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• My Thoughts On the Xbox 180

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/06/21/my-thoughts-on-the-xbox-180.aspx Everyone seems to be putting their 0.00237 cents into the wishing well over Microsoft's recent decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. However, there have been a few issues that nobody has touched. As such, I have decided to dig 0.00237 cents out of my pocket. First, let me be clear about this point. I do not support the decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. I wanted that point to be expressed first and unambiguously. I will say it again. I do not support the decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. Now that I have that out of the way, let me go into my rationale. This decision removes most of the cool features that enticed me to pre-order the console. No, I didn't cancel my pre-order. There is still five months before the release of the console, and there is still a plethora of information that we, as consumers, do not have. With that, it should be noted that much of the talk in this post is speculation and rhetoric. I do not have any insider information that you do not possess. The persistent connection would have allowed the console to do many of the functions for which we have been begging. That demo where someone was playing Ryse, seamlessly accepted a multiplayer challenge in Killer Instinct, played the match (and a rematch,) and then jumped back into Ryse. That's gone, if you bought the game on disc. The new, DRM free system will require the disc in the system to play a game. That bullet point where one Xbox Live account could have up to 10 slave accounts so families could play together, no matter where they were located. That's gone as well. The promise of huge, expansive, dynamically changing worlds that was brought to us with the power of cloud computing. Well, "the people" didn't want there to be a forced, persistent connection. As such, developers can't rely on a connection and, as such, that feature is gone. This is akin to the removal of the hard drive on the Xbox 360. The list continues, but the enthusiast press has enumerated the list far better than I wish. All of this is because the Xbox team saw the HUGE success of Steam and decided to borrow a few ideas. Yes, Steam. The service that everyone hated for the first six months (for the same reasons the Xbox One is getting flack.) There was an initial growing pain. However, it is now lauded as the way games distribution should be handled. Unless you are Microsoft. I do find it curious that many of the features were originally announced for the PS4 during its unveiling. However, much of that was left strangely absent for Sony's E3 press conference. Instead, we received a single, static slide that basically said the exact opposite of Microsoft's plans. It is not farfetched to believe that slide came into existence during the approximately seven hours between the two media briefings. The thing that majorly annoys me over this whole kerfuffle is that the single thing that caused the call to arms is, really, not an issue. Microsoft never said they were going to block used sales. They said it was up to the publisher to make that decision. This would have allowed publishers to reclaim some of the costs of development in subsequent sales of the product. If you sell your game to GameStop for 7 USD, GameStop is going to sell it for 55 USD. That is 48 USD pure profit for them. Some publishers asked GameStop for a small cut. Was this a huge, money grubbing scheme? Well, yes, but the idea was that they have to handle server infrastructure for dormant accounts, etc. Of course, GameStop flatly refused, and the Online Pass was born. Fortunately, this trend didn’t last, and most publishers have stopped the practice. The ability to sell "licenses" has already begun to be challenged. Are you living in the EU? If so, companies must allow you to sell digital property. With this precedent in place, it's only a matter of time before other areas follow suit. If GameStop were smart, they should have immediately contacted every publisher out there to get the rights to become a clearing house for these licenses. Then, they keep their business model and could reduce their brick and mortar footprint. The digital landscape is changing. We need to not block this process. As Seth MacFarlane best said "Some issues are so important that you should drag people kicking and screaming." I believe this was said on an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher about the issue of Gay Marriages. Much like the original source, this is an issue that we need to drag people to the correct, progressive position. Microsoft, as a company, actually has the resources to weather the transition period. They have a great pool of first and second party developers that can leverage this new framework to prove the validity. Over time, the third party developers will get excited to use these tools. As an old C++ guy, I resisted C# for years. Now, I think it's one of the best languages I've ever used. I have a server room and a Co-Lo full of servers, so I originally didn't see the value in Azure. Now, I wish I could move every one of my projects into the cloud. I still LOVE getting physical packaging, which my music and games collection will proudly attest. However, I have started to see the value in pure digital, and have found ways to integrate this into the ways I consume those products. I can, honestly, understand how some parts of the population would be very apprehensive about this new landscape. There were valid arguments about people with no internet access. There are ways to combat these problems. These methods do not require us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. However, the number of people in the computer industry that I have seen cry foul is truly appalling. We are the forward looking people that help show how technology can improve people's lives. If we can't see the value of the brief pain involved with an exciting new ecosystem, than who will?

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• Segfault when iterating over a map<string, string> and drawing its contents using SDL_TTF

  - by Michael Stahre

  I'm not entirely sure this question belongs on gamedev.stackexchange, but I'm technically working on a game and working with SDL, so it might not be entirely offtopic. I've written a class called DebugText. The point of the class is to have a nice way of printing values of variables to the game screen. The idea is to call SetDebugText() with the variables in question every time they change or, as is currently the case, every time the game's Update() is called. The issue is that when iterating over the map that contains my variables and their latest updated values, I get segfaults. See the comments in DrawDebugText() below, it specifies where the error happens. I've tried splitting the calls to it-first and it-second into separate lines and found that the problem doesn't always happen when calling it-first. It alters between it-first and it-second. I can't find a pattern. It doesn't fail on every call to DrawDebugText() either. It might fail on the third time DrawDebugText() is called, or it might fail on the fourth. Class header: #ifndef CLIENT_DEBUGTEXT_H #define CLIENT_DEBUGTEXT_H #include <Map> #include <Math.h> #include <sstream> #include <SDL.h> #include <SDL_ttf.h> #include "vector2.h" using std::string; using std::stringstream; using std::map; using std::pair; using game::Vector2; namespace game { class DebugText { private: TTF_Font* debug_text_font; map<string, string>* debug_text_list; public: void SetDebugText(string var, bool value); void SetDebugText(string var, float value); void SetDebugText(string var, int value); void SetDebugText(string var, Vector2 value); void SetDebugText(string var, string value); int DrawDebugText(SDL_Surface*, SDL_Rect*); void InitDebugText(); void Clear(); }; } #endif Class source file: #include "debugtext.h" namespace game { // Copypasta function for handling the toString conversion template <class T> inline string to_string (const T& t) { stringstream ss (stringstream::in | stringstream::out); ss << t; return ss.str(); } // Initializes SDL_TTF and sets its font void DebugText::InitDebugText() { if(TTF_WasInit()) TTF_Quit(); TTF_Init(); debug_text_font = TTF_OpenFont("LiberationSans-Regular.ttf", 16); TTF_SetFontStyle(debug_text_font, TTF_STYLE_NORMAL); } // Iterates over the current debug_text_list and draws every element on the screen. // After drawing with SDL you need to get a rect specifying the area on the screen that was changed and tell SDL that this part of the screen needs to be updated. this is done in the game's Draw() function // This function sets rects_to_update to the new list of rects provided by all of the surfaces and returns the number of rects in the list. These two parameters are used in Draw() when calling on SDL_UpdateRects(), which takes an SDL_Rect* and a list length int DebugText::DrawDebugText(SDL_Surface* screen, SDL_Rect* rects_to_update) { if(debug_text_list == NULL) return 0; if(!TTF_WasInit()) InitDebugText(); rects_to_update = NULL; // Specifying the font color SDL_Color font_color = {0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00}; // r, g, b, unused int row_count = 0; string line; // The iterator variable map<string, string>::iterator it; // Gets the iterator and iterates over it for(it = debug_text_list->begin(); it != debug_text_list->end(); it++) { // Takes the first value (the name of the variable) and the second value (the value of the parameter in string form) //---------THIS LINE GIVES ME SEGFAULTS----- line = it->first + ": " + it->second; //------------------------------------------ // Creates a surface with the text on it that in turn can be rendered to the screen itself later SDL_Surface* debug_surface = TTF_RenderText_Solid(debug_text_font, line.c_str(), font_color); if(debug_surface == NULL) { // A standard check for errors fprintf(stderr, "Error: %s", TTF_GetError()); return NULL; } else { // If SDL_TTF did its job right, then we now set a destination rect row_count++; SDL_Rect dstrect = {5, 5, 0, 0}; // x, y, w, h dstrect.x = 20; dstrect.y = 20*row_count; // Draws the surface with the text on it to the screen int res = SDL_BlitSurface(debug_surface,NULL,screen,&dstrect); if(res != 0) { //Just an error check fprintf(stderr, "Error: %s", SDL_GetError()); return NULL; } // Creates a new rect to specify the area that needs to be updated with SDL_Rect* new_rect_to_update = (SDL_Rect*) malloc(sizeof(SDL_Rect)); new_rect_to_update->h = debug_surface->h; new_rect_to_update->w = debug_surface->w; new_rect_to_update->x = dstrect.x; new_rect_to_update->y = dstrect.y; // Just freeing the surface since it isn't necessary anymore SDL_FreeSurface(debug_surface); // Creates a new list of rects with room for the new rect SDL_Rect* newtemp = (SDL_Rect*) malloc(row_count*sizeof(SDL_Rect)); // Copies the data from the old list of rects to the new one memcpy(newtemp, rects_to_update, (row_count-1)*sizeof(SDL_Rect)); // Adds the new rect to the new list newtemp[row_count-1] = *new_rect_to_update; // Frees the memory used by the old list free(rects_to_update); // And finally redirects the pointer to the old list to the new list rects_to_update = newtemp; newtemp = NULL; } } // When the entire map has been iterated over, return the number of lines that were drawn, ie. the number of rects in the returned rect list return row_count; } // The SetDebugText used by all the SetDebugText overloads // Takes two strings, inserts them into the map as a pair void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, string value) { if (debug_text_list == NULL) { debug_text_list = new map<string, string>(); } debug_text_list->erase(var); debug_text_list->insert(pair<string, string>(var, value)); } // Writes the bool to a string and calls SetDebugText(string, string) void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, bool value) { string result; if (value) result = "True"; else result = "False"; SetDebugText(var, result); } // Does the same thing, but uses to_string() to convert the float void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, float value) { SetDebugText(var, to_string(value)); } // Same as above, but int void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, int value) { SetDebugText(var, to_string(value)); } // Vector2 is a struct of my own making. It contains the two float vars x and y void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, Vector2 value) { SetDebugText(var + ".x", to_string(value.x)); SetDebugText(var + ".y", to_string(value.y)); } // Empties the list. I don't actually use this in my code. Shame on me for writing something I don't use. void DebugText::Clear() { if(debug_text_list != NULL) debug_text_list->clear(); } }

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• ASP.NET MVC 2 throws exception for ‘favicon.ico’

  - by nmarun

  I must be on fire or something – third blog in 2 days… awesome! Before I begin, in case you’re wondering, favicon.ico is the small image that appears to the left of your web address, once the page loads. In order to learn more about MVC or any thing for that matter, it’s better to look at the source itself. Since MVC is open source (at least some part of it is), I started looking at the source code that’s available for download. While doing so, I hit Steve Sanderson’s blog site where he explains in great detail the way to debug your app using ASP.NET MVC source code. For those who are not aware, Steve Sanderson’s book - Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, is one of the best books to learn about MVC. Alrighty, I followed the article and I hit F5 to debug the default / unchanged MVC project. I put a breakpoint in the DefaultControllerFactory.cs, CreateController() method. To know a little more about this class and the method, read this. Sure enough, the control stopped at the breakpoint and I hit F5 again and the page rendered just fine. But then what’s this? The breakpoint was hit again, as if something else was being requested. I now hovered my mouse over the ‘controllerName’ parameter and it says – favicon.ico. This by itself was more than enough for me to raise my eye-brows, but what happened next just took the ground below my feet. Oh, oh, I’m sorry I’m just typing, no code, no image, so here are a couple of screen captures. The first one shows the request for the Home controller; I get ‘Home’ when I hover over the parameter: And here’s the one that shows the same for call for ‘favicon.ico’. So, I step through the code and when the control reaches line 91 – GetControllerInstance() method, I step in. This is when I had the ‘ground-losing’ experience. Wow, an exception is being thrown for this file and that too in RTM. For some reason MVC thinks, this as a controller and tries to run it through the MvcHandler and it hits this snag. So it seems like this will happen for any MVC 2 site and this did not happen for me in the previous version of MVC. Before I get to how to resolve it, here’s another way of reproducing this exception. Revert back all your changes that you did as mentioned in Steve’s blog above. Now, add a class to your MVC project and call it say, MyControllerFactory and let this inherit from DefaultControllerFactory class. (Read this for details on the DefaultControllerFactory class is and how it is used in a different context). Add an override for the CreateController() method and for the sake of this blog, just copy the same content from the DefaultControllerFactory class. The last step is to tell your MVC app to use the MyControllerFactory class instead of the default one. To do this, go to your Global.asax.cs file and add line 6 of the snippet below: 1: protected void Application_Start() 2: { 3: AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); 4:   5: RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); 6: ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new MyControllerFactory()); 7: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now, you’re ready to reproduce the issue. Just F5 the project and when you hit the overridden CreateController() method for the second time, this is what it looks like for me: And continuing further gives me the same exception. I believe this is something that MS should fix, as not having ‘favicon.ico’ file will be common for most of the applications. So I think the when you create an MVC project, line 6 should be added by default by Visual Studio itself: 1: public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication 2: { 3: public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) 4: { 5: routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); 6: routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico"); 7:   8: routes.MapRoute( 9: "Default", // Route name 10: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 11: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults 12: ); 13: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } There it is, that’s the solution to avoid the exception altogether. I tried this both IE8 and Firefox browsers and was able to successfully reproduce the error. Hope someone will look at this issue and find a fix. Just before I finish up, I found another ‘bug’, if you want to call it, with Visual Studio 2008. Remember how you could change what browser you want your application to run in by just right clicking on the .aspx file and choosing ‘Browse with…’? Seems like that’s missing when you’re working with an MVC project. In order to test the above bug in the other browser, I had to load a classic ASP.NET project, change the settings and then run my MVC project. Felt kinda ‘icky’, for lack of a better word.

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• SQL University: Database testing and refactoring tools and examples

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Database testing and refactoring tools and examples This is the third and last part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at tools we can test and refactor with plus some an example of the both. Tools of the trade First a few thoughts about how to go about testing a database. I'm firmily against any testing tools that go into the database itself or need an extra database. Unit tests for the database and applications using the database should all be in one place using the same technology. By using database specific frameworks we fragment our tests into many places and increase test system complexity. Let’s take a look at some testing tools. 1. NUnit, xUnit, MbUnit All three are .Net testing frameworks meant to unit test .Net application. But we can test databases with them just fine. I use NUnit because I’ve always used it for work and personal projects. One day this might change. So the thing to remember is to be flexible if something better comes along. All three are quite similar and you should be able to switch between them without much problem. 2. TSQLUnit As much as this framework is helpful for the non-C# savvy folks I don’t like it for the reason I stated above. It lives in the database and thus fragments the testing infrastructure. Also it appears that it’s not being actively developed anymore. 3. DbFit I haven’t had the pleasure of trying this tool just yet but it’s on my to-do list. From what I’ve read and heard Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic on Twitter) has done a remarkable job with it. 4. Redgate SQL Refactor and Apex SQL Refactor Neither of these refactoring tools are free, however if you have hardcore refactoring planned they are worth while looking into. I’ve only used the Red Gate’s Refactor and was quite impressed with it. 5. Reverting the database state I’ve talked before about ways to revert a database to pre-test state after unit testing. This still holds and I haven’t changed my mind. Also make sure to read the comments as they are quite informative. I especially like the idea of setting up and tearing down the schema for each test group with NHibernate. Testing and refactoring example We’ll take a look at the simple schema and data test for a view and refactoring the SELECT * in that view. We’ll use a single table PhoneNumbers with ID and Phone columns. Then we’ll refactor the Phone column into 3 columns Prefix, Number and Suffix. Lastly we’ll remove the original Phone column. Then we’ll check how the view behaves with tests in NUnit. The comments in code explain the problem so be sure to read them. I’m assuming you know NUnit and C#. T-SQL Code C# test code USE tempdbGOCREATE TABLE PhoneNumbers( ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Phone VARCHAR(20))GOINSERT INTO PhoneNumbers(Phone)SELECT '111 222333 444' UNION ALLSELECT '555 666777 888'GO-- notice we don't have WITH SCHEMABINDINGCREATE VIEW vPhoneNumbersAS SELECT * FROM PhoneNumbersGO-- Let's take a look at what the view returns -- If we add a new columns and rows both tests will failSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers GO -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- refactor to split Phone column into 3 partsALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Prefix VARCHAR(3)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Number VARCHAR(6)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Suffix VARCHAR(3)GO-- update the new columnsUPDATE PhoneNumbers SET Prefix = LEFT(Phone, 3), Number = SUBSTRING(Phone, 5, 6), Suffix = RIGHT(Phone, 3)GO-- remove the old columnALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers DROP COLUMN PhoneGO-- This returns unexpected results!-- it returns 2 columns ID and Phone even though -- we don't have a Phone column anymore.-- Notice that the data is from the Prefix column-- This is a danger of SELECT *SELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- for a fix we have to call sp_refreshview -- to refresh the view definitionEXEC sp_refreshview 'vPhoneNumbers'-- after the refresh the view returns 4 columns-- this breaks the input/output behavior of the database-- which refactoring MUST NOT doSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will FAIL -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- to fix the input/output behavior change problem -- we have to concat the 3 columns into one named PhoneALTER VIEW vPhoneNumbersASSELECT ID, Prefix + ' ' + Number + ' ' + Suffix AS PhoneFROM PhoneNumbersGO-- now it works as expectedSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- clean upDROP VIEW vPhoneNumbersDROP TABLE PhoneNumbers [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCoorectColumns(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb // note the SET FMTONLY ON with which we return only schema and no data using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SET FMTONLY ON; SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned schema: number of columns, column names and data types Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].Caption, "ID"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].DataType, typeof(int)); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].Caption, "Phone"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].DataType, typeof(string)); }} [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCorrectData(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned data: number of rows and their values Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["ID"], 1); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["Phone"], "111 222333 444"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["ID"], 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["Phone"], "555 666777 888"); }}   With this simple example we’ve seen how a very simple schema can cause a lot of problems in the whole application/database system if it doesn’t have tests. Imagine what would happen if some outside process would depend on that view. It would get wrong data and propagate it silently throughout the system. And that is not good. So have tests at least for the crucial parts of your systems. And with that we conclude the Database Testing and Refactoring week at SQL University. Hope you learned something new and enjoy the learning weeks to come. Have fun!

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• Scripting Language Sessions at Oracle OpenWorld and MySQL Connect, 2012

  - by cj

  This posts highlights some great scripting language sessions coming up at the Oracle OpenWorld and MySQL Connect conferences. These events are happening in San Francisco from the end of September. You can search for other interesting conference sessions in the Content Catalog. Also check out what is happening at JavaOne in that event's Content Catalog (I haven't included sessions from it in this post.) To find the timeslots and locations of each session, click their respective link and check the "Session Schedule" box on the top right. GEN8431 - General Session: What’s New in Oracle Database Application Development This general session takes a look at what’s been new in the last year in Oracle Database application development tools using the latest generation of database technology. Topics range from Oracle SQL Developer and Oracle Application Express to Java and PHP. (Thomas Kyte - Architect, Oracle) BOF9858 - Meet the Developers of Database Access Services (OCI, ODBC, DRCP, PHP, Python) This session is your opportunity to meet in person the Oracle developers who have built Oracle Database access tools and products such as the Oracle Call Interface (OCI), Oracle C++ Call Interface (OCCI), and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers; Transparent Application Failover (TAF); Oracle Database Instant Client; Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP); Oracle Net Services, and so on. The team also works with those who develop the PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl adapters for Oracle Database. Come discuss with them the features you like, your pains, and new product enhancements in the latest database technology. CON8506 - Syndication and Consolidation: Oracle Database Driver for MySQL Applications This technical session presents a new Oracle Database driver that enables you to run MySQL applications (written in PHP, Perl, C, C++, and so on) against Oracle Database with almost no code change. Use cases for such a driver include application syndication such as interoperability across a relationship database management system, application migration, and database consolidation. In addition, the session covers enhancements in database technology that enable and simplify the migration of third-party databases and applications to and consolidation with Oracle Database. Attend this session to learn more and see a live demo. (Srinath Krishnaswamy - Director, Software Development, Oracle. Kuassi Mensah - Director Product Management, Oracle. Mohammad Lari - Principal Technical Staff, Oracle ) CON9167 - Current State of PHP and MySQL Together, PHP and MySQL power large parts of the Web. The developers of both technologies continue to enhance their software to ensure that developers can be satisfied despite all their changing and growing needs. This session presents an overview of changes in PHP 5.4, which was released earlier this year and shows you various new MySQL-related features available for PHP, from transparent client-side caching to direct support for scaling and high-availability needs. (Johannes Schlüter - SoftwareDeveloper, Oracle) CON8983 - Sharding with PHP and MySQL In deploying MySQL, scale-out techniques can be used to scale out reads, but for scaling out writes, other techniques have to be used. To distribute writes over a cluster, it is necessary to shard the database and store the shards on separate servers. This session provides a brief introduction to traditional MySQL scale-out techniques in preparation for a discussion on the different sharding techniques that can be used with MySQL server and how they can be implemented with PHP. You will learn about static and dynamic sharding schemes, their advantages and drawbacks, techniques for locating and moving shards, and techniques for resharding. (Mats Kindahl - Senior Principal Software Developer, Oracle) CON9268 - Developing Python Applications with MySQL Utilities and MySQL Connector/Python This session discusses MySQL Connector/Python and the MySQL Utilities component of MySQL Workbench and explains how to write MySQL applications in Python. It includes in-depth explanations of the features of MySQL Connector/Python and the MySQL Utilities library, along with example code to illustrate the concepts. Those interested in learning how to expand or build their own utilities and connector features will benefit from the tips and tricks from the experts. This session also provides an opportunity to meet directly with the engineers and provide feedback on your issues and priorities. You can learn what exists today and influence future developments. (Geert Vanderkelen - Software Developer, Oracle) BOF9141 - MySQL Utilities and MySQL Connector/Python: Python Developers, Unite! Come to this lively discussion of the MySQL Utilities component of MySQL Workbench and MySQL Connector/Python. It includes in-depth explanations of the features and dives into the code for those interested in learning how to expand or build their own utilities and connector features. This is an audience-driven session, so put on your best Python shirt and let’s talk about MySQL Utilities and MySQL Connector/Python. (Geert Vanderkelen - Software Developer, Oracle. Charles Bell - Senior Software Developer, Oracle) CON3290 - Integrating Oracle Database with a Social Network Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps. There are many social network sites, each with their own APIs for sharing data with them. Most developers do not realize that Oracle Database has base tools for communicating with these sites, enabling all manner of information, including multimedia, to be passed back and forth between the sites. This technical presentation goes through the methods in PL/SQL for connecting to, and then sending and retrieving, all types of data between these sites. (Marcelle Kratochvil - CTO, Piction) CON3291 - Storing and Tuning Unstructured Data and Multimedia in Oracle Database Database administrators need to learn new skills and techniques when the decision is made in their organization to let Oracle Database manage its unstructured data. They will face new scalability challenges. A single row in a table can become larger than a whole database. This presentation covers the techniques a DBA needs for managing the large volume of data in a standard Oracle Database instance. (Marcelle Kratochvil - CTO, Piction) CON3292 - Using PHP, Perl, Visual Basic, Ruby, and Python for Multimedia in Oracle Database These five programming languages are just some of the most popular ones in use at the moment in the marketplace. This presentation details how you can use them to access and retrieve multimedia from Oracle Database. It covers programming techniques and methods for achieving faster development against Oracle Database. (Marcelle Kratochvil - CTO, Piction) UGF5181 - Building Real-World Oracle DBA Tools in Perl Perl is not normally associated with building mission-critical application or DBA tools. Learn why Perl could be a good choice for building your next killer DBA app. This session draws on real-world experience of building DBA tools in Perl, showing the framework and architecture needed to deal with portability, efficiency, and maintainability. Topics include Perl frameworks; Which Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) modules are good to use; Perl and CPAN module licensing; Perl and Oracle connectivity; Compiling and deploying your app; An example of what is possible with Perl. (Arjen Visser - CEO & CTO, Dbvisit Software Limited) CON3153 - Perl: A DBA’s and Developer’s Best (Forgotten) Friend This session reintroduces Perl as a language of choice for many solutions for DBAs and developers. Discover what makes Perl so successful and why it is so versatile in our day-to-day lives. Perl can automate all those manual tasks and is truly platform-independent. Perl may not be in the limelight the way other languages are, but it is a remarkable language, it is still very current with ongoing development, and it has amazing online resources. Learn what makes Perl so great (including CPAN), get an introduction to Perl language syntax, find out what you can use Perl for, hear how Oracle uses Perl, discover the best way to learn Perl, and take away a small Perl project challenge. (Arjen Visser - CEO & CTO, Dbvisit Software Limited) CON10332 - Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service’s Connect PHP API: Intro, What’s New, and Roadmap Connect PHP is a public API that enables developers to build solutions with the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service platform. This API is used primarily by developers working within the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Cloud Service framework who are looking to gain access to data and services hosted by the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service platform through a backward-compatible API. Connect for PHP leverages the same data model and services as the Connect Web Services for SOAP API. Come to this session to get an introduction and learn what’s new and what’s coming up. (Mark Rhoads - Senior Principal Applications Engineer, Oracle. Mark Ericson - Sr. Principle Product Manager, Oracle) CON10330 - Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service APIs and Frameworks Overview Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service APIs are available in the following areas: desktop UI, Web services, customer portal, PHP, and knowledge. These frameworks provide access to Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service’s Connect Common Object Model and custom objects. This session provides a broad overview of capabilities in all these areas. (Mark Ericson - Sr. Principle Product Manager, Oracle)

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• Try a sample: Using the counter predicate for event sampling

  - by extended_events

  Extended Events offers a rich filtering mechanism, called predicates, that allows you to reduce the number of events you collect by specifying criteria that will be applied during event collection. (You can find more information about predicates in Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events (by Jonathan Kehayias)) By evaluating predicates early in the event firing sequence we can reduce the performance impact of collecting events by stopping event collection when the criteria are not met. You can specify predicates on both event fields and on a special object called a predicate source. Predicate sources are similar to action in that they typically are related to some type of global information available from the server. You will find that many of the actions available in Extended Events have equivalent predicate sources, but actions and predicates sources are not the same thing. Applying predicates, whether on a field or predicate source, is very similar to what you are used to in T-SQL in terms of how they work; you pick some field/source and compare it to a value, for example, session_id = 52. There is one predicate source that merits special attention though, not just for its special use, but for how the order of predicate evaluation impacts the behavior you see. I’m referring to the counter predicate source. The counter predicate source gives you a way to sample a subset of events that otherwise meet the criteria of the predicate; for example you could collect every other event, or only every tenth event. Simple CountingThe counter predicate source works by creating an in memory counter that increments every time the predicate statement is evaluated. Here is a simple example with my favorite event, sql_statement_completed, that only collects the second statement that is run. (OK, that’s not much of a sample, but this is for demonstration purposes. Here is the session definition: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.counter = 2)ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS) You can find general information about the session DDL syntax in BOL and from Pedro’s post Introduction to Extended Events. The important part here is the WHERE statement that defines that I only what the event where package0.count = 2; in other words, only the second instance of the event. Notice that I need to provide the package name along with the predicate source. You don’t need to provide the package name if you’re using event fields, only for predicate sources. Let’s say I run the following test queries: -- Run three statements to test the sessionSELECT 'This is the first statement'GOSELECT 'This is the second statement'GOSELECT 'This is the third statement';GO Once you return the event data from the ring buffer and parse the XML (see my earlier post on reading event data) you should see something like this: event_name sql_text sql_statement_completed SELECT ‘This is the second statement’ You can see that only the second statement from the test was actually collected. (Feel free to try this yourself. Check out what happens if you remove the WHERE statement from your session. Go ahead, I’ll wait.) Percentage Sampling OK, so that wasn’t particularly interesting, but you can probably see that this could be interesting, for example, lets say I need a 25% sample of the statements executed on my server for some type of QA analysis, that might be more interesting than just the second statement. All comparisons of predicates are handled using an object called a predicate comparator; the simple comparisons such as equals, greater than, etc. are mapped to the common mathematical symbols you know and love (eg. = and >), but to do the less common comparisons you will need to use the predicate comparators directly. You would probably look to the MOD operation to do this type sampling; we would too, but we don’t call it MOD, we call it divides_by_uint64. This comparator evaluates whether one number is divisible by another with no remainder. The general syntax for using a predicate comparator is pred_comp(field, value), field is always first and value is always second. So lets take a look at how the session changes to answer our new question of 25% sampling: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test_25 ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.divides_by_uint64(package0.counter,4))ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS)GO Here I’ve replaced the simple equivalency check with the divides_by_uint64 comparator to check if the counter is evenly divisible by 4, which gives us back every fourth record. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to test this session. Why order matters I indicated at the start of this post that order matters when it comes to the counter predicate – it does. Like most other predicate systems, Extended Events evaluates the predicate statement from left to right; as soon as the predicate statement is proven false we abandon evaluation of the remainder of the statement. The counter predicate source is only incremented when it is evaluated so whether or not the counter is incremented will depend on where it is in the predicate statement and whether a previous criteria made the predicate false or not. Here is a generic example: Pred1: (WHERE statement_1 AND package0.counter = 2)Pred2: (WHERE package0.counter = 2 AND statement_1) Let’s say I cause a number of events as follows and examine what happens to the counter predicate source. Iteration Statement Pred1 Counter Pred2 Counter A Not statement_1 0 1 B statement_1 1 2 C Not statement_1 1 3 D statement_1 2 4 As you can see, in the case of Pred1, statement_1 is evaluated first, when it fails (A & C) predicate evaluation is stopped and the counter is not incremented. With Pred2 the counter is evaluated first, so it is incremented on every iteration of the event and the remaining parts of the predicate are then evaluated. In this example, Pred1 would return an event for D while Pred2 would return an event for B. But wait, there is an interesting side-effect here; consider Pred2 if I had run my statements in the following order: Not statement_1 Not statement_1 statement_1 statement_1 In this case I would never get an event back from the system because the point at which counter=2, the rest of the predicate evaluates as false so the event is not returned. If you’re using the counter target for sampling and you’re not getting the expected events, or any events, check the order of the predicate criteria. As a general rule I’d suggest that the counter criteria should be the last element of your predicate statement since that will assure that your sampling rate will apply to the set of event records defined by the rest of your predicate. Aside: I’m interested in hearing about uses for putting the counter predicate criteria earlier in the predicate statement. If you have one, post it in a comment to share with the class. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – June 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity. Please feel free to send us your news! Lucas Jellema ?Getting started with Java EE 7: The Tutorial http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/7/tutorial/doc/home.htm … Simon Haslam I'm looking forward to starting a "WLS on ODA" proof of concept - some ideas for testing: http://www.veriton.co.uk/roller/fmw/entry/virtualised_oda_proof_of_concept … Frank Munz ?It's not too late - I just submitted two presentations about #OracleWebLogic and #Coherence for the @DOAGeV conference in Nürnberg. Did you? Arun Gupta ?Tyrus 1.0 User Guide: https://tyrus.java.net/documentation/1.0/user-guide.html … #WebSocket #JavaEE7 #GlassFish Arun Gupta #JavaEE7 Launch Webinar Technical Breakout replays on Youtube: http://bit.ly/12uUicT JSON 1.0 , EJB .2, Batch 1.0 more coming! OracleBlogs ?FREE Virtual Developer Day: Java SE, Java EE, Java Emebedded on Jun 19th and 25th http://ow.ly/2xBkwV Markus Eisele #Oracle #JavaSE Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement - June 2013 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/javacpujun2013-1899847.html … #security OracleSupport_WLS ?Simple Custom #JMX MBeans with #WebLogic 12c and #Spring http://pub.vitrue.com/3kEr Oracle Technet Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 - 4pm - Grand Ballroom Salon A/B #qconnewyork WebLogic Community Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g (11.1.1.7) Starter Kit available & Customizable Demos http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BK Oracle Technet #Java EE 7: Moving Java Forward for the Enterprise | @java http://pub.vitrue.com/tHiM OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Forms to ADF Modernization Reference - Convero (AMEC) Project | @AndrejusB http://pub.vitrue.com/lZPR WebLogic Community ?ExaLogic In Memory Applications & Whitepapers Building Large Scale E-Commerce Platforms & Rethink the Entire Application Lifecycle… WebLogic Community ?Coherence YouTube videos http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BG Arun Gupta ?WARNING: Next 2 days are going to be loaded with #JavaEE7 launch related tweets, and offline next week! JDeveloper & ADF Using Contextual Event in Oracle ADF http://dlvr.it/3Vpybr Oracle WebLogic Check out new blog on #hybrid_cloud & why choice is important http://bit.ly/1b1QGhL Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle Forms to ADF Modernization Reference - Convero (AMEC) Project http://fb.me/1M9iWNmAw WebLogic Community WebLogic on Oracle Database Appliance by Frances Zhao http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BE OTNArchBeat ?New: A-Team Chronicles >> A great resource for technical content covering Oracle Fusion Middleware / Fusion Apps http://pub.vitrue.com/qbzS Oracle for Partners ?Take Java To The Edge: Java Virtual Developer Day – June 19 & June 25 http://bit.ly/19fGlSX Adam Bien ?Looking forward to tomorrow's #javaee7 + #angularjs #html5 marriage at #jpoint. See you there: http://www.jpoint.nl/meetingpoint/editie-2013#sessie-1 … shay shmeltzer ?There is a new patch for the #Oracle #ADF Mobile extension - use help->check for updates to get it. Frank Munz ?Not using @OracleWebLogic 12c yet? Australia does! Reviews from my @AUSOUG workshops in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. http://goo.gl/BfVc4 Arun Gupta ?WebSocket, Server-Sent Events, #JavaEE7 sessions accepted at #jaxlondon ... that's gonna be at least third trip to London this year! WebLogic Community SPARC T5-8 Delivers Best Single System SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark running WebLogic 12c http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BC WebLogic Community The Ultimate Java EE Event - 16 Power Workshops mit allen wichtigen Java-EE-Themen http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BY Oracle WebLogic ?@OracleWebLogic 7 Jun New Blog Post: Using try-with-resources with JDBC objects http://ow.ly/2xryb5 JDeveloper & ADF Switching Lists of Values http://dlvr.it/3PbCkw WebLogic Community ?YouTube channel Learning Oracle's ADF http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zA Markus Eisele [GER] RT @heisedc: #Java-Entwicklung in #Oracles Public #Cloud http://heise.de/-1866388/ftw OracleBlogs ?Coherence Incubator & Community Source Code & Release Documentation http://ow.ly/2x2fXK chriscmuir ?New blog post: Migrating ADF Mobile apps from 1.0 to 1.1 https://blogs.oracle.com/onesizedoesntfitall/entry/migrating_adf_mobile_apps_from … JDeveloper & ADF ?ADF JavaScript Partitioning for Performance http://dlvr.it/3Trw15 WebLogic Community WebLogic Server Security Workshop June 27th 2013 Germany http://wp.me/p1LMIb-C7 WebLogic Community Oracle Optimized Solution for WebLogic Server 12c http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BA WebLogic Community Virtualize and Run Your Forms Applications in the Cloud - Now On Demand http://wp.me/p1LMIb-By Lucas Jellema Innteresting presentation on various aspects of end user assistance in Fusion Applications (ADF based): http://www.slideshare.net/uobroin/ouag-ireland-final2012slideshare … Adam Bien ?Summer Of JavaEE Workshops And Gigs: Free Hacking night:11.06.2013, Utrecht JavaEE 7 Meets HTML 5 and AngularJ... http://bit.ly/11XRjt4 WebLogic Community ?Real World ADF Design & Architecture Principles Trainings Germany, Poland & Portugal http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bw Oracle for Partners ?JAVA Virtual Developer Day – June 19 & June 25 - Watch educational content and engage with Oracle experts online https://oracle.6connex.com/portal/java2013/login/?langR=en_US&mcc=OPNNSL … Markus Eisele ?[blog] Java EE 7 is final. Thoughts, Insights and further Pointers. http://dlvr.it/3SrxnB #javaee7 WebLogic Community Oracle takes the top spot for market share in the Application Server Market Segment for 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bu OTNArchBeat ?Oracle ACE Director @LucasJellema is "very pleasantly surprised" with the new ADF Academy. http://pub.vitrue.com/8fad chriscmuir ?Sell out crowd for our ADF architecture course in Munich #adfarch pic.twitter.com/zhNtQJ25JV Markus Eisele ?[blog] New German Article: Java 7 Update 21 Security Improvements http://dlvr.it/3Sc8V9 #java #heise #security Markus Eisele ?[blog] New German Article: Oracle Java Cloud Service http://dlvr.it/3Sc20V #java #heise #OracleCloud OracleSupport_WLS ?Troubleshooting and Tuning with #WebLogic - Developer Webcast now available on #Youtube http://pub.vitrue.com/GSOy Andrejus Baranovskis New ADF Academy - Impressive Concept for ADF eLearning http://fb.me/2kYSMKKR5 OracleSupport_WLS ?Removing a #weblogic domain properly http://pub.vitrue.com/ZndM WebLogic Community WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter May 2013 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bp Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: Troubleshooting tools Part 3- Heap Dumps #Oracle #WebLogic Read the series http://bit.ly/14CQSD2 Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: #WebLogic_Server on #Oracle_Database_Appliance- How to conjure a WebLogic cluster- http://bit.ly/11fciHA Oracle WebLogic ?Check out new cool features in Oracle Traffic Director- http://bit.ly/11fbz9h WebLogic Community Additional new material WebLogic Community April 2013 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zM WebLogic Community New WebLogic references - we want yours http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zK OracleSupport_WLS ?#Weblogic Session Replication jsession ID and F5 http://pub.vitrue.com/dWZp OracleBlogs ?top tweets WebLogic Partner Community May 2013 http://ow.ly/2xc8M5 WebLogic Community Welcome to the Spring edition of Oracle Scene http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zE Andreas Koop ?[blog post] ADF: Static Values View Object does not show any values (solved) http://bit.ly/14RDZ8p OracleBlogs ?ADF Mobile - accessing the SQLite database http://ow.ly/2x85r0 OracleSupport_WLS Youtube channel- Troubleshooting and Tuning with #WebLogic.#JRockit #SOAP #JRF http://pub.vitrue.com/qMxu Arun Gupta Next Java Magazine is all about #JavaEE7...productivity, HTML5, WebSocket, Batch & more. Subscribe http://ow.ly/lkD5D (@Oraclejavamag) Oracle WebLogic How to configure a #WebLogic cluster on #Oracle_Database_Appliance? It’s easy, read how. http://bit.ly/11fciHA Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: How to use Heap Dumps to troubleshooting memory leaks- #Oracle #WebLogic_Server http://bit.ly/14CQSD2 OracleBlogs ?Over 100 Images To Be Added to NetBeans Platform Showcase http://ow.ly/2x7Fvp Lucas Jellema A new release of the ADF EMG Task Flow Tester is now available for both JDeveloper 11 R1 and R2. https://java.net/projects/adf-task-flow-tester/pages/GettingStarted … WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; Deploy Web Sites (WAWS Part 3)

  - by Shaun

  This is the sixth post of my Windows Azure Evolution series. After talked a bit about the new caching preview feature in the previous one, let’s back to the Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS).   Git and GitHub Integration In the third post I introduced the overview functionality of WAWS and demonstrated how to create a WordPress blog through the build-in application gallery. And in the fourth post I covered how to use the TFS service preview to deploy an ASP.NET MVC application to the web site through the TFS integration. WAWS also have the Git integration. I’m not going to talk very detailed about the Git and GitHub integration since there are a bunch of information on the internet you can refer to. To enable the Git just go to the web site item in the developer portal and click the “Set up Git publishing”. After specified the username and password the windows azure platform will establish the Git integration and provide some basic guide. As you can see, you can download the Git binaries, commit the files and then push to the remote repository. Regarding the GitHub, since it’s built on top of Git it should work. Maarten Balliauw have a wonderful post about how to integrate GitHub to Windows Azure Web Site you can find here.   WebMatrix 2 RC WebMatrix is a lightweight web application development tool provided by Microsoft. It utilizes WebDeploy or FTP to deploy the web application to the server. And in WebMatrix 2.0 RC it added the feature to work with Windows Azure. First of all we need to download the latest WebMatrix 2 through the Web Platform Installer 4.0. Just open the WebPI and search “WebMatrix”, or go to its home page download its web installer. Once we have WebMatrix 2, we need to download the publish file of our WAWS. Let’s go to the developer portal and open the web site we want to deploy and download the publish file from the link on the right hand side. This file contains the necessary information of publishing the web site through WebDeploy and FTP, which can be used in WebMatrix, Visual Studio, etc.. Once we have the publish file we can open the WebMatrix, click the Open Site, Remote Site. Then it will bring up a dialog where we can input the information of the remote site. Since we have our publish file already, we can click the “Import publish settings” and select the publish file, then we can see the site information will be populated automatically. Click OK, the WebMatrix will connect to the remote site, which is the WAWS we had deployed already, retrieve the folders and files information. We can open files in WebMatrix and modify. But since WebMatrix is a lightweight web application tool, we cannot update the backend C# code. So in this case, we will modify the frontend home page only. After saved our modification, WebMatrix will compare the files between in local and remote and then it will only upload the modified files to Windows Azure through the connection information in the publish file. Since it only update the files which were changed, this minimized the bandwidth and deployment duration. After few seconds we back to the website and the modification had been applied.   Visual Studio and WebDeploy The publish file we had downloaded can be used not only in WebMatrix but also Visual Studio. As we know in Visual Studio we can publish a web application by clicking the “Publish” item from the project context menu in the solution explorer, and we can specify the WebDeploy, FTP or File System for the publish target. Now we can use the WAWS publish file to let Visual Studio publish the web application to WAWS. Let’s create a new ASP.NET MVC Web Application in Visual Studio 2010 and then click the “Publish” in solution explorer. Once we have the Windows Azure SDK 1.7 installed, it will update the web application publish dialog. So now we can import the publish information from the publish file. Select WebDeploy as the publish method. We can select FTP as well, which is supported by Windows Azure and the FTP information was in the same publish file. In the last step the publish wizard can check the files which will be uploaded to the remote site before the actually publishing. This gives us a chance to review and amend the files. Same as the WebMatrix, Visual Studio will compare the files between local and WAWS and determined which had been changed and need to be published. Finally Visual Studio will publish the web application to windows azure through WebDeploy protocol. Once it finished we can browse our website.   FTP Deployment The publish file we downloaded contains the connection information to our web site via both WebDeploy and FTP. When using WebMatrix and Visual Studio we can select WebDeploy or FTP. WebDeploy method can be used very easily from WebMatrix and Visual Studio, with the file compare feature. But the FTP gives more flexibility. We can use any FTP client to upload files to windows azure regardless which client and OS we are using. Open the publish file in any text editor, we can find the connection information very easily. As you can see the publish file is actually a XML file with WebDeploy and FTP information in plain text attributes. And once we have the FTP URL, username and password, when can connect to the site and upload and download files. For example I opened FileZilla and connected to my WAWS through FTP. Then I can download files I am interested in and modify them on my local disk. Then upload back to windows azure through FileZilla. Then I can see the new page.   Summary In this simple and quick post I introduced vary approaches to deploy our web application to Windows Azure Web Site. It supports TFS integration which I mentioned previously. It also supports Git and GitHub, WebDeploy and FTP as well.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• C# Extension Methods - To Extend or Not To Extend...

  - by James Michael Hare

  I've been thinking a lot about extension methods lately, and I must admit I both love them and hate them. They are a lot like sugar, they taste so nice and sweet, but they'll rot your teeth if you eat them too much.   I can't deny that they aren't useful and very handy. One of the major components of the Shared Component library where I work is a set of useful extension methods. But, I also can't deny that they tend to be overused and abused to willy-nilly extend every living type.   So what constitutes a good extension method? Obviously, you can write an extension method for nearly anything whether it is a good idea or not. Many times, in fact, an idea seems like a good extension method but in retrospect really doesn't fit.   So what's the litmus test? To me, an extension method should be like in the movies when a person runs into their twin, separated at birth. You just know you're related. Obviously, that's hard to quantify, so let's try to put a few rules-of-thumb around them.   A good extension method should:     Apply to any possible instance of the type it extends.     Simplify logic and improve readability/maintainability.     Apply to the most specific type or interface applicable.     Be isolated in a namespace so that it does not pollute IntelliSense.     So let's look at a few examples in relation to these rules.   The first rule, to me, is the most important of all. Once again, it bears repeating, a good extension method should apply to all possible instances of the type it extends. It should feel like the long lost relative that should have been included in the original class but somehow was missing from the family tree.    Take this nifty little int extension, I saw this once in a blog and at first I really thought it was pretty cool, but then I started noticing a code smell I couldn't quite put my finger on. So let's look:       public static class IntExtensinos     {         public static int Seconds(int num)         {             return num * 1000;         }           public static int Minutes(int num)         {             return num * 60000;         }     }     This is so you could do things like:       ...     Thread.Sleep(5.Seconds());     ...     proxy.Timeout = 1.Minutes();     ...     Awww, you say, that's cute! Well, that's the problem, it's kitschy and it doesn't always apply (and incidentally you could achieve the same thing with TimeStamp.FromSeconds(5)). It's syntactical candy that looks cool, but tends to rot and pollute the code. It would allow things like:       total += numberOfTodaysOrders.Seconds();     which makes no sense and should never be allowed. The problem is you're applying an extension method to a logical domain, not a type domain. That is, the extension method Seconds() doesn't really apply to ALL ints, it applies to ints that are representative of time that you want to convert to milliseconds.    Do you see what I mean? The two problems, in a nutshell, are that a) Seconds() called off a non-time value makes no sense and b) calling Seconds() off something to pass to something that does not take milliseconds will be off by a factor of 1000 or worse.   Thus, in my mind, you should only ever have an extension method that applies to the whole domain of that type.   For example, this is one of my personal favorites:       public static bool IsBetween<T>(this T value, T low, T high)         where T : IComparable<T>     {         return value.CompareTo(low) >= 0 && value.CompareTo(high) <= 0;     }   This allows you to check if any IComparable<T> is within an upper and lower bound. Think of how many times you type something like:       if (response.Employee.Address.YearsAt >= 2         && response.Employee.Address.YearsAt <= 10)     {     ...     }     Now, you can instead type:       if(response.Employee.Address.YearsAt.IsBetween(2, 10))     {     ...     }     Note that this applies to all IComparable<T> -- that's ints, chars, strings, DateTime, etc -- and does not depend on any logical domain. In addition, it satisfies the second point and actually makes the code more readable and maintainable.   Let's look at the third point. In it we said that an extension method should fit the most specific interface or type possible. Now, I'm not saying if you have something that applies to enumerables, you create an extension for List, Array, Dictionary, etc (though you may have reasons for doing so), but that you should beware of making things TOO general.   For example, let's say we had an extension method like this:       public static T ConvertTo<T>(this object value)     {         return (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof(T));     }         This lets you do more fluent conversions like:       double d = "5.0".ConvertTo<double>();     However, if you dig into Reflector (LOVE that tool) you will see that if the type you are calling on does not implement IConvertible, what you convert to MUST be the exact type or it will throw an InvalidCastException. Now this may or may not be what you want in this situation, and I leave that up to you. Things like this would fail:       object value = new Employee();     ...     // class cast exception because typeof(IEmployee) != typeof(Employee)     IEmployee emp = value.ConvertTo<IEmployee>();       Yes, that's a downfall of working with Convertible in general, but if you wanted your fluent interface to be more type-safe so that ConvertTo were only callable on IConvertibles (and let casting be a manual task), you could easily make it:         public static T ConvertTo<T>(this IConvertible value)     {         return (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof(T));     }         This is what I mean by choosing the best type to extend. Consider that if we used the previous (object) version, every time we typed a dot ('.') on an instance we'd pull up ConvertTo() whether it was applicable or not. By filtering our extension method down to only valid types (those that implement IConvertible) we greatly reduce our IntelliSense pollution and apply a good level of compile-time correctness.   Now my fourth rule is just my general rule-of-thumb. Obviously, you can make extension methods as in-your-face as you want. I included all mine in my work libraries in its own sub-namespace, something akin to:       namespace Shared.Core.Extensions { ... }     This is in a library called Shared.Core, so just referencing the Core library doesn't pollute your IntelliSense, you have to actually do a using on Shared.Core.Extensions to bring the methods in. This is very similar to the way Microsoft puts its extension methods in System.Linq. This way, if you want 'em, you use the appropriate namespace. If you don't want 'em, they won't pollute your namespace.   To really make this work, however, that namespace should only include extension methods and subordinate types those extensions themselves may use. If you plant other useful classes in those namespaces, once a user includes it, they get all the extensions too.   Also, just as a personal preference, extension methods that aren't simply syntactical shortcuts, I like to put in a static utility class and then have extension methods for syntactical candy. For instance, I think it imaginable that any object could be converted to XML:       namespace Shared.Core     {         // A collection of XML Utility classes         public static class XmlUtility         {             ...             // Serialize an object into an xml string             public static string ToXml(object input)             {                 var xs = new XmlSerializer(input.GetType());                   // use new UTF8Encoding here, not Encoding.UTF8. The later includes                 // the BOM which screws up subsequent reads, the former does not.                 using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())                 using (var xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, new UTF8Encoding()))                 {                     xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, input);                     return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());                 }             }             ...         }     }   I also wanted to be able to call this from an object like:       value.ToXml();     But here's the problem, if i made this an extension method from the start with that one little keyword "this", it would pop into IntelliSense for all objects which could be very polluting. Instead, I put the logic into a utility class so that users have the choice of whether or not they want to use it as just a class and not pollute IntelliSense, then in my extensions namespace, I add the syntactical candy:       namespace Shared.Core.Extensions     {         public static class XmlExtensions         {             public static string ToXml(this object value)             {                 return XmlUtility.ToXml(value);             }         }     }   So now it's the best of both worlds. On one hand, they can use the utility class if they don't want to pollute IntelliSense, and on the other hand they can include the Extensions namespace and use as an extension if they want. The neat thing is it also adheres to the Single Responsibility Principle. The XmlUtility is responsible for converting objects to XML, and the XmlExtensions is responsible for extending object's interface for ToXml().

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• CEN/CENELEC Lacks Perspective

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  Over the last few months, two of the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN and CENELEC have circulated an unfortunate position statement distorting the facts around fora and consortia. For the benefit of outsiders to this debate, let's just say that this debate regards whether and how the EU should recognize standards and specifications from certain fora and consortia based on a process evaluating the openness and transparency of such deliverables. The topic is complex, and somewhat confusing even to insiders, but nevertheless crucial to the European economy. As far as I can judge, their positions are not based on facts. This is unfortunate. For the benefit of clarity, here are some of the observations they make: a)"Most consortia are in essence driven by technology companies making hardware and software solutions, by definition very few of the largest ones are European-based". b) "Most consortia lack a European presence, relevant Committees, even those that are often cited as having stronger links with Europe, seem to lack an overall, inclusive set of participants". c) "Recognising specific consortia specifications will not resolve any concrete problems of interoperability for public authorities; interoperability depends on stringing together a range of specifications (from formal global bodies or consortia alike)". d) "Consortia already have the option to have their specifications adopted by the international formal standards bodies and many more exercise this than the two that seem to be campaigning for European recognition. Such specifications can then also be adopted as European standards." e) "Consortium specifications completely lack any process to take due and balanced account of requirements at national level - this is not important for technologies but can be a critical issue when discussing cross-border issues within the EU such as eGovernment, eHealth and so on". f) "The proposed recognition will not lead to standstill on national or European activities, nor to the adoption of the specifications as national standards in the CEN and CENELEC members (usually in their official national languages), nor to withdrawal of conflicting national standards. A big asset of the European standardization system is its coherence and lack of fragmentation." g) "We always miss concrete and specific examples of where consortia referencing are supposed to be helpful." First of all, note that ETSI, the third ESO, did not join the position. The reason is, of course, that ETSI beyond being an ESO, also has a global perspective and, moreover, does consider reality. Secondly, having produced arguments a) to g), CEN/CENELEC has the audacity to call a meeting on Friday 25 February entitled "ICT standardization - improving collaboration in Europe". This sounds very nice, but they have not set the stage for constructive debate. Rather, they demonstrate a striking lack of vision and lack of perspective. I will back this up by three facts, and leave it there. 1. Since the 1980s, global industry fora and consortia, such as IETF, W3C and OASIS have emerged as world-leading ICT standards development organizations with excellent procedures for openness and transparency in all phases of standards development, ex post and ex ante. - Practically no ICT system can be built without using fora and consortia standards (FCS). - Without using FCS, neither the Internet, upon which the EU economy depends, nor EU institutions would operate. - FCS are of high relevance for achieving and promoting interoperability and driving innovation. 2. FCS are complementary to the formally recognized standards organizations including the ESOs. - No work will be taken away from the ESOs should the EU recognize certain FCS. - Each FCS would be evaluated on its merit and on the openness of the process that produced it. ESOs would, with other stakeholders, have a say. - ESOs could potentially educate and assist European stakeholders to engage more actively and constructively with FCS. - ETSI, also an ESO, seems to clearly recognize these facts. 3. Europe and its Member States have a strong voice in several of the most relevant global industry fora and consortia. - W3C: W3C was founded in 1994 by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with CERN, the European research lab. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France became the first European W3C host and in 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), also based in France, took over the role of European W3C host from INRIA. Today, W3C has 326 Members, 40% of which are European. Government participation is also strong, and it could be increased - a development that is very much desired by W3C. Current members of the W3C Advisory Board includes Ora Lassila (Nokia) and Charles McCathie Nevile (Opera). Nokia is Finnish company, Opera is a Norwegian company. SAP's Claus von Riegen is an alumni of the same Advisory Board. - OASIS: its membership - 30% of which is European - represents the marketplace, reflecting a balance of providers, user companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. In particular, about 15% of OASIS members are governments or universities. Frederick Hirsch from Nokia, Claus von Riegen from SAP AG and Charles-H. Schulz from Ars Aperta are on the Board of Directors. Nokia is a Finnish company, SAP is a German company and Ars Aperta is a French company. The Chairman of the Board is Peter Brown, who is an Independent Consultant, an Austrian citizen AND an official of the European Parliament currently on long-term leave. - IETF: The oversight of its activities is by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), since 2007 chaired by Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch national who lives in Uithoorn, NL. Kolkman is director of NLnet Labs, a foundation chartered to develop open source software and open source standards for the Internet. Other IAB members include Marcelo Bagnulo whose affiliation is the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain as well as Hannes Tschofenig from Nokia Siemens Networks. Nokia is a Finnish company. Siemens is a German company. Nokia Siemens is a European joint venture. - Member States: At least 17 European Member States have developed Interoperability Frameworks that include FCS, according to the EU-funded National Interoperability Framework Observatory (see list and NIFO web site on IDABC). This also means they actively procure solutions using FCS, reference FCS in their policies and even in laws. Member State reps are free to engage in FCS, and many do. It would be nice if the EU adjusted to this reality. - A huge number of European nationals work in the global IT industry, on European soil or elsewhere, whether in EU registered companies or not. CEN/CENELEC lacks perspective and has engaged in an effort to twist facts that is quite striking from a publicly funded organization. I wish them all possible success with Friday's meeting but I fear all of the most important stakeholders will not be at the table. Not because they do not wish to collaborate, but because they just have been insulted. If they do show up, it would be a gracious move, almost beyond comprehension. While I do not expect CEN/CENELEC to line up perfectly in favor of fora and consortia, I think it would be to their benefit to stick to more palatable observations. Actually, I would suggest an apology, straightening out the facts. This works among friends and it works in an organizational context. Then, we can all move on. Standardization is important. Too important to ignore. Too important to distort. The European economy depends on it. We need CEN/CENELEC. It is an important organization. But CEN/CENELEC needs fora and consortia, too.

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• Improved Performance on PeopleSoft Combined Benchmark using SPARC T4-4

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle's PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 combined online and batch benchmark achieved a world record 18,000 concurrent users experiencing subsecond response time while executing a PeopleSoft Payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 32.4 minutes. This result was obtained with a SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Database 11g Release 2, a SPARC T4-4 server running PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 application server and a SPARC T4-2 server running Oracle WebLogic Server in the web tier. The SPARC T4-4 server running the application tier used Oracle Solaris Zones which provide a flexible, scalable and manageable virtualization environment. The average CPU utilization on the SPARC T4-2 server in the web tier was 17%, on the SPARC T4-4 server in the application tier it was 59%, and on the SPARC T4-4 server in the database tier was 47% (online and batch) leaving significant headroom for additional processing across the three tiers. The SPARC T4-4 server used for the database tier hosted Oracle Database 11g Release 2 using Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) for database files management with I/O performance equivalent to raw devices. Performance Landscape Results are presented for the PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service and Payroll combined benchmark. The new result with 128 streams shows significant improvement in the payroll batch processing time with little impact on the self-service component response time. PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service and Payroll Benchmark Systems Users Ave Response Search (sec) Ave Response Save (sec) Batch Time (min) Streams SPARC T4-2 (web) SPARC T4-4 (app) SPARC T4-4 (db) 18,000 0.988 0.539 32.4 128 SPARC T4-2 (web) SPARC T4-4 (app) SPARC T4-4 (db) 18,000 0.944 0.503 43.3 64 The following results are for the PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service benchmark that was previous run. The results are not directly comparable with the combined results because they do not include the payroll component. PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service 9.1 Benchmark Systems Users Ave Response Search (sec) Ave Response Save (sec) Batch Time (min) Streams SPARC T4-2 (web) SPARC T4-4 (app) 2x SPARC T4-2 (db) 18,000 1.048 0.742 N/A N/A The following results are for the PeopleSoft Payroll benchmark that was previous run. The results are not directly comparable with the combined results because they do not include the self-service component. PeopleSoft Payroll (N.A.) 9.1 - 500K Employees (7 Million SQL PayCalc, Unicode) Systems Users Ave Response Search (sec) Ave Response Save (sec) Batch Time (min) Streams SPARC T4-4 (db) N/A N/A N/A 30.84 96 Configuration Summary Application Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 512 GB memory Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 PeopleTools 8.52 PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Oracle Tuxedo, Version 10.3.0.0, 64-bit, Patch Level 031 Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit 6 Update 32 Database Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 256 GB memory Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 PeopleTools 8.52 Oracle Tuxedo, Version 10.3.0.0, 64-bit, Patch Level 031 Micro Focus Server Express (COBOL v 5.1.00) Web Tier Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-2 server with 2 x SPARC T4 processors, 2.85 GHz 256 GB memory Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 PeopleTools 8.52 Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.4 Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit 6 Update 32 Storage Configuration: 1 x Sun Server X2-4 as a COMSTAR head for data 4 x Intel Xeon X7550, 2.0 GHz 128 GB memory 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (80 flash modules) 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 as a COMSTAR head for redo logs 12 x 2 TB SAS disks with Niwot Raid controller Benchmark Description This benchmark combines PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 HR Self Service online and PeopleSoft Payroll batch workloads to run on a unified database deployed on Oracle Database 11g Release 2. The PeopleSoft HRSS benchmark kit is a Oracle standard benchmark kit run by all platform vendors to measure the performance. It's an OLTP benchmark where DB SQLs are moderately complex. The results are certified by Oracle and a white paper is published. PeopleSoft HR SS defines a business transaction as a series of HTML pages that guide a user through a particular scenario. Users are defined as corporate Employees, Managers and HR administrators. The benchmark consist of 14 scenarios which emulate users performing typical HCM transactions such as viewing paycheck, promoting and hiring employees, updating employee profile and other typical HCM application transactions. All these transactions are well-defined in the PeopleSoft HR Self-Service 9.1 benchmark kit. This benchmark metric is the weighted average response search/save time for all the transactions. The PeopleSoft 9.1 Payroll (North America) benchmark demonstrates system performance for a range of processing volumes in a specific configuration. This workload represents large batch runs typical of a ERP environment during a mass update. The benchmark measures five application business process run times for a database representing large organization. They are Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation, Payroll Confirmation, Print Advice forms, and Create Direct Deposit File. The benchmark metric is the cumulative elapsed time taken to complete the Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation and Payroll Confirmation business application processes. The benchmark metrics are taken for each respective benchmark while running simultaneously on the same database back-end. Specifically, the payroll batch processes are started when the online workload reaches steady state (the maximum number of online users) and overlap with online transactions for the duration of the steady state. Key Points and Best Practices Two PeopleSoft Domain sets with 200 application servers each on a SPARC T4-4 server were hosted in 2 separate Oracle Solaris Zones to demonstrate consolidation of multiple application servers, ease of administration and performance tuning. Each Oracle Solaris Zone was bound to a separate processor set, each containing 15 cores (total 120 threads). The default set (1 core from first and third processor socket, total 16 threads) was used for network and disk interrupt handling. This was done to improve performance by reducing memory access latency by using the physical memory closest to the processors and offload I/O interrupt handling to default set threads, freeing up cpu resources for Application Servers threads and balancing application workload across 240 threads. A total of 128 PeopleSoft streams server processes where used on the database node to complete payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 32.4 minutes. See Also Oracle PeopleSoft Benchmark White Papers oracle.com SPARC T4-2 Server oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Managementoracle.com OTN PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management (Payroll) oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 8 November 2012.

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• Java JRE 1.6.0_65 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  The latest Java Runtime Environment 1.6.0_65 (a.k.a. JRE 6u65-b14) and later updates on the JRE 6 codeline are now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12 for Windows-based desktop clients. Effects of new support dates on Java upgrades for EBS environments Support dates for the E-Business Suite and Java have changed.  Please review the sections below for more details: What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? All JRE 6 and 7 releases are certified with EBS upon release Our standard policy is that all E-Business Suite customers can apply all JRE updates to end-user desktops from JRE 1.6.0_03 and later updates on the 1.6 codeline, and from JRE 7u10 and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline.  We test all new JRE 1.6 and JRE 7 releases in parallel with the JRE development process, so all new JRE 1.6 and 7 releases are considered certified with the E-Business Suite on the same day that they're released by our Java team.  You do not need to wait for a certification announcement before applying new JRE 1.6 or JRE 7 releases to your EBS users' desktops. What's new in in this Java release?Java 6 is now available only via My Oracle Support for E-Business Suite users.  You can find links to this release, including Release Notes, documentation, and the actual Java downloads here: All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Note 1439822.1) 32-bit and 64-bit versions certified This certification includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit JRE versions. 32-bit JREs are certified on: Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Service Pack 2 (SP2) Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) 64-bit JREs are certified only on 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Worried about the 'mismanaged session cookie' issue? No need to worry -- it's fixed.  To recap: JRE releases 1.6.0_18 through 1.6.0_22 had issues with mismanaging session cookies that affected some users in some circumstances. The fix for those issues was first included in JRE 1.6.0_23. These fixes will carry forward and continue to be fixed in all future JRE releases.  In other words, if you wish to avoid the mismanaged session cookie issue, you should apply any release after JRE 1.6.0_22. Implications of Java 6 End of Public Updates for EBS Users The Support Roadmap for Oracle Java is published here: Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap The latest updates to that page (as of Sept. 19, 2012) state (emphasis added): Java SE 6 End of Public Updates Notice After February 2013, Oracle will no longer post updates of Java SE 6 to its public download sites. Existing Java SE 6 downloads already posted as of February 2013 will remain accessible in the Java Archive on Oracle Technology Network. Developers and end-users are encouraged to update to more recent Java SE versions that remain available for public download. For enterprise customers, who need continued access to critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 or older versions, long term support is available through Oracle Java SE Support . What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? EBS users fall under the category of "enterprise users" above.  Java is an integral part of the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, so EBS users will continue to receive Java SE 6 updates from February 2013 to the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. In other words, nothing changes for EBS users after February 2013.  EBS users will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 until the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017.  How can EBS customers obtain Java 6 updates after the public end-of-life? EBS customers can download Java 6 patches from My Oracle Support.  For a complete list of all Java SE patch numbers, see: All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Note 1439822.1) Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? This upgrade is highly recommended but remains optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JRE 6 desktop clients.  Java 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All E-Business Suite customers must upgrade to JRE 7 by June 2017. Coexistence of JRE 6 and JRE 7 on Windows desktops The upgrade to JRE 7 is highly recommended for EBS users, but some users may need to run both JRE 6 and 7 on their Windows desktops for reasons unrelated to the E-Business Suite. Most EBS configurations with IE and Firefox use non-static versioning by default. JRE 7 will be invoked instead of JRE 6 if both are installed on a Windows desktop. For more details, see "Appendix B: Static vs. Non-static Versioning and Set Up Options" in Notes 290807.1 and 393931.1. Applying Updates to JRE 6 and JRE 7 to Windows desktops Auto-update will keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with JRE 7 installed. Auto-update will only keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with both JRE 6 and 7 installed.  JRE 6 users are strongly encouraged to apply the latest Critical Patch Updates as soon as possible after each release. The Jave SE CPUs will be available via My Oracle Support.  EBS users can find more information about JRE 6 and 7 updates here: Information Center: Installation & Configuration for Oracle Java SE (Note 1412103.2) The dates for future Java SE CPUs can be found on the Critical Patch Updates, Security Alerts and Third Party Bulletin.  An RSS feed is available on that site for those who would like to be kept up-to-date. What do Mac users need? Mac users running Mac OS 10.7 or 10.8 can run JRE 7 plug-ins.  See this article: EBS 12 certified with Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 with Safari 6 and JRE 7 Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? JRE is used for desktop clients.  JDK is used for application tier servers JDK upgrades for E-Business Suite application tier servers are highly recommended but currently remain optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JDK 6 for application tier servers.  Java SE 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All EBS customers with application tier servers on Windows, Solaris, and Linux must upgrade to JDK 7 by June 2017. EBS customers running their application tier servers on other operating systems should check with their respective vendors for the support dates for those platforms. JDK 7 is certified with E-Business Suite 12.  See: Java (JDK) 7 Certified for E-Business Suite 12 Servers References Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1) Upgrading Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) with Oracle Applications 11i for Windows Clients (Metalink Note 290807.1) Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1) Upgrading JRE Plugin with Oracle Applications R12 (MetaLink Note 393931.1) Related Articles Mismanaged Session Cookie Issue Fixed for EBS in JRE 1.6.0_23 Roundup: Oracle JInitiator 1.3 Desupported for EBS Customers in July 2009

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011Popular ReleasesTerraria World Viewer: Version 1.2: Update June 15thNew User Interface Map drawing will not cause the program to freeze anymore Fixed the "Draw Symbols" (now called "Markers") checkbox not having any effectMVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.1.5 RC: Added Extended Dropdown allows a prompt item to be inserted as first element. RequiredAttribute, if present, trggers if no element is chosen Client side javascript function to set/get the values of DateTimeInput, TypedTextBox, TypedEditDisplay, and to bind/unbind a "change" handler The selected page in the pager is applied the attribute selected-page="selected" that can be used in the definition of CSS rules to style the selected page items controls now interpret a null value as an empr...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.0 CTP 1: Umbraco 5 Community Technology Preview Umbraco 5 will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out our first CTP of version 5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a quick low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video here. What's in the v5 CTP box? This is a preview version of version 5 and includes support for the following familiar Umbr...Ribbon Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Browser (1.0.514.30): Initial releaseTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.0 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: In this version, I did an overhaul of the GUI of the program. The only pop-up window you will receive now is a warning box for for when you click on the "Delete" button. Everything has been integrated into the tabs on the form. I added every item included with v1.0.4 of Terraria and added the option to set inventory/bank slots to "No Item". This WILL work with characters that have not been opened in v1.0.4patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 11 - June 14, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Updated "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "jQuery UI Widget" chapter. Updated "Widget QuickStart" appendix and code. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separat...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.2: Build: 1.2.41 Published: 6/14/2010 How to Install Orchard To install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx. Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.2.41.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents o...PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.3.4: Changes - Got rid of suppressed exceptions on assemblies loading at project startup - Fixed Issue #28535 "No Print Support" - Enabled IntelliSence commands wich are supported by ActiPro Syntax Editor control: ToggleBookmark, NextBookmark, PreviousBookmark, ShowMemberList - Added missing Import directives in PS Script project template - Fixed exception occurring on debug start - Fixed an issue: after creating a new PS project, a debugging session hung being run for the second timeSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.4.0: Snippet Designer 1.4.0 for Visual Studio 2010 Change logSnippet Explorer ChangesReworked language filter UI to work better in the side bar. Added result count drop down which lets you choose how many results to see. Language filter and result count choices are persisted after Visual Studio is closed. Added file name to search criteria. Search is now case insensitive. Snippet Editor Changes Snippet Editor ChangesAdded menu option for the $end$ symbol which indicates where the c...SizeOnDisk: 1.0.9.0: Can handle Right-To-Left languages (issue 316) About box (issue 310) New language: Deutsch (thanks to kyoka) Fix: file and folder context menuDropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.1: Added different popup descriptions for actions (copy/append/update/remove) Added popup timeout control (with live preview) Added option to overwrite clipboard with the last link only Notification popup closes on user click Notification popup default timeout increased to 3 sec. Added codeplex link to about .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredWCF Community Site: WCF Express Interop Bindings 1.0: Welcome to the first release of the WCF Express Interop BindingsThis project provides a starter kit for WCF service developers wishing to connect with Java clients in WebSphere, WebLogic, Metro and Apache. It supports security, MTOM and RM features. For more information see the Landing page We welcome your feedback (Topic: Interop Bindings). Please submit any feature requests / bug fixes via the issue tracker. FeaturesVSIX Installer WCF Bindings for Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Metro, IBM WebS...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.4.1: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation is the best way to detect and redirect mobile devices and their capabilities on ASP.NET and is being used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re highly confident in our software and we recommend all users update to this version. Changes to Version 1.0.4.1Changed the BlackberryHandler and BlackberryVersion6Handler to have equal CONFIDENCE values to ensure they both get a chance at detecting BlackBerry version 4&5 and version 6 devices. Prior to thi...Kouak - HTTP File Share Server: Kouak Beta 3 - Clean: Some critical bug solved and dependecy problems There's 3 package : - The first, contains the cli server and the graphical server. - The second, only the cli server - The third, only the graphical client. It's a beta release, so don't hesitate to emmit issue ;pRawr: Rawr 4.1.06: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta6: ??AcDown?????????????，?????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta6 ?????(imanhua.com)????? ???? ?? ??"????","?????","?????","????"?????? "????"?????"????????"?? ??????????? ?????????????? ?????????????/???? ?? ????Windows 7???????????? ????????? ?? ????????????? ???????/??????????? ???????????? ?? ?? ?????(imanh...Pulse: Pulse Beta 2: - Added new wallpapers provider http://wallbase.cc. Supports english search, multiple keywords* - Improved font rendering in Options window - Added "Set wallpaper as logon background" option* - Fixed crashes if there is no internet connection - Fixed: Rewalls downloads empty images sometimes - Added filters* Note 1: wallbase provider supports only english search. Rewalls provider supports only russian search but Pulse automatically translates your english keyword into russian using Google Tr...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.7: Version: 2.0.0.7 (Milestone 7): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...SimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & RefactoringNew Projects360U: 360UAd Configuration + Rotator for Windows Phone: Ad Configuration and Rotator for Windows Phone is a set of classes and controls which allow you to remotely manage advertising providers used inside your Windows Phone application. Advertising providers can be plugged in on an 'as needed' so application only ship with the providers being used.CommerceShopSystem: CommerceShopSystemContour strikes again: Collection of extensions for the Umbraco Contour form builderFarseer Physics & GLEED2D Link: This project includes c# files usable to implement the Farseer Physics engine in a level created using GLEED2D.FolderComparer: This DLL holds an extension of the DirectoryInfo class. It contains a logic that helps compare the contents of two folders. HierList Hierarchial Outline ASP.NET Server Control ( using UL or OL and LI ): The HierList ASP WebControl generates a hierarchial list using the UL, OL, and LI html tags. Images Organizator: A C# .Net program that organizes all pictures in a folder by date.KiggDemo: i study kiggLavieOrnamentos: LavieOrnamentos is a MVC project written in C# for a standard business website. I plan to use it as a base for a bigger project, a standard business site framework targeting small companies that just want to display their products and latest news.Multiple Choice Training Application: This is an ASP.Net (VB.Net) Web based training application. This application can be configured to ask multiple choice questions for multiple groups, score based on percentage, create completion certificates and be completely managed via a web interface,Orchard Windows Authentication: This module allows Windows domain users to be authenticated in Orchard.Party Estimator: Party Estimator is a training project based on requirements from O'Reilly's _Head First C#_, and is not intended for widespread use. SharePoint Enforcer - Ensuring large sites comply with standards: SharePoint Enforcer is a utility that aids in governance of large SharePoint sites to ensure that the sites comply with various business rules that have been created to keep the site from growing out of control.SharePoint WarmUp Tool (Claims+FBA): This tools is for warming up (waking) SharPoint sites. It addresses the issue of a 403 forbidden error when the SharePoint web app is in claims mode and FBA. It uses Windows authentication to warm up the sites and bypasses the FBA login redirection causing the 403 forbidden error.Super Mario Limitless: Super Mario Limitless is an in-production Super Mario level engine. It allows you to play your own levels and worlds, play others' levels and worlds, and even play online. With limitless features, you'll spend hours playing and creating.VB.NET ASP.NET MVC 2 - Music Store: This project is a port using the VB language with ASP.NET MVC 2 of the MusicStore application that can be found at : http://mvcmusicstore.codeplex.com/ Veni, Vedi, Velcro...: A personal phone 7 social media app that shows basic elements of design, ad model, panorama etc.XMLServiceMonitor: A Windows service (VB.Net) that allows the monitoring of failure of Servers, Services, Applications, Scheduled Tasks and SQL Jobs. The service is configurable with simple XML files and sends out email notifications of failures.

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• Reg Gets a Job at Red Gate (and what happens behind the scenes)

  - by red(at)work

  Mr Reg Gater works at one of Cambridge’s many high-tech companies. He doesn’t love his job, but he puts up with it because... well, it could be worse. Every day he drives to work around the Red Gate roundabout, wondering what his boss is going to blame him for today, and wondering if there could be a better job out there for him. By late morning he already feels like handing his notice in. He got the hacky look from his boss for being 5 minutes late, and then they ran out of tea. Again. He goes to the local sandwich shop for lunch, and picks up a Red Gate job menu and a Book of Red Gate while he’s waiting for his order. That night, he goes along to Cambridge Geek Nights and sees some very enthusiastic Red Gaters talking about the work they do; it sounds interesting and, of all things, fun. He takes a quick look at the job vacancies on the Red Gate website, and an hour later realises he’s still there – looking at videos, photos and people profiles. He especially likes the Red Gate’s Got Talent page, and is very impressed with Simon Johnson’s marathon time. He thinks that he’d quite like to work with such awesome people. It just so happens that Red Gate recently decided that they wanted to hire another hot shot team member. Behind the scenes, the wheels were set in motion: the recruitment team met with the hiring manager to understand exactly what they’re looking for, and to decide what interview tests to do, who will do the interviews, and to kick-start any interview training those people might need. Next up, a job description and job advert were written, and the job was put on the market. Reg applies, and his CV lands in the Recruitment team’s inbox and they open it up with eager anticipation that Reg could be the next awesome new starter. He looks good, and in a jiffy they’ve arranged an interview. Reg arrives for his interview, and is greeted by a smiley receptionist. She offers him a selection of drinks and he feels instantly relaxed. A couple of interviews and an assessment later, he gets a job offer. We make his day and he makes ours by accepting, and becoming one of the 60 new starters so far this year. Behind the scenes, things start moving all over again. The HR team arranges for a “Welcome” goodie box to be whisked out to him, prepares his contract, sends an email to Information Services (Or IS for short - we’ll come back to them), keeps in touch with Reg to make sure he knows what to expect on his first day, and of course asks him to fill in the all-important wiki questionnaire so his new colleagues can start to get to know him before he even joins. Meanwhile, the IS team see an email in SupportWorks from HR. They see that Reg will be starting in the sales team in a few days’ time, and they know exactly what to do. They pull out a new machine, and within minutes have used their automated deployment software to install every piece of software that a new recruit could ever need. They also check with Reg’s new manager to see if he has any special requirements that they could help with. Reg starts and is amazed to find a fully configured machine sitting on his desk, complete with stationery and all the other tools he’ll need to do his job. He feels even more cared for after he gets a workstation assessment, and realises he’d be comfier with an ergonomic keyboard and a footstool. They arrive minutes later, just like that. His manager starts him off on his induction and sales training. Along with job-specific training, he’ll also have a buddy to help him find his feet, and loads of pre-arranged demos and introductions. Reg settles in nicely, and is great at his job. He enjoys the canteen, and regularly eats one of the 40,000 meals provided each year. He gets used to the selection of teas that are available, develops a taste for champagne launch parties, and has his fair share of the 25,000 cups of coffee downed at Red Gate towers each year. He goes along to some Feel Good Fund events, and donates a little something to charity in exchange for a turn on the chocolate fountain. He’s looking a little scruffy, so he decides to get his hair cut in between meetings, just in time for the Red Gate birthday company photo. Reg starts a new project: identifying existing customers to up-sell to new bundles. He talks with the web team to generate lists of qualifying customers who haven’t recently been sent marketing emails, and sends emails out, using a new in-house developed tool to schedule follow-up calls in CRM for the same group. The customer responds, saying they’d like to upgrade but are having a licensing problem – Reg sends the issue to Support, and it gets routed to the web team. The team identifies a workaround, and the bug gets scheduled into the next maintenance release in a fortnight’s time (hey; they got lucky). With all the new stuff Reg is working on, he realises that he’d be way more efficient if he had a third monitor. He speaks to IS and they get him one - no argument. He also needs a test machine and then some extra memory. Done. He then thinks he needs an iPad, and goes to ask for one. He gets told to stop pushing his luck. Some time later, Reg’s wife has a baby, so Reg gets 2 weeks of paid paternity leave and a bunch of flowers sent to his house. He signs up to the childcare scheme so that he doesn’t have to pay National Insurance on the first £243 of his childcare. The accounts team makes it all happen seamlessly, as they did with his Give As You Earn payments, which come out of his wages and go straight to his favorite charity. Reg’s sales career is going well. He’s grateful for the help that he gets from the product support team. How do they answer all those 900-ish support calls so effortlessly each month? He’s impressed with the patches that are sent out to customers who find “interesting behavior” in their tools, and to the customers who just must have that new feature. A little later in his career at Red Gate, Reg decides that he’d like to learn about management. He goes on some management training specially customised for Red Gate, joins the Management Book Club, and gets together with other new managers to brainstorm how to get the most out of one to one meetings with his team. Reg decides to go for a game of Foosball to celebrate his good fortune with his team, and has to wait for Finance to finish. While he’s waiting, he reflects on the wonderful time he’s had at Red Gate. He can’t put his finger on what it is exactly, but he knows he’s on to a good thing. All of the stuff that happened to Reg didn’t just happen magically. We’ve got teams of people working relentlessly behind the scenes to make sure that everyone here is comfortable, safe, well fed and caffeinated to the max.

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• Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

  - by [email protected]

  A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

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• Beginner’s Guide to Flock, the Social Media Browser

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you wanting a browser that can work as a social hub from the first moment that you start it up? If you love the idea of a browser that is ready to go out of the box then join us as we look at Flock. During the Install Process When you are installing Flock there are two install windows that you should watch for. The first one lets you choose between the “Express Setup & Custom Setup”. We recommend the “Custom Setup”. Once you have selected the “Custom Setup” you can choose which of the following options will enabled. Notice the “anonymous usage statistics” option at the bottom…you can choose to leave this enabled or disable it based on your comfort level. The First Look When you start Flock up for the first time it will open with three tabs. All three are of interest…especially if this is your first time using Flock. With the first tab you can jump right into “logging in/activating” favorite social services within Flock. This page is set to display each time that you open Flock unless you deselect the option in the lower left corner. The second tab provides a very nice overview of Flock and its’ built-in social management power. The third and final page can be considered a “Personal Page”. You can make some changes to the content displayed for quick and easy access and/or monitoring “Twitter Search, Favorite Feeds, Favorite Media, Friend Activity, & Favorite Sites”. Use the “Widget Menu” in the upper left corner to select the “Personal Page Components” that you would like to use. In the upper right corner there is a built-in “Search Bar” and buttons for “Posting to Your Blog & Uploading Media”. To help personalize the “My World Page” just a bit more you can even change the text to your name or whatever best suits your needs. The Flock Toolbar The “Flock Toolbar” is full of social account management goodness. In order from left to right the buttons are: My World (Homepage), Open People Sidebar, Open Media Bar, Open Feeds Sidebar, Webmail, Open Favorites Sidebar, Open Accounts and Services Sidebar, Open Web Clipboard Sidebar, Open Blog Editor, & Open Photo Uploader. The buttons will be “highlighted” with a blue background to help indicate which area you are in. The first area will display a listing of people that you are watching/following at the services shown here. Clicking on the “Media Bar Button” will display the following “Media Slider Bar” above your “Tab Bar”. Notice that there is a built-in “Search Bar” on the right side. Any photos, etc. clicked on will be opened in the currently focused tab below the “Media Bar”. Here is a listing of the “Media Streams” available for viewing. By default Flock will come with a small selection of pre-subscribed RSS Feeds. You can easily unsubscribe, rearrange, add custom folders, or non-categorized feeds as desired. RSS Feeds subscribed to here can be viewed combined together as a single feed (clickable links) in the “My World Page”. or can be viewed individually in a new tab. Very nice! Next on the “Flock Toolbar is the “Webmail Button”. You can set up access to your favorite “Yahoo!, Gmail, & AOL Mail” accounts from here. The “Favorites Sidebar” combines your “Browser History & Bookmarks” into one convenient location. The “Accounts and Services Sidebar” gives you quick and easy access to get logged into your favorite social accounts. Clicking on any of the links will open that particular service’s login page in a new tab. Want to store items such as photos, links, and text to add into a blog post or tweet later on? Just drag and drop them into the “Web Clipboard Sidebar” for later access. Clicking on the “Blog Editor Button” will open up a separate blogging window to compose your posts in. If you have not logged into or set up an account yet in Flock you will see the following message window. The “Blogging Window”…nice, simple, and straightforward. If you are not already logged into your photo account(s) then you will see the following message window when you click on the “Photo Uploader Button”. Clicking “OK” will open the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” with compatible photo services highlighted in a light yellow color. Log in to your favorite service to start uploading all those great images. After Setting Up Here is what our browser looked like after setting up some of our favorite services. The Twitter feed is certainly looking nice and easy to read through… Some tweaking in the “RSS Feeds Sidebar” makes for a perfect reading experience. Keeping up with our e-mail is certainly easy to do too. A look back at the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” shows that all of our accounts are actively logged in (green dot on the right side). Going back to our “My World Page” you can see how nice everything looks for monitoring our “Friend Activity & Favorite Feeds”. Moving on to regular browsing everything is looking very good… Flock is a perfect choice for anyone wanting a browser and social hub all built into a single app. Conclusion Anyone who loves keeping up with their favorite social services while browsing will find using Flock to be a wonderful experience. You literally get the best of both worlds with this browser. Links Download Flock The Official Flock Extensions Homepage The Official Flock Toolbar Homepage Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow to use an ISO image on Ubuntu LinuxAdvertise on How-To GeekFixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Emit Knowledge - social network for knowledge sharing

  - by hajan

  Emit Knowledge, as the words refer - it's a social network for emitting / sharing knowledge from users by users. Those who can benefit the most out of this network is perhaps all of YOU who have something to share with others and contribute to the knowledge world. I've been closely communicating with the core team of this very, very interesting, brand new social network (with specific purpose!) about the concept, idea and the vision they have for their product and I can say with a lot of confidence that this network has real potential to become something from which we will all benefit. I won't speak much about that and would prefer to give you link and try it yourself - http://www.emitknowledge.com Mainly, through the past few months I've been testing this network and it is getting improved all the time. The user experience is great, you can easily find out what you need and it follows some known patterns that are common for all social networks. They have some real good ideas and plans that are already under development for the next updates of their product. You can do micro blogging or you can do regular normal blogging… it’s up to you, and the way it works, it is seamless. Here is a short Question and Answers (QA) interview I made with the lead of the team, Marijan Nikolovski: 1. Can you please explain us briefly, what is Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge is a brand new knowledge based social network, delivering quality content from users to users. We believe that people’s knowledge, experience and professional thoughts compose quality content, worth sharing among millions around the world. Therefore, we created the platform that matches people’s need to share and gain knowledge in the most suitable and comfortable way. Easy to work with, Emit Knowledge lets you to smoothly craft and emit knowledge around the globe. 2. How 'old' is Emit Knowledge? In hamster’s years we are almost five years old start-up :). Just kidding. We’ve released our public beta about three months ago. Our official release date is 27 of June 2012. 3. How did you come up with this idea? Everything started from a simple idea to solve a complex problem. We’ve seen that the social web has become polluted with data and is on the right track to lose its base principles – socialization and common cause. That was our start point. We’ve gathered the team, drew some sketches and started to mind map the idea. After several idea refactoring’s Emit Knowledge was born. 4. Is there any competition out there in the market? Currently we don't have any competitors that share the same cause. What makes our platform different is the ideology that our product promotes and the functionalities that our platform offers for easy socialization based on interests and knowledge sharing. 5. What are the main technologies used to build Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge was built on a heterogeneous pallet of technologies. Currently, we have four of separation: UI – Built on ASP.NET MVC3 and Knockout.js; Messaging infrastructure – Build on top of RabbitMQ; Background services – Our in-house solution for job distribution, orchestration and processing; Data storage – Build on top of MongoDB; What are the main reasons you've chosen ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 6. What are the main reasons for choosing ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 7. Did you use some of the latest Microsoft technologies? If yes, which ones? Yes, we like to rock the cutting edge tech house. Currently we are using Microsoft’s latest technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Web API (work in progress) and the best for the last; we are utilizing Windows Azure IaaS to the bone. 8. Can you please tell us shortly, what would be the benefit of regular bloggers in other blogging platforms to join Emit Knowledge? Well, unless you are some of the smoking ace gurus whose blogs are followed by a large number of users, our platform offers knowledge based segregated community equipped with tools that will enable both current and future users to expand their relations and to self-promote in the community based on their activity and knowledge sharing. 10. I see you are working very intensively and there is already integration with some third-party services to make the process of sharing and emitting knowledge easier, which services did you integrate until now and what do you plan do to next? We have “reemit” functionality for internal sharing and we also support external services like: Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook; For the regular bloggers we have an extra cream, Windows Live Writer support for easy blog posts emitting. 11. What should we expect next? Currently, we are working on a new fancy community feature. This means that we are going to support user groups to be formed. So for all existing communities and user groups out there, wait us a little bit, we are coming for rescue :). One of the top next features they are developing is the Community Feature. It means, if you have your own User Group, Community Group or any other Group on which you and your users are mostly blogging or sharing (emitting) knowledge in various ways, Emit Knowledge as a platform will help you have everything you need to promote your group, make new followers and host all the necessary stuff that you have had need of. I would invite you to try the network and start sharing knowledge in a way that will help you gather new followers and spread your knowledge faster, easier and in a more efficient way! Let’s Emit Knowledge!

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• xml file save/read error (making a highscore system for XNA game)

  - by Eddy

  i get an error after i write player name to the file for second or third time (An unhandled exception of type 'System.InvalidOperationException' occurred in System.Xml.dll Additional information: There is an error in XML document (18, 17).) (in highscores load method In data = (HighScoreData)serializer.Deserialize(stream); it stops) the problem is that some how it adds additional "" at the end of my .dat file could anyone tell me how to fix this? the file before save looks: <?xml version="1.0"?> <HighScoreData xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <PlayerName> <string>neil</string> <string>shawn</string> <string>mark</string> <string>cindy</string> <string>sam</string> </PlayerName> <Score> <int>200</int> <int>180</int> <int>150</int> <int>100</int> <int>50</int> </Score> <Count>5</Count> </HighScoreData> the file after save looks: <?xml version="1.0"?> <HighScoreData xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <PlayerName> <string>Nick</string> <string>Nick</string> <string>neil</string> <string>shawn</string> <string>mark</string> </PlayerName> <Score> <int>210</int> <int>210</int> <int>200</int> <int>180</int> <int>150</int> </Score> <Count>5</Count> </HighScoreData>> the part of my code that does all of save load to xml is: DECLARATIONS PART [Serializable] public struct HighScoreData { public string[] PlayerName; public int[] Score; public int Count; public HighScoreData(int count) { PlayerName = new string[count]; Score = new int[count]; Count = count; } } IAsyncResult result = null; bool inputName; HighScoreData data; int Score = 0; public string NAME; public string HighScoresFilename = "highscores.dat"; Game1 constructor public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; Width = graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 960; Height = graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight =640; GamerServicesComponent GSC = new GamerServicesComponent(this); Components.Add(GSC); } Inicialize function (end of it) protected override void Initialize() { //other game code base.Initialize(); string fullpath =Path.Combine(HighScoresFilename); if (!File.Exists(fullpath)) { //If the file doesn't exist, make a fake one... // Create the data to save data = new HighScoreData(5); data.PlayerName[0] = "neil"; data.Score[0] = 200; data.PlayerName[1] = "shawn"; data.Score[1] = 180; data.PlayerName[2] = "mark"; data.Score[2] = 150; data.PlayerName[3] = "cindy"; data.Score[3] = 100; data.PlayerName[4] = "sam"; data.Score[4] = 50; SaveHighScores(data, HighScoresFilename); } } all methods for loading saving and output public static void SaveHighScores(HighScoreData data, string filename) { // Get the path of the save game string fullpath = Path.Combine("highscores.dat"); // Open the file, creating it if necessary FileStream stream = File.Open(fullpath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate); try { // Convert the object to XML data and put it in the stream XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(HighScoreData)); serializer.Serialize(stream, data); } finally { // Close the file stream.Close(); } } /* Load highscores */ public static HighScoreData LoadHighScores(string filename) { HighScoreData data; // Get the path of the save game string fullpath = Path.Combine("highscores.dat"); // Open the file FileStream stream = File.Open(fullpath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Read); try { // Read the data from the file XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(HighScoreData)); data = (HighScoreData)serializer.Deserialize(stream);//this is the line // where program gives an error } finally { // Close the file stream.Close(); } return (data); } /* Save player highscore when game ends */ private void SaveHighScore() { // Create the data to saved HighScoreData data = LoadHighScores(HighScoresFilename); int scoreIndex = -1; for (int i = 0; i < data.Count ; i++) { if (Score > data.Score[i]) { scoreIndex = i; break; } } if (scoreIndex > -1) { //New high score found ... do swaps for (int i = data.Count - 1; i > scoreIndex; i--) { data.PlayerName[i] = data.PlayerName[i - 1]; data.Score[i] = data.Score[i - 1]; } data.PlayerName[scoreIndex] = NAME; //Retrieve User Name Here data.Score[scoreIndex] = Score; // Retrieve score here SaveHighScores(data, HighScoresFilename); } } /* Iterate through data if highscore is called and make the string to be saved*/ public string makeHighScoreString() { // Create the data to save HighScoreData data2 = LoadHighScores(HighScoresFilename); // Create scoreBoardString string scoreBoardString = "Highscores:\n\n"; for (int i = 0; i<5;i++) { scoreBoardString = scoreBoardString + data2.PlayerName[i] + "-" + data2.Score[i] + "\n"; } return scoreBoardString; } when ill make this work i will start this code when i call game over (now i start it when i press some buttons, so i could test it faster) public void InputYourName() { if (result == null && !Guide.IsVisible) { string title = "Name"; string description = "Write your name in order to save your Score"; string defaultText = "Nick"; PlayerIndex playerIndex = new PlayerIndex(); result= Guide.BeginShowKeyboardInput(playerIndex, title, description, defaultText, null, null); // NAME = result.ToString(); } if (result != null && result.IsCompleted) { NAME = Guide.EndShowKeyboardInput(result); result = null; inputName = false; SaveHighScore(); } } this where i call output to the screen (ill call this in highscores meniu section when i am done with debugging) spriteBatch.DrawString(Font1, "" + makeHighScoreString(),new Vector2(500,200), Color.White); }

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - CLR metadata 1

  - by Simon Cooper

  Before we look at the bytes comprising the CLR-specific data inside an assembly, we first need to understand the logical format of the metadata (For this post I only be looking at simple pure-IL assemblies; mixed-mode assemblies & other things complicates things quite a bit). Metadata streams Most of the CLR-specific data inside an assembly is inside one of 5 streams, which are analogous to the sections in a PE file. The name of each section in a PE file starts with a ., and the name of each stream in the CLR metadata starts with a #. All but one of the streams are heaps, which store unstructured binary data. The predefined streams are: #~ Also called the metadata stream, this stream stores all the information on the types, methods, fields, properties and events in the assembly. Unlike the other streams, the metadata stream has predefined contents & structure. #Strings This heap is where all the namespace, type & member names are stored. It is referenced extensively from the #~ stream, as we'll be looking at later. #US Also known as the user string heap, this stream stores all the strings used in code directly. All the strings you embed in your source code end up in here. This stream is only referenced from method bodies. #GUID This heap exclusively stores GUIDs used throughout the assembly. #Blob This heap is for storing pure binary data - method signatures, generic instantiations, that sort of thing. Items inside the heaps (#Strings, #US, #GUID and #Blob) are indexed using a simple binary offset from the start of the heap. At that offset is a coded integer giving the length of that item, then the item's bytes immediately follow. The #GUID stream is slightly different, in that GUIDs are all 16 bytes long, so a length isn't required. Metadata tables The #~ stream contains all the assembly metadata. The metadata is organised into 45 tables, which are binary arrays of predefined structures containing information on various aspects of the metadata. Each entry in a table is called a row, and the rows are simply concatentated together in the file on disk. For example, each row in the TypeRef table contains: A reference to where the type is defined (most of the time, a row in the AssemblyRef table). An offset into the #Strings heap with the name of the type An offset into the #Strings heap with the namespace of the type. in that order. The important tables are (with their table number in hex): 0x2: TypeDef 0x4: FieldDef 0x6: MethodDef 0x14: EventDef 0x17: PropertyDef Contains basic information on all the types, fields, methods, events and properties defined in the assembly. 0x1: TypeRef The details of all the referenced types defined in other assemblies. 0xa: MemberRef The details of all the referenced members of types defined in other assemblies. 0x9: InterfaceImpl Links the types defined in the assembly with the interfaces that type implements. 0xc: CustomAttribute Contains information on all the attributes applied to elements in this assembly, from method parameters to the assembly itself. 0x18: MethodSemantics Links properties and events with the methods that comprise the get/set or add/remove methods of the property or method. 0x1b: TypeSpec 0x2b: MethodSpec These tables provide instantiations of generic types and methods for each usage within the assembly. There are several ways to reference a single row within a table. The simplest is to simply specify the 1-based row index (RID). The indexes are 1-based so a value of 0 can represent 'null'. In this case, which table the row index refers to is inferred from the context. If the table can't be determined from the context, then a particular row is specified using a token. This is a 4-byte value with the most significant byte specifying the table, and the other 3 specifying the 1-based RID within that table. This is generally how a metadata table row is referenced from the instruction stream in method bodies. The third way is to use a coded token, which we will look at in the next post. So, back to the bytes Now we've got a rough idea of how the metadata is logically arranged, we can now look at the bytes comprising the start of the CLR data within an assembly: The first 8 bytes of the .text section are used by the CLR loader stub. After that, the CLR-specific data starts with the CLI header. I've highlighted the important bytes in the diagram. In order, they are: The size of the header. As the header is a fixed size, this is always 0x48. The CLR major version. This is always 2, even for .NET 4 assemblies. The CLR minor version. This is always 5, even for .NET 4 assemblies, and seems to be ignored by the runtime. The RVA and size of the metadata header. In the diagram, the RVA 0x20e4 corresponds to the file offset 0x2e4 Various flags specifying if this assembly is pure-IL, whether it is strong name signed, and whether it should be run as 32-bit (this is how the CLR differentiates between x86 and AnyCPU assemblies). A token pointing to the entrypoint of the assembly. In this case, 06 (the last byte) refers to the MethodDef table, and 01 00 00 refers to to the first row in that table. (after a gap) RVA of the strong name signature hash, which comes straight after the CLI header. The RVA 0x2050 corresponds to file offset 0x250. The rest of the CLI header is mainly used in mixed-mode assemblies, and so is zeroed in this pure-IL assembly. After the CLI header comes the strong name hash, which is a SHA-1 hash of the assembly using the strong name key. After that comes the bodies of all the methods in the assembly concatentated together. Each method body starts off with a header, which I'll be looking at later. As you can see, this is a very small assembly with only 2 methods (an instance constructor and a Main method). After that, near the end of the .text section, comes the metadata, containing a metadata header and the 5 streams discussed above. We'll be looking at this in the next post. Conclusion The CLI header data doesn't have much to it, but we've covered some concepts that will be important in later posts - the logical structure of the CLR metadata and the overall layout of CLR data within the .text section. Next, I'll have a look at the contents of the #~ stream, and how the table data is arranged on disk.

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• Java JRE 1.7.0_45 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  Java Runtime Environment 7u45 (a.k.a. JRE 7u45-b18) and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline are now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12.0, 12.1, and 12.2 for Windows-based desktop clients. Effects of new support dates on Java upgrades for EBS environments Support dates for the E-Business Suite and Java have changed.  Please review the sections below for more details: What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? All JRE 6 and 7 releases are certified with EBS upon release Our standard policy is that all E-Business Suite customers can apply all JRE updates to end-user desktops from JRE 1.6.0_03 and later updates on the 1.6 codeline, and from JRE 7u10 and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline.  We test all new JRE 1.6 and JRE 7 releases in parallel with the JRE development process, so all new JRE 1.6 and 7 releases are considered certified with the E-Business Suite on the same day that they're released by our Java team.  You do not need to wait for a certification announcement before applying new JRE 1.6 or JRE 7 releases to your EBS users' desktops. What's needed to enable EBS environments for JRE 7? EBS customers should ensure that they are running JRE 7u17, at minimum, on Windows desktop clients. Of the compatibility issues identified with JRE 7, the most critical is an issue that prevents E-Business Suite Forms-based products from launching on Windows desktops that are running JRE 7.  Customers can prevent this issue -- and all other JRE 7 compatibility issues -- by ensuring that they have applied the latest certified patches documented for JRE 7 configurations to their EBS application tier servers.  These patches are compatible with JRE 6 and 7, production ready, and fully-tested with the E-Business Suite.  These patches may be applied immediately to all E-Business Suite environments. All other Forms prerequisites documented in the Notes above should also be applied.  Where are the official patch requirements documented? All patches required for ensuring full compatibility of the E-Business Suite with JRE 7 are documented in these Notes: For EBS 11i: Deploying Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i (Note 290807.1) Upgrading Developer 6i with Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (Note 125767.1) For EBS 12.0, 12.1, 12.2 Deploying Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 393931.1) Upgrading OracleAS 10g Forms and Reports in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 437878.1) EBS + Discoverer 11g Users JRE 1.7.0_45 is certified for Discoverer 11g in E-Business Suite environments with the following minimum requirements: Discoverer (11g) 11.1.1.6 plus Patch 13877486 and later  Reference: How To Find Oracle BI Discoverer 10g and 11g Certification Information (Document 233047.1) Worried about the 'mismanaged session cookie' issue? No need to worry -- it's fixed.  To recap: JRE releases 1.6.0_18 through 1.6.0_22 had issues with mismanaging session cookies that affected some users in some circumstances. The fix for those issues was first included in JRE 1.6.0_23. These fixes will carry forward and continue to be fixed in all future JRE releases on the JRE 6 and 7 codelines.  In other words, if you wish to avoid the mismanaged session cookie issue, you should apply any release after JRE 1.6.0_22 on the JRE 6 codeline, and JRE 7u10 and later JRE 7 codeline updates. Implications of Java 6 End of Public Updates for EBS Users The Support Roadmap for Oracle Java is published here: Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap The latest updates to that page (as of Sept. 19, 2012) state (emphasis added): Java SE 6 End of Public Updates Notice After February 2013, Oracle will no longer post updates of Java SE 6 to its public download sites. Existing Java SE 6 downloads already posted as of February 2013 will remain accessible in the Java Archive on Oracle Technology Network. Developers and end-users are encouraged to update to more recent Java SE versions that remain available for public download. For enterprise customers, who need continued access to critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 or older versions, long term support is available through Oracle Java SE Support . What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? EBS users fall under the category of "enterprise users" above.  Java is an integral part of the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, so EBS users will continue to receive Java SE 6 updates from February 2013 to the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. In other words, nothing changes for EBS users after February 2013.  EBS users will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 until the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. How can EBS customers obtain Java 6 updates after the public end-of-life? EBS customers can download Java 6 patches from My Oracle Support.  For a complete list of all Java SE patch numbers, see: All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Note 1439822.1) Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? This upgrade is highly recommended but remains optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JRE 6 desktop clients.  Java 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All E-Business Suite customers must upgrade to JRE 7 by June 2017. Coexistence of JRE 6 and JRE 7 on Windows desktops The upgrade to JRE 7 is highly recommended for EBS users, but some users may need to run both JRE 6 and 7 on their Windows desktops for reasons unrelated to the E-Business Suite. Most EBS configurations with IE and Firefox use non-static versioning by default. JRE 7 will be invoked instead of JRE 6 if both are installed on a Windows desktop. For more details, see "Appendix B: Static vs. Non-static Versioning and Set Up Options" in Notes 290807.1 and 393931.1. Applying Updates to JRE 6 and JRE 7 to Windows desktops Auto-update will keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with JRE 7 installed. Auto-update will only keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with both JRE 6 and 7 installed.  JRE 6 users are strongly encouraged to apply the latest Critical Patch Updates as soon as possible after each release. The Jave SE CPUs will be available via My Oracle Support.  EBS users can find more information about JRE 6 and 7 updates here: Information Center: Installation & Configuration for Oracle Java SE (Note 1412103.2) The dates for future Java SE CPUs can be found on the Critical Patch Updates, Security Alerts and Third Party Bulletin.  An RSS feed is available on that site for those who would like to be kept up-to-date. What do Mac users need? Mac users running Mac OS 10.7 or 10.8 can run JRE 7 plug-ins.  See this article: EBS 12 certified with Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 with Safari 6 and JRE 7 Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? JRE is used for desktop clients.  JDK is used for application tier servers JDK upgrades for E-Business Suite application tier servers are highly recommended but currently remain optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JDK 6 for application tier servers.  Java SE 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All EBS customers with application tier servers on Windows, Solaris, and Linux must upgrade to JDK 7 by June 2017. EBS customers running their application tier servers on other operating systems should check with their respective vendors for the support dates for those platforms. JDK 7 is certified with E-Business Suite 12.  See: Java (JDK) 7 Certified for E-Business Suite 12 Servers References Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1) Upgrading Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) with Oracle Applications 11i for Windows Clients (Metalink Note 290807.1) Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1) Upgrading JRE Plugin with Oracle Applications R12 (MetaLink Note 393931.1) Related Articles Mismanaged Session Cookie Issue Fixed for EBS in JRE 1.6.0_23 Roundup: Oracle JInitiator 1.3 Desupported for EBS Customers in July 2009

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• tile_static, tile_barrier, and tiled matrix multiplication with C++ AMP

  - by Daniel Moth

  We ended the previous post with a mechanical transformation of the C++ AMP matrix multiplication example to the tiled model and in the process introduced tiled_index and tiled_grid. This is part 2. tile_static memory You all know that in regular CPU code, static variables have the same value regardless of which thread accesses the static variable. This is in contrast with non-static local variables, where each thread has its own copy. Back to C++ AMP, the same rules apply and each thread has its own value for local variables in your lambda, whereas all threads see the same global memory, which is the data they have access to via the array and array_view. In addition, on an accelerator like the GPU, there is a programmable cache, a third kind of memory type if you'd like to think of it that way (some call it shared memory, others call it scratchpad memory). Variables stored in that memory share the same value for every thread in the same tile. So, when you use the tiled model, you can have variables where each thread in the same tile sees the same value for that variable, that threads from other tiles do not. The new storage class for local variables introduced for this purpose is called tile_static. You can only use tile_static in restrict(direct3d) functions, and only when explicitly using the tiled model. What this looks like in code should be no surprise, but here is a snippet to confirm your mental image, using a good old regular C array // each tile of threads has its own copy of locA, // shared among the threads of the tile tile_static float locA[16][16]; Note that tile_static variables are scoped and have the lifetime of the tile, and they cannot have constructors or destructors. tile_barrier In amp.h one of the types introduced is tile_barrier. You cannot construct this object yourself (although if you had one, you could use a copy constructor to create another one). So how do you get one of these? You get it, from a tiled_index object. Beyond the 4 properties returning index objects, tiled_index has another property, barrier, that returns a tile_barrier object. The tile_barrier class exposes a single member, the method wait. 15: // Given a tiled_index object named t_idx 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: // more code …in the code above, all threads in the tile will reach line 16 before a single one progresses to line 17. Note that all threads must be able to reach the barrier, i.e. if you had branchy code in such a way which meant that there is a chance that not all threads could reach line 16, then the code above would be illegal. Tiled Matrix Multiplication Example – part 2 So now that we added to our understanding the concepts of tile_static and tile_barrier, let me obfuscate rewrite the matrix multiplication code so that it takes advantage of tiling. Before you start reading this, I suggest you get a cup of your favorite non-alcoholic beverage to enjoy while you try to fully understand the code. 01: void MatrixMultiplyTiled(vector<float>& vC, const vector<float>& vA, const vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 02: { 03: static const int TS = 16; 04: array_view<const float,2> a(M, W, vA); 05: array_view<const float,2> b(W, N, vB); 06: array_view<writeonly<float>,2> c(M,N,vC); 07: parallel_for_each(c.grid.tile< TS, TS >(), 08: [=] (tiled_index< TS, TS> t_idx) restrict(direct3d) 09: { 10: int row = t_idx.local[0]; int col = t_idx.local[1]; 11: float sum = 0.0f; 12: for (int i = 0; i < W; i += TS) { 13: tile_static float locA[TS][TS], locB[TS][TS]; 14: locA[row][col] = a(t_idx.global[0], col + i); 15: locB[row][col] = b(row + i, t_idx.global[1]); 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: for (int k = 0; k < TS; k++) 18: sum += locA[row][k] * locB[k][col]; 19: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 20: } 21: c[t_idx.global] = sum; 22: }); 23: } Notice that all the code up to line 9 is the same as per the changes we made in part 1 of tiling introduction. If you squint, the body of the lambda itself preserves the original algorithm on lines 10, 11, and 17, 18, and 21. The difference being that those lines use new indexing and the tile_static arrays; the tile_static arrays are declared and initialized on the brand new lines 13-15. On those lines we copy from the global memory represented by the array_view objects (a and b), to the tile_static vanilla arrays (locA and locB) – we are copying enough to fit a tile. Because in the code that follows on line 18 we expect the data for this tile to be in the tile_static storage, we need to synchronize the threads within each tile with a barrier, which we do on line 16 (to avoid accessing uninitialized memory on line 18). We also need to synchronize the threads within a tile on line 19, again to avoid the race between lines 14, 15 (retrieving the next set of data for each tile and overwriting the previous set) and line 18 (not being done processing the previous set of data). Luckily, as part of the awesome C++ AMP debugger in Visual Studio there is an option that helps you find such races, but that is a story for another blog post another time. May I suggest reading the next section, and then coming back to re-read and walk through this code with pen and paper to really grok what is going on, if you haven't already? Cool. Why would I introduce this tiling complexity into my code? Funny you should ask that, I was just about to tell you. There is only one reason we tiled our extent, had to deal with finding a good tile size, ensure the number of threads we schedule are correctly divisible with the tile size, had to use a tiled_index instead of a normal index, and had to understand tile_barrier and to figure out where we need to use it, and double the size of our lambda in terms of lines of code: the reason is to be able to use tile_static memory. Why do we want to use tile_static memory? Because accessing tile_static memory is around 10 times faster than accessing the global memory on an accelerator like the GPU, e.g. in the code above, if you can get 150GB/second accessing data from the array_view a, you can get 1500GB/second accessing the tile_static array locA. And since by definition you are dealing with really large data sets, the savings really pay off. We have seen tiled implementations being twice as fast as their non-tiled counterparts. Now, some algorithms will not have performance benefits from tiling (and in fact may deteriorate), e.g. algorithms that require you to go only once to global memory will not benefit from tiling, since with tiling you already have to fetch the data once from global memory! Other algorithms may benefit, but you may decide that you are happy with your code being 150 times faster than the serial-version you had, and you do not need to invest to make it 250 times faster. Also algorithms with more than 3 dimensions, which C++ AMP supports in the non-tiled model, cannot be tiled. Also note that in future releases, we may invest in making the non-tiled model, which already uses tiling under the covers, go the extra step and use tile_static memory on your behalf, but it is obviously way to early to commit to anything like that, and we certainly don't do any of that today. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Is Financial Inclusion an Obligation or an Opportunity for Banks?

  - by tushar.chitra

  Why should banks care about financial inclusion? First, the statistics, I think this will set the tone for this blog post. There are close to 2.5 billion people who are excluded from the banking stream and out of this, 2.2 billion people are from the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia (McKinsey on Society: Global Financial Inclusion). However, this is not just a third-world phenomenon. According to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), in the US, post 2008 financial crisis, one family out of five has either opted out of the banking system or has been moved out (American Banker). Moving this huge unbanked population into mainstream banking is both an opportunity and a challenge for banks. An obvious opportunity is the significant untapped customer base that banks can target, so is the positive brand equity a bank can build by fulfilling its social responsibilities. Also, as banks target the cost-conscious unbanked customer, they will be forced to look at ways to offer cost-effective products and services, necessitating technology upgrades and innovations. However, cost is not the only hurdle in increasing the adoption of banking services. The potential users need to be convinced of the benefits of banking and banks will also face stiff competition from unorganized players. Finally, the banks will have to believe in the viability of this business opportunity, and not treat financial inclusion as an obligation. In what ways can banks target the unbanked For financial inclusion to be a success, banks should adopt innovative business models to develop products that address the stated and unstated needs of the unbanked population and also design delivery channels that are cost effective and viable in the long run. Through business correspondents and facilitators In rural and remote areas, one of the major hurdles in increasing banking penetration is connectivity and accessibility to banking services, which makes last mile inclusion a daunting challenge. To address this, banks can avail the services of business correspondents or facilitators. This model allows banks to establish greater connectivity through a trusted and reliable intermediary. In India, for instance, banks can leverage the local Kirana stores (the mom & pop stores) to service rural and remote areas. With a supportive nudge from the central bank, the commercial banks can enlist these shop owners as business correspondents to increase their reach. Since these neighborhood stores are acquainted with the local population, they can help banks manage the KYC norms, besides serving as a conduit for remittance. Banks also have an opportunity over a period of time to cross-sell other financial products such as micro insurance, mutual funds and pension products through these correspondents. To exercise greater operational control over the business correspondents, banks can also adopt a combination of branch and business correspondent models to deliver financial inclusion. Through mobile devices According to a 2012 world bank report on financial inclusion, out of a world population of 7 billion, over 5 billion or 70% have mobile phones and only 2 billion or 30% have a bank account. What this means for banks is that there is scope for them to leverage this phenomenal growth in mobile usage to serve the unbanked population. Banks can use mobile technology to service the basic banking requirements of their customers with no frills accounts, effectively bringing down the cost per transaction. As I had discussed in my earlier post on mobile payments, though non-traditional players have taken the lead in P2P mobile payments, banks still hold an edge in terms of infrastructure and reliability. Through crowd-funding According to the Crowdfunding Industry Report by Massolution, the global crowdfunding industry raised $2.7 billion in 2012, and is projected to grow to $5.1 billion in 2013. With credit policies becoming tighter and banks becoming more circumspect in terms of loan disbursals, crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative channel for lending. Typically, these initiatives target the unbanked population by offering small loans that are unviable for larger banks. Though a significant proportion of crowdfunding initiatives globally are run by non-banking institutions, banks are also venturing into this space. The next step towards inclusive finance Banks by themselves cannot make financial inclusion a success. There is a need for a whole ecosystem that is supportive of this mission. The policy makers, that include the regulators and government bodies, must be in sync, the IT solution providers must put on their thinking caps to come out with innovative products and solutions, communication channels such as internet and mobile need to expand their reach, and the media and the public need to play an active part. The other challenge for financial inclusion is from the banks themselves. While it is true that financial inclusion will unleash a hitherto hugely untapped market, the normal banking model may be found wanting because of issues such as flexibility, convenience and reliability. The business will be viable only when there is a focus on increasing the usage of existing infrastructure and that is possible when the banks can offer the entire range of products and services to the large number of users of essential banking services. Apart from these challenges, banks will also have to quickly master and replicate the business model to extend their reach to the remotest regions in their respective geographies. They will need to ensure that the transactions deliver a viable business benefit to the bank. For tapping cross-sell opportunities, banks will have to quickly roll-out customized and segment-specific products. The bank staff should be brought in sync with the business plan by convincing them of the viability of the business model and the need for a business correspondent delivery model. Banks, in collaboration with the government and NGOs, will have to run an extensive financial literacy program to educate the unbanked about the benefits of banking. Finally, with the growing importance of retail banking and with many unconventional players eyeing the opportunity in payments and other lucrative areas of banking, banks need to understand the importance of micro and small branches. These micro and small branches can help banks increase their presence without a huge cost burden, provide bankers an opportunity to cross sell micro products and offer a window of opportunity for the large non-banked population to transact without any interference from intermediaries. These branches can also help diminish the role of the unorganized financial sector, such as local moneylenders and unregistered credit societies. This will also help banks build a brand awareness and loyalty among the users, which by itself has a cascading effect on the business operations, especially among the rural and un-banked centers. In conclusion, with the increasingly competitive banking sector facing frequent slowdowns and downturns, the unbanked population presents a huge opportunity for banks to enhance their customer base and fulfill their social responsibility.

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• Setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy At Runtime

  - by Reed

  Version 4.0 of the .NET Framework included a new CLR which is almost entirely backwards compatible with the 2.0 version of the CLR.  However, by default, mixed-mode assemblies targeting .NET 3.5sp1 and earlier will fail to load in a .NET 4 application.  Fixing this requires setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy in your app.Config for the application.  While there are many good reasons for this decision, there are times when this is extremely frustrating, especially when writing a library.  As such, there are (rare) times when it would be beneficial to set this in code, at runtime, as well as verify that it’s running correctly prior to receiving a FileLoadException. Typically, loading a pre-.NET 4 mixed mode assembly is handled simply by changing your app.Config file, and including the relevant attribute in the startup element: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> .csharpcode { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .csharpcode pre { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000 } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080 } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0 } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633 } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00 } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000 } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000 } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; margin: 0em; width: 100% } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060 } This causes your application to run correctly, and load the older, mixed-mode assembly without issues. For full details on what’s happening here and why, I recommend reading Mark Miller’s detailed explanation of this attribute and the reasoning behind it. Before I show any code, let me say: I strongly recommend using the official approach of using app.config to set this policy. That being said, there are (rare) times when, for one reason or another, changing the application configuration file is less than ideal. While this is the supported approach to handling this issue, the CLR Hosting API includes a means of setting this programmatically via the ICLRRuntimeInfo interface.  Normally, this is used if you’re hosting the CLR in a native application in order to set this, at runtime, prior to loading the assemblies.  However, the F# Samples include a nice trick showing how to load this API and bind this policy, at runtime.  This was required in order to host the Managed DirectX API, which is built against an older version of the CLR. This is fairly easy to port to C#.  Instead of a direct port, I also added a little addition – by trapping the COM exception received if unable to bind (which will occur if the 2.0 CLR is already bound), I also allow a runtime check of whether this property was setup properly: public static class RuntimePolicyHelper { public static bool LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully { get; private set; } static RuntimePolicyHelper() { ICLRRuntimeInfo clrRuntimeInfo = (ICLRRuntimeInfo)RuntimeEnvironment.GetRuntimeInterfaceAsObject( Guid.Empty, typeof(ICLRRuntimeInfo).GUID); try { clrRuntimeInfo.BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = true; } catch (COMException) { // This occurs with an HRESULT meaning // "A different runtime was already bound to the legacy CLR version 2 activation policy." LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = false; } } [ComImport] [InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] [Guid("BD39D1D2-BA2F-486A-89B0-B4B0CB466891")] private interface ICLRRuntimeInfo { void xGetVersionString(); void xGetRuntimeDirectory(); void xIsLoaded(); void xIsLoadable(); void xLoadErrorString(); void xLoadLibrary(); void xGetProcAddress(); void xGetInterface(); void xSetDefaultStartupFlags(); void xGetDefaultStartupFlags(); [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.InternalCall, MethodCodeType = MethodCodeType.Runtime)] void BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); } } Using this, it’s possible to not only set this at runtime, but also verify, prior to loading your mixed mode assembly, whether this will succeed. In my case, this was quite useful – I am working on a library purely for internal use which uses a numerical package that is supplied with both a completely managed as well as a native solver.  The native solver uses a CLR 2 mixed-mode assembly, but is dramatically faster than the pure managed approach.  By checking RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully at runtime, I can decide whether to enable the native solver, and only do so if I successfully bound this policy. There are some tricks required here – To enable this sort of fallback behavior, you must make these checks in a type that doesn’t cause the mixed mode assembly to be loaded.  In my case, this forced me to encapsulate the library I was using entirely in a separate class, perform the check, then pass through the required calls to that class.  Otherwise, the library will load before the hosting process gets enabled, which in turn will fail. This code will also, of course, try to enable the runtime policy before the first time you use this class – which typically means just before the first time you check the boolean value.  As a result, checking this early on in the application is more likely to allow it to work. Finally, if you’re using a library, this has to be called prior to the 2.0 CLR loading.  This will cause it to fail if you try to use it to enable this policy in a plugin for most third party applications that don’t have their app.config setup properly, as they will likely have already loaded the 2.0 runtime. As an example, take a simple audio player.  The code below shows how this can be used to properly, at runtime, only use the “native” API if this will succeed, and fallback (or raise a nicer exception) if this will fail: public class AudioPlayer { private IAudioEngine audioEngine; public AudioPlayer() { if (RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully) { // This will load a CLR 2 mixed mode assembly this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineNative(); } else { this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineManaged(); } } public void Play(string filename) { this.audioEngine.Play(filename); } } Now – the warning: This approach works, but I would be very hesitant to use it in public facing production code, especially for anything other than initializing your own application.  While this should work in a library, using it has a very nasty side effect: you change the runtime policy of the executing application in a way that is very hidden and non-obvious.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

  - by Jeff

  This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

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• Can you help me fix my broken packages?

  - by Andreas Hartmann

  I would like to upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10, but some broken packages are preventing upgrade success: grep Broken /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log output: Broken libwayland-client0:amd64 Conflicts on libwayland0 [ amd64 ] < 1.0.5-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (< 1.1.0) Broken libunity9:amd64 Breaks on unity-common [ amd64 ] < 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (< 7.1.2) Broken cups-filters:amd64 Conflicts on ghostscript-cups [ amd64 ] < 9.07~dfsg2-0ubuntu3.1 > ( text ) Broken libpam-systemd:amd64 Conflicts on libpam-xdg-support [ amd64 ] < 0.2-0ubuntu2 > ( admin ) Broken libharfbuzz0a:amd64 Breaks on libharfbuzz0 [ amd64 ] < 0.9.13-1 > ( libs ) Broken libharfbuzz0a:amd64 Breaks on libharfbuzz0 [ i386 ] < 0.9.13-1 > ( libs ) Broken libunity-scopes-json-def-desktop:amd64 Conflicts on libunity-common [ amd64 ] < 6.90.2daily13.04.05-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (< 7.0.7) Broken libunity-scopes-json-def-desktop:amd64 Conflicts on libunity-common [ i386 ] < none > ( none ) (< 7.0.7) Broken libaccount-plugin-generic-oauth:amd64 Conflicts on account-plugin-generic-oauth [ amd64 ] < 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 > ( gnome ) (< 0.10bzr13.04.30) Broken libaccount-plugin-generic-oauth:amd64 Breaks on account-plugin-generic-oauth [ amd64 ] < 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 > ( gnome ) (< 0.10bzr13.04.30) Broken libmutter0b:amd64 Breaks on libmutter0a [ amd64 ] < 3.6.3-0ubuntu2 > ( libs ) Broken python3-aptdaemon.pkcompat:amd64 Breaks on libpackagekit-glib2-14 [ amd64 ] < 0.7.6-3ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (<= 0.7.6-4) Broken apache2:amd64 Conflicts on apache2.2-common [ amd64 ] < 2.2.22-6ubuntu5.1 > ( httpd ) Broken chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra:amd64 Conflicts on chromium-codecs-ffmpeg [ amd64 ] < 28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.13.04.1 -> 29.0.1547.65-0ubuntu2 > ( universe/web ) Broken unity-scope-home:amd64 Conflicts on unity-lens-shopping [ amd64 ] < 6.8.0daily13.03.04-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) Broken libsnmp30:amd64 Breaks on libsnmp15 [ amd64 ] < 5.4.3~dfsg-2.7ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken apache2.2-bin:amd64 Breaks on gnome-user-share [ amd64 ] < 3.0.4-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (< 3.8.0-2~) Broken libgjs0d:amd64 Conflicts on libgjs0c [ amd64 ] < 1.34.0-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken unity-gtk2-module:amd64 Conflicts on appmenu-gtk [ amd64 ] < 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken lib32asound2:amd64 Depends on libasound2 [ amd64 ] < 1.0.25-4ubuntu3.1 -> 1.0.27.2-1ubuntu6 > ( libs ) (= 1.0.25-4ubuntu3.1) Broken unity-gtk3-module:amd64 Conflicts on appmenu-gtk3 [ amd64 ] < 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken activity-log-manager:amd64 Conflicts on activity-log-manager-common [ amd64 ] < 0.9.4-0ubuntu6.2 > ( utils ) Broken libgtksourceview-3.0-0:amd64 Depends on libgtksourceview-3.0-common [ amd64 ] < 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 -> 3.8.2-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (< 3.7) Broken icaclient:amd64 Depends on lib32asound2 [ amd64 ] < 1.0.25-4ubuntu3.1 > ( libs ) Broken libunity-core-6.0-5:amd64 Depends on unity-services [ amd64 ] < 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 -> 7.1.2+13.10.20131014.1-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (= 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1) Broken libbamf3-1:amd64 Depends on bamfdaemon [ amd64 ] < 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 -> 0.5.1+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (= 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1) Broken apache2-bin:amd64 Conflicts on apache2.2-bin [ amd64 ] < 2.2.22-6ubuntu5.1 -> 2.4.6-2ubuntu2 > ( httpd ) (< 2.3~) Output for cat /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 13.04 _Raring Ringtail_ - Release amd64 (20130424)]/ raring main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring universe deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring multiverse deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu raring partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu raring partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring main # deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring main # deb http://linux.dropbox.com/ubuntu precise main output for sudo dpkg -l | grep -e "^iU" -e "^rc": rc ibm-lotus-cae 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Composite Application Editor rc ibm-lotus-cae-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus CAE NL1 rc ibm-lotus-feedreader 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 Feeds for IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2 rc ibm-lotus-feedreader-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Feed Reader NL1 rc ibm-lotus-notes 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Notes rc ibm-lotus-notes-core-de 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Notes Native German (de) rc ibm-lotus-notes-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Notes Java NL1 rc ibm-lotus-sametime 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Sametime rc ibm-lotus-symphony 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Symphony rc ibm-lotus-symphony-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Symphony NL1 rc libapache2-mod-php5filter 5.4.9-4ubuntu2.2 amd64 server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (apache 2 filter module) rc libavcodec53:amd64 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 amd64 Libav codec library rc libavutil51:amd64 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 amd64 Libav utility library rc libmotif4:amd64 2.3.3-7ubuntu1 amd64 Open Motif - shared libraries rc linux-image-3.8.0-25-generic 3.8.0-25.37 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-25-generic 3.8.0-25.37 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP

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