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  • Selling Solutions, Not Products

    - by David Dorf
    When I think about next-generation retailers, the names that come to mind are Apple, Whole Foods, Lulu Lemon, and IKEA.  They may not be the biggest retailers, but they are certainly growing fast. Success is never defined by just one dimension, and these retailers execute well across many dimensions, but the one that stands out for me is customer experience.  These stores feel...approachable...part of the community...local.  Customers are not intimidated to ask questions, and staff seem to go out of their way to help. What's makes these retailers stand out in the industry?  These retailers aren't selling products -- they're selling solutions.  Think about that.  You think you're going to the Apple store to buy a phone, but you're actually buying a communications solution that handles much, much more.  If you carry an iPhone, your life has changed.  The way you do things is different.  The impacts go much beyond a simple phone. Solutions start with a problem, which is why these retailers greet customers with "what brought you in today," or "can I answer any questions for you?"  Good retailers establish a relationship, even if it lasts only a few minutes. You don't walk into Whole Foods looking for cans of soup.  You are looking for meals: healthy snacks, interesting lunches, exotic dinners.  Its a learning experience where you might discover solutions to problems you didn't know you had.  Mention what foods you like, and you'll get a list of similar items you had not considered.  I didn't know I needed a closet organizer until I visited an IKEA and learned about all the options.  They were able to customize the solution to meet my needs, and now I'm much more organized. One of the differences between selling products and selling solutions is training.  Visit any of these retailers' sites and you'll see a long list of in-store events for the benefit of customers.  You can buy exercise clothing from Lulu Lemon, and also learn new yoga techniques, meet like-minded people, and branch off to other fitness regimes via their ambassadors.  You can visit the Geek Bar at Apple, eat lunch at IKEA, and learn to cook at Whole Foods. These retailers are making an investment in a relationship with their customers.  They are showing loyalty to their customers before asking for it back.  In the long-run, this strategic approach will outlive any scan-and-bag mentality.

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  • Silverlight Cream for March 10, 2010 -- #810

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Jeremy Likness(-2-), Andrew Veresov, Nokola, SilverLaw, Gill Cleeren, Jim Wightman and Jeremy Likness, Viktor Larsson(-2-), and Walter Ferrari. Shoutouts: Viktor Larsson has a post up about Silverlight Market Penetration ... hope to meet you at MIX10, Viktor! Gergely Orosz has posted the Slides and code for the presentation “An Introduction to Silverlight” It appears that if I miss a day, I can pretty much do an all-submittal post :) From SilverlightCream.com: Writing an AsyncLoader to enqueue long running operations Andrea Boschin has a tutorial on SilverlightShow where he's building up an asynch service to deal with a long-running app on the server. MVVM with MEF in Silverlight: Video Tutorial Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial up for helping beginners wire up MVVM and MEF to Silverlight. Source code for the app in the video is downloadable. MVVM with MEF in Silverlight Video Tutorial Part 2: Plugins and Metadata In part 2, Jeremy Likness redesigns the app using metadata to turn the shapes into objects, and then show how easy it is to add a new plugin... and the source for the app is downloadable. Binding a Converter Parameter Andrew Veresov has a nice code-filled solution up for those times that you need to bind a ConverterParameter value. EasyPainter: Lion Hair styling Nokola has not been idle with Easy Painter... now he's added "Lion Hair" to the list of stylings you can apply... guess if you want to change someone's 'mane' ... sorry! Twisting Navigation - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has another control up - a "Twisting Navigation" control... very cool :) ... and since I'm behind the curve, he already has an update in the Expression Gallery as noted in his post, and a video tutorial on implementing it in an application... and if you understand German, turn up the sound :) Uploading and downloading images using a WCF service with Silverlight Gill Cleeren has a tutorial up at SilverlightShow on uploading and downloading images using WCF Services in Silverlight New Windows Phone 7 Community Developer Hub Jim Wightman and Jeremy Likness have a very cool Silverlight page up where you can paste the URL of your XAP in and have it display in a "Windows 7 Series Phone" ... and that's all I'm saying about that. XAML Transformation 101 Viktor Larsson is discussing Transforms in XAML and has a nice tutorial up that is easily the beginning of a carousel... you may also want to check out his other posts... I'm adding him to my list. Silverlight 4 Webcam Demo In this post, Viktor Larsson has a tutorial up for using the WebCam. This is from a beginner perspective, so if you haven't jumped in, now's a good time. How to extend Bing Maps Silverlight with an elevation profile graph - Part 1 Walter Ferrari has a post up at SilverlightShow discussing extensions to BingMaps such as creating routes using GeoCoding and Route Services plus drawing lines on the maps and getting coordinates of the points. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    MIX10

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  • How Can I Test My Computer’s Power Supply?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    You’re concerned your computer troubles stem from a failing (or outright fried) power supply unit. How can you test the unit to be sure that it’s the source of your hardware headaches? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Sam Hoice has some PSU concerns: My computer powered off the other day on its own, and now when I push the power button, nothing happens. My assumption would naturally be that the power supply is done (possibly well done) but is there any good way to test this before I buy a new one? How can Sam test things without damaging his current computer or other hardware?   The Answer SuperUser contributor Grant writes: Unplug the power supply from any of the components inside the computer (or just remove it from the computer completely). USE CAUTION HERE (Though you’d only be shocked with a max of 24 volts) Plug the power supply into the wall. Find the big 24-ish pin connector that connects to the motherboard. Connect the GREEN wire with the adjacent BLACK wire. The power supply’s fan should start up. If it doesn’t then it’s dead. If the fan starts up, then it could be the motherboard that’s dead. You can use a multimeter to check if there is power output from the power supply. Adrien offers a solution for readers who may not be comfortable jamming wires into their power supply unit’s MOBO connector: Most well-stocked geek-stores sell a “power-supply tester” that has all the appropriate connectors to plug each part of your PSU into, with spiffy LEDs indicating status of the various rails, connectors for IDE/SATA/floppy power cables, etc. They run ~$20 US. With a little careful shopping you can even find a highly-rated PSU tester for a measly $6. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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  • Woes of a Junior Developer - is it possible to not be cut out for programming?

    - by user575158
    (Let me start off by asking - please be gentle, I know this is subjective, but it's meant to incite discussion and provide information for others. If needed it can be converted to community wiki.) I recently was hired as a junior developer at a company I really like. I started out in the field doing QA and transitioned into more and more development work, which is what I really want to end up doing. I enjoy it, but more and more I am questioning whether I am really any good at it or not. Part of this is still growing into the junior developer role, I know, but how much? What are junior developers to expect, what should they be doing and not doing? What can I do to improve and show my company I am serious about this opportunity? I hate that I am costing them time by getting up to speed. I've been told by others that companies make investments in Junior devs and don't expect them to pay off for a while, but how much of this is true? There's got to be a point when it's apparent whether the investment will pay off or not. So far I've been trying to ask as many questions I can, but I've you've been obsessing over a simple problem for some time and the others know that, there comes a time when it's pretty embarrassing to have to get help after struggling so long. I've also tried to be as open to suggestion as possible and work with others to try to refactor my code, but sometimes this can be hard clashing with various team members' personal opinions (being told by someone to write it one way, and then having someone else make you rewrite it). I often get over-stressed and judge myself too harshly, but I just don't want to have to struggle the rest of my life trying to get things work if I just don't have the talent. In your experience, is programming something that almost everyone can learn, or something that some people just don't get? Do others feel this way, or did you feel that way when starting out? It scares me that I have no other job skills should I be unsuited for having the skills necessary to code well.

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  • BIWA Wednesday TechCast Series - Opposition to Data Warehouse Initiatives

    - by jenny.gelhausen
    BIWA Wednesday TechCast Series - 19th Event! Opposition to Data Warehouse Initiatives Please join us for this webcast on Wednesday, March 24, 12 noon Eastern or check your local area's time Webcast is open to clients, prospects and partners. No matter how good your technology and technical skills, organizational issues can derail a data warehousing or BI project. Therefore BIWA presents a vital topic that crosses product boundaries: organizational resistance to data warehouse initiatives - how to recognize it and what to do about it. Many a DW/BI professional has been surprised by organizational resistance to DW/BI initiatives. Yet real organizational imperatives may be behind this apparently irrational behavior. Based on in-depth interviews with IT professionals, industry consultants, and power users, our speaker Bruce Jenks will present his research findings about what drives organizational resistance to data warehouse initiatives. The talk will cover specific behaviors that can signal organizational resistance to a data warehouse program and what organizations have done to address such resistance. Presenter: Bruce Jenks of Dun and Bradstreet Bruce Jenks has over 20 years experience in data warehousing and business intelligence, much of it as a consultant to large organizations spanning the US. Bruce's data warehousing clients have included firms such as Sprint, Gallo Wines, Southern California Edison, The Gap, and Safeway. He started his data warehousing career at Metaphor Computers, a pioneering DW/BI firm from which a number of industry luminaries sprang including Ralph Kimball (author of The Data Warehouse Toolkit ). Bruce continued his data warehousing career at HP, Stanford University and other firms. Bruce is currently completing his doctorate in business administration at Golden Gate University, and today's material arises from his doctoral research. He is also a principal consultant for Dun and Bradstreet. Audio Dial-In: 866 682 4770 Audio Meeting ID: 1683901 Audio Meeting Passcode: 334451 Web Conference: Please register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/807185273 After you register you will be provided with a link to the TechCast. Invitation to Speakers: All BIWA members and Oracle professionals (experts, end users, managers, DBAs, developers, data analysts, ISVs, partners, etc.) may submit abstracts for 45 minute technical webcasts to our Oracle BIWA (IOUG SIG) Community. Submit your BIWA TechCast abstract today! BIWA is a worldwide forum with over 2000 members who are business intelligence, warehousing and analytics professionals. BIWA presents information, experiences and best practices in successfully deploying Oracle Database-centric BI, Data Warehousing, and Analytics products, features and Options--the Oracle Database "BIWA" platform. Attendance Information & Replays at the BIWA website: oraclebiwa.org var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-13185312-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

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  • A frequently updated mixed bag blog OR several seldom updated niche sites?

    - by Melanie
    Background I am a member of the website HubPages where I have about a hundred articles (and I'm always writing more.) Anyway, HubPages revenue model is 40% ad-share for them and 60% ad share for users. While the userbase there is really friendly, the site is REALLY slow, buggy and there is a ton of content on HubPages that is copied from other sources. Upon flagging these articles it takes a ton of time for mods to remove it and it's just generally dragging down my stuff. Furthermore, HubPages was hit really hard by Google's Panda Update: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS426US426&tbm=nws&q=google+panda& Aside from the temporary problems I would deal with when removing content from HubPages and putting it on my own domain (duplicate content, etc) I have another problem. Which would be the best for my articles? I have tons of articles in a wide variety of niches and would like to do what would help them perform the best. I'm not a huge niche writer and have received wide criticism from the HubPages community for my articles not performing as well as they could because I don't use enough keywords within the text of my articles. I prefer to write more naturally in a way that would appeal to an audience instead of keyword stuff. Anyway, this is aside the point. My Question After removing my articles from HubPages, should I put them on one domain or spread them across multiple domains grouped sort of by topic. For example: a-bunch-of-articles.com OR travel-articles.com and financial-articles.com and knitting-articles.com (I know those domains aren't available, but it's just kind of an example.) Here are the pros and cons of each: a mixed bag site like a-bunch-of-articles.com may not perform as well because of its mixed-bag nature a mixed bag site would be updated far more frequently than several niche sites... some niche sites may be updated so infrequently that a year could pass before one sees a new article a mixed bag site would be like putting all my eggs is one basket, where having several niche sites would spread out my portfolio, so to speak. a mixed bag site would be cheaper, $14 (two year registration) to start out with and hosting and I'm good to go. a mixed bag site wouldn't allow me to easily target keywords, but then again isn't HubPages pretty much a mixed bag site?

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  • The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip

    - by Laila
    Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, the two .NET Rocks radio show hosts, have decided to set off to 15 cities in the US, between April 19th and May 7th, in their DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV). What for you'll ask me? Well, to drive around the US, meet up with .NET developers, and show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Each evening, they stop in a city and host a three hour event in front of a 100 to 300 crowd of developers, where Carl is showing off media features in Silverlight 4 and their road trip tracking application, whilst Richard is demo-ing the web performance testing features of VS2010 using his portable server rig. But before they take to the stage, they have a special guest brought in - a rock star from the Visual Studio world - whom they interview for an hour as a .NET Rock episode. So far, they've had - amongst others - Phil Haack, a Program Manager with the ASP.NET team working on ASP.NET MVC, Dan Fernandez, an Evangelism Manager in the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft, and Beth Massi, Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft. I love the fact that the audience gets a chance to participate, ask questions and have a great laugh, as you can hear in the first episode! Along the way, the .NET Rocks guys are giving away great prizes (including .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler licenses, and "40" LCD TVs!). Even more out of the ordinary, at each stop on the road trip, one lucky attendee (who entered in the Ride Along competition) gets to jump in the RV with Carl and Richard and ride along with them to the next stop on the roadtrip. How cool is that! Richard told us: "Our first winner in Mountain View was Eric Ziko. I was looking for him to announce that he had won, when he found us and gave us a bottle of scotch he had brought just to say 'thanks for the great show'. We all had a toast from the bottle the next night when he headed back home." Cheeky! There's still space to a few of these events, so if you want to attend, register now, because it's first come first serve. We're grateful to Richard and Carl for giving us the opportunity to sponsor this major .NET event! A unique .NET adventure worth following for sure. Cheers, Laila

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  • So it comes to PASS…

    - by Tony Davis
    How does your company gauge the benefit of attending a technical conference? What's the best change you made as a direct result of attendance? It's time again for the PASS Summit and I, like most people go with a set of general goals for enhancing technical knowledge; to learn more about PowerShell, to drill into SQL Server performance tuning techniques, and so on. Most will write up a brief report on the event for the rest of the team. Ideally, however, it will go a bit further than that; each conference should result in a specific improvement to one of your systems, or in the way you do your job. As co-editor of Simple-talk.com, and responsible for the majority of our SQL books, my “high level” goals don't vary much from conference to conference. I'm always on the lookout for good new authors. I target interesting new technologies and tools and try to learn more. I return with a list of actions, new articles to commission, and potential new authors. Three years ago, however, I started setting myself the goal of implementing “one new thing” after each conference. After one, I adopted Kanban for managing my workload, a technique that places strict limits on “work in progress” and makes the overall workload, and backlog, highly visible. After another I trialled a community book project. At PASS 2010, one of my general goals was to delve deeper into SQL Server transaction log mechanics, but on top of that, I set a specific goal of writing something useful on the topic. I started a Stairway series and, ultimately, it's turned into a book! If you're attending the PASS Summit this year, take some time to consider what specific improvement or change you'll implement as a result. Also, try to drop by the Red Gate booth (#101). During the Vendor event on Wednesday evening, Gail Shaw and I will be there to discuss, and hand out copies of the book. Cheers, Tony.  

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  • Administering Team Foundation Server 2010 Class resource links

    - by John Alexander
    Here are the resource links for the Administering Team Foundation Server 2010 Class from last week in Minneapolis.  Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 RTM virtual machine for Microsoft® Virtual PC 2007 SP1 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=5e13b15a-fd74-4cd7-b53e-bdf9456855bd Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 RTM virtual machine for Windows Virtual PC http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=509c3ba1-4efc-42b5-b6d8-0232b2cbb26e Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 RTM virtual machine for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0198b64-4acb-4709-b07f-359fb4d523bc Customizable process guidance http://blogs.msdn.com/b/allclark/archive/2010/08/12/customizable-process-guidance.aspx The 5 most read Visual Studio ALM help topics on MSDN http://blogs.msdn.com/b/allclark/archive/2010/11/12/the-5-most-read-visual-studio-alm-help-topics-on-msdn.aspx Inside TFS http://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/List/Inside-TFS.aspx Testing Topics http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd286594.aspx Blogs http://community.accentient.com http://geekswithblogs.net Branching Guide http://tfsbranchingguideiii.codeplex.com/ Great VSTS blog http://geekswithblogs.net/hinshelm/Default.aspx My Blog :D http://geekswithblogs.net/jalexander/Default.aspx Visual Studio Forums http://bit.ly/fE16u3 TFS Migration and Integration Solutions http://bit.ly/cLaBnT TFS Migration and Integration Tools (VS ALM Rangers) http://bit.ly/9tHWdG TFS Migration and Integration Platform (CodePlex) http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com Team Foundation Server SDK http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/TfsSdk Migrate and Integration Forum http://bit.ly/f4Lnps Team Foundation Server Widgets http://www.tfswidgets.com TFS Sdk http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/TfsSdk TFS Migration and Integration Solutions http://bit.ly/cLaBnT TFS Integration Tools Forum http://bit.ly/f4Lnps TFS Integration Tools http://bit.ly/9tHWdG TFS Integration Platform http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com VS Upgrade Guide http://vs2010upgradeguide.codeplex.com Updating an Upgraded Team Project to Access New Features http://bit.ly/9cCcMP Team Foundation Power Tools http://bit.ly/dfNVQk Team Foundation Administration Tool http://tfsadmin.codeplex.com Using Team Foundation Server Command-Line Tools http://bit.ly/hCyozJ Changing Groups and Permissions with TFSSecurity http://bit.ly/esIjgw Unofficial Prep guide for TFS 2010 Administration Exam (70-512) http://geekswithblogs.net/enriquelima/archive/2010/07/21/unofficial-prep-guide-for-tfs-2010-administration-exam-70-512.aspx Another Prep Guide http://bit.ly/bpO30R Professional Application Lifecycle Management with VS 2010 Book http://bit.ly/9rCIRj Search CodePlex for TFS related apps http://www.codeplex.com/site/search Visual Studio Gallery http://visualstudiogallery.com TFS Widgets http://tfswidgets.com Migrate from Visual SourceSafe http://bit.ly/8XPSRh Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider 2010 http://bit.ly/dst1OQ Attrice TFS Sidekicks www.attrice.info/cm/tfs Hosted TFS http://bit.ly/cMZdvp Manually Processing the Team Foundation Server 2010 Data Warehouse and Analysis Services Database http://bit.ly/aG5oEh TFS 2005, 2008 and 2010 Compatibility http://shrinkster.com/1dhj

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  • Week 21: FY10 in the Rear View Mirror

    - by sandra.haan
    FY10 is coming to a close and before we dive into FY11 we thought we would take a walk down memory lane and reminisce on some of our favorite Oracle PartnerNetwork activities. June 2009 brought One Red Network to partners offering access to the same virtual kickoff environment used by Oracle employees. It was a new way to deliver valuable content to key stakeholders (and without the 100+ degree temperatures). Speaking of hot, Oracle also announced in June new licensing options for our ISV partners. This model enables an even broader community of ISVs to build, deploy and manage SaaS applications on the same platform. While some people took the summer off, the OPN Program team was working away to deliver a brand new partner program - Oracle PartnerNetwork Specialized - at Oracle OpenWorld in October. Specialized. Recognized. Preferred. If you haven't gotten the message yet, we may need an emergency crew to pull you out from that rock you've been hiding under. But seriously, the announcement at the OPN Forum drew a big crowd and our FY11 event is shaping up to be just as exciting. OPN Specialized was announced in October and opened our doors for enrollment in December 2009. To mark our grand opening we held our first ever social webcast allowing partners from around the world to interact with us live throughout the day. We had a lot of great conversations and really enjoyed the chance to speak with so many of you. After a short holiday break we were back at it - just a small announcement - Oracle's acquisition of Sun. In case you missed it, here is a short field report from Ted Bereswill, SVP North America Alliances & Channels on the partner events to support the announcement: And while we're announcing things - did we mention that both Ted Bereswill and Judson Althoff were named Channel Chiefs by CRN? Not only do we have a couple of Channel Chiefs, but Oracle also won the Partner Program 5 Star Programs Award and took top honors at the CRN Channel Champion Awards for Financial Factors/Financial Performance in the category of Data and Information Management and the and Xchange Solution Provider event in March 2010. We actually caught up with Judson at this event for a quick recap of our participation: But awards aside, let's not forget our main focus in FY10 and that is Specialization. In April we announced that we had over 35 Specializations available for partners and a plan to deliver even more in FY11. We are just days away from the end of FY10 but hope you enjoyed our walk down memory lane. We are already planning lots of activity for our partners in FY11 starting with our Partner Kickoff event on June 29th. Join us to hear the vision and strategy for FY11 and interact with regional A&C leaders. We look forward to talking with you then. The OPN Communications Team

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  • Oracle ADF Core Functionality Now Available for Free - Presenting Oracle ADF Essentials

    - by Shay Shmeltzer
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE HE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;} We are happy to announce the new Oracle ADF Essentials - a free to develop and deploy version of the core technologies at the base of Oracle ADF – Oracle’s strategic development framework that was used, among other things, to build the new generation of the enterprise Oracle Fusion Applications. This release is aligned with the new Oracle JDeveloper 11.1.2.3 version that we released today. Oracle ADF Essentials enables developers to use the following free: Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client components –over 150 JSF 2.0 components that include extensive charting and data visualization components, supports skinning, internalization, accessibility and touch gestures and providing advanced Ajax, windowing, drag and drop and other UI capabilities in a declarative way. Oracle ADF Controller – an extension on top of the JSF controller providing complete process flow definition and enabling advanced reusability of flows inside page’s regions. Oracle ADF Binding – a declarative way to bind various business services to JSF user interfaces eliminating tedious managed-beans coding. Oracle ADF Business Components – a declarative layer for building Java based business services on top of relational databases. The main goal of Oracle ADF Essentials is to bring the benefits of Oracle ADF to a broader community of developers. If you are already using Oracle ADF, a key new functionality for you would be the ability to deploy your application on GlassFish. Several other interesting points: We provide instructions for deployment of Oracle ADF Essentials on GlassFish and officially support this platform for Oracle ADF Essentials deployment. Developers can choose to use the whole Oracle ADF Essentials, or just pieces of the technology. Visual development for Oracle ADF Essentials is provided in Oracle JDeveloper. Eclipse support via Oracle Enterprise for Eclipse (OEPE) is also planned. Want to learn more? Here is a quick overview and development demo of Oracle ADF Essentials For more visit the Oracle ADF Essentials page on OTN

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  • NetBeans Podcast 69

    - by TinuA
    Podcast Guests: Terrence Barr, Simon Ritter, Jaroslav Tulach (It's an all-Oracle lineup!) Download mp3: 47 Minutes – 39.5 mb Subscribe on iTunes NetBeans Community News with Geertjan and Tinu If you missed the first two Java Virtual Developer Day events in early May, there's still one more LIVE training left on May 28th. Sign up here to participate live in the APAC time zone or watch later ON DEMAND. Video: Get started with Vaadin development using NetBeans IDE NetBeans IDE was at JavaCro 2014 and at Hippo Get-together 2014 Another great lineup is in the works for NetBeans Day at JavaOne 2014. More details coming soon! NetBeans' Facebook page is almost at 40,000 Likes! Help us crack that milestone in the next few weeks! Other great ways to stay updated about NetBeans? Twitter and Google+. 09:28 / Terrence Barr - What to Know about Java Embedded Terrence Barr, a Senior Technologist and Principal Product Manager for Embedded and Mobile technologies at Oracle, discusses new features of the Java SE Embedded and Java ME Embedded platforms, and sheds some light on the differences between them and what they have to offer to developers. Learn more about Java SE Embedded Tutorial: Using Oracle Java SE Embedded Support in NetBeans IDE Learn more about Java ME Embedded Video: NetBeans IDE Support for Java ME 8 Video: Installing and Using Java ME SDK 8.0 Plugins in NetBeans IDE Follow Terrence Barr to keep up with news in the Embedded space: Blog and Twitter 26:02 / Simon Ritter - A Massive Serving of Raspberry Pi Oracle's Raspberry Pi virtual course is back by popular demand! Simon Ritter, the head of Oracle's Java Technology Evangelism team, chats about the second run of the free Java Embedded course (starting May 30th), what participants can expect to learn, NetBeans' support for Java ME development, and other Java trainings coming to a desktop, laptop or user group near you. Sign up for the Oracle MOOC: Develop Java Embedded Applications Using Raspberry Pi Find out when Simon Ritter and the Java Evangelism team are coming to a Java event or JUG in your area--follow them on Twitter: Simon Ritter Angela Caicedo Steven Chin Jim Weaver 36:58 / Jaroslav Tulach - A Perfect Translation Jaroslav Tulach returns to the NetBeans podcast with tales about the Japanese translation of the Practical API Design book, which he contends surpasses all previous translations, including the English edition! Order "Practical API Design" (Japanese Version)  Find out why the Japanese translation is the best edition yet *Have ideas for NetBeans Podcast topics? Send them to ">nbpodcast at netbeans dot org. *Subscribe to the official NetBeans page on Facebook! Check us out as well on Twitter, YouTube, and Google+.

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  • Adding AjaxOnly Filter in ASP.NET Web API

    - by imran_ku07
            Introduction:                     Currently, ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Single Page Application are the hottest topics in ASP.NET community. Specifically, lot of developers loving the inclusion of ASP.NET Web API in ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET Web API makes it very simple to build HTTP RESTful services, which can be easily consumed from desktop/mobile browsers, silverlight/flash applications and many different types of clients. Client side Ajax may be a very important consumer for various service providers. Sometimes, some HTTP service providers may need some(or all) of thier services can only be accessed from Ajax. In this article, I will show you how to implement AjaxOnly filter in ASP.NET Web API application.         Description:                     First of all you need to create a new ASP.NET MVC 4(Web API) application. Then, create a new AjaxOnly.cs file and add the following lines in this file, public class AjaxOnlyAttribute : System.Web.Http.Filters.ActionFilterAttribute { public override void OnActionExecuting(System.Web.Http.Controllers.HttpActionContext actionContext) { var request = actionContext.Request; var headers = request.Headers; if (!headers.Contains("X-Requested-With") || headers.GetValues("X-Requested-With").FirstOrDefault() != "XMLHttpRequest") actionContext.Response = request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); } }                     This is an action filter which simply checks X-Requested-With header in request with value XMLHttpRequest. If X-Requested-With header is not presant in request or this header value is not XMLHttpRequest then the filter will return 404(NotFound) response to the client.                      Now just register this filter, [AjaxOnly] public string GET(string input)                     You can also register this filter globally, if your Web API application is only targeted for Ajax consumer.         Summary:                       ASP.NET WEB API provide a framework for building RESTful services. Sometimes, you may need your certain API services can only be accessed from Ajax. In this article, I showed you how to add AjaxOnly action filter in ASP.NET Web API. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.

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  • Mac OS X roaming profile from Samba with OpenLDAP backend on Ubuntu 11.10

    - by Sam Hammamy
    I have been battling for a week now to get my Mac (Mountain Lion) to authenticate on my home network's OpenLDAP and Samba. From several sources, like the Ubuntu community docs, and other blogs, and after a hell of a lot of trial and error and piecing things together, I have created a samba.ldif that will pass the smbldap-populate when combined with apple.ldif and I have a fully functional OpenLDAP server and a Samba PDC that uses LDAP to authenticate the OS X Machine. The problem is that when I login, the home directory is not created or pulled from the server. I get the following in system.log Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local SecurityAgent[265]: User info context values set for sam Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_authenticate(): Got user: sam Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_authenticate(): Got ruser: (null) Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_authenticate(): Got service: authorization Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in od_principal_for_user(): no authauth availale for user. Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in od_principal_for_user(): failed: 7 Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_authenticate(): Failed to determine Kerberos principal name. Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_authenticate(): Done cleanup3 Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_authenticate(): Kerberos 5 refuses you Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_authenticate(): pam_sm_authenticate: ntlm Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_acct_mgmt(): OpenDirectory - Membership cache TTL set to 1800. Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in od_record_check_pwpolicy(): retval: 0 Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_setcred(): Establishing credentials Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_setcred(): Got user: sam Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_setcred(): Context initialised Sep 21 06:09:15 Sams-MacBook-Pro.local authorizationhost[270]: in pam_sm_setcred(): pam_sm_setcred: ntlm user sam doesn't have auth authority All that's great and good and I authenticate. Then I get CFPreferences: user home directory for user kCFPreferencesCurrentUser at /Network/Servers/172.17.148.186/home/sam is unavailable. User domains will be volatile. Failed looking up user domain root; url='file://localhost/Network/Servers/172.17.148.186/home/sam/' path=/Network/Servers/172.17.148.186/home/sam/ err=-43 uid=9000 euid=9000 If you're wondering where /Network/Servers/IP/home/sam comes from, it's from a couple of blogs that said the OpenLDAP attribute apple-user-homeDirectory should have that value and the NFSHomeDirectory on the mac should point to apple-user-homeDirectory I also set the attr apple-user-homeurl to <home_dir><url>smb://172.17.148.186/sam/</url><path></path></home_dir> which I found on this forum. Any help is appreciated, because I'm banging my head against the wall at this point. By the way, I intend to create a blog on my vps just for this, and create an install script in python that people can download so no one has to go through what I've had to go through this week :) After some sleep I am going to try to login from a windows machine and report back here. Thanks Sam

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  • What was missing from the Content Strategy Forum?

    - by Roger Hart
    In April, Paris hosted the first ever Content Strategy Forum. The event's website proudly proclaims: 170 attendees, 18 nationalities, 17 speakers, 1 volcano... Content Strategy Forum 2010 rocked the world! The volcano was in Iceland, and the closest we came to rocking the world was a cursory mention in the Huffington Post, but I'll grant the event was awesome. One thing missing from that list, however, is "94 companies" (Plus a couple of universities and freelancers, and what have you). A glance through the attendees directory reveals a fairly wide organisational turnout - 24 students from two Parisian universities, countless design and marketing agencies, a series of tech firms, small and large. Two delegates from IBM, two from ARM, an appearance from RIM, Skype, and Facebook; twelve from the various bits of eBay. Oh, and, err, nobody from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Play, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, the BBC, no banks I noticed, and I didn't spot a newspaper. You get the idea. Facebook notwithstanding, you have to scroll through a few pages to Alexa rankings to find company names from the attendee list. I find this interesting, and I'm not wholly sure what to make of it. Of the large, web-centric, content-rich organizations conspicuously absent, at least one of two things is true: They didn't know about the event They didn't care about the event Maybe these guys all have content strategy completely sorted, and it's an utterly naturalised part of their business process. Maybe nobody at say, Apple or Play.com ever publishes a single piece of content that isn't neatly tailored to their (clearly defined, of course) user and business goals. Wouldn't that be lovely? The thing is, in that rosy and beatific world, there's still a case for those folks to join the community. There are bound to be other perspectives, and things to learn. You see, the other thing achingly conspicuous by its absence was case studies. In her keynote address, Kristina Halvorson made the point that what content strategy really needs is some big, loud success stories. A point I'd firmly second as a content strategist working within an organisation. Sarah Cancilla's presentation on content strategy at Facebook included some very neat, specific examples, and was richer for it. It didn't hurt that the example was Facebook - you're getting impressively big numbers off base. What about the other big boys? Is there anybody out there with a perspective? Do we all just look very silly to you, fretting away over text and images and users and purposes? Is content validation and maintenance so accustomed a part of your business that calling attention to it is like sniffing the air and saying "Hmm, a lot of nitrogen about today."? And if it is, do you have any wisdom to share?

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  • Getting Started With nServiceBus on VAN Mar 31

    - by van
    Topic: nServiceBus is mature and powerful open source framework that enables to design robust, scalable, message-based, service-oriented architectures. Latest improvements in the configuration API enables developers to quickly get started and build a working simple system that uses messaging infrastructure. The goal of this session is to give a jump start with the framework, introduce basic concepts such as message handlers, Sagas, Pub/Sub, Generic Host and also create a working demo application that uses publish/subscribe messaging. The content of the session is addressed to developers that are interested in learning how to get started using nServiceBus in order to design and build distributed systems. Bio: Bernard Kowalski is currently a Software Developer at Microdesk, one of Autodesk's leading partners in providing variety of Geospatial and Computer-Aided Design solutions. Bernard has experience developing .NET framework-based applications utilizing Windows Forms, Windows Services, ASP.NET MVC, and Web services. In a recent project, Bernard architected and implemented a distributed system based on SOA principles using an open source implementation of an Enterprise Service Bus. Bernard develops software with Agile patterns and practices using Domain Driven Design combined with TDD (Test Driven Development). He is familiar with all of the following APIs: Autodesk Vault/Product Stream API, AutoCAD ActiveX/VBA/.NET API, AutoCAD Mechanical API, Autodesk Inventor API, Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. Prior to joining Microdesk, Bernard worked as a researcher and teacher at the University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland where he was awarded with a PhD in Computer Methods in Materials Science. He also participated in research projects where he developed applications for analysis of hot compression test results using advanced optimization techniques. He also developed Finite Element Method-based programs for thermal and stress analysis using C++ and FORTRAN. Bernard is a member of the Domain Driven Design and ALT.NET user groups in NYC. Virtual ALT.NET (VAN) is the online gathering place of the ALT.NET community. Through conversations, presentations, pair programming and dojos, we strive to improve, explore, and challenge the way we create software. Using net conferencing technology such as Skype and LiveMeeting, we hold regular meetings, open to anyone, usually taking the form of a presentation or an Open Space Technology-style conversation. Please see the Calendar(http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar) to find a VAN group that meets at a time convenient to you, and feel welcome to join a meeting. Past sessions can be found on the Recording page. To stay informed about VAN activities, you can subscribe to the Virtual ALT.NET Google Group and follow the Virtual ALT.NET blog. Times below are Central Standard Time Start Time: Wed, Mar 31, 2010 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours End Time: Wed, Mar 31, 2010 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours Attendee URL: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/van Zach Young http://www.virtualaltnet.com

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  • First impressions of Scala

    - by Scott Weinstein
    I have an idea that it may be possible to predict build success/failure based on commit data. Why Scala? It’s a JVM language, has lots of powerful type features, and it has a linear algebra library which I’ll need later. Project definition and build Neither maven or the scala build tool (sbt) are completely satisfactory. This maven **archetype** (what .Net folks would call a VS project template) mvn archetype:generate `-DarchetypeGroupId=org.scala-tools.archetypes `-DarchetypeArtifactId=scala-archetype-simple `-DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases `-DgroupId=org.SW -DartifactId=BuildBreakPredictor gets you started right away with “hello world” code, unit tests demonstrating a number of different testing approaches, and even a ready made `.gitignore` file - nice! But the Scala version is behind at v2.8, and more seriously, compiling and testing was painfully slow. So much that a rapid edit – test – edit cycle was not practical. So Lab49 colleague Steve Levine tells me that I can either adjust my pom to use fsc – the fast scala compiler, or use sbt. Sbt has some nice features It’s fast – it uses fsc by default It has a continuous mode, so  `> ~test` will compile and run your unit test each time you save a file It’s can consume (and produce) Maven 2 dependencies the build definition file can be much shorter than the equivalent pom (about 1/5 the size, as repos and dependencies can be declared on a single line) And some real limitations Limited support for 3rd party integration – for instance out of the box, TeamCity doesn’t speak sbt, nor does IntelliJ IDEA Steeper learning curve for build steps outside the default Side note: If a language has a fast compiler, why keep the slow compiler around? Even worse, why make it the default? I choose sbt, for the faster development speed it offers. Syntax Scala APIs really like to use punctuation – sometimes this works well, as in the following map1 |+| map2 The `|+|` defines a merge operator which does addition on the `values` of the maps. It’s less useful here: http(baseUrl / url >- parseJson[BuildStatus] sure you can probably guess what `>-` does from the context, but how about `>~` or `>+`? Language features I’m still learning, so not much to say just yet. However case classes are quite usefull, implicits scare me, and type constructors have lots of power. Community A number of projects, such as https://github.com/scalala and https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz are split between github and google code – github for the src, and google code for the docs. Not sure I understand the motivation here.

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  • XNA Screen Manager problem with transitions

    - by NexAddo
    I'm having issues using the game statemanagement example in the game I am developing. I have no issues with my first three screens transitioning between one another. I have a main menu screen, a splash screen and a high score screen that cycle: mainMenuScreen->splashScreen->highScoreScreen->mainMenuScreen The screens change every 15 seconds. Transition times public MainMenuScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.0); currentCreditAmount = Global.CurrentCredits; } public SplashScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } public HighScoreScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } public GamePlayScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } When a user inserts credits they can play the game after pressing start mainMenuScreen->splashScreen->highScoreScreen->(loops forever) || || || ===========Credits In============= || Start || \/ LoadingScreen || Start || \/ GamePlayScreen During each of these transitions, between screens, the same code is used, which exits(removes) all current active screens and respects transitions, then adds the new screen to the screen manager: foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); //AddScreen takes a new screen to manage and the controlling player ScreenManager.AddScreen(new NameOfScreenHere(), null); Each screen is removed from the ScreenManager with ExitScreen() and using this function, each screen transition is respected. The problem I am having is with my gamePlayScreen. When the current game is finished and the transition is complete for the gamePlayScreen, it should be removed and the next screens should be added to the ScreenManager. GamePlayScreen Code Snippet private void FinishCurrentGame() { AudioManager.StopSounds(); this.UnloadContent(); if (Global.SaveDevice.IsReady) Stats.Save(); if (HighScoreScreen.IsInHighscores(timeLimit)) { foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); Global.TimeRemaining = timeLimit; ScreenManager.AddScreen(new BackgroundScreen(), null); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new MessageBoxScreen("Enter your Initials", true), null); } else { foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new BackgroundScreen(), null); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new MainMenuScreen(), null); } } The problem is that when isExiting is set to true by screen.ExitScreen() for the gamePlayScreen, the transition never completes the transition and removes the screen from the ScreenManager. Every other screen that I use the same technique to add and remove each screen fully transitions On/Off and is removed at the appropriate time from the ScreenManager, but noy my GamePlayScreen. Has anyone that has used the GameStateManagement example experienced this issue or can someone see the mistake I am making? EDIT This is what I tracked down. When the game is done, I call foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); to start the transition off process for the gameplay screen. At this point there is only 1 screen on the ScreenManager stack. The gamePlay screen gets isExiting set to true and starts to transition off. Right after the above call to ExitScreen() I add a background screen and menu screen to the screenManager: ScreenManager.AddScreen(new background(), null); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new Menu(), null); The count of the ScreenManager is now 3. What I noticed while stepping through the updates for GameScreen and ScreenManager, the gameplay screen never gets to the point where the transistion process finishes so the ScreenManager can remove it from the stack. This anomaly does not happen to any of my other screens when I switch between them. Screen Manager Code #region File Description //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // ScreenManager.cs // // Microsoft XNA Community Game Platform // Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- #endregion #define DEMO #region Using Statements using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Collections.Generic; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using PerformanceUtility.GameDebugTools; #endregion namespace GameStateManagement { /// <summary> /// The screen manager is a component which manages one or more GameScreen /// instances. It maintains a stack of screens, calls their Update and Draw /// methods at the appropriate times, and automatically routes input to the /// topmost active screen. /// </summary> public class ScreenManager : DrawableGameComponent { #region Fields List<GameScreen> screens = new List<GameScreen>(); List<GameScreen> screensToUpdate = new List<GameScreen>(); InputState input = new InputState(); SpriteBatch spriteBatch; SpriteFont font; Texture2D blankTexture; bool isInitialized; bool getOut; bool traceEnabled; #if DEBUG DebugSystem debugSystem; Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); bool debugTextEnabled; #endif #endregion #region Properties /// <summary> /// A default SpriteBatch shared by all the screens. This saves /// each screen having to bother creating their own local instance. /// </summary> public SpriteBatch SpriteBatch { get { return spriteBatch; } } /// <summary> /// A default font shared by all the screens. This saves /// each screen having to bother loading their own local copy. /// </summary> public SpriteFont Font { get { return font; } } public Rectangle ScreenRectangle { get { return new Rectangle(0, 0, GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height); } } /// <summary> /// If true, the manager prints out a list of all the screens /// each time it is updated. This can be useful for making sure /// everything is being added and removed at the right times. /// </summary> public bool TraceEnabled { get { return traceEnabled; } set { traceEnabled = value; } } #if DEBUG public bool DebugTextEnabled { get { return debugTextEnabled; } set { debugTextEnabled = value; } } public DebugSystem DebugSystem { get { return debugSystem; } } #endif #endregion #region Initialization /// <summary> /// Constructs a new screen manager component. /// </summary> public ScreenManager(Game game) : base(game) { // we must set EnabledGestures before we can query for them, but // we don't assume the game wants to read them. //TouchPanel.EnabledGestures = GestureType.None; } /// <summary> /// Initializes the screen manager component. /// </summary> public override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); #if DEBUG debugSystem = DebugSystem.Initialize(Game, "Fonts/MenuFont"); #endif isInitialized = true; } /// <summary> /// Load your graphics content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Load content belonging to the screen manager. ContentManager content = Game.Content; spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); font = content.Load<SpriteFont>(@"Fonts\menufont"); blankTexture = content.Load<Texture2D>(@"Textures\Backgrounds\blank"); // Tell each of the screens to load their content. foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) { screen.LoadContent(); } } /// <summary> /// Unload your graphics content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // Tell each of the screens to unload their content. foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) { screen.UnloadContent(); } } #endregion #region Update and Draw /// <summary> /// Allows each screen to run logic. /// </summary> public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.StartFrame(); debugSystem.TimeRuler.BeginMark("Update", Color.Blue); if (debugTextEnabled && getOut == false) { debugSystem.FpsCounter.Visible = true; debugSystem.TimeRuler.Visible = true; debugSystem.TimeRuler.ShowLog = true; getOut = true; } else if (debugTextEnabled == false) { getOut = false; debugSystem.FpsCounter.Visible = false; debugSystem.TimeRuler.Visible = false; debugSystem.TimeRuler.ShowLog = false; } #endif // Read the keyboard and gamepad. input.Update(); // Make a copy of the master screen list, to avoid confusion if // the process of updating one screen adds or removes others. screensToUpdate.Clear(); foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) screensToUpdate.Add(screen); bool otherScreenHasFocus = !Game.IsActive; bool coveredByOtherScreen = false; // Loop as long as there are screens waiting to be updated. while (screensToUpdate.Count > 0) { // Pop the topmost screen off the waiting list. GameScreen screen = screensToUpdate[screensToUpdate.Count - 1]; screensToUpdate.RemoveAt(screensToUpdate.Count - 1); // Update the screen. screen.Update(gameTime, otherScreenHasFocus, coveredByOtherScreen); if (screen.ScreenState == ScreenState.TransitionOn || screen.ScreenState == ScreenState.Active) { // If this is the first active screen we came across, // give it a chance to handle input. if (!otherScreenHasFocus) { screen.HandleInput(input); otherScreenHasFocus = true; } // If this is an active non-popup, inform any subsequent // screens that they are covered by it. if (!screen.IsPopup) coveredByOtherScreen = true; } } // Print debug trace? if (traceEnabled) TraceScreens(); #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.EndMark("Update"); #endif } /// <summary> /// Prints a list of all the screens, for debugging. /// </summary> void TraceScreens() { List<string> screenNames = new List<string>(); foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) screenNames.Add(screen.GetType().Name); Debug.WriteLine(string.Join(", ", screenNames.ToArray())); } /// <summary> /// Tells each screen to draw itself. /// </summary> public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.StartFrame(); debugSystem.TimeRuler.BeginMark("Draw", Color.Yellow); #endif foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) { if (screen.ScreenState == ScreenState.Hidden) continue; screen.Draw(gameTime); } #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.EndMark("Draw"); #endif #if DEMO SpriteBatch.Begin(); SpriteBatch.DrawString(font, "DEMO - NOT FOR RESALE", new Vector2(20, 80), Color.White); SpriteBatch.End(); #endif } #endregion #region Public Methods /// <summary> /// Adds a new screen to the screen manager. /// </summary> public void AddScreen(GameScreen screen, PlayerIndex? controllingPlayer) { screen.ControllingPlayer = controllingPlayer; screen.ScreenManager = this; screen.IsExiting = false; // If we have a graphics device, tell the screen to load content. if (isInitialized) { screen.LoadContent(); } screens.Add(screen); } /// <summary> /// Removes a screen from the screen manager. You should normally /// use GameScreen.ExitScreen instead of calling this directly, so /// the screen can gradually transition off rather than just being /// instantly removed. /// </summary> public void RemoveScreen(GameScreen screen) { // If we have a graphics device, tell the screen to unload content. if (isInitialized) { screen.UnloadContent(); } screens.Remove(screen); screensToUpdate.Remove(screen); } /// <summary> /// Expose an array holding all the screens. We return a copy rather /// than the real master list, because screens should only ever be added /// or removed using the AddScreen and RemoveScreen methods. /// </summary> public GameScreen[] GetScreens() { return screens.ToArray(); } /// <summary> /// Helper draws a translucent black fullscreen sprite, used for fading /// screens in and out, and for darkening the background behind popups. /// </summary> public void FadeBackBufferToBlack(float alpha) { Viewport viewport = GraphicsDevice.Viewport; spriteBatch.Begin(); spriteBatch.Draw(blankTexture, new Rectangle(0, 0, viewport.Width, viewport.Height), Color.Black * alpha); spriteBatch.End(); } #endregion } } Game Screen Parent of GamePlayScreen #region File Description //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // GameScreen.cs // // Microsoft XNA Community Game Platform // Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- #endregion #region Using Statements using System; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; //using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Touch; using System.IO; #endregion namespace GameStateManagement { /// <summary> /// Enum describes the screen transition state. /// </summary> public enum ScreenState { TransitionOn, Active, TransitionOff, Hidden, } /// <summary> /// A screen is a single layer that has update and draw logic, and which /// can be combined with other layers to build up a complex menu system. /// For instance the main menu, the options menu, the "are you sure you /// want to quit" message box, and the main game itself are all implemented /// as screens. /// </summary> public abstract class GameScreen { #region Properties /// <summary> /// Normally when one screen is brought up over the top of another, /// the first screen will transition off to make room for the new /// one. This property indicates whether the screen is only a small /// popup, in which case screens underneath it do not need to bother /// transitioning off. /// </summary> public bool IsPopup { get { return isPopup; } protected set { isPopup = value; } } bool isPopup = false; /// <summary> /// Indicates how long the screen takes to /// transition on when it is activated. /// </summary> public TimeSpan TransitionOnTime { get { return transitionOnTime; } protected set { transitionOnTime = value; } } TimeSpan transitionOnTime = TimeSpan.Zero; /// <summary> /// Indicates how long the screen takes to /// transition off when it is deactivated. /// </summary> public TimeSpan TransitionOffTime { get { return transitionOffTime; } protected set { transitionOffTime = value; } } TimeSpan transitionOffTime = TimeSpan.Zero; /// <summary> /// Gets the current position of the screen transition, ranging /// from zero (fully active, no transition) to one (transitioned /// fully off to nothing). /// </summary> public float TransitionPosition { get { return transitionPosition; } protected set { transitionPosition = value; } } float transitionPosition = 1; /// <summary> /// Gets the current alpha of the screen transition, ranging /// from 1 (fully active, no transition) to 0 (transitioned /// fully off to nothing). /// </summary> public float TransitionAlpha { get { return 1f - TransitionPosition; } } /// <summary> /// Gets the current screen transition state. /// </summary> public ScreenState ScreenState { get { return screenState; } protected set { screenState = value; } } ScreenState screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOn; /// <summary> /// There are two possible reasons why a screen might be transitioning /// off. It could be temporarily going away to make room for another /// screen that is on top of it, or it could be going away for good. /// This property indicates whether the screen is exiting for real: /// if set, the screen will automatically remove itself as soon as the /// transition finishes. /// </summary> public bool IsExiting { get { return isExiting; } protected internal set { isExiting = value; } } bool isExiting = false; /// <summary> /// Checks whether this screen is active and can respond to user input. /// </summary> public bool IsActive { get { return !otherScreenHasFocus && (screenState == ScreenState.TransitionOn || screenState == ScreenState.Active); } } bool otherScreenHasFocus; /// <summary> /// Gets the manager that this screen belongs to. /// </summary> public ScreenManager ScreenManager { get { return screenManager; } internal set { screenManager = value; } } ScreenManager screenManager; public KeyboardState KeyboardState { get {return Keyboard.GetState();} } /// <summary> /// Gets the index of the player who is currently controlling this screen, /// or null if it is accepting input from any player. This is used to lock /// the game to a specific player profile. The main menu responds to input /// from any connected gamepad, but whichever player makes a selection from /// this menu is given control over all subsequent screens, so other gamepads /// are inactive until the controlling player returns to the main menu. /// </summary> public PlayerIndex? ControllingPlayer { get { return controllingPlayer; } internal set { controllingPlayer = value; } } PlayerIndex? controllingPlayer; /// <summary> /// Gets whether or not this screen is serializable. If this is true, /// the screen will be recorded into the screen manager's state and /// its Serialize and Deserialize methods will be called as appropriate. /// If this is false, the screen will be ignored during serialization. /// By default, all screens are assumed to be serializable. /// </summary> public bool IsSerializable { get { return isSerializable; } protected set { isSerializable = value; } } bool isSerializable = true; #endregion #region Initialization /// <summary> /// Load graphics content for the screen. /// </summary> public virtual void LoadContent() { } /// <summary> /// Unload content for the screen. /// </summary> public virtual void UnloadContent() { } #endregion #region Update and Draw /// <summary> /// Allows the screen to run logic, such as updating the transition position. /// Unlike HandleInput, this method is called regardless of whether the screen /// is active, hidden, or in the middle of a transition. /// </summary> public virtual void Update(GameTime gameTime, bool otherScreenHasFocus, bool coveredByOtherScreen) { this.otherScreenHasFocus = otherScreenHasFocus; if (isExiting) { // If the screen is going away to die, it should transition off. screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOff; if (!UpdateTransition(gameTime, transitionOffTime, 1)) { // When the transition finishes, remove the screen. ScreenManager.RemoveScreen(this); } } else if (coveredByOtherScreen) { // If the screen is covered by another, it should transition off. if (UpdateTransition(gameTime, transitionOffTime, 1)) { // Still busy transitioning. screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOff; } else { // Transition finished! screenState = ScreenState.Hidden; } } else { // Otherwise the screen should transition on and become active. if (UpdateTransition(gameTime, transitionOnTime, -1)) { // Still busy transitioning. screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOn; } else { // Transition finished! screenState = ScreenState.Active; } } } /// <summary> /// Helper for updating the screen transition position. /// </summary> bool UpdateTransition(GameTime gameTime, TimeSpan time, int direction) { // How much should we move by? float transitionDelta; if (time == TimeSpan.Zero) transitionDelta = 1; else transitionDelta = (float)(gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds / time.TotalMilliseconds); // Update the transition position. transitionPosition += transitionDelta * direction; // Did we reach the end of the transition? if (((direction < 0) && (transitionPosition <= 0)) || ((direction > 0) && (transitionPosition >= 1))) { transitionPosition = MathHelper.Clamp(transitionPosition, 0, 1); return false; } // Otherwise we are still busy transitioning. return true; } /// <summary> /// Allows the screen to handle user input. Unlike Update, this method /// is only called when the screen is active, and not when some other /// screen has taken the focus. /// </summary> public virtual void HandleInput(InputState input) { } public KeyboardState currentKeyState; public KeyboardState lastKeyState; public bool IsKeyHit(Keys key) { if (currentKeyState.IsKeyDown(key) && lastKeyState.IsKeyUp(key)) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// This is called when the screen should draw itself. /// </summary> public virtual void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { } #endregion #region Public Methods /// <summary> /// Tells the screen to serialize its state into the given stream. /// </summary> public virtual void Serialize(Stream stream) { } /// <summary> /// Tells the screen to deserialize its state from the given stream. /// </summary> public virtual void Deserialize(Stream stream) { } /// <summary> /// Tells the screen to go away. Unlike ScreenManager.RemoveScreen, which /// instantly kills the screen, this method respects the transition timings /// and will give the screen a chance to gradually transition off. /// </summary> public void ExitScreen() { if (TransitionOffTime == TimeSpan.Zero) { // If the screen has a zero transition time, remove it immediately. ScreenManager.RemoveScreen(this); } else { // Otherwise flag that it should transition off and then exit. isExiting = true; } } #endregion #region Helper Methods /// <summary> /// A helper method which loads assets using the screen manager's /// associated game content loader. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">Type of asset.</typeparam> /// <param name="assetName">Asset name, relative to the loader root /// directory, and not including the .xnb extension.</param> /// <returns></returns> public T Load<T>(string assetName) { return ScreenManager.Game.Content.Load<T>(assetName); } #endregion } }

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  • Skinny controller in ASP.NET MVC 4

    - by thangchung
    Rails community are always inspire a lot of best ideas. I really love this community by the time. One of these is "Fat models and skinny controllers". I have spent a lot of time on ASP.NET MVC, and really I did some miss-takes, because I made the controller so fat. That make controller is really dirty and very hard to maintain in the future. It is violate seriously SRP principle and KISS as well. But how can we achieve that in ASP.NET MVC? That question is really clear after I read "Manning ASP.NET MVC 4 in Action". It is simple that we can separate it into ActionResult, and try to implementing logic and persistence data inside this. In last 2 years, I have read this from Jimmy Bogard blog, but in that time I never had a consideration about it. That's enough for talking now. I just published a sample on ASP.NET MVC 4, implemented on Visual Studio 2012 RC at here. I used EF framework at here for implementing persistence layer, and also use 2 free templates from internet to make the UI for this sample. In this sample, I try to implementing the simple magazine website that managing all articles, categories and news. It is not finished at all in this time, but no problems, because I just show you about how can we make the controller skinny. And I wanna hear more about your ideas. The first thing, I am abstract the base ActionResult class like this:    public abstract class MyActionResult : ActionResult, IEnsureNotNull     {         public abstract void EnsureAllInjectInstanceNotNull();     }     public abstract class ActionResultBase<TController> : MyActionResult where TController : Controller     {         protected readonly Expression<Func<TController, ActionResult>> ViewNameExpression;         protected readonly IExConfigurationManager ConfigurationManager;         protected ActionResultBase (Expression<Func<TController, ActionResult>> expr)             : this(DependencyResolver.Current.GetService<IExConfigurationManager>(), expr)         {         }         protected ActionResultBase(             IExConfigurationManager configurationManager,             Expression<Func<TController, ActionResult>> expr)         {             Guard.ArgumentNotNull(expr, "ViewNameExpression");             Guard.ArgumentNotNull(configurationManager, "ConfigurationManager");             ViewNameExpression = expr;             ConfigurationManager = configurationManager;         }         protected ViewResult GetViewResult<TViewModel>(TViewModel viewModel)         {             var m = (MethodCallExpression)ViewNameExpression.Body;             if (m.Method.ReturnType != typeof(ActionResult))             {                 throw new ArgumentException("ControllerAction method '" + m.Method.Name + "' does not return type ActionResult");             }             var result = new ViewResult             {                 ViewName = m.Method.Name             };             result.ViewData.Model = viewModel;             return result;         }         public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)         {             EnsureAllInjectInstanceNotNull();         }     } I also have an interface for validation all inject objects. This interface make sure all inject objects that I inject using Autofac container are not null. The implementation of this as below public interface IEnsureNotNull     {         void EnsureAllInjectInstanceNotNull();     } Afterwards, I am just simple implementing the HomePageViewModelActionResult class like this public class HomePageViewModelActionResult<TController> : ActionResultBase<TController> where TController : Controller     {         #region variables & ctors         private readonly ICategoryRepository _categoryRepository;         private readonly IItemRepository _itemRepository;         private readonly int _numOfPage;         public HomePageViewModelActionResult(Expression<Func<TController, ActionResult>> viewNameExpression)             : this(viewNameExpression,                    DependencyResolver.Current.GetService<ICategoryRepository>(),                    DependencyResolver.Current.GetService<IItemRepository>())         {         }         public HomePageViewModelActionResult(             Expression<Func<TController, ActionResult>> viewNameExpression,             ICategoryRepository categoryRepository,             IItemRepository itemRepository)             : base(viewNameExpression)         {             _categoryRepository = categoryRepository;             _itemRepository = itemRepository;             _numOfPage = ConfigurationManager.GetAppConfigBy("NumOfPage").ToInteger();         }         #endregion         #region implementation         public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)         {             base.ExecuteResult(context);             var cats = _categoryRepository.GetCategories();             var mainViewModel = new HomePageViewModel();             var headerViewModel = new HeaderViewModel();             var footerViewModel = new FooterViewModel();             var mainPageViewModel = new MainPageViewModel();             headerViewModel.SiteTitle = "Magazine Website";             if (cats != null && cats.Any())             {                 headerViewModel.Categories = cats.ToList();                 footerViewModel.Categories = cats.ToList();             }             mainPageViewModel.LeftColumn = BindingDataForMainPageLeftColumnViewModel();             mainPageViewModel.RightColumn = BindingDataForMainPageRightColumnViewModel();             mainViewModel.Header = headerViewModel;             mainViewModel.DashBoard = new DashboardViewModel();             mainViewModel.Footer = footerViewModel;             mainViewModel.MainPage = mainPageViewModel;             GetViewResult(mainViewModel).ExecuteResult(context);         }         public override void EnsureAllInjectInstanceNotNull()         {             Guard.ArgumentNotNull(_categoryRepository, "CategoryRepository");             Guard.ArgumentNotNull(_itemRepository, "ItemRepository");             Guard.ArgumentMustMoreThanZero(_numOfPage, "NumOfPage");         }         #endregion         #region private functions         private MainPageRightColumnViewModel BindingDataForMainPageRightColumnViewModel()         {             var mainPageRightCol = new MainPageRightColumnViewModel();             mainPageRightCol.LatestNews = _itemRepository.GetNewestItem(_numOfPage).ToList();             mainPageRightCol.MostViews = _itemRepository.GetMostViews(_numOfPage).ToList();             return mainPageRightCol;         }         private MainPageLeftColumnViewModel BindingDataForMainPageLeftColumnViewModel()         {             var mainPageLeftCol = new MainPageLeftColumnViewModel();             var items = _itemRepository.GetNewestItem(_numOfPage);             if (items != null && items.Any())             {                 var firstItem = items.First();                 if (firstItem == null)                     throw new NoNullAllowedException("First Item".ToNotNullErrorMessage());                 if (firstItem.ItemContent == null)                     throw new NoNullAllowedException("First ItemContent".ToNotNullErrorMessage());                 mainPageLeftCol.FirstItem = firstItem;                 if (items.Count() > 1)                 {                     mainPageLeftCol.RemainItems = items.Where(x => x.ItemContent != null && x.Id != mainPageLeftCol.FirstItem.Id).ToList();                 }             }             return mainPageLeftCol;         }         #endregion     }  Final step, I get into HomeController and add some line of codes like this [Authorize]     public class HomeController : BaseController     {         [AllowAnonymous]         public ActionResult Index()         {             return new HomePageViewModelActionResult<HomeController>(x=>x.Index());         }         [AllowAnonymous]         public ActionResult Details(int id)         {             return new DetailsViewModelActionResult<HomeController>(x => x.Details(id), id);         }         [AllowAnonymous]         public ActionResult Category(int id)         {             return new CategoryViewModelActionResult<HomeController>(x => x.Category(id), id);         }     } As you see, the code in controller is really skinny, and all the logic I move to the custom ActionResult class. Some people said, it just move the code out of controller and put it to another class, so it is still hard to maintain. Look like it just move the complicate codes from one place to another place. But if you have a look and think it in details, you have to find out if you have code for processing all logic that related to HttpContext or something like this. You can do it on Controller, and try to delegating another logic  (such as processing business requirement, persistence data,...) to custom ActionResult class. Tell me more your thinking, I am really willing to hear all of its from you guys. All source codes can be find out at here. Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="http://weblogs.asp.net//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");

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  • Taking AIIM at Social

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Today we are pleased to have a guest post from Christian Finn (@cfinn).  Christian is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter and heads up the WebCenter evangelist team.Last week I had the privilege of speaking at AIIM’s new conference in San Francisco.  AIIM, for those of you not familiar with it, is a global community of information professionals and got its start with ECM and imaging long ago. With 65,000+ members, AIIM has now set about broadening its scope to focus more on the intersection between systems of record (think traditional ECM) and systems of engagement (think social solutions).  So AIIM’s conference is a natural place to be for WebCenter types like me, who have a foot in both of those worlds.AIIM used to have their name on a very large tradeshow, but have changed direction now to run a small, intimate conference.  The lineup of keynotes was terrific, including David Pogue of The New York Times, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, and Ted Schadler, author of Empowered among many thought-provoking and engaging speakers. (Note: Ted will soon be featured in our Social Business webcast series. Stay tuned.)John Mancini and his team at AIIM did a fabulous job running the event and the engagement from the 450 attendees was sustained over the two and a half days.  Our proudest moment was having three finalists up for AIIM awards including: San Joaquin County, CA, for a justice case management system using WebCenter Content and Oracle BPM; Medtronic and Fishbowl Solutions for their innovative iPad solutions on WebCenter Content, and the government of Louisville, Kentucky/Jefferson County for their accounts payable solution using WebCenter Content’s Image & Process Management.  The highlight of the awards night was San Joaquin winning the small organization award against some tough competition.In addition to the conversations sparked at the show, AIIM promoted the whitepapers their industry task forces have produced on the impact and opportunities created by systems of engagement and systems of record. The task forces were led by: Geoffrey Moore, the renowned high tech marketing guru and author of Crossing The Chasm; and Andrew McAfee, who coined the term and wrote the book, Enterprise 2.0. (Note: Andy will also be featured soon on the Social Business webcast series.)  These free papers make short, excellent reading and you can download them on the AIIM website: Moore highlights the changes to Enterprise IT that the social revolution will engender, and McAfee covers where and how organizations are finding value in using social techniques to foster innovation, to scale Q&A across the organization, and to connect sales and marketing for greater efficiency and effectiveness. Moore’s whitepaper is here and McAfee’s whitepapers are available here. For the benefit of those who did not get a chance to attend the AIIM conference, I’ll be posting the topics of my AIIM presentation, “Three Principles for Fixing Your Broken Organization,” here on the WebCenter blog over the rest of this week and next in a series of posts.  

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  • On Turning 30&hellip;

    - by MOSSLover
    I know I am not a wise old sage like some people in the community.  I just turned 30 however I feel like all my years looking back have changed me.  My collective experiences and thoughts have given me a different perspective on life recently.  Seven months ago my head was in a gutter and since then a lot of things have happened.  I was always the weird kid in the corner reading Star Trek books.  When I was in elementary school I thought that kids would throw me birthday parties out of pity because I was the poor kid who everyone hated.  I am no longer that person.  I realized that during the worst possible period between my 29th and 30th year when I hit rock bottom.  You all know the insane story as I’ve told it two billion times over.  Honestly it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life time, because many things would not have happened.  My friends came through for me at every given moment people from all over were checking up on me all over the world.  I fell and I landed on a bunch of people it was awesome.  I landed on family and friends who I thought I was never close enough to talk about these things.  They helped me realize I had a ton of unfulfilled dreams.  I got to move to New York City one of the greatest cities in the universe.  I got to do whatever I wanted without judgment from anyone.  I got to meet some great people at a few meetup groups in the past few months.  I got to meet an awesome person that I have been dating for 3 months.  I am trying to run for the 8 billionth time and keep up with it.  I got to go to Europe and next week for the first time New Orleans.  I got renewed for MVP for 2012.  I am grateful for all the people and things in my life.  I understand that sometimes when things seem bad you can always seek friends and family.  They will always help me.  I have to learn to lean on people sometimes just how they occasionally lean on me.  That is the biggest thing I have learned from the decade of 20 to 30.  I hope that 30 to 40 will be the best decade.  I hope that I can continue to grow.  I will catch you all later. Technorati Tags: Turning 30,Wisdom

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  • Oracle WebCenter: The Best of the Best

    - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com
    You may remember that the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  Last week, we provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter, and this week, we'll focus on Convergence and how the new release of Oracle WebCenter is the Best of the Best..Our development team has been working very hard to bring all the best capabilities from each of the existing portal products into one modern user experience platform that provides a robust foundation for moving customers into the future.  Each of the development teams still maintain their existing products to support the current customers,  but they've been tasked with converging their unique best of breed features into the new WebCenter release so that it will meet the broadest set of use cases possible. For example, we've taken the fastest and most scalable portlet engine in the industry with Oracle WebLogic Portal, integrated it within WebCenter, and improved performance further, to deliver even more performance for our customers.  In addition, we've focused on extending the reach of all the different user experience resources so that customers can deliver robust capabilities into their existing portals, applications, composite applications, dashboards, mobile applications, really any channel that requires information.  And finally, we've combined a whole set of community and multi-site capabilities leveraging the pioneering capabilities of Plumtree portal directly into the new WebCenter release.  While at the same time we've built and delivered the new WebCenter release, we've also provided new feature releases of all the existing products.  In this way, customers can continue to gain value out of their existing investments while at the same time have the smoothest path to upgrading to the new WebCenter release. With the new WebCenter release, we are delivering a converged platform to address all portal requirements that have been delivered by different point products in our portal portfolio in the past. Additionally, this release delivers the most modern user experience that goes well beyond the experience the other portal products provided. This is because the new WebCenter release has been built from the ground up with modern technologies around rich clients, SOA, and customizations compared with other portal products whose architecture has been adapted to add capabilities like AJAX, personalization, and social computing.The new WebCenter release addresses the broadest set of use cases using single product set and single architecture spanning extranet sites to social communities. It helps customers manage, maintain and develop one technology set, but leverage it throughout their organization whether it's embedded in an application or a new destination for improved customer and employee productivity. Additionally, the new release of WebCenter leverages the best and most performant features of all the existing portfolio products to deliver the fastest and most scalable portal platform.  Most importantly, it supports the broadest development models spanning from J2EE/Java to HTML/REST to .NET.Keep checking back this week as we provide additional resources and information on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter is the Best of the Best - converging all the best capabilities from each of the existing portal products into one modern user experience platform.

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  • A Plea for Plain English

    - by Tony Davis
    The English language has, within a lifetime, emerged as the ubiquitous 'international language' of scientific, political and technical communication. On the one hand, learning a single, common language, International English, has made it much easier to participate in and adopt new technologies; on the other hand it must be exasperating to have to use English at international conferences, or on community sites, when your own language has a long tradition of scientific and technical usage. It is also hard to master the subtleties of using a foreign language to explain advanced ideas. This requires English speakers to be more considerate in their writing. Even if you’re used to speaking English, you may be brought up short by this sort of verbiage… "Business Intelligence delivering actionable insights is becoming more critical in the enterprise, and these insights require large data volumes for trending and forecasting" It takes some imagination to appreciate the added hassle in working out what it means, when English is a language you only use at work. Try, just to get a vague feel for it, using Google Translate to translate it from English to Chinese and back again. "Providing actionable business intelligence point of view is becoming more and more and more business critical, and requires that these insights and projected trends in large amounts of data" Not easy eh? If you normally use a different language, you will need to pause for thought before finally working out that it really means … "Every Business Intelligence solution must be able to help companies to make decisions. In order to detect current trends, and accurately predict future ones, we need to analyze large volumes of data" Surely, it is simple politeness for English speakers to stop peppering their writing with a twisted vocabulary that renders it inaccessible to everyone else. It isn’t just the problem of writers who use long words to give added dignity to their prose. It is the use of Colloquial English. This changes and evolves at a dizzying rate, adding new terms and idioms almost daily; it is almost a new and separate language. By contrast, ‘International English', is gradually evolving separately, at its own, more sedate, pace. As such, all native English speakers need to make an effort to learn, and use it, switching from casual colloquial patter into a simpler form of communication that can be widely understood by different cultures, even if it gives you less credibility on the street. Simple-Talk is based, at least in part, on the idea that technical articles can be written simply and clearly in a form of English that can be easily understood internationally, and that they can be written, with a little editorial help, by anyone, and read by anyone, regardless of their native language. Cheers, Tony.

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  • JavaFX 2.0 at Devoxx 2011

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    JavaFX Sessions Abound JavaFX had a big presence at Devoxx 2011 as witnessed by the number of sessions this year given by leading JavaFX movers and shakers.     “JavaFX 2.0 -- A Java Developer's Guide” by Java Champions Stephen Chin and Peter Pilgrim     “JavaFX 2.0 Hands On” by Jasper Potts and Richard Bair     “Animation Bringing your User Interfaces to Life” by Michael Heinrichs and John Yoong (JavaFX development team)     “Complete Guide to Writing Custom Bindings in JavaFX 2.0” by Michael Heinrichs (JavaFX development team)     “Java Rich Clients with JavaFX 2.0” by Jasper Potts and Richard Bair     “JavaFX Properties & Bindings for Experts” (and those who want to become experts) by Michael Heinrichs (JavaFX development team)     “JavaFX Under the Hood” by Richard Bair     “JavaFX Open Mic” with Jasper Potts and Richard Bair With the release of JavaFX 2.0 and Oracle’s move towards an open development model with an open bug database already created, it’s a great time for developers to take the JavaFX plunge. One Devoxx attendee, Mark Stephens, a developer at IDRsolutions blogged about a problem he was having setting up JavaFX on NetBeans to work on his Mac. He wrote: “I’ve tried desperate measures (I even read and reread the instructions) but it did not help. Luckily, I am at Devoxx at the moment and there seem to be a lot of JavaFX gurus here (and it is running on all their Macs). So I asked them… It turns out that sometimes the software does not automatically pickup the settings like it should do if you give it the JavaFX SDK path. The solution is actually really simple (isn’t it always once you know). Enter these values manually and it will work.” He simply entered certain values and his problem was solved. He thanked Java Champion Stephen Chin, “for a great talk at Devoxx and putting me out of my misery.” JavaFX in Java Magazine Over in the November/December 2011 issue of Java Magazine, Oracle’s Simon Ritter, well known for his creative Java inventions at JavaOne, has an article up titled “JavaFX and Swing Integration” in which he shows developers how to use the power of JavaFX to migrate Swing interfaces to JavaFX. The consensus among JavaFX experts is that JavaFX is the next step in the evolution of Java as a rich client platform. In the same issue Java Champion and JavaFX maven James Weaver has an article, “Using Transitions for Animation in JavaFX 2.0”. In addition, Oracle’s Vice President of Java Client Development, Nandini Ramani, provides the keys to unlock the mysteries of JavaFX 2.0 in her Java Magazine interview. Look for the JavaFX community to grow and flourish in coming years.

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  • Is SugarCRM really adequate for custom development?

    - by dukeofgaming
    I used SugarCRM for a project about two years ago, I ran into errors from the very installation, having to hack the actual installation file to deploy the software in the server... and other erros that I can't recall now. Two years after, I'm picking it up for a project once again... oh dear, I'm feeling like I should have developed the whole thing from scratch myself. Some examples: I couldn't install it in the server (again)... I had to install it locally, then copy the files and database over to the server and manually edit the config file. Constantly getting deployment errors from the module builder... one reason is SugarCRM keeps creating a record in the upgrade_history table for a file that does not exist, I keep deleting such record and it keeps coming back corrupt. I get other deployment errors, but have not figured them out... then I have to rollback all files and database to try again. I deleted a custom module with relationships, the relationships stayed in the other modules and cannot be deleted anymore, PHP warnings all over the place. Quick create for custom modules does not appear, hack needed. Its whole cache directory is a joke, permanent data/files are stored there. The module builder interface disappears required fields. Edit the wrong thing, module builder won't deploy again... then pray Quick Repair and/or Rebuild Relationships do the trick. My impression of SugarCRM now is that, regardless of its pretty exterior and apparent functionality, it is a very low quality piece of software. This even scared me more: http://amplicate.com/hate/sugarcrm; a quote: I wis this info had been available when I tried to implement it 2 years ago... I searched high and low and the only info I found was positive. Yes, it's a piece of crap. The community edition was full of bugs... nothing worked. Essentially I got fired for implementing it. I'm glad though, because now I work for myself, am much happier and make more money... so, I should really thank SugarCRM for sucking so much I guess! I figured that perhaps some of you have had similar experiences, and have either sticked with SugarCRM or moved on to another solution. I'm very interested in knowing what your resolutions were -or your current situations are- to make up my own mind, since the project I'm working on is long term and I'm feeling SugarCRM will be more an obstacle than an aid. Thanks in advance.

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