cause of failure is most likely that an unsupported parameter was passed or a parameter was passed without a corresponding option." 1>&2 ; exit 64;; esac done #sets date variable date_current=`date -u +%Y-%m-%d` #sets the PurgeAfter tag to the number of days that a snapshot should be retained if [[ -n $purge_after_days ]] then #if the date_binary is not set, call the date_command_get function if [[ -z $date_binary ]] then date_command_get fi purge_after_date=`$date_command` echo "Snapshots taken by $app_name will be eligible for purging after the following date: $purge_after_date." fi #get_EBS_List gets a list of EBS instances for which a snapshot is desired. The list of EBS instances depends upon the selection_method that is provided by user input get_EBS_List #the loop below is called once for each volume in $ebs_backup_list - the currently selected EBS volume is passed in as "ebs_selected" for ebs_selected in $ebs_backup_list do ec2_snapshot_description="ec2ab_${ebs_selected}_$date_current" ec2_create_snapshot_result=`ec2-create-snapshot --region $region -d $ec2_snapshot_description $ebs_selected 2>&1` if [[ $? != 0 ]] then echo -e "An error occured when running ec2-create-snapshot. The error returned is below:\n$ec2_create_snapshot_result" 1>&2 ; exit 70 else ec2_snapshot_resource_id=`echo "$ec2_create_snapshot_result" | cut -f 2` echo "Snapshots successfully created for volume $volumeid" | mailx -s "Snapshots successfully created for $volumeid" [email protected] fi create_EBS_Snapshot_Tags done #if purge_snapshots is true, then run purge_EBS_Snapshots function if $purge_snapshots then echo "Snapshot Purging is Starting Now." purge_EBS_Snapshots fi cron log Oct 23 10:24:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28214]: (root) CMD (root (ec2-automate-backup.sh -v "vol-fb2fbcdf" -k 3;)) Oct 23 10:24:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28215]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:25:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28228]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:25:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28229]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab2.log) Oct 23 10:26:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28239]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:27:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28247]: (root) CMD (root (ec2-automate-backup.sh -v "vol-fb2fbcdf" -k 3;)) Oct 23 10:27:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28248]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:28:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28263]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:29:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28275]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:30:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28292]: (root) CMD (root (ec2-automate-backup.sh -v "vol-fb2fbcdf" -k 3;)) Oct 23 10:30:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28293]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:30:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28294]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab2.log) Oct 23 10:31:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28312]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:32:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28319]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:33:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28325]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:33:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28324]: (root) CMD (root (ec2-automate-backup.sh -v "vol-fb2fbcdf" -k 3;)) Oct 23 10:34:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28345]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:35:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28362]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab.log;) Oct 23 10:35:01 ip-10-130-153-227 CROND[28363]: (root) CMD (date >> /root/logs/crontab2.log) Mails to root From [email protected] Tue Oct 23 06:00:01 2012 Return-Path: <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 06:00:01 GMT From: [email protected] (Cron Daemon) To: [email protected] Subject: Cron <root@ip-10-130-153-227> root ec2-automate-backup.sh -v "vol-fb2fbcdf" -k 3 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Auto-Submitted: auto-generated X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh> X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/root> X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/bin:/bin> X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=root> X-Cron-Env: <USER=root> Status: R /bin/sh: root: command not found

  Read the article

• Javascript stockticker : not showing data on php page

  - by developer

  iam not getting any javascript errors , code is getting rendered properly only, but still server not displaying data on the page. please check the code below . <style type="text/css"> #marqueeborder { color: #cccccc; background-color: #EEF3E2; font-family:"Lucida Console", Monaco, monospace; position:relative; height:20px; overflow:hidden; font-size: 0.7em; } #marqueecontent { position:absolute; left:0px; line-height:20px; white-space:nowrap; } .stockbox { margin:0 10px; } .stockbox a { color: #cccccc; text-decoration : underline; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="marqueeborder" onmouseover="pxptick=0" onmouseout="pxptick=scrollspeed"> <div id="marqueecontent"> <?php // Original script by Walter Heitman Jr, first published on http://techblog.shanock.com // List your stocks here, separated by commas, no spaces, in the order you want them displayed: $stocks = "idt,iye,mill,pwer,spy,f,msft,x,sbux,sne,ge,dow,t"; // Function to copy a stock quote CSV from Yahoo to the local cache. CSV contains symbol, price, and change function upsfile($stock) { copy("http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=$stock&f=sl1c1&e=.csv","stockcache/".$stock.".csv"); } foreach ( explode(",", $stocks) as $stock ) { // Where the stock quote info file should be... $local_file = "stockcache/".$stock.".csv"; // ...if it exists. If not, download it. if (!file_exists($local_file)) { upsfile($stock); } // Else,If it's out-of-date by 15 mins (900 seconds) or more, update it. elseif (filemtime($local_file) <= (time() - 900)) { upsfile($stock); } // Open the file, load our values into an array... $local_file = fopen ("stockcache/".$stock.".csv","r"); $stock_info = fgetcsv ($local_file, 1000, ","); // ...format, and output them. I made the symbols into links to Yahoo's stock pages. echo "<span class=\"stockbox\"><a href=\"http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=".$stock_info[0]."\">".$stock_info[0]."</a> ".sprintf("%.2f",$stock_info[1])." <span style=\""; // Green prices for up, red for down if ($stock_info[2]>=0) { echo "color: #009900;\">&uarr;"; } elseif ($stock_info[2]<0) { echo "color: #ff0000;\">&darr;"; } echo sprintf("%.2f",abs($stock_info[2]))."</span></span>\n"; // Done! fclose($local_file); } ?> <span class="stockbox" style="font-size:0.6em">Quotes from <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/">Yahoo Finance</a></span> </div> </div> </body> <script type="text/javascript"> // Original script by Walter Heitman Jr, first published on http://techblog.shanock.com // Set an initial scroll speed. This equates to the number of pixels shifted per tick var scrollspeed=2; var pxptick=scrollspeed; var marqueediv=''; var contentwidth=""; var marqueewidth = ""; function startmarquee(){ alert("hi"); // Make a shortcut referencing our div with the content we want to scroll marqueediv=document.getElementById("marqueecontent"); //alert("marqueediv"+marqueediv); alert("hi"+marqueediv.innerHTML); // Get the total width of our available scroll area marqueewidth=document.getElementById("marqueeborder").offsetWidth; alert("marqueewidth"+marqueewidth); // Get the width of the content we want to scroll contentwidth=marqueediv.offsetWidth; alert("contentwidth"+contentwidth); // Start the ticker at 50 milliseconds per tick, adjust this to suit your preferences // Be warned, setting this lower has heavy impact on client-side CPU usage. Be gentle. var lefttime=setInterval("scrollmarquee()",50); alert("lefttime"+lefttime); } function scrollmarquee(){ // Check position of the div, then shift it left by the set amount of pixels. if (parseInt(marqueediv.style.left)>(contentwidth*(-1))) marqueediv.style.left=parseInt(marqueediv.style.left)-pxptick+"px"; //alert("hikkk"+marqueediv.innerHTML);} // If it's at the end, move it back to the right. else{ alert("marqueewidth"+marqueewidth); marqueediv.style.left=parseInt(marqueewidth)+"px"; } } window.onload=startmarquee; </script> </html> Below is the server displayed page. I have updated with screenshot with your suggestion, i made change in html too, to check what is showing by child dev

  Read the article

• Why wont this sort in Solr work?

  - by Camran

  I need to sort on a date-field type, which name is "mod_date". It works like this in the browser adress-bar: http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?&q=bmw&sort=mod_date+desc But I am using a phpSolr client which sends an URL to Solr, and the url sent is this: fq=+category%3A%22Bilar%22+%2B+car_action%3AS%C3%A4ljes&version=1.2&wt=json&json.nl=map&q=%2A%3A%2A&start=0&rows=5&sort=mod_date+desc // This wont work and is echoed after this in php: $queryString = http_build_query($params, null, $this->_queryStringDelimiter); $queryString = preg_replace('/%5B(?:[0-9]|[1-9][0-9]+)%5D=/', '=', $queryString); This wont work, I dont know why! Everything else works fine, all right fields are returned. But the sort doesn't work. Any ideas? Thanks BTW: The field "mod_date" contains something like: 2010-03-04T19:37:22.5Z EDIT: First I use PHP to send this to a SolrPhpClient which is another php-file called service.php: require_once('../SolrPhpClient/Apache/Solr/Service.php'); $solr = new Apache_Solr_Service('localhost', 8983, '/solr/'); $results = $solr->search($querystring, $p, $limit, $solr_params); $solr_params is an array which contains the solr-parameters (q, fq, etc). Now, in service.php: $params['version'] = self::SOLR_VERSION; // common parameters in this interface $params['wt'] = self::SOLR_WRITER; $params['json.nl'] = $this->_namedListTreatment; $params['q'] = $query; $params['sort'] = 'mod_date desc'; // HERE IS THE SORT I HAVE PROBLEM WITH $params['start'] = $offset; $params['rows'] = $limit; $queryString = http_build_query($params, null, $this->_queryStringDelimiter); $queryString = preg_replace('/%5B(?:[0-9]|[1-9][0-9]+)%5D=/', '=', $queryString); if ($method == self::METHOD_GET) { return $this->_sendRawGet($this->_searchUrl . $this->_queryDelimiter . $queryString); } else if ($method == self::METHOD_POST) { return $this->_sendRawPost($this->_searchUrl, $queryString, FALSE, 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'); } The $results contain the results from Solr... So this is the way I need to get to work (via php). This code below (also on top of this Q) works but thats because I paste it into the adress bar manually, not via the PHPclient. But thats just for debugging, I need to get it to work via the PHPclient: http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?&q=bmw&sort=mod_date+des // Not via phpclient, but works UPDATE (2010-03-08): I have tried Donovans codes (the urls) and they work fine. Now, I have noticed that it is one of the parameters causing the 'SORT' not to work. This parameter is the "wt" parameter. If we take the url from top of this Q, (fq=+category%3A%22Bilar%22+%2B+car_action%3AS%C3%A4ljes&version=1.2&wt=json&json.nl=map&q=%2A%3A%2A&start=0&rows=5&sort=mod_date+desc), and just simply remove the "wt" parameter, then the sort works. BUT the results appear differently, thus making my php code not able to recognize the results I believe. Donovan would know this I think. I am guessing in order for the PHPClient to work, the results must be in a specific structure, which gets messed up as soon as I remove the wt parameter. Donovan, help me please... Here is some background what I use your SolrPhpClient for: I have a classifieds website, which uses MySql. But for the searching I am using Solr to search some indexed fields. Then Solr returns an array of ID:numbers (for all matches of the search criteria). Then I use those ID:numbers to find everything in a MySql db and fetch all other information (example is not searchable information). So simplified: Search - Solr returns all matches in an array of ID:nrs - Id:numbers from Solr are the same as the Id numbers in the MySql db, so I can just make a simple match agains every record with the ID matching the ID from the Solr results array. I don't use Faceting, no boosting, no relevancy or other fancy stuff. I only sort by the latest classified put, and give the option to users to also sort on the cheapest price. Nothing more. Then I use the "fq" parameter to do queries on different fields in Solr depending on category chosen by users (example "cars" in this case which in my language is "Bilar"). I am really stuck with this problem here... Thanks for all help

  Read the article

• Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent

  - by Pankaj Khurana

  Hi, I am using code available on http://www.forosdelweb.com/f18/zip-lib-php-archivo-zip-vacio-431133/ for creating zip file. First file-zip.lib.php <?php /* $Id: zip.lib.php,v 1.1 2004/02/14 15:21:18 anoncvs_tusedb Exp $ */ // vim: expandtab sw=4 ts=4 sts=4: /** * Zip file creation class. * Makes zip files. * * Last Modification and Extension By : * * Hasin Hayder * HomePage : www.hasinme.info * Email : [email protected] * IDE : PHP Designer 2005 * * * Originally Based on : * * http://www.zend.com/codex.php?id=535&single=1 * By Eric Mueller <[email protected]> * * http://www.zend.com/codex.php?id=470&single=1 * by Denis125 <[email protected]> * * a patch from Peter Listiak <[email protected]> for last modified * date and time of the compressed file * * Official ZIP file format: http://www.pkware.com/appnote.txt * * @access public */ class zipfile { /** * Array to store compressed data * * @var array $datasec */ var $datasec = array(); /** * Central directory * * @var array $ctrl_dir */ var $ctrl_dir = array(); /** * End of central directory record * * @var string $eof_ctrl_dir */ var $eof_ctrl_dir = "\x50\x4b\x05\x06\x00\x00\x00\x00"; /** * Last offset position * * @var integer $old_offset */ var $old_offset = 0; /** * Converts an Unix timestamp to a four byte DOS date and time format (date * in high two bytes, time in low two bytes allowing magnitude comparison). * * @param integer the current Unix timestamp * * @return integer the current date in a four byte DOS format * * @access private */ function unix2DosTime($unixtime = 0) { $timearray = ($unixtime == 0) ? getdate() : getdate($unixtime); if ($timearray['year'] < 1980) { $timearray['year'] = 1980; $timearray['mon'] = 1; $timearray['mday'] = 1; $timearray['hours'] = 0; $timearray['minutes'] = 0; $timearray['seconds'] = 0; } // end if return (($timearray['year'] - 1980) << 25) | ($timearray['mon'] << 21) | ($timearray['mday'] << 16) | ($timearray['hours'] << 11) | ($timearray['minutes'] << 5) | ($timearray['seconds'] >> 1); } // end of the 'unix2DosTime()' method /** * Adds "file" to archive * * @param string file contents * @param string name of the file in the archive (may contains the path) * @param integer the current timestamp * * @access public */ function addFile($data, $name, $time = 0) { $name = str_replace('', '/', $name); $dtime = dechex($this->unix2DosTime($time)); $hexdtime = 'x' . $dtime[6] . $dtime[7] . 'x' . $dtime[4] . $dtime[5] . 'x' . $dtime[2] . $dtime[3] . 'x' . $dtime[0] . $dtime[1]; eval('$hexdtime = "' . $hexdtime . '";'); $fr = "\x50\x4b\x03\x04"; $fr .= "\x14\x00"; // ver needed to extract $fr .= "\x00\x00"; // gen purpose bit flag $fr .= "\x08\x00"; // compression method $fr .= $hexdtime; // last mod time and date // "local file header" segment $unc_len = strlen($data); $crc = crc32($data); $zdata = gzcompress($data); $zdata = substr(substr($zdata, 0, strlen($zdata) - 4), 2); // fix crc bug $c_len = strlen($zdata); $fr .= pack('V', $crc); // crc32 $fr .= pack('V', $c_len); // compressed filesize $fr .= pack('V', $unc_len); // uncompressed filesize $fr .= pack('v', strlen($name)); // length of filename $fr .= pack('v', 0); // extra field length $fr .= $name; // "file data" segment $fr .= $zdata; // "data descriptor" segment (optional but necessary if archive is not // served as file) $fr .= pack('V', $crc); // crc32 $fr .= pack('V', $c_len); // compressed filesize $fr .= pack('V', $unc_len); // uncompressed filesize // add this entry to array $this -> datasec[] = $fr; // now add to central directory record $cdrec = "\x50\x4b\x01\x02"; $cdrec .= "\x00\x00"; // version made by $cdrec .= "\x14\x00"; // version needed to extract $cdrec .= "\x00\x00"; // gen purpose bit flag $cdrec .= "\x08\x00"; // compression method $cdrec .= $hexdtime; // last mod time & date $cdrec .= pack('V', $crc); // crc32 $cdrec .= pack('V', $c_len); // compressed filesize $cdrec .= pack('V', $unc_len); // uncompressed filesize $cdrec .= pack('v', strlen($name) ); // length of filename $cdrec .= pack('v', 0 ); // extra field length $cdrec .= pack('v', 0 ); // file comment length $cdrec .= pack('v', 0 ); // disk number start $cdrec .= pack('v', 0 ); // internal file attributes $cdrec .= pack('V', 32 ); // external file attributes - 'archive' bit set $cdrec .= pack('V', $this -> old_offset ); // relative offset of local header $this -> old_offset += strlen($fr); $cdrec .= $name; // optional extra field, file comment goes here // save to central directory $this -> ctrl_dir[] = $cdrec; } // end of the 'addFile()' method /** * Dumps out file * * @return string the zipped file * * @access public */ function file() { $data = implode('', $this -> datasec); $ctrldir = implode('', $this -> ctrl_dir); return $data . $ctrldir . $this -> eof_ctrl_dir . pack('v', sizeof($this -> ctrl_dir)) . // total # of entries "on this disk" pack('v', sizeof($this -> ctrl_dir)) . // total # of entries overall pack('V', strlen($ctrldir)) . // size of central dir pack('V', strlen($data)) . // offset to start of central dir "\x00\x00"; // .zip file comment length } // end of the 'file()' method /** * A Wrapper of original addFile Function * * Created By Hasin Hayder at 29th Jan, 1:29 AM * * @param array An Array of files with relative/absolute path to be added in Zip File * * @access public */ function addFiles($files /*Only Pass Array*/) { foreach($files as $file) { if (is_file($file)) //directory check { $data = implode("",file($file)); $this->addFile($data,$file); } } } /** * A Wrapper of original file Function * * Created By Hasin Hayder at 29th Jan, 1:29 AM * * @param string Output file name * * @access public */ function output($file) { $fp=fopen($file,"w"); fwrite($fp,$this->file()); fclose($fp); } } // end of the 'zipfile' class ?> My second file newzip.php <? include("zip.lib.php"); $ziper = new zipfile(); $ziper->addFiles(array("index.htm")); //array of files // the next three lines force an immediate download of the zip file: header("Content-type: application/octet-stream"); header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=test.zip"); echo $ziper -> file(); ?> I am getting this warning while executing newzip.php Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at E:\xampp\htdocs\demo\zip.lib.php:233) in E:\xampp\htdocs\demo\newzip.php on line 6 I am unable to figure out the reason for the same. Please help me on this. Thanks

  Read the article

• how to display user name in login name control

  - by user569285

  I have a master page that holds the loginview content that appears on all subsequent pages based on the master page. i have a username control also nested in the loginview to display the name of the user when they are logged in. the code for the loginview from the master page is displayed as follows: <div class="loginView"> <asp:LoginView ID="MasterLoginView" runat="server"> <LoggedInTemplate> Welcome <span class="bold"><asp:LoginName ID="HeadLoginName" runat="server" /> <asp:Label ID="userNameLabel" runat="server" Text="Label"></asp:Label></span>! [ <asp:LoginStatus ID="HeadLoginStatus" runat="server" LogoutAction="Redirect" LogoutText="Log Out" LogoutPageUrl="~/Logout.aspx"/> ] <%--Welcome: <span class="bold"><asp:LoginName ID="MasterLoginName" runat="server" /> </span>!--%> </LoggedInTemplate> <AnonymousTemplate> Welcome: Guest [ <a href="~/Account/Login.aspx" ID="HeadLoginStatus" runat="server">Log In</a> ] </AnonymousTemplate> </asp:LoginView> <%--&nbsp;&nbsp; [&nbsp;<asp:LoginStatus ID="MasterLoginStatus" runat="server" LogoutAction="Redirect" LogoutPageUrl="~/Logout.aspx" />&nbsp;]&nbsp;&nbsp;--%> </div> Since VS2010 launches with a default login page in the accounts folder, i didnt think it necessary to create a separate log in page, so i just used the same log in page. please find the code for the login control below: <asp:Login ID="LoginUser" runat="server" EnableViewState="false" RenderOuterTable="false"> <LayoutTemplate> <span class="failureNotification"> <asp:Literal ID="FailureText" runat="server"></asp:Literal> </span> <asp:ValidationSummary ID="LoginUserValidationSummary" runat="server" CssClass="failureNotification" ValidationGroup="LoginUserValidationGroup"/> <div class="accountInfo"> <fieldset class="login"> <legend style="text-align:left; font-size:1.2em; color:White;">Account Information</legend> <p style="text-align:left; font-size:1.2em; color:White;"> <asp:Label ID="UserNameLabel" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="UserName">User ID:</asp:Label> <asp:TextBox ID="UserName" runat="server" CssClass="textEntry"></asp:TextBox> <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="UserNameRequired" runat="server" ControlToValidate="UserName" CssClass="failureNotification" ErrorMessage="User ID is required." ToolTip="User ID field is required." ValidationGroup="LoginUserValidationGroup">*</asp:RequiredFieldValidator> </p> <p style="text-align:left; font-size:1.2em; color:White;"> <asp:Label ID="PasswordLabel" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="Password">Password:</asp:Label> <asp:TextBox ID="Password" runat="server" CssClass="passwordEntry" TextMode="Password"></asp:TextBox> <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="PasswordRequired" runat="server" ControlToValidate="Password" CssClass="failureNotification" ErrorMessage="Password is required." ToolTip="Password is required." ValidationGroup="LoginUserValidationGroup">*</asp:RequiredFieldValidator> </p> <p style="text-align:left; font-size:1.2em; color:White;"> <asp:CheckBox ID="RememberMe" runat="server"/> <asp:Label ID="RememberMeLabel" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="RememberMe" CssClass="inline">Keep me logged in</asp:Label> </p> </fieldset> <p class="submitButton"> <asp:Button ID="LoginButton" runat="server" CommandName="Login" Text="Log In" ValidationGroup="LoginUserValidationGroup" onclick="LoginButton_Click"/> </p> </div> </LayoutTemplate> </asp:Login> I then wrote my own code for authentication since i had my own database. the following displays the code in the login buttons click event.: public partial class Login : System.Web.UI.Page { //create string objects string userIDStr, pwrdStr; protected void LoginButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { //assign textbox items to string objects userIDStr = LoginUser.UserName.ToString(); pwrdStr = LoginUser.Password.ToString(); //SQL connection string string strConn; strConn = WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["CMSSQL3ConnectionString"].ConnectionString; SqlConnection Conn = new SqlConnection(strConn); //SqlDataSource CSMDataSource = new SqlDataSource(); // CSMDataSource.ConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["CMSSQL3ConnectionString"].ToString(); //SQL select statement for comparison string sqlUserData; sqlUserData = "SELECT StaffID, StaffPassword, StaffFName, StaffLName, StaffType FROM Staffs"; sqlUserData += " WHERE (StaffID ='" + userIDStr + "')"; sqlUserData += " AND (StaffPassword ='" + pwrdStr + "')"; SqlCommand com = new SqlCommand(sqlUserData, Conn); SqlDataReader rdr; string usrdesc; string lname; string fname; string staffname; try { //string CurrentData; //CurrentData = (string)com.ExecuteScalar(); Conn.Open(); rdr = com.ExecuteReader(); rdr.Read(); usrdesc = (string)rdr["StaffType"]; fname = (string)rdr["StaffFName"]; lname = (string)rdr["StaffLName"]; staffname = lname.ToString() + " " + fname.ToString(); LoginUser.UserName = staffname.ToString(); rdr.Close(); if (usrdesc.ToLower() == "administrator") { Response.Redirect("~/CaseAdmin.aspx", false); } else if (usrdesc.ToLower() == "manager") { Response.Redirect("~/CaseManager.aspx", false); } else if (usrdesc.ToLower() == "investigator") { Response.Redirect("~/Investigator.aspx", false); } else { Response.Redirect("~/Default.aspx", false); } } catch(Exception ex) { string script = "<script>alert('" + ex.Message + "');</script>"; } finally { Conn.Close(); } } My authentication works perfectly and the page gets redirected to the designated destination. However, the login view does not display the users name. i actually cant figure out how to pass the users name that i had picked from the database to the login name control to be displayed. taking a close look i also noticed the logout text that should be displayed after successful log in does not show. that leaves me wondering if the loggedin template control on the masterpage even fires at all or its still the anonymous template control that keeps displaying.? How do i get this to work as expected? Please help....

  Read the article

• Subset sum problem

  - by MadBoy

  I'm having a problem with counting which is continuation of this question. I am not really a math person so it's really hard for me to figure out this subset sum problem which was suggested as resolution. I'm having 4 ArrayList in which I hold data: alId, alTransaction, alNumber, alPrice Type | Transaction | Number | Price 8 | Buy | 95.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Buy | 126.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Buy | 93.00000000 | 306.00000000 8 | Transfer out | 221.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Transfer in | 221.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Sell | 93.00000000 | 360.00000000 8 | Sell | 95.00000000 | 360.00000000 8 | Sell | 126.00000000 | 360.00000000 8 | Buy | 276.00000000 | 380.00000000 In the end I'm trying to get what's left for customer and what's left I put into 3 array lists: alNew (corresponds to alNumber), alNewPoIle (corresponds to alPrice), and alNewCo (corrseponds to alID) ArrayList alNew = new ArrayList(); ArrayList alNewPoIle = new ArrayList(); ArrayList alNewCo = new ArrayList(); for (int i = 0; i < alTransaction.Count; i++) { string tempAkcjeCzynnosc = (string) alTransaction[i]; string tempAkcjeInId = (string) alID[i]; decimal varAkcjeCena = (decimal) alPrice[i]; decimal varAkcjeIlosc = (decimal) alNumber[i]; int index; switch (tempAkcjeCzynnosc) { case "Transfer out": case "Sell": index = alNew.IndexOf(varAkcjeIlosc); if (index != -1) { alNew.RemoveAt(index); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(index); alNewCo.RemoveAt(index); } else { ArrayList alTemp = new ArrayList(); decimal varAkcjeSuma = 0; for (int j = 0; j < alNew.Count; j ++) { string akcjeInId = (string) alNewCo[j]; decimal akcjeCena = (decimal) alNewPoIle[j]; decimal akcjeIlosc = (decimal) alNew[j]; if (tempAkcjeInId == akcjeInId && akcjeCena == varAkcjeCena) { alTemp.Add(j); varAkcjeSuma = varAkcjeSuma + akcjeIlosc; } } if (varAkcjeSuma == varAkcjeIlosc) { for (int j = alTemp.Count -1 ; j >=0 ; j --) { int tempIndex = (int) alTemp[j]; alNew.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewCo.RemoveAt(tempIndex); } } } break; case "Transfer In": case "Buy": alNew.Add(varAkcjeIlosc); alNewPoIle.Add(varAkcjeCena); alNewCo.Add(tempAkcjeInId); break; } } Basically I'm adding and removing things from Array depending on Transaction Type, Transaction ID and Numbers. I'm adding numbers to ArrayList like 156, 340 (when it is TransferIn or Buy) etc and then i remove them doing it like 156, 340 (when it's TransferOut, Sell). My solution works for that without a problem. The problem I have is that for some old data employees were entering sum's like 1500 instead of 500+400+100+500. How would I change it so that when there's Sell/TransferOut or Buy/Transfer In and there's no match inside ArrayList it should try to add multiple items from thatArrayList and find elements that combine into aggregate. Inside my code I tried to resolve that problem with simple summing everything when there's no match (index == 1) if (index != -1) { alNew.RemoveAt(index); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(index); alNewCo.RemoveAt(index); } else { ArrayList alTemp = new ArrayList(); decimal varAkcjeSuma = 0; for (int j = 0; j < alNew.Count; j ++) { string akcjeInId = (string) alNewCo[j]; decimal akcjeCena = (decimal) alNewPoIle[j]; decimal akcjeIlosc = (decimal) alNew[j]; if (tempAkcjeInId == akcjeInId && akcjeCena == varAkcjeCena) { alTemp.Add(j); varAkcjeSuma = varAkcjeSuma + akcjeIlosc; } } if (varAkcjeSuma == varAkcjeIlosc) { for (int j = alTemp.Count -1 ; j >=0 ; j --) { int tempIndex = (int) alTemp[j]; alNew.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewCo.RemoveAt(tempIndex); } } But it only works if certain conditions are met, and fails for the rest.

  Read the article

• ASP.Net repeater item.DataItem is null

  - by mattgcon

  Within a webpage, upon loading, I fill a dataset with two table with a relation between those tables and then load the data into a repeater with a nested repeater. This can also occur after the user clicks on a button. The data gets loaded from a SQL database and the repeater datasource is set to the dataset after a postback. However, when ItemDataBound occurs the Item.Dataitem is always null. Why would this occur? below is my HTML repeater code <asp:Repeater ID="rptCustomSpaList" runat="server" onitemdatabound="rptCustomSpaList_ItemDataBound"> <HeaderTemplate> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <table> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label3" runat="server" Text="Spa Series:"></asp:Label> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label4" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "SPASERIESVALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label5" runat="server" Text="Spa Model:"></asp:Label> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label6" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "SPAMODELVALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label9" runat="server" Text="Acrylic Color:"></asp:Label> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label10" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "ACRYLICCOLORVALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label11" runat="server" Text="Cabinet Color:"></asp:Label> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label12" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "CABPANCOLORVALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label17" runat="server" Text="Cabinet Type:"></asp:Label> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label18" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "CABINETVALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label13" runat="server" Text="Cover Color:"></asp:Label> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label14" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "COVERCOLORVALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> </table> <asp:Label ID="Label15" runat="server" Text="Options:"></asp:Label> <asp:Repeater ID="rptCustomSpaItem" runat="server"> <HeaderTemplate> <table> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "PROPERTY") %>'></asp:Label> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="Label2" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> </table> </FooterTemplate> </asp:Repeater> <table> <tr> <td style="padding-top:15px;padding-bottom:30px;"> <asp:Label ID="Label7" runat="server" Text="Configured Price:"></asp:Label> </td> <td style="padding-top:15px;padding-bottom:30px;"> <asp:Label ID="Label8" runat="server" Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "SPAVALUEVALUE") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> </table> <asp:Label ID="Label16" runat="server" Text="------"></asp:Label> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate></FooterTemplate> </asp:Repeater>

  Read the article

• C++ Sentinel/Count Controlled Loop beginning programming

  - by Bryan Hendricks

  Hello all this is my first post. I'm working on a homework assignment with the following parameters. Piecework Workers are paid by the piece. Often worker who produce a greater quantity of output are paid at a higher rate. 1 - 199 pieces completed $0.50 each 200 - 399 $0.55 each (for all pieces) 400 - 599 $0.60 each 600 or more $0.65 each Input: For each worker, input the name and number of pieces completed. Name Pieces Johnny Begood 265 Sally Great 650 Sam Klutz 177 Pete Precise 400 Fannie Fantastic 399 Morrie Mellow 200 Output: Print an appropriate title and column headings. There should be one detail line for each worker, which shows the name, number of pieces, and the amount earned. Compute and print totals of the number of pieces and the dollar amount earned. Processing: For each person, compute the pay earned by multiplying the number of pieces by the appropriate price. Accumulate the total number of pieces and the total dollar amount paid. Sample Program Output: Piecework Weekly Report Name Pieces Pay Johnny Begood 265 145.75 Sally Great 650 422.50 Sam Klutz 177 88.5 Pete Precise 400 240.00 Fannie Fantastic 399 219.45 Morrie Mellow 200 110.00 Totals 2091 1226.20 You are required to code, compile, link, and run a sentinel-controlled loop program that transforms the input to the output specifications as shown in the above attachment. The input items should be entered into a text file named piecework1.dat and the ouput file stored in piecework1.out . The program filename is piecework1.cpp. Copies of these three files should be e-mailed to me in their original form. Read the name using a single variable as opposed to two different variables. To accomplish this, you must use the getline(stream, variable) function as discussed in class, except that you will replace the cin with your textfile stream variable name. Do not forget to code the compiler directive #include < string at the top of your program to acknowledge the utilization of the string variable, name . Your nested if-else statement, accumulators, count-controlled loop, should be properly designed to process the data correctly. The code below will run, but does not produce any output. I think it needs something around line 57 like a count control to stop the loop. something like (and this is just an example....which is why it is not in the code.) count = 1; while (count <=4) Can someone review the code and tell me what kind of count I need to introduce, and if there are any other changes that need to be made. Thanks. [code] //COS 502-90 //November 2, 2012 //This program uses a sentinel-controlled loop that transforms input to output. #include <iostream> #include <fstream> #include <iomanip> //output formatting #include <string> //string variables using namespace std; int main() { double pieces; //number of pieces made double rate; //amout paid per amount produced double pay; //amount earned string name; //name of worker ifstream inFile; ofstream outFile; //***********input statements**************************** inFile.open("Piecework1.txt"); //opens the input text file outFile.open("piecework1.out"); //opens the output text file outFile << setprecision(2) << showpoint; outFile << name << setw(6) << "Pieces" << setw(12) << "Pay" << endl; outFile << "_____" << setw(6) << "_____" << setw(12) << "_____" << endl; getline(inFile, name, '*'); //priming read inFile >> pieces >> pay >> rate; // ,, while (name != "End of File") //while condition test { //begining of loop pay = pieces * rate; getline(inFile, name, '*'); //get next name inFile >> pieces; //get next pieces } //end of loop inFile.close(); outFile.close(); return 0; }[/code]

  Read the article

• weird space in IE - Any suggestions?

  - by Guru

  The below table is the only element inside a body tag - This displays fine in Firefox 3 as i expect it to be but it does not look good in IE7. There is a weird space just between the nested table and the row above. Can you please suggest some way to remove that weird space? - Thanks <table> <tr> <td colspan="14"> <div> <table id="value_table" width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" style="border-collapse: collapse; display: block"> <tr> <td height="20" align="center" valign="Middle" class="Header"> <div align="left"><b>  Search Relationships</b></div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>This is working</td> </tr> <tr valign="top"> <td>second row</td> <td nowrap="nowrap" class="GrayRow" valign="top" border="1" height="40" align="center" style="border: none"> just above the table <table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="left"> <tr valign="top"> <td>new row inside table</td> <td class="GrayRow" nowrap="nowrap"> <b>Select:</b>   <select id="j_id19:browseType" name="j_id19:browseType" size="1" class="TextBlackNormal" onchange="showDynamicBox(this);"> <option value="NAME">User Name</option> <option value="ID">User Id</option> <option value="IBD/Office/IP">IBD/Office /IP</option> <option value="APA#">APA#</option></select>    </td> <td> <div id="dynamicBox1" style="display: block"><input id="j_id19:j_id23" name="j_id19:j_id23" type="text" value="" size="32" class="TextBlackNormal" /></div> </td>     <td> <div id="dynamicBox2" style="display: none"><input id="j_id19:j_id25" name="j_id19:j_id25" type="text" value="" size="32" class="TextBlackNormal" /></div> </td>     <td> <div id="dynamicBox3" style="display: none"> IBD   <input id="j_id19:ibdval1" name="j_id19:ibdval1" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />   OFF   <input id="j_id19:ibdval2" name="j_id19:ibdval2" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />   IP    <input id="j_id19:ibdval3" name="j_id19:ibdval3" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" /> </div> </td>     <td> <div id="dynamicBox4" style="display: none"> Average Price Account#    <input id="j_id19:apaval1" name="j_id19:apaval1" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />  <input id="j_id19:apaval2" name="j_id19:apaval2" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" />  <input id="j_id19:apaval3" name="j_id19:apaval3" type="text" value="" maxlength="3" size="3" onkeyup="goToNextFocus(this);" class="TextBlackNormal" /> </div> </td>        <td class="GrayRow" nowrap="nowrap"> <div id="msg_multiple_inputs" style="display:none"> <font color="#990000" size="1">Enter multiple separated by commas   </font> </div>                                   </td> <td><input id="j_id19:display" name="j_id19:display" type="submit" value="Display" class="TextBlackNormal" /></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </td> </tr> </table>

  Read the article

• PHP Form checkbox question

  - by Sef

  Hello, I have a form that takes the following inputs: Name: IBM Surface(in m^2): 9 Floor: (Checkbox1) Phone: (Checkbox2) Network: (Checkbox3) Button to send to a next php page. All those values above are represented in a table when i press the submit button. The first two (name and surname) are properly displayed in the table. The problem is with the checkboxes. If i select the first checkbox the value in the table should be presented with 1. If its not selected the value in the table should be empty. echo "<td>$Name</td>"; // works properly echo "<td>$Surface</td>"; // works properly echo "<td>....no idea for the checkboxes</td>; Some part of my php code with the variables: <?php if (!empty($_POST)) { $standnaam = $_POST["name"]; $oppervlakte = $_POST["surface"]; $verdieping = $_POST["floor"]; $telefoon = $_POST["telefoon"]; $netwerk = $_POST["netwerk"]; if (is_numeric($surface)) { $_SESSION["name"]=$name; $_SESSION["surface"]=$surface; header("Location:ExpoOverzicht.php"); } else { echo "<h1>Wrong input, Pleasee fill in again</h1>"; } if(!empty($floor) && ($phone) && ($network)) { $_SESSION["floor"]=$floor; $_SESSION["phone"]=$phone; $_SESSION["network"]=$network; header("Location:ExpoOverzicht.php"); } } ?> Second page with table: <?php $name= $_SESSION["name"]; $surface= $_SESSION["surface"]; $floor= $_SESSION["floor"]; $phone= $_SESSION["phone"]; $network= $_SESSION["network"]; echo "<table class=\"tableExpo\">"; echo "<th>name</th>"; echo "<th>surface</th>"; echo "<th>floor</th>"; echo "<th>phone</th>"; echo "<th>network</th>"; echo "<th>total price</th>"; for($i=0; $i <= $_SESSION["name"]; $i++) { echo "<tr>"; echo "<td>$name</td>"; // gives right output echo "<td>$surface</td>"; // gives right output echo "<td>...</td>"; //wrong output (ment for checkbox 1) echo "<td>...</td>"; //wrong output (ment for checkbox 2) echo "<td>...</td>"; //wrong output (ment for checkbox 3) echo "<td>....</td>"; echo "</tr>;"; } echo "</table>"; <form action="<?php echo $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]; ?>" method="post" id="form1"> <h1>Vul de gegevens in</h1> <table> <tr> <td>Name:</td> <td><input type="text" name="name" size="18"/></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Surface(in m^2):</td> <td><input type="text" name="surface" size="6"/></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Floor:</td> <td><input type="checkbox" name="floor" value="floor"/></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Phone:</td> <td><input type="checkbox" name="phone" value="phone"/></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Network:</td> <td><input type="checkbox" name="network" value="network"/></td> </tr> <tr> <td><input type="submit" name="verzenden" value="Verzenden"/></td> </tr> </table> There might be a few spelling mistakes since i had to translate it. Best regards.

  Read the article

• C++ run error: pointer being freed was not allocated

  - by Dale Reves

  I'm learning c++ and am working on a program that keeps giving me a 'pointer being freed was not allocated' error. It's a grocery store program that inputs data from a txt file, then user can enter item# & qty. I've read through similar questions but what's throwing me off is the 'pointer' issue. I would appreciate if someone could take a look and help me out. I'm using Netbeans IDE 7.2 on a Mac. I'll just post the whole piece I have so far. Thx. #include <iostream> #include <fstream> #include <string> #include <vector> using namespace std; class Product { public: // PLU Code int getiPluCode() { return iPluCode; } void setiPluCode( int iTempPluCode) { iPluCode = iTempPluCode; } // Description string getsDescription() { return sDescription; } void setsDescription( string sTempDescription) { sDescription = sTempDescription; } // Price double getdPrice() { return dPrice; } void setdPrice( double dTempPrice) { dPrice = dTempPrice; } // Type..weight or unit int getiType() { return iType; } void setiType( int iTempType) { iType = iTempType; } // Inventory quantity double getdInventory() { return dInventory; } void setdInventory( double dTempInventory) { dInventory = dTempInventory; } private: int iPluCode; string sDescription; double dPrice; int iType; double dInventory; }; int main () { Product paInventory[21]; // Create inventory array Product paPurchase[21]; // Create customer purchase array // Constructor to open inventory input file ifstream InputInventory ("inventory.txt", ios::in); //If ifstream could not open the file if (!InputInventory) { cerr << "File could not be opened" << endl; exit (1); }//end if int x = 0; while (!InputInventory.eof () ) { int iTempPluCode; string sTempDescription; double dTempPrice; int iTempType; double dTempInventory; InputInventory >> iTempPluCode >> sTempDescription >> dTempPrice >> iTempType >> dTempInventory; paInventory[x].setiPluCode(iTempPluCode); paInventory[x].setsDescription(sTempDescription); paInventory[x].setdPrice(dTempPrice); paInventory[x].setiType(iTempType); paInventory[x].setdInventory(dTempInventory); x++; } bool bQuit = false; //CREATE MY TOTAL VARIABLE HERE! int iUserItemCount; do { int iUserPLUCode; double dUserAmount; double dAmountAvailable; int iProductIndex = -1; //CREATE MY SUBTOTAL VARIABLE HERE! while(iProductIndex == -1) { cout<<"Please enter the PLU Code of the product."<< endl; cin>>iUserPLUCode; for(int i = 0; i < 21; i++) { if(iUserPLUCode == paInventory[i].getiPluCode()) { dAmountAvailable = paInventory[i].getdInventory(); iProductIndex = i; } } //PLU code entry validation if(iProductIndex == -1) { cout << "You have entered an invalid PLU Code."; } } cout<<"Enter the quantity to buy.\n"<< "There are "<< dAmountAvailable << "available.\n"; cin>> dUserAmount; while(dUserAmount > dAmountAvailable) { cout<<"That's too many, please try again"; cin>>dUserAmount; } paPurchase[iUserItemCount].setiPluCode(iUserPLUCode);// Array of objects function calls paPurchase[iUserItemCount].setdInventory(dUserAmount); paPurchase[iUserItemCount].setdPrice(paInventory[iProductIndex].getdPrice()); paInventory[iProductIndex].setdInventory( paInventory[iProductIndex].getdInventory() - dUserAmount ); iUserItemCount++; cout <<"Are you done purchasing items? Enter 1 for yes and 0 for no.\n"; cin >> bQuit; //NOTE: Put Amount * quantity for subtotal //NOTE: Put code to update subtotal (total += subtotal) // NOTE: Need to create the output txt file! }while(!bQuit); return 0; }

  Read the article

• how can i update view when fragment change?

  - by user1524393

  i have a activity that have 2 sherlockfragment in this The first two pages display fragments with custom list views which are built from xml from server using AsyncTask. However, when the app runs, only one list view is displayed, the other page is just blank public class VpiAbsTestActivity extends SherlockFragmentActivity { private static final String[] CONTENT = new String[] { "1","2"}; TestFragmentAdapter mAdapter; ViewPager mPager; PageIndicator mIndicator; protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT); super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.simple_tabs); mAdapter = new TestFragmentAdapter(getSupportFragmentManager()); mPager = (ViewPager)findViewById(R.id.pager); mPager.setAdapter(mAdapter); mIndicator = (TabPageIndicator)findViewById(R.id.indicator); mIndicator.setViewPager(mPager); mIndicator.notifyDataSetChanged(); } class TestFragmentAdapter extends FragmentPagerAdapter { private int mCount = CONTENT.length; public TestFragmentAdapter(FragmentManager fm) { super(fm); } @Override public Fragment getItem(int position) { switch(position) { case 0: return new customlist(); case 1: return new customlistnotuser(); default: return null; } } @Override public int getCount() { return mCount; } public CharSequence getPageTitle(int position) { return VpiAbsTestActivity.CONTENT[position % VpiAbsTestActivity.CONTENT.length].toUpperCase(); } @Override public void destroyItem(View collection, int position, Object view) { ((ViewPager) collection).removeView((View) view); } } } what can i update viewpager when change pages ? the customlistnotuser page likes customlist page but not show public class customlistnotuser extends SherlockFragment { // All static variables static final String URL = "url"; // XML node keys static final String KEY_TEST = "test"; // parent node static final String KEY_ID = "id"; static final String KEY_TITLE = "title"; static final String KEY_Description = "description"; static final String KEY_DURATION = "duration"; static final String KEY_THUMB_URL = "thumb_url"; static final String KEY_PRICE = "price"; static final String KEY_URL = "url"; private ProgressDialog pDialog; ListView list; LazyAdapterbeth adapter; XMLParser parser = new XMLParser(); public void onActivityCreated(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onActivityCreated(savedInstanceState); } public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); new getFeed().execute(); } public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater, ViewGroup container, Bundle savedInstanceState) { View thisfragment = inflater.inflate(R.layout.dovomi, container, false); return thisfragment; } private class getFeed extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Document> { } protected Document doInBackground(Void... params) { XMLParser parser = new XMLParser(); String xml = parser.getXmlFromUrl(URL); // getting XML from URL Document doc = parser.getDomElement(xml); // getting DOM element return doc; } protected void onPostExecute(Document doc) { ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>> songsList = new ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>(); NodeList nl = doc.getElementsByTagName(KEY_TEST); // looping through all song nodes <song> for (int i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) { // creating new HashMap HashMap<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>(); Element e = (Element) nl.item(i); // adding each child node to HashMap key => value map.put(KEY_ID, parser.getValue(e, KEY_ID)); map.put(KEY_TITLE, parser.getValue(e, KEY_TITLE)); map.put(KEY_Description, parser.getValue(e, KEY_Description)); map.put(KEY_DURATION, parser.getValue(e, KEY_DURATION)); map.put(KEY_THUMB_URL, parser.getValue(e, KEY_THUMB_URL)); map.put(KEY_PRICE, parser.getValue(e, KEY_PRICE)); map.put(KEY_URL, parser.getValue(e, KEY_URL)); // adding HashList to ArrayList songsList.add(map); pDialog.dismiss(); } list=(ListView)getActivity().findViewById(R.id.list); // Getting adapter by passing xml data ArrayList adapter=new LazyAdapterbeth(getActivity(), songsList); list.setAdapter(adapter); // Click event for single list row list.setOnItemClickListener(new OnItemClickListener() {

  Read the article

• Send mail to multiple recipient

  - by Ahmad Maslan

  Hi, i have already research on using the mail() to send to multiple recipient's but i just cant get it to work. What im trying to do is, for every order that i have, order 1,2,3, each having their own email addresses, when i change their order status from pending to confirm, the mail() will use that id to refer to the db table and send the email of those 3 orders. But for my case, it mailed just the latest order which is order 3. This is the form that i use to change the order status. <form action="results-action" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <fieldset> <table id ="table_id" class="display"> <thead> <tr><td><h2>Pending Order</h2></td></tr> <tr> <th scope="col">Order ID</th> <th scope="col"> </th> <th scope="col">Name</th> <th scope="col">Address</th> <th scope="col">Product Name</th> <th scope="col">Produt Quantity</th> <th scope="col">Price</th> <th scope="col">Order status</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <?php while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) { ?> <tr> <td><input type="text" value='<?=$row['virtuemart_order_id']?>' name="orderid" id="virtuemart_order_id"></td> <td><input type="hidden" value='<?=$row['virtuemart_product_id']?>' name="productid" id="virtuemart_product_id"></td> <td><?=$row['first_name']?></td> <td><?=$row['address_1']?></td> <td><?=$row['order_item_name']?></td> <td><?=$row['product_quantity']?></td> <td><?=$row['product_final_price'] ?></td> <td><select name='change[<?=$row['virtuemart_order_id']?>]'> <option value='C'> Confirmed</option> <option value='X'> Cancelled</option></select></td> </tr> <?php } ?> </tbody> </table> </fieldset> <fieldset> <table> <tr> <td><input type="submit" value="Update status" name="update status"> </td> </tr> </table> </fieldset> </form> This is the php, using the order id from the form to select the email addresses. <?php $orderid = $_POST['orderid']; // build SQL statement to select email addresses $query3 = "SELECT email from ruj3d_virtuemart_order_userinfos where virtuemart_order_id = '$orderid'"; // execute SQL statement $result3 = mysqli_query($link, $query3) or die(mysqli_error($link)); $subject = "Order confirmed by Home and decor"; $message = "Hello! This is a message to inform that your order has been confirmed"; $from = "[email protected]"; $headers = "From: $from"; while($row3 = mysqli_fetch_array($result3)){ $addresses[] = $row3['email']; } $to = implode(",", $addresses); mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers); ?>

  Read the article

• Unwanted character being added to string in C

  - by Church

  I have a program that gives you shipping addresses from an input file. However at the beginning of one of the strings, order.add_one, a number is being added to the beginning of the string, that number is equivalent to the variable "choice" every time. Why is it doing this? #include <stdio.h> #include <math.h> #include <string.h> //structure typedef struct {char cust_name[25]; char cust_id[3]; char add_one[30]; char add_two[30]; char bike; char risky; int number_ordered; char cust_information[500]; }ORDER; ORDER order; int main(void){ fflush(stdin); system ( "clear" ); //initialize variables float price; float m = 359.95; float s = 279.95; //while loop, runs until user declares they no longer wish to input orders while (1==1){ printf("Options: \nEnter Customer information manually : 1 \nSearch Customer by ID(input.txt reader) : 2 \n"); int option = 0; scanf(" %d", &option); if (option == 1){ //Print and scan statements printf("Enter Customer Information\n"); printf("Customer Name: "); scanf(" %[^\n]s", &order.cust_name); printf("\nEnter Address Line One: "); scanf(" %[^\n]s", &order.add_one); printf("\nEnter Addres Line Two: "); scanf(" %[^\n]s", &order.add_two); printf("\nHow Many Bicycles Are Ordered: "); scanf(" %d", &order.number_ordered); printf("\nWhat Type Of Bike Is Ordered\n M Mountain Bike \n S Street Bike"); printf("\nChoose One (M or S): "); scanf(" %c", &order.bike); printf("\nIs The Customer Risky (Y/N): "); scanf(" %c", &order.risky); system ( "clear" ); } if (option == 2){ FILE *fpt; fpt = fopen("input.txt", "r"); if (fpt==NULL){ printf("Text file did not open\n"); return 1; } printf("Enter Customer ID: "); scanf("%s", &order.cust_id); char choice; choice = order.cust_id[0]; char x[3]; int w, u, y, z; char a[10], b[10], c[10], d[10], e[20], f[10], g[10], i[1], j[1]; int h; printf("%s value of c", c); if (choice >='1'){ while ((w = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } if (choice >='2'){ while ((u = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } if (choice >='3'){ while ((y = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } if (choice >= '4'){ while ((z = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } printf("\n"); fscanf(fpt, "%s", x); fscanf(fpt, "%s", a); printf("%s", a); strcat(order.cust_name, a); fscanf(fpt, " %s", b); printf(" %s", b); strcat(order.cust_name, " "); strcat(order.cust_name, b); fscanf(fpt, "%s", c); printf(" %s", c); strcat(order.add_one, "\0"); strcat(order.add_one, c); fscanf(fpt, "%s", d); printf(" %s", d); strcat(order.add_one, " "); strcat(order.add_one, d); fscanf(fpt, "%s", e); printf(" %s", e); strcat(order.add_two, e); fscanf(fpt, "%s", f); printf(" %s", f); strcat(order.add_two, " "); strcat(order.add_two, f); fscanf(fpt, "%s", g); printf(" %s", g); strcat(order.add_two, " "); strcat(order.add_two, g); strcat(order.add_two, "\0"); fscanf(fpt, "%d", &h); printf(" %d", h); order.number_ordered = h; fscanf(fpt, "%s", i); printf(" %s", i); order.bike = i[0]; fscanf(fpt, "%s", j); printf(" %s", j); order.risky = j[0]; fclose(fpt); printf("%s %s %s %d %c %c", order.cust_name, order.add_one, order.add_two, order.number_ordered, order.bike, order.risky); }

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released

  - by ScottGu

  The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available. Download and Install Today MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark/BizSpark/DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center.  If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010.  Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out).  If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page). What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4 Today’s release is a big one – and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better.  What this means is that you don’t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release.  There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them.  Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE  Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate).  It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used.  It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow.  The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense. The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging.  VS 2010’s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications.  And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster. TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and continuous integration support.  Testing (both automated and manual) is now much, much richer.  And VS 2010 Premium and Ultimate provide much richer architecture and design tooling support. VB and C# Language Features VB and C# in VS 2010 both contain a bunch of new features and capabilities.  VB adds new support for automatic properties, collection initializers, and implicit line continuation support among many other features.  C# adds support for optional parameters and named arguments, a new dynamic keyword, co-variance and contra-variance, and among many other features. ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website.  ViewState within applications can now be more easily controlled and made smaller.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data support has been expanded.  More controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster.  New starter project templates now make it easier to get going with new projects.  SEO enhancements make it easier to drive traffic to your public facing sites.  And web.config files are now clean and simple. ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods.  It also enables more modular/reusable applications.  The new <%: %> syntax in ASP.NET makes it easier to HTML encode output.  Visual Studio 2010 also now includes better tooling support for unit testing and TDD.  In particular, “Consume first intellisense” and “generate from usage" support within VS 2010 make it easier to write your unit tests first, and then drive your implementation from them. Deploying ASP.NET applications gets a lot easier with this release. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes. WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 WPF 4 includes a ton of new improvements and capabilities including more built-in controls, richer graphics features (cached composition, pixel shader 3 support, layoutrounding, and animation easing functions), a much improved text stack (with crisper text rendering, custom dictionary support, and selection and caret brush options).  WPF 4 also includes a bunch of support to enable you to take advantage of new Windows 7 features – including multi-touch and Windows 7 shell integration. Silverlight 4 will launch this week as well.  You can watch my Silverlight 4 launch keynote streamed live Tuesday (April 13th) at 8am Pacific Time.  Silverlight 4 includes a ton of new capabilities – including a bunch for making it possible to build great business applications and out of the browser applications.  I’ll be doing a separate blog post later this week (once it is live on the web) that talks more about its capabilities. Visual Studio 2010 now includes great tooling support for both WPF and Silverlight.  The new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer makes it much easier to build client applications as well as build great line of business solutions, as well as integrate and bind with data.  Tooling support for Silverlight 4 with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will be available when Silverlight 4 releases to the web this week. SharePoint and Azure Visual Studio 2010 now includes built-in support for building SharePoint applications.  You can now create, edit, build, and debug SharePoint applications directly within Visual Studio 2010.  You can also now use SharePoint with TFS 2010. Support for creating Azure-hosted applications is also now included with VS 2010 – allowing you to build ASP.NET and WCF based applications and host them within the cloud. Data Access Data access has a lot of improvements coming to it with .NET 4.  Entity Framework 4 includes a ton of new features and capabilities – including support for model first and POCO development, default support for lazy loading, built-in support for pluralization/singularization of table/property names within the VS 2010 designer, full support for all the LINQ operators, the ability to optionally expose foreign keys on model objects (useful for some stateless web scenarios), disconnected API support to better handle N-Tier and stateless web scenarios, and T4 template customization support within VS 2010 to allow you to customize and automate how code is generated for you by the data designer.  In addition to improvements with the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL with .NET 4 also includes a bunch of nice improvements.  WCF and Workflow WCF includes a bunch of great new capabilities – including better REST, activation and configuration support.  WCF Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) and WCF RIA Services also now enable you to easily expose and work with data from remote clients. Windows Workflow is now much faster, includes flowchart services, and now makes it easier to make custom services than before.  More details can be found here. CLR and Core .NET Library Improvements .NET 4 includes the new CLR 4 engine – which includes a lot of nice performance and feature improvements.  CLR 4 engine now runs side-by-side in-process with older versions of the CLR – allowing you to use two different versions of .NET within the same process.  It also includes improved COM interop support.  The .NET 4 base class libraries (BCL) include a bunch of nice additions and refinements.  In particular, the .NET 4 BCL now includes new parallel programming support that makes it much easier to build applications that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores on a computer.  This work dove-tails nicely with the new VS 2010 parallel debugger (making it much easier to debug parallel applications), as well as the new F# functional language support now included in the VS 2010 IDE.  .NET 4 also now also has the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) library built-in – which makes it easier to use dynamic language functionality with .NET.  MEF – a really cool library that enables rich extensibility – is also now built-into .NET 4 and included as part of the base class libraries.  .NET 4 Client Profile The download size of the .NET 4 redist is now much smaller than it was before (the x86 full .NET 4 package is about 36MB).  We also now have a .NET 4 Client Profile package which is a pure sub-set of the full .NET that can be used to streamline client application installs. C++ VS 2010 includes a bunch of great improvements for C++ development.  This includes better C++ Intellisense support, MSBuild support for projects, improved parallel debugging and profiler support, MFC improvements, and a number of language features and compiler optimizations. My VS 2010 and .NET 4 Blog Series I’ve been cranking away on a blog series the last few months that highlights many of the new VS 2010 and .NET 4 improvements.  The good news is that I have about 20 in-depth posts already written.  The bad news (for me) is that I have about 200 more to go until I’m done!  I’m going to try and keep adding a few more each week over the next few months to discuss the new improvements and how best to take advantage of them. Below is a list of the already written ones that you can check out today: Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 Stay tuned to my blog as I post more.  Also check out this page which links to a bunch of great articles and videos done by others. VS 2010 Installation Notes If you have installed a previous version of VS 2010 on your machine (either the beta or the RC) you must first uninstall it before installing the final VS 2010 release.  I also recommend uninstalling .NET 4 betas (including both the client and full .NET 4 installs) as well as the other installs that come with VS 2010 (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2 preview builds, etc).  The uninstalls of the betas/RCs will clean up all the old state on your machine – after which you can install the final VS 2010 version and should have everything just work (this is what I’ve done on all of my machines and I haven’t had any problems). The VS 2010 and .NET 4 installs add a bunch of new managed assemblies to your machine.  Some of these will be “NGEN’d” to native code during the actual install process (making them run fast).  To avoid adding too much time to VS setup, though, we don’t NGEN all assemblies immediately – and instead will NGEN the rest in the background when your machine is idle.  Until it finishes NGENing the assemblies they will be JIT’d to native code the first time they are used in a process – which for large assemblies can sometimes cause a slight performance hit. If you run into this you can manually force all assemblies to be NGEN’d to native code immediately (and not just wait till the machine is idle) by launching the Visual Studio command line prompt from the Windows Start Menu (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt).  Within the command prompt type “Ngen executequeueditems” – this will cause everything to be NGEN’d immediately. How to Buy Visual Studio 2010 You can can download and use the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). You can buy a new copy of VS 2010 Professional that includes a 1 year subscription to MSDN Essentials for $799.  MSDN Essentials includes a developer license of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 DataCenter R2, and 20 hours of Azure hosting time.  Subscribers also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, and Priority Support in MSDN Forums. Upgrade prices from previous releases of Visual Studio are also available.  Existing Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard customers can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional for a special $299 retail price until October.  You can take advantage of this VS Standard->Professional upgrade promotion here. Web developers who build applications for others, and who are either independent developers or who work for companies with less than 10 employees, can also optionally take advantage of the Microsoft WebSiteSpark program.  This program gives you three copies of Visual Studio 2010 Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio, and 4 CPU licenses of both Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and SQL 2008 Web Edition that you can use to both develop and deploy applications with at no cost for 3 years.  At the end of the 3 years there is no obligation to buy anything.  You can sign-up for WebSiteSpark today in under 5 minutes – and immediately have access to the products to download. Summary Today’s release is a big one – and has a bunch of improvements for pretty much every developer.  Thank you everyone who provided feedback, suggestions and reported bugs throughout the development process – we couldn’t have delivered it without you.  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

  Read the article

• Using an alternate search platform in Commerce Server 2009

  - by Lewis Benge

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

  Read the article

• Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.”  Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard  What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals.  In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense.  In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable.  But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk.  There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires.   Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence.   Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development.  2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others.  Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts.  Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day)  Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users.   Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts.  The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits.  Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

  Read the article

• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

  Read the article

• The Benefits of Smart Grid Business Software

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Smart Grid Background What Are Smart Grids?Smart Grids use computer hardware and software, sensors, controls, and telecommunications equipment and services to: Link customers to information that helps them manage consumption and use electricity wisely. Enable customers to respond to utility notices in ways that help minimize the duration of overloads, bottlenecks, and outages. Provide utilities with information that helps them improve performance and control costs. What Is Driving Smart Grid Development? Environmental ImpactSmart Grid development is picking up speed because of the widespread interest in reducing the negative impact that energy use has on the environment. Smart Grids use technology to drive efficiencies in transmission, distribution, and consumption. As a result, utilities can serve customers’ power needs with fewer generating plants, fewer transmission and distribution assets,and lower overall generation. With the possible exception of wind farm sprawl, landscape preservation is one obvious benefit. And because most generation today results in greenhouse gas emissions, Smart Grids reduce air pollution and the potential for global climate change.Smart Grids also more easily accommodate the technical difficulties of integrating intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar into the grid, providing further greenhouse gas reductions. CostsThe ability to defer the cost of plant and grid expansion is a major benefit to both utilities and customers. Utilities do not need to use as many internal resources for traditional infrastructure project planning and management. Large T&D infrastructure expansion costs are not passed on to customers.Smart Grids will not eliminate capital expansion, of course. Transmission corridors to connect renewable generation with customers will require major near-term expenditures. Additionally, in the future, electricity to satisfy the needs of population growth and additional applications will exceed the capacity reductions available through the Smart Grid. At that point, expansion will resume—but with greater overall T&D efficiency based on demand response, load control, and many other Smart Grid technologies and business processes. Energy efficiency is a second area of Smart Grid cost saving of particular relevance to customers. The timely and detailed information Smart Grids provide encourages customers to limit waste, adopt energy-efficient building codes and standards, and invest in energy efficient appliances. Efficiency may or may not lower customer bills because customer efficiency savings may be offset by higher costs in generation fuels or carbon taxes. It is clear, however, that bills will be lower with efficiency than without it. Utility Operations Smart Grids can serve as the central focus of utility initiatives to improve business processes. Many utilities have long “wish lists” of projects and applications they would like to fund in order to improve customer service or ease staff’s burden of repetitious work, but they have difficulty cost-justifying the changes, especially in the short term. Adding Smart Grid benefits to the cost/benefit analysis frequently tips the scales in favor of the change and can also significantly reduce payback periods.Mobile workforce applications and asset management applications work together to deploy assets and then to maintain, repair, and replace them. Many additional benefits result—for instance, increased productivity and fuel savings from better routing. Similarly, customer portals that provide customers with near-real-time information can also encourage online payments, thus lowering billing costs. Utilities can and should include these cost and service improvements in the list of Smart Grid benefits. What Is Smart Grid Business Software? Smart Grid business software gathers data from a Smart Grid and uses it improve a utility’s business processes. Smart Grid business software also helps utilities provide relevant information to customers who can then use it to reduce their own consumption and improve their environmental profiles. Smart Grid Business Software Minimizes the Impact of Peak Demand Utilities must size their assets to accommodate their highest peak demand. The higher the peak rises above base demand: The more assets a utility must build that are used only for brief periods—an inefficient use of capital. The higher the utility’s risk profile rises given the uncertainties surrounding the time needed for permitting, building, and recouping costs. The higher the costs for utilities to purchase supply, because generators can charge more for contracts and spot supply during high-demand periods. Smart Grids enable a variety of programs that reduce peak demand, including: Time-of-use pricing and critical peak pricing—programs that charge customers more when they consume electricity during peak periods. Pilot projects indicate that these programs are successful in flattening peaks, thus ensuring better use of existing T&D and generation assets. Direct load control, which lets utilities reduce or eliminate electricity flow to customer equipment (such as air conditioners). Contracts govern the terms and conditions of these turn-offs. Indirect load control, which signals customers to reduce the use of on-premises equipment for contractually agreed-on time periods. Smart Grid business software enables utilities to impose penalties on customers who do not comply with their contracts. Smart Grids also help utilities manage peaks with existing assets by enabling: Real-time asset monitoring and control. In this application, advanced sensors safely enable dynamic capacity load limits, ensuring that all grid assets can be used to their maximum capacity during peak demand periods. Real-time asset monitoring and control applications also detect the location of excessive losses and pinpoint need for mitigation and asset replacements. As a result, utilities reduce outage risk and guard against excess capacity or “over-build”. Better peak demand analysis. As a result: Distribution planners can better size equipment (e.g. transformers) to avoid over-building. Operations engineers can identify and resolve bottlenecks and other inefficiencies that may cause or exacerbate peaks. As above, the result is a reduction in the tendency to over-build. Supply managers can more closely match procurement with delivery. As a result, they can fine-tune supply portfolios, reducing the tendency to over-contract for peak supply and reducing the need to resort to spot market purchases during high peaks. Smart Grids can help lower the cost of remaining peaks by: Standardizing interconnections for new distributed resources (such as electricity storage devices). Placing the interconnections where needed to support anticipated grid congestion. Smart Grid Business Software Lowers the Cost of Field Services By processing Smart Grid data through their business software, utilities can reduce such field costs as: Vegetation management. Smart Grids can pinpoint momentary interruptions and tree-caused outages. Spatial mash-up tools leverage GIS models of tree growth for targeted vegetation management. This reduces the cost of unnecessary tree trimming. Service vehicle fuel. Many utility service calls are “false alarms.” Checking meter status before dispatching crews prevents many unnecessary “truck rolls.” Similarly, crews use far less fuel when Smart Grid sensors can pinpoint a problem and mobile workforce applications can then route them directly to it. Smart Grid Business Software Ensures Regulatory Compliance Smart Grids can ensure compliance with private contracts and with regional, national, or international requirements by: Monitoring fulfillment of contract terms. Utilities can use one-hour interval meters to ensure that interruptible (“non-core”) customers actually reduce or eliminate deliveries as required. They can use the information to levy fines against contract violators. Monitoring regulations imposed on customers, such as maximum use during specific time periods. Using accurate time-stamped event history derived from intelligent devices distributed throughout the smart grid to monitor and report reliability statistics and risk compliance. Automating business processes and activities that ensure compliance with security and reliability measures (e.g. NERC-CIP 2-9). Grid Business Software Strengthens Utilities’ Connection to Customers While Reducing Customer Service Costs During outages, Smart Grid business software can: Identify outages more quickly. Software uses sensors to pinpoint outages and nested outage locations. They also permit utilities to ensure outage resolution at every meter location. Size outages more accurately, permitting utilities to dispatch crews that have the skills needed, in appropriate numbers. Provide updates on outage location and expected duration. This information helps call centers inform customers about the timing of service restoration. Smart Grids also facilitates display of outage maps for customer and public-service use. Smart Grids can significantly reduce the cost to: Connect and disconnect customers. Meters capable of remote disconnect can virtually eliminate the costs of field crews and vehicles previously required to change service from the old to the new residents of a metered property or disconnect customers for nonpayment. Resolve reports of voltage fluctuation. Smart Grids gather and report voltage and power quality data from meters and grid sensors, enabling utilities to pinpoint reported problems or resolve them before customers complain. Detect and resolve non-technical losses (e.g. theft). Smart Grids can identify illegal attempts to reconnect meters or to use electricity in supposedly vacant premises. They can also detect theft by comparing flows through delivery assets with billed consumption. Smart Grids also facilitate outreach to customers. By monitoring and analyzing consumption over time, utilities can: Identify customers with unusually high usage and contact them before they receive a bill. They can also suggest conservation techniques that might help to limit consumption. This can head off “high bill” complaints to the contact center. Note that such “high usage” or “additional charges apply because you are out of range” notices—frequently via text messaging—are already common among mobile phone providers. Help customers identify appropriate bill payment alternatives (budget billing, prepayment, etc.). Help customers find and reduce causes of over-consumption. There’s no waiting for bills in the mail before they even understand there is a problem. Utilities benefit not just through improved customer relations but also through limiting the size of bills from customers who might struggle to pay them. Where permitted, Smart Grids can open the doors to such new utility service offerings as: Monitoring properties. Landlords reduce costs of vacant properties when utilities notify them of unexpected energy or water consumption. Utilities can perform similar services for owners of vacation properties or the adult children of aging parents. Monitoring equipment. Power-use patterns can reveal a need for equipment maintenance. Smart Grids permit utilities to alert owners or managers to a need for maintenance or replacement. Facilitating home and small-business networks. Smart Grids can provide a gateway to equipment networks that automate control or let owners access equipment remotely. They also facilitate net metering, offering some utilities a path toward involvement in small-scale solar or wind generation. Prepayment plans that do not need special meters. Smart Grid Business Software Helps Customers Control Energy Costs There is no end to the ways Smart Grids help both small and large customers control energy costs. For instance: Multi-premises customers appreciate having all meters read on the same day so that they can more easily compare consumption at various sites. Customers in competitive regions can match their consumption profile (detailed via Smart Grid data) with specific offerings from competitive suppliers. Customers seeing inexplicable consumption patterns and power quality problems may investigate further. The result can be discovery of electrical problems that can be resolved through rewiring or maintenance—before more serious fires or accidents happen. Smart Grid Business Software Facilitates Use of Renewables Generation from wind and solar resources is a popular alternative to fossil fuel generation, which emits greenhouse gases. Wind and solar generation may also increase energy security in regions that currently import fossil fuel for use in generation. Utilities face many technical issues as they attempt to integrate intermittent resource generation into traditional grids, which traditionally handle only fully dispatchable generation. Smart Grid business software helps solves many of these issues by: Detecting sudden drops in production from renewables-generated electricity (wind and solar) and automatically triggering electricity storage and smart appliance response to compensate as needed. Supporting industry-standard distributed generation interconnection processes to reduce interconnection costs and avoid adding renewable supplies to locations already subject to grid congestion. Facilitating modeling and monitoring of locally generated supply from renewables and thus helping to maximize their use. Increasing the efficiency of “net metering” (through which utilities can use electricity generated by customers) by: Providing data for analysis. Integrating the production and consumption aspects of customer accounts. During non-peak periods, such techniques enable utilities to increase the percent of renewable generation in their supply mix. During peak periods, Smart Grid business software controls circuit reconfiguration to maximize available capacity. Conclusion Utility missions are changing. Yesterday, they focused on delivery of reasonably priced energy and water. Tomorrow, their missions will expand to encompass sustainable use and environmental improvement.Smart Grids are key to helping utilities achieve this expanded mission. But they come at a relatively high price. Utilities will need to invest heavily in new hardware, software, business process development, and staff training. Customer investments in home area networks and smart appliances will be large. Learning to change the energy and water consumption habits of a lifetime could ultimately prove even more formidable tasks.Smart Grid business software can ease the cost and difficulties inherent in a needed transition to a more flexible, reliable, responsive electricity grid. Justifying its implementation, however, requires a full understanding of the benefits it brings—benefits that can ultimately help customers, utilities, communities, and the world address global issues like energy security and climate change while minimizing costs and maximizing customer convenience. This white paper is available for download here. For further information about Oracle's Primavera Solutions for Utilities, please read our Utilities e-book.

  Read the article

• Understanding the value of Customer Experience & Loyalty for the Telecommunications Industry

  - by raul.goycoolea

  Worried by economic woes and market forces, especially in mature markets, communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly focus on improving customer experience. In fact, it seems difficult to find a major message by a C-level executive in the developed world that does not include something on "meeting and exceeding customers' needs". Frequently in customer satisfaction studies by prominent firms, CSPs fall short of the leadership demonstrated by other industries that take customer-centric approaches to their bottom-line strategies. Consider the following:Despite the continued impact of global economic crisis, in July 2010, Apple Computer posted record revenue and net quarterly profit. Those who attribute the results primarily to the iPhone 4 launch should note that Apple also shipped around 30% more Macintosh computers than the same period the previous year. Even sales of the iPod line increased by 8% in a highly commoditized, shrinking media player market. Finally, Apple began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of more than 3 million units. What does Apple have that the others lack? Well, some great products (and services) to be sure, but it also excels at customer service and support, marketing, and distribution, and has one of the strongest brands globally. Its products are useful, simple to use, easy to acquire and augment, high quality, and considered very cool. They also evoke such an emotional response from many of Apple's customers, which they turn up their noses at competitive products.In other words, Apple appears to have mastered virtually every aspect of customer experience and the resultant loyalty of its customer base - even in difficult financial times. Through that unwavering customer focus, Apple continues to drive its revenues and profits to new heights. Other customer loyalty leaders like Wal-Mart, Google, Toyota and Honda are also doing well by focusing on customer experience as an essential driver of profitability. Service providers should note this performance and ask themselves how they might leverage the same principles to increase their own profitability. After all, that is what customer experience and loyalty are all about: profitability.To successfully manage all the critical touch points of customer experience, CSPs must shun the one-size-fits-all approach. They can no longer afford to view customer service fundamentally as an act of altruism - which mentality dates back to the industry's civil service days, when CSPs were typically government organizations that were critical to economic development and public safety.As regulators and public officials have pushed, and continue to push, service providers to new heights of reliability - using incentives and punishments - most CSPs already have some of the fundamental building blocks of customer service in place. Yet despite that history and experience, service providers still lag other industries in providing what is seen as good customer service.As we observed in the TMF's 2009 Insights Research report, Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty & Profitability there has been resurgence in interest by CSPs. More and more of them have stated ambitions to catch up other industries, and they are realizing that good customer service is a powerful strategy for increasing business performance and profitability, not an act of good will.CSPs are recognizing the connection between customer experience and profitability, as demonstrated in many studies. For example, according to research by Bain & Company, a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can yield as much as a 75 percent increase in profits for companies across a range of industries.After decades of customer experience strategy formulation, Bain partner and business author, Frederick Reichheld, considers "would you recommend us to a friend?" as the ultimate question for a customer. How many times have you or your friends recommended an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? What do your children recommend to their peers? Their peers to them?There are certain steps service providers have to take to create more personalized relationships with their customers, as well as reduce churn and increase profitability, all while becoming leaner and more agile. First, they have to define customer experience, we define it as the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service provider(s). Virtually every customer touch point - whether directly or indirectly linked to service providers and their partners - contributes to customer perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately profitability. Gaining leadership in customer experience and satisfaction will not be a simple task, as it is affected by virtually every customer-facing aspect of the service provider, and in turn impacts the service provider deeply - especially on the all-important bottom line. The scope of issues affecting customer experience is complex and dynamic.With new services, devices and applications extending the basis of customer experience to domains beyond the direct control of the service provider, it is likely to increase in complexity and dynamism.Customer loyalty = increased profitsAs stated earlier, customer experience programs are not fundamentally altruistic exercises, but a strategic means of improving competitiveness and profitability in the short and long term. Loyalty is essential to deriving long term profits from customers.Some of the earliest loyalty programs date back to the 1930s, when packaged goods companies offered embedded coupons for rewards to buyers, and eventually retail chains began offering reward programs to frequent shoppers. These programs continued for decades but were leapfrogged in the 1980s by more aggressive programs from the airlines.This movement was led by American Airlines, which launched the first full-scale loyalty marketing program of the modern era with the AAdvantage frequent flyer scheme. It was the first to reward frequent fliers with notional air miles that could be accumulated and later redeemed for free travel. Figure 1: Opportunities example of Customer loyalty driven profitOther airlines and travel providers were quick to grasp the incredible value of providing customers with an incentive to use their company exclusively. Within a few years, dozens of travel industry companies launched similar initiatives and now loyalty programs are achieving near-ubiquity in many service industries, especially those in which it is difficult to differentiate offerings by product attributes.The belief is that increased profitability will result from customer retention efforts because:•    The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship: the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost;•    Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs, or as a percentage of revenue, over the lifetime of the relationship;•    Long term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and less price sensitive which can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume;•    Long term customers may initiate word-of-mouth promotions and referrals, which cost the company nothing and arguably are the most effective form of advertising;•    Long-term customers are more likely to buy ancillary products and higher margin supplemental products;•    Long term customers tend to be satisfied with their relationship with the company and are less likely to switch to competitors, making market entry or competitors gaining market share difficult;•    Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service, as they are familiar with the processes involved, require less 'education', and are consistent in their order placement;•    Increased customer retention and loyalty makes the employees' jobs easier and more satisfying. In turn, happy employees feed back into higher customer satisfaction in a virtuous circle. Figure 2: The virtuous circle of customer loyaltyFigure 2 represents a high-level example of a virtuous cycle driven by customer satisfaction and loyalty, depicting how superiority in product and service offerings, as well as strong customer support by competent employees, lead to higher sales and ultimately profitability. As stated above, this is not a new concept, but succeeding with it is difficult. It has eluded many a company driven to achieve profitability goals. Of course, for this circle to be virtuous, the customer relationship(s) must be profitable.Trying to maintain the loyalty of unprofitable customers is not a viable business strategy. It is, therefore, important that marketers can assess the profitability of each customer (or customer segment), and either improve or terminate relationships that are not profitable. This means each customer's 'relationship costs' must be understood and compared to their 'relationship revenue'. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the most commonly used metric here, as it is generally accepted as a representation of exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary terms, and therefore a determinant of exactly how much a service provider should be willing to spend to acquire or retain that customer.CLV models make several simplifying assumptions and often involve the following inputs:•    Churn rate represents the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period;•    Retention rate is calculated by subtracting the churn rate percentage from 100;•    Period/horizon equates to the units of time into which a customer relationship can be divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period for this purpose. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, often projecting three to seven years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The model horizon is the number of periods used in the calculation;•    Periodic revenue is the amount of revenue collected from a customer in a given period (though this is often extended across multiple periods into the future to understand lifetime value), such as usage revenue, revenues anticipated from cross and upselling, and often some weighting for referrals by a loyal customer to others; •    Retention cost describes the amount of money the service provider must spend, in a given period, to retain an existing customer. Again, this is often forecast across multiple periods. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives and so on;•    Discount rate means the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced method used in more sophisticated CLV calculations;•    Profit margin is the projected profit as a percentage of revenue for the period. This may be reflected as a percentage of gross or net profit. Again, this is generally projected across the model horizon to understand lifetime value.A strong focus on managing these inputs can help service providers realize stronger customer relationships and profits, but there are some obstacles to overcome in achieving accurate calculations of CLV, such as the complexity of allocating costs across the customer base. There are many costs that serve all customers which must be properly allocated across the base, and often a simple proportional allocation across the whole base or a segment may not accurately reflect the true cost of serving that customer;  This is made worse by the fragmentation of customer information, which is likely to be across a variety of product or operations groups, and may be difficult to aggregate due to different representations.In addition, there is the complexity of account relationships and structures to take into consideration. Complex account structures may not be understood or properly represented. For example, a profitable customer may have a separate account for a second home or another family member, which may appear to be unprofitable. If the service provider cannot relate the two accounts, CLV is not properly represented and any resultant cancellation of the apparently unprofitable account may result in the customer churning from the profitable one.In summary, if service providers are to realize strong customer relationships and their attendant profits, there must be a very strong focus on data management. This needs to be coupled with analytics that help business managers and those who work in customer-facing functions offer highly personalized solutions to customers, while maintaining profitability for the service provider. It's clear that acquiring new customers is expensive. Advertising costs, campaign management expenses, promotional service pricing and discounting, and equipment subsidies make a serious dent in a new customer's profitability. That is especially true given the rising subsidies for Smartphone users, which service providers hope will result in greater profits from profits from data services profitability in future.  The situation is made worse by falling prices and greater competition in mature markets.Customer acquisition through industry consolidation isn't cheap either. A North American service provider spent about $2,000 per subscriber in its acquisition of a smaller company earlier this year. While this has allowed it to leapfrog to become the largest mobile service provider in the country, it required a total investment of more than $28 billion (including assumption of the acquiree's debt).While many operating cost synergies clearly made this deal more attractive to the acquiring company, this is certainly an expensive way to acquire customers: the cost per subscriber in this case is not out of line with the prices others have paid for acquisitions.While growth by acquisition certainly increases overall revenues, it often creates tremendous challenges for profitability. Organic growth through increased customer loyalty and retention is a more effective driver of profit, as well as a stronger predictor of future profitability. Service providers, especially those in mature markets, are increasingly recognizing this and taking steps toward a creating a more personalized, flexible and satisfying experience for their customers.In summary, the clearest path to profitability for companies in virtually all industries is through customer retention and maximization of lifetime value. Service providers would do well to recognize this and focus attention on profitable customer relationships.

  Read the article

• Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

  - by Roger Hart

  Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 174 175 176 177 178 179 180  | Next Page >