Search Results

Search found 7726 results on 310 pages for 'twitter integration'.

Page 195/310 | < Previous Page | 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202  | Next Page >

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 23, 2010New Projects.NET StarCraft II Replay Parser: A .NET 3.5 Library used to parse StarCraft II replays. Developed in C# 3.5.BackToBasics "B2B" Chat: With technology and software getting more and more complicated, why not get back to basics with BackToBasicsChat. B2B allows you to chat over a ser...Dark Neuron Game Engine: Dark Neuron allows you to easily create fun and interesting games with no need of developing basic game components. This engine is developed for C#...DeepZoom Pivot Constructor: Library to make building DeepZoom images and Pivot displays simpler.ePaper reader: The project is aimed at creating a tool which helps in reading electronic editions of news papers(pdf/flash)FSharpPageProvider for EPiServer CMS 6: This project starts as the port of EPiServer XmlPageProvider to F# programming language. Hammock for REST: Hammock is a REST library for .NET that greatly simplifies consuming and wrapping RESTful services.Kirill Osenkov: Various small projects, tools, utilities and samples by Kirill OsenkovliveDB: liveDB - web client for sql serverLucilla Framework: lucilla frameworkMVC Foolproof Validation: MVC Foolproof Validation aims to extend the Data Annotation validation provided in ASP.NET MVC. Initial efforts are focused on adding contingent va...MVC2Forums: MVC2Forums is simply a forum system based upon MVC2.Mvvm Foundation Silverlight: Mvvm Foundation Silverlight is a library of classes that are helpful when building Silverlight applications based in the MVVM pattern. This librar...MyPersonalWebsite: This is my personal web site developed using ASP.NET MVC 2Planner: Planner makes it easier for all peoples to plan your tasks. It's developed in Delphi.Prose: Prose is an playground for an experimental JavaScript like language compiler. Eventually it will implement 0-CFA, CFA2, and a Tracing JITQuestTracker: QuestTracker is a todo list presented in the format of a quest tracking list such as the one in World of Warcraft.SevenZipLib: SevenZipLib is a C# interface to the 7-zip library.SimpleGeo .Net: .Net Client library for the SimpleGeo.com serviceNew ReleasesAutenticar no OpenLDAP utilizando pGIna: DLL LDAPAuth Plus: New Group: No LoginBMap.NET: BMap.NET 2: This is the 2nd version of BMap.NET. It has included these tags: Bing Maps, and "About BMap.NET".Cronos: Version 2.04: This is primarily a bug-fix release. Several numerical issues have been resolved, and a resource leak (of MS Windows graphics objects) has been fi...EV Dashboard: v1.0: This release includes support for an App.config file and Auto Connect, which will connect to the specified BMS at startup. Note: You still have to ...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.1 Beta: 0.1 Beta Added More utilities and functions RefactoringsGLB Virtual Player Builder: 0.4.2 Beta: Beta build that includes a new player creator.HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201003222215): New features: (None) Bug fix: Fixed bugs of unable to parse XML file stream returned from HKGolden API, as the encoding of XML file stream chang...jQuery Web Controls ASP.Net: jQueryWebControls 1.1.1.2: En esta versión se han corregido problemas existentes en la ejecución de los scripts de jquery cuando se utilizaban MasterPage y/o Ajax Control Too...LightKit: Version 0.2.2: Fixed: fixed bug when CollectionItemsEditor ditermines IsChanged property incorrectly fixed ObjectEditor`a thisstring propertyName method wrong l...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.8: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 22): This version fixes the icons for the desktop installer and changes the install directory to Program Files\MapWindow instead of Program Files\ISU.Math.NET Numerics: 2010.3.22.1334 Build: Latest alpha buildMiniCalendar Web Part: MiniCalendar Web Part 1.8: A small web part to display links to events stored in a list (or document library) in a mini calendar (in month view mode). It shows tooltips for t...OCInject: Release Two: This release brings some missing features such as Singleton support, Func<T> factories and child containers. It, also, has an updated constructor ...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (March 2010): Installer of the latest binaries of Phalanger 2.0 (March 2010) and its integration into Visual Studio 2008. Easy installer with automatic IIS int...Planner: Planner: firstQuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1: This is the preliminary release of QuestTracker. There's not much documentation or many features yet, but it is functional. Any feedback would be a...QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1.1: Bugfix for QuestTracker 0.1QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1.2: Fixes an issue with saving the quest list.Rawr: Rawr 2.3.13: We're pleased to announce that, after long last, Rawr3 has entered public beta. You're still welcome to continue using Rawr2 (that's what you're re...Single Web Session: Alpha Model Plugin: !How to use Single Web Session add following line into your web config <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.W...SMIL - SharePoint Map Integration Layer: SMIL 1.0: Custom data field Extracts Lat/Lon from EXIF from images being uploaded. Map Web Part Filter with SharePoint views Filter by connecting to...sTASKedit: sTASKedit 42532 (Developer Alpha): This release is only to verify the currently decoded task structure... Supported files: tasks.data (v1.3.6 client)VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30322.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Advanced Notepad (Visual C++ 2008): An notepad written in c that can save in a rich text file format.Wallpaper Rotator: Wallpaper Rotator 0.5: Wallpaper Rotator 0.5 This version includes the following improvements: Saving the choice of "Random Order (Shuffle Mode)" Updating the configu...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETLINQ to TwitterPHPExcelFarseer Physics EngineFacebook Developer ToolkitNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightN2 CMS

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 19, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 19, 2010New Projects3FD - Framework For Fast Development: This is a C++ framework that provides a solid error handling structure, garbage collection, multi-threading and portability between compilers. The ...ali test project: test projectAttribute Builder: The Attribute Builder builds an attribute from a lambda expression because it can.BDK0008: it is a food lovers websitecgdigest: cg digest template for non-profit orgCokmez: Bilmuh cokmez duyuru sistemiDot Game: It is a dot game that our Bangladeshi people used to play at their childhood time and their last time when they are poor for working.ESRI Javascript .NET Integration: Visual Studio project that shows how to integrate the Esri Javascript API with .NET Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI): Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI) Developed in C# and using Powershell behind the scenes RBAC tool to simplfy RBAC administrationFile Validator (Validador de Archivos): Componente que permite realizar la validación de archivos (txt, imagenes, PDF, etc) actualmente solo tiene implementado la parte de los txt, permit...Grip 09 Lab4: GripjPageFlipper: This is a wonderful implementation of page flipper entirely based on HTML 5 <canvas> tag. It means that it can work in any browser that supports HT...Main project: Index bird families and associated species. Malware Analysis and Can Handler: MACH is a tool to organize and catalog your malware analysis canned responses, and to track the topic response lifecycle for forum experts.Perf Web: Performance team web sitePiPiBugNet: PiPiBugNet是一套全新的开源Bug管理系统。 PiPiBugNet代码基于ASP.NET 2.0平台开发，编程语言为C#。 PiPiBugNet界面基于Ext JS设计，提供了极佳的用户体验。RemoteDesktop: integrated remote console, desktop and chat utilityRuneScape emulation done right.: RuneScape emulator.Sandkasten: SandkastenSilverlight Metro Theme: Metro Theme for Silverlight.Silverlight Stereoscopy: Stereoscopy with Silverlight.Twitivia: Twitivia is an online trivia service that runs through twitter and is being used as an example set of projects. C#, MVC, Windows Services, Linq ...XPool: A simple school project.New ReleasesDot Game: 'Dot Game' first release: Dot Game first release This is the 'Dot Game' first release.DotNetNuke® Store: 02.01.35: What's New in this release? Bugs corrected: - Fixed a resource for the header in the Category list of the Store Admin module. - Added several test...ESRI Javascript .NET Integration: Map search results in a DataView: Visual Studio 2010 example showing how to pass Map results back to ASP.NET for use in a DataView.Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI): RBAC Editor: This binary is still beta (0.0.9.1) but in most case it's very stableExtending C# editor - Outlining, classification: first revision: a couple of bug has been eliminated, performance improvementFloe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R6: Corrected bug where text would be unexpectedly copied to the clipboard.Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R7: - Fixed bug where text would show up in a query window with someone if they said something on a channel that you are both present on.Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.0.9 GA released: Hi, Today we have released the final version of Visifire v3.0.9 which contains the following enhancements: * Two new properties ActualAxisMin...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.5.2 GA Released: Hi, Today we have released the final version of Visifire v3.5.2 which contains the following enhancements: Two new properties ActualAxisMinimum a...HB Batch Encoder Mk 2: HB Batch Encoder Mk2 v1.02: Added .mov support.jPageFlipper: jPageFlipper 0.9: This is an initial community preview of jPageFlipper. It's not ready for production usage but has almost all functionality implemented.linq.js - LINQ for JavaScript: ver 2.1.0.0: Add Class Dictionary Lookup Grouping OrderedEnumerable Add Method ToDictionary MemoizeAll Share Let Add Overload ...Microsoft Research Biology Extension for Excel: MSR Biology Extension for Excel - M9: M9 Release includes the following updates to the previous release: > Import / Export support from Excel for multiple file formats > Bug fixes and ...Nifty CSharp Tools: Event Watcher: Event Watcher!Paint.NET Bulk Image Processor: Paint.NET Bulk Image Processor v1.0: This is the initial release of the Paint.NET Bulk Image processor plugin. All feedback is welcome.PiPiBugNet: PiPiBugNet架构设计: PiPiBugNet架构设计，未包含功能实现RuneScape emulation done right.: rc0: Release cantidate 0.Rx Contrib: V1.6: Adding CCR queue as adapter for the ReactiveQueue credits goes to Yuval Mazor http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/yuvmaz/Silverlight Metro Theme: Silverlight Metro Theme Alpha 1: Silverlight Metro Theme Alpha 1Silverlight Stereoscopy: Silverlight Stereoscopy Alpha 1: Silverlight Stereoscopy Alpha 20100518Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.6.0: Introduced support for batch put Introduced Support for conditional updates and consistent read Added support for select conditions Brought t...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30518.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVideo Downloader: Example Program - 1.1: Example Program showing the features of the DLL and what can be achieved using it. For DLL Version 1.1.Video Downloader: Version 1.1: Version 1.1 See Home Page for usage and more information regarding new features. Please remember changes at You-Tube can prevent this software from...WatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.06.00: Whats New New Tag Mode: Show Tags from Ventrian.com NewsArticles Module New Tag Mode: Show Tags from Ventrian.com SimpleGallery Module Hyperlin...Windows Double Explorer: WDE v0.4: -optimization -switch to new vst2010 -viewer close now by pressing escape -reorder tabs -send selected fullname or shortnames via email (eye button...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrPHPExcelGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMBlogEngine.NETWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersCassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers EditionSQL Server PowerShell ExtensionsFluent Ribbon Control Suite

  Read the article

• Charms and the App Bar

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I admit. I made a mistake in the last post about our planespotter app. I have dedicated a full part of the hub to Social. I also had a section called Friends but that made sense since I said that “Friends” is a special group of people that connect to each other through our app and only our app. Social however is sharing our spots with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Now, we could write that functionality in our app in a different section but there is one small problem with that: users don’t expect that. Ok, I admit. The mistake was quite deliberate to give me an excuse to write this part. But still: the mistake is one I see a lot. People are trying to do stuff in their application that they shouldn’t be doing. This always strike me as slightly odd: why do some work when others have already done it for you and you can just use it? After all: good developers are lazy (lazy people will always try to find the easiest way to do something and in development land this usually means the cleanest and best to support way…) So. What is that part that Microsoft has done for us and we don’t have to do ourselves? The answer lies on the right hand of your Win8 screen: This is a screenshot of my tablet (as you can see I am writing this right now….) When I swipe my finger from out of the screen on the right inside the screen (or move the mouse to the upper right corner) this menu will appear. Next to settings and the start menu button we’ll find the Search and the Share charms. These are two ways that your app can share the information it contains with the rest of the world, or at least: the rest of your system. So don’t write a Search feature in your app. Don’t write a Share feature in your app. It’s here already. Users, once they are used to Windows 8, will use that feature and expect it to work. If it doesn’t, they won’t like your app and you can kiss you dreams of everlasting fame goodbye. So use these two. What are they? Well, simply they are parts of a contract. In your app you say somewhere in code that you are supporting Search and Share. So when the user selects Share the system will interrogate the current app in the foreground if it supports this feature. Your app will say “But why, yes, I do!” Then the system will ask the app “Ok then, wisecrack, then share!” and you will have to provide the system with some information about the format. Other applications have subscribed to be at the receiving end of the Share contract. They have told the system that they support Sharing (receiving) and which formats they understand. If one or more of them support the formats you specify, the user will see them. The user clicks / taps on the app of their choice and data is moved from your app to the new one. So if you say you support Facebook and Twitter users can post data from your app to these networks by selecting Share. The same applies to Search. Don’t make a “search” button in your app but use the contract to tell the system that you support search and use that instead. Users will be grateful (remember that bar with men/women/creatures that are waiting for you?) The more and more people get to know Windows 8, the more they will use this. And if you are one of the people who wrote an app that helped them learn the system, well, that’s even better. So. We don’t have a Share or a Search button. We do have other buttons. Most important: we probably need a “New Spot” button. And a “Filter” might be useful. Or someway to open the camera so you can add a picture to the spot. Where will be put those? The answer is the “Appbar” . This is a application / context aware menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen when you move your finger / mouse from below the screen into it. From above downwards works just as well. Here you see an example of the appbar from the People app. (click on it for a larger version). This appears whenever you slide your finger up from below of down from above. This is where you put your commands. Remember, this is context aware so this menu will change when you are in different parts of your app or when you have selected different items. There are a few conventions when you create this appbar. First, the items on the right are “General” items, meaning they have little to do with what is on the screen right now. I think this would be a great place to add our “New Spot” icon. On the far left are items associated with the current selected item or screen. So if you have a spot selected, the button for Add Photo should be visible here and on the left hand side. Not everything is as clear as this, but this is what you should strive for. Group items together. And please note: this is the only place in Metro design where we are allowed to use lines as separators. So when you want to separate a group of icons from another group, add a line. Also note the simplicity of the buttons. No colors, no lights or shadows, no 3D. After a couple of years of fancy almost realistic looking icons people have finally decided that hey, this is a virtual world: it’s ok to look virtual as well. So make things as readable and clear as possible and don’t try to duplicate nature. It’s all about the information, remember? (If you don’t remember I’d like to point you to a older blog post of mine about the what and why of Metro). So.. think about the buttons a bit and think about Share and Search. What will you put there? Remember: this is the way the users interact with your apps and while you shouldn’t judge a book by its covers when it comes to people, this isn’t entirely so when it comes to apps. People DO judge an app by its looks and the way it feels. Take advantage of that. History has learned that a crappy app with a GREAT user interface gets better reviews than a GREAT app with a lousy UI… I know: developers will find this extremely unfair but that’s the world we live in (No, I am not saying you should deliver rubbish apps). Next time: we’ll start by building the darn thing!

  Read the article

• In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

  - by Mike Stiles

  0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

  Read the article

• HTML5 Input type=date Formatting Issues

  - by Rick Strahl

  One of the nice features in HTML5 is the abililty to specify a specific input type for HTML text input boxes. There a host of very useful input types available including email, number, date, datetime, month, number, range, search, tel, time, url and week. For a more complete list you can check out the MDN reference. Date input types also support automatic validation which can be useful in some scenarios but maybe can get in the way at other times. One of the more common input types, and one that can most benefit of a custom UI for selection is of course date input. Almost every application could use a decent date representation and HTML5's date input type seems to push into the right direction. It'd be nice if you could just say:<form action="DateTest.html"> <label for="FromDate">Enter a Date:</label> <input type="date" id="FromDate" name="FromDate" value="11/08/2012" class="date" /> <hr /> <input type="submit" id="btnSubmit" name="btnSubmit" value="Save Date" class="smallbutton" /> </form> but if you'd expect to just work, you're likely to be pretty disappointed. Problem #1: Browser Support For starters there's browser support. Out of the major browsers only the latest versions of WebKit and Opera based browsers seem to support date input. Neither FireFox, nor any version of Internet Explorer (including the new touch enabled IE10 in Windows RT) support input type=date. Browser support is an issue, but it would be OK if it wasn't for problem #2. Problem #2: Date Formatting If you look at my date input from before:<input type="date" id="FromDate" name="FromDate" value="11/08/2012" class="date" /> You can see that my date is formatted in local date format (ie. en-us). Now when I run this sadly the form that comes up in Chrome (and also iOS mobile browsers) comes up like this: Chrome isn't recognizing my local date string. Instead it's expecting my date format to be provided in ISO 8601 format which is: 2012-11-08 So if I change the date input field to:<input type="date" id="FromDate" name="FromDate" value="2012-10-08" class="date" /> I correctly get the date field filled in: Also when I pick a date with the DatePicker the date value is also returned is also set to the ISO date format. Yet notice how the date is still formatted to the local date time format (ie. en-US format). So if I pick a new date: and then save, the value field is set back to: 2012-11-15 using the ISO format. The same is true for Opera and iOS browsers and I suspect any other WebKit style browser and their date pickers. So to summarize input type=date: Expects ISO 8601 format dates to display intial values Sets selected date values to ISO 8601 Now what? This would sort of make sense, if all browsers supported input type=date. It'd be easy because you could just format dates appropriately when you set the date value into the control by applying the appropriate culture formatting (ie. .ToString("yyyy-MM-dd") ). .NET is actually smart enough to pick up the date on the other end for modelbinding when ISO 8601 is used. For other environments this might be a bit more tricky. input type=date is clearly the way to go forward. Date controls implemented in HTML are going the way of the dodo, given the intricacies of mobile platforms and scaling for both desktop and mobile. I've been using jQuery UI Datepicker for ages but once going to mobile, that's no longer an option as the control doesn't scale down well for mobile apps (at least not without major re-styling). It also makes a lot of sense for the browser to provide this functionality - creating a consistent date input experience across apps only makes sense, which is why I find it baffling that neither FireFox nor IE 10 deign it necessary to support date input natively. The problem is that a large number of even the latest and greatest browsers don't support this. So now you're stuck with not knowing what date format you have to serve since neither the local format, nor the ISO format works in all cases. For my current app I just broke down and used the ISO format and so I'll live with the non-local date format. <input type="date" id="ToDate" name="ToDate" value="2012-11-08" class="date"/> Here's what this looks like on Chrome: Here's what it looks like on my iPhone: Both Chrome and the phone do this the way it should be. For the phone especially this demonstrates why we'd want this - the built-in date picker there certainly beats manually trying to edit the date using finger gymnastics, and it's one of the easiest ways to pick a date I can think of (ie. easier to use than your typical date picker). Finally here's what the date looks like in FireFox: Certainly this is not the ideal date format, but it's clear enough I suppose. If users enter a date in local US format and that works as well (but won't work for other locales). It'll have to do. Over time one can only hope that other browsers will finally decide to implement this functionality natively to provide a unique experience. Until then, incomplete solutions it is. Related Posts Html 5 Input Types - How useful is this really going to be?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  HTML   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• Running Solaris 11 as a control domain on a T2000

  - by jsavit

  There is increased adoption of Oracle Solaris 11, and many customers are deploying it on systems that previously ran Solaris 10. That includes older T1-processor based systems like T1000 and T2000. Even though they are old (from 2005) and don't have the performance of current SPARC servers, they are still functional, stable servers that customers continue to operate. One reason to install Solaris 11 on them is that older machines are attractive for testing OS upgrades before updating current, production systems. Normally this does not present a challenge, because Solaris 11 runs on any T-series or M-series SPARC server. One scenario adds a complication: running Solaris 11 in a control domain on a T1000 or T2000 hosting logical domains. Solaris 11 pre-installed Oracle VM Server for SPARC incompatible with T1 Unlike Solaris 10, Solaris 11 comes with Oracle VM Server for SPARC preinstalled. The ldomsmanager package contains the logical domains manager for Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2, which requires a SPARC T2, T2+, T3, or T4 server. It does not work with T1-processor systems, which are only supported by LDoms Manager 1.2 and earlier. The following screenshot shows what happens (bold font) if you try to use Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.x commands in a Solaris 11 control domain. The commands were issued in a control domain on a T2000 that previously ran Solaris 10. We also display the version of the logical domains manager installed in Solaris 11: root@t2000 psrinfo -vp The physical processor has 4 virtual processors (0-3) UltraSPARC-T1 (chipid 0, clock 1200 MHz) # prtconf|grep T SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200 # ldm -V Failed to connect to logical domain manager: Connection refused # pkg info ldomsmanager Name: system/ldoms/ldomsmanager Summary: Logical Domains Manager Description: LDoms Manager - Virtualization for SPARC T-Series Category: System/Virtualization State: Installed Publisher: solaris Version: 2.2.0.0 Build Release: 5.11 Branch: 0.175.0.8.0.3.0 Packaging Date: May 25, 2012 10:20:48 PM Size: 2.86 MB FMRI: pkg://solaris/system/ldoms/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.8.0.3.0:20120525T222048Z The 2.2 version of the logical domains manager will have to be removed, and 1.2 installed, in order to use this as a control domain. Preparing to change - create a new boot environment Before doing anything else, lets create a new boot environment: # beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created -- ------ ---------- ----- ------ ------- solaris NR / 2.14G static 2012-09-25 10:32 # beadm create solaris-1 # beadm activate solaris-1 # beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created -- ------ ---------- ----- ------ ------- solaris N / 4.82M static 2012-09-25 10:32 solaris-1 R - 2.14G static 2012-09-29 11:40 # init 0 Normally an init 6 to reboot would have been sufficient, but in the next step I reset the system anyway in order to put the system in factory default mode for a "clean" domain configuration. Preparing to change - reset to factory default There was a leftover domain configuration on the T2000, so I reset it to the factory install state. Since the ldm command is't working yet, it can't be done from the control domain, so I did it by logging onto to the service processor: $ ssh -X admin@t2000-sc Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle Advanced Lights Out Manager CMT v1.7.9 Please login: admin Please Enter password: ******** sc> showhost Sun-Fire-T2000 System Firmware 6.7.10 2010/07/14 16:35 Host flash versions: OBP 4.30.4.b 2010/07/09 13:48 Hypervisor 1.7.3.c 2010/07/09 15:14 POST 4.30.4.b 2010/07/09 14:24 sc> bootmode config="factory-default" sc> poweroff Are you sure you want to power off the system [y/n]? y SC Alert: SC Request to Power Off Host. SC Alert: Host system has shut down. sc> poweron SC Alert: Host System has Reset At this point I rebooted into the new Solaris 11 boot environment, and Solaris commands showed it was running on the factory default configuration of a single domain owning all 32 CPUs and 32GB of RAM (that's what it looked like in 2005.) # psrinfo -vp The physical processor has 8 cores and 32 virtual processors (0-31) The core has 4 virtual processors (0-3) The core has 4 virtual processors (4-7) The core has 4 virtual processors (8-11) The core has 4 virtual processors (12-15) The core has 4 virtual processors (16-19) The core has 4 virtual processors (20-23) The core has 4 virtual processors (24-27) The core has 4 virtual processors (28-31) UltraSPARC-T1 (chipid 0, clock 1200 MHz) # prtconf|grep Mem Memory size: 32640 Megabytes Note that the older processor has 4 virtual CPUs per core, while current processors have 8 per core. Remove ldomsmanager 2.2 and install the 1.2 version The Solaris 11 pkg command is now used to remove the 2.2 version that shipped with Solaris 11: # pkg uninstall ldomsmanager Packages to remove: 1 Create boot environment: No Create backup boot environment: No Services to change: 2 PHASE ACTIONS Removal Phase 130/130 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 1/1 Package Cache Update Phase 1/1 Image State Update Phase 2/2 Finally, LDoms 1.2 installed via its install script, the same way it was done years ago: # unzip LDoms-1_2-Integration-10.zip # cd LDoms-1_2-Integration-10/Install/ # ./install-ldm Welcome to the LDoms installer. You are about to install the Logical Domains Manager package that will enable you to create, destroy and control other domains on your system. Given the capabilities of the LDoms domain manager, you can now change the security configuration of this Solaris instance using the Solaris Security Toolkit. ... ... normal install messages omitted ... The Solaris Security Toolkit applies to Solaris 10, and cannot be used in Solaris 11 (in which several things hardened by the Toolkit are already hardened by default), so answer b in the choice below: You are about to install the Logical Domains Manager package that will enable you to create, destroy and control other domains on your system. Given the capabilities of the LDoms domain manager, you can now change the security configuration of this Solaris instance using the Solaris Security Toolkit. Select a security profile from this list: a) Hardened Solaris configuration for LDoms (recommended) b) Standard Solaris configuration c) Your custom-defined Solaris security configuration profile Enter a, b, or c [a]: b ... other install messages omitted for brevity... After install I ensure that the necessary services are enabled, and verify the version of the installed LDoms Manager: # svcs ldmd STATE STIME FMRI online 22:00:36 svc:/ldoms/ldmd:default # svcs vntsd STATE STIME FMRI disabled Aug_19 svc:/ldoms/vntsd:default # ldm -V Logical Domain Manager (v 1.2-debug) Hypervisor control protocol v 1.3 Using Hypervisor MD v 1.1 System PROM: Hypervisor v. 1.7.3. @(#)Hypervisor 1.7.3.c 2010/07/09 15:14\015 OpenBoot v. 4.30.4. @(#)OBP 4.30.4.b 2010/07/09 13:48 Set up control domain and domain services At this point we have a functioning LDoms 1.2 environment that can be configured in the usual fashion. One difference is that LDoms 1.2 behavior had 'delayed configuration mode (as expected) during initial configuration before rebooting the control domain. Another minor difference with a Solaris 11 control domain is that you define virtual switches using the 'vanity name' of the network interface, rather than the hardware driver name as in Solaris 10. # ldm list ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice: the LDom Manager is running in configuration mode. Configuration and resource information is displayed for the configuration under construction; not the current active configuration. The configuration being constructed will only take effect after it is downloaded to the system controller and the host is reset. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-c-- SP 32 32640M 3.2% 4d 2h 50m # ldm add-vdiskserver primary-vds0 primary # ldm add-vconscon port-range=5000-5100 primary-vcc0 primary # ldm add-vswitch net-dev=net0 primary-vsw0 primary # ldm set-mau 2 primary # ldm set-vcpu 8 primary # ldm set-memory 4g primary # ldm add-config initial # ldm list-spconfig factory-default initial [current] That's it, really. After reboot, we are ready to install guest domains. Summary - new wine in old bottles This example shows that (new) Solaris 11 can be installed on (old) T2000 servers and used as a control domain. The main activity is to remove the preinstalled Oracle VM Server for 2.2 and install Logical Domains 1.2 - the last version of LDoms to support T1-processor systems. I tested Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 guest domains running on this server and they worked without any surprises. This is a viable way to get further into Solaris 11 adoption, even on older T-series equipment.

  Read the article

• 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.  

  Read the article

• Grow Your Business with Security

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Author: Kevin Moulton Kevin Moulton has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East EnterpriseSecurity Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. It happened again! There I was, reading something interesting online, and realizing that a friend might find it interesting too. I clicked on the little email link, thinking that I could easily forward this to my friend, but no! Instead, a new screen popped up where I was asked to create an account. I was expected to create a User ID and password, not to mention providing some personally identifiable information, just for the privilege of helping that website spread their word. Of course, I didn’t want to have to remember a new account and password, I didn’t want to provide the requisite information, and I didn’t want to waste my time. I gave up, closed the web page, and moved on to something else. I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, and my friend might never find her way to this interesting website. If you were this content provider, would this be the outcome you were looking for? A few days later, I had a similar experience, but this one went a little differently. I was surfing the web, when I happened upon some little chotcke that I just had to have. I added it to my cart. When I went to buy the item, I was again brought to a page to create account. Groan! But wait! On this page, I also had the option to sign in with my OpenID account, my Facebook account, my Yahoo account, or my Google Account. I have all of those! No new account to create, no new password to remember, and no personally identifiable information to be given to someone else (I’ve already given it all to those other guys, after all). In this case, the vendor was easy to deal with, and I happily completed the transaction. That pleasant experience will bring me back again. This is where security can grow your business. It’s a differentiator. You’ve got to have a presence on the web, and that presence has to take into account all the smart phones everyone’s carrying, and the tablets that took over cyber Monday this year. If you are a company that a customer can deal with securely, and do so easily, then you are a company customers will come back to again and again. I recently had a need to open a new bank account. Every bank has a web presence now, but they are certainly not all the same. I wanted one that I could deal with easily using my laptop, but I also wanted 2-factor authentication in case I had to login from a shared machine, and I wanted an app for my iPad. I found a bank with all three, and that’s who I am doing business with. Let’s say, for example, that I’m in a regular Texas Hold-em game on Friday nights, so I move a couple of hundred bucks from checking to savings on Friday afternoons. I move a similar amount each week and I do it from the same machine. The bank trusts me, and they trust my machine. Most importantly, they trust my behavior. This is adaptive authentication. There should be no reason for my bank to make this transaction difficult for me. Now let's say that I login from a Starbucks in Uzbekistan, and I transfer $2,500. What should my bank do now? Should they stop the transaction? Should they call my home number? (My former bank did exactly this once when I was taking money out of an ATM on a business trip, when I had provided my cell phone number as my primary contact. When I asked them why they called my home number rather than my cell, they told me that their “policy” is to call the home number. If I'm on the road, what exactly is the use of trying to reach me at home to verify my transaction?) But, back to Uzbekistan… Should my bank assume that I am happily at home in New Jersey, and someone is trying to hack into my account? Perhaps they think they are protecting me, but I wouldn’t be very happy if I happened to be traveling on business in Central Asia. What if my bank were to automatically analyze my behavior and calculate a risk score? Clearly, this scenario would be outside of my typical behavior, so my risk score would necessitate something more than a simple login and password. Perhaps, in this case, a one-time password to my cell phone would prove that this is not just some hacker half way around the world. But, what if you're not a bank? Do you need this level of security? If you want to be a business that is easy to deal with while also protecting your customers, then of course you do. You want your customers to trust you, but you also want them to enjoy doing business with you. Make it easy for them to do business with you, and they’ll come back, and perhaps even Tweet about it, or Like you, and then their friends will follow. How can Oracle help? Oracle has the technology and expertise to help you to grown your business with security. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager will help you to prevent fraud while making it easier for your customers to do business with you by providing the risk analysis I discussed above, step-up authentication, and much more. Oracle Mobile and Social Access Service will help you to secure mobile access to applications by expanding on your existing back-end identity management infrastructure, and allowing your customers to transact business with you using the social media accounts they already know. You also have device fingerprinting and metrics to help you to grow your business securely. Security is not just a cost anymore. It’s a way to set your business apart. With Oracle’s help, you can be the business that everyone’s tweeting about. Image courtesy of Flickr user shareski

  Read the article

• The SPARC SuperCluster

  - by Karoly Vegh

  Oracle has been providing a lead in the Engineered Systems business for quite a while now, in accordance with the motto "Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together." Indeed it is hard to find a better definition of these systems.  Allow me to summarize the idea. It is:  Build a compute platform optimized to run your technologies Develop application aware, intelligently caching storage components Take an impressively fast network technology interconnecting it with the compute nodes Tune the application to scale with the nodes to yet unseen performance Reduce the amount of data moving via compression Provide this all in a pre-integrated single product with a single-pane management interface All these ideas have been around in IT for quite some time now. The real Oracle advantage is adding the last one to put these all together. Oracle has built quite a portfolio of Engineered Systems, to run its technologies - and run those like they never ran before. In this post I'll focus on one of them that serves as a consolidation demigod, a multi-purpose engineered system.  As you probably have guessed, I am talking about the SPARC SuperCluster. It has many great features inherited from its predecessors, and it adds several new ones. Allow me to pick out and elaborate about some of the most interesting ones from a technological point of view.  I. It is the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. That is, as compute nodes, it includes SPARC T4-4 servers that we learned to appreciate and respect for their features: The SPARC T4 CPUs: Each CPU has 8 cores, each core runs 8 threads. The SPARC T4-4 servers have 4 sockets. That is, a single compute node can in parallel, simultaneously  execute 256 threads. Now, a full-rack SPARC SuperCluster has 4 of these servers on board. Remember the keyword demigod.  While retaining the forerunner SPARC T3's exceptional throughput, the SPARC T4 CPUs raise the bar with single performance too - a humble 5x better one than their ancestors.  actually, the SPARC T4 CPU cores run in both single-threaded and multi-threaded mode, and switch between these two on-the-fly, fulfilling not only single-threaded OR multi-threaded applications' needs, but even mixed requirements (like in database workloads!). Data security, anyone? Every SPARC T4 CPU core has a built-in encryption engine, that is, encryption algorithms cast into silicon.  A PCI controller right on the chip for customers who need I/O performance.  Built-in, no-cost Virtualization:  Oracle VM for SPARC (the former LDoms or Logical Domains) is not a server-emulation virtualization technology but rather a serverpartitioning one, the hypervisor runs in the server firmware, and all the VMs' HW resources (I/O, CPU, memory) are accessed natively, without performance overhead.  This enables customers to run a number of Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 VMs separated, independent of each other within a physical server II. For Database performance, it includes Exadata Storage Cells - one of the main reasons why the Exadata Database Machine performs at diabolic speed. What makes them important? They provide DB backend storage for your Oracle Databases to run on the SPARC SuperCluster, that is what they are built and tuned for DB performance.  These storage cells are SQL-aware.  That is, if a SPARC T4 database compute node executes a query, it doesn't simply request tons of raw datablocks from the storage, filters the received data, and throws away most of it where the statement doesn't apply, but provides the SQL query to the storage node too. The storage cell software speaks SQL, that is, it is able to prefilter and through that transfer only the relevant data. With this, the traffic between database nodes and storage cells is reduced immensely. Less I/O is a good thing - as they say, all the CPUs of the world do one thing just as fast as any other - and that is waiting for I/O.  They don't only pre-filter, but also provide data preprocessing features - e.g. if a DB-node requests an aggregate of data, they can calculate it, and handover only the results, not the whole set. Again, less data to transfer.  They support the magical HCC, (Hybrid Columnar Compression). That is, data can be stored in a precompressed form on the storage. Less data to transfer.  Of course one can't simply rely on disks for performance, there is Flash Storage included there for caching.  III. The low latency, high-speed backbone network: InfiniBand, that interconnects all the members with: Real High Speed: 40 Gbit/s. Full Duplex, of course. Oh, and a really low latency.  RDMA. Remote Direct Memory Access. This technology allows the DB nodes to do exactly that. Remotely, directly placing SQL commands into the Memory of the storage cells. Dodging all the network-stack bottlenecks, avoiding overhead, placing requests directly into the process queue.  You can also run IP over InfiniBand if you please - that's the way the compute nodes can communicate with each other.  IV. Including a general-purpose storage too: the ZFSSA, which is a unified storage, providing NAS and SAN access too, with the following features:  NFS over RDMA over InfiniBand. Nothing is faster network-filesystem-wise.  All the ZFS features onboard, hybrid storage pools, compression, deduplication, snapshot, replication, NFS and CIFS shares Storageheads in a HA-Cluster configuration providing availability of the data  DTrace Live Analytics in a web-based Administration UI Being a general purpose application data storage for your non-database applications running on the SPARC SuperCluster over whichever protocol they prefer, easily replicating, snapshotting, cloning data for them.  There's a lot of great technology included in Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster, we have talked its interior through. As for external scalability: you can start with a half- of full- rack SPARC SuperCluster, and scale out to several racks - that is, stacking not separate full-rack SPARC SuperClusters, but extending always one large instance of the size of several full-racks. Yes, over InfiniBand network. Add racks as you grow.  What technologies shall run on it? SPARC SuperCluster is a general purpose scaleout consolidation/cloud environment. You can run Oracle Databases with RAC scaling, or Oracle Weblogic (end enjoy the SPARC T4's advantages to run Java). Remember, Oracle technologies have been integrated with the Oracle Engineered Systems - this is the Oracle on Oracle advantage. But you can run other software environments such as SAP if you please too. Run any application that runs on Oracle Solaris 10 or Solaris 11. Separate them in Virtual Machines, or even Oracle Solaris Zones, monitor and manage those from a central UI. Here the key takeaways once again: The SPARC SuperCluster: Is a pre-integrated Engineered System Contains SPARC T4-4 servers with built-in virtualization, cryptography, dynamic threading Contains the Exadata storage cells that intelligently offload the burden of the DB-nodes  Contains a highly available ZFS Storage Appliance, that provides SAN/NAS storage in a unified way Combines all these elements over a high-speed, low-latency backbone network implemented with InfiniBand Can grow from a single half-rack to several full-rack size Supports the consolidation of hundreds of applications To summarize: All these technologies are great by themselves, but the real value is like in every other Oracle Engineered System: Integration. All these technologies are tuned to perform together. Together they are way more than the sum of all - and a careful and actually very time consuming integration process is necessary to orchestrate all these for performance. The SPARC SuperCluster's goal is to enable infrastructure operations and offer a pre-integrated solution that can be architected and delivered in hours instead of months of evaluations and tests. The tedious and most importantly time and resource consuming part of the work - testing and evaluating - has been done.  Now go, provide services.   -- charlie  

  Read the article

• More Great Improvements to the Windows Azure Management Portal

  - by ScottGu

  Over the last 3 weeks we’ve released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Localization Support for 6 languages Operation Log Support Support for SQL Database Metrics Virtual Machine Enhancements (quick create Windows + Linux VMs) Web Site Enhancements (support for creating sites in all regions, private github repo deployment) Cloud Service Improvements (deploy from storage account, configuration support of dedicated cache) Media Service Enhancements (upload, encode, publish, stream all from within the portal) Virtual Networking Usability Enhancements Custom CNAME support with Storage Accounts All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Localization Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports 6 languages – English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese. You can easily switch between languages by clicking on the Avatar bar on the top right corner of the Portal: Selecting a different language will automatically refresh the UI within the portal in the selected language: Operation Log Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports the ability for administrators to review the “operation logs” of the services they manage – making it easy to see exactly what management operations were performed on them.  You can query for these by selecting the “Settings” tab within the Portal and then choosing the “Operation Logs” tab within it.  This displays a filter UI that enables you to query for operations by date and time: As of the most recent release we now show logs for all operations performed on Cloud Services and Storage Accounts.  You can click on any operation in the list and click the “Details” button in the command bar to retrieve detailed status about it.  This now makes it possible to retrieve details about every management operation performed. In future updates you’ll see us extend the operation log capability to apply to all Windows Azure Services – which will enable great post-mortem and audit support. Support for SQL Database Metrics You can now monitor the number of successful connections, failed connections and deadlocks in your SQL databases using the new “Dashboard” view provided on each SQL Database resource: Additionally, if the database is added as a “linked resource” to a Web Site or Cloud Service, monitoring metrics for the linked SQL database are shown along with the Web Site or Cloud Service metrics in the dashboard. This helps with viewing and managing aggregated information across both resources in your application. Enhancements to Virtual Machines The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Virtual Machines: Integrated Quick Create experience for Windows and Linux VMs Creating a new Windows or Linux VM is now easy using the new “Quick Create” experience in the Portal: In addition to Windows VM templates you can also now select Linux image templates in the quick create UI: This makes it incredibly easy to create a new Virtual Machine in only a few seconds. Enhancements to Web Sites Prior to this past month’s release, users were forced to choose a single geographical region when creating their first site.  After that, subsequent sites could only be created in that same region.  This restriction has now been removed, and you can now create sites in any region at any time and have up to 10 free sites in each supported region: One of the new regions we’ve recently opened up is the “East Asia” region.  This allows you to now deploy sites to North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously.  Private GitHub Repository Support This past week we also enabled Git based continuous deployment support for Web Sites from private GitHub and BitBucket repositories (previous to this you could only enable this with public repositories).  Enhancements to Cloud Services Experience The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Cloud Services: Deploy a Cloud Service from a Windows Azure Storage Account The Windows Azure Portal now supports deploying an application package and configuration file stored in a blob container in Windows Azure Storage. The ability to upload an application package from storage is available when you custom create, or upload to, or update a cloud service deployment. To upload an application package and configuration, create a Cloud Service, then select the file upload dialog, and choose to upload from a Windows Azure Storage Account: To upload an application package from storage, click the “FROM STORAGE” button and select the application package and configuration file to use from the new blob storage explorer in the portal. Configure Windows Azure Caching in a caching enabled cloud service If you have deployed the new dedicated cache within a cloud service role, you can also now configure the cache settings in the portal by navigating to the configuration tab of for your Cloud Service deployment. The configuration experience is similar to the one in Visual Studio when you create a cloud service and add a caching role.  The portal now allows you to add or remove named caches and change the settings for the named caches – all from within the Portal and without needing to redeploy your application. Enhancements to Media Services You can now upload, encode, publish, and play your video content directly from within the Windows Azure Portal.  This makes it incredibly easy to get started with Windows Azure Media Services and perform common tasks without having to write any code. Simply navigate to your media service and then click on the “Content” tab.  All of the media content within your media service account will be listed here: Clicking the “upload” button within the portal now allows you to upload a media file directly from your computer: This will cause the video file you chose from your local file-system to be uploaded into Windows Azure.  Once uploaded, you can select the file within the content tab of the Portal and click the “Encode” button to transcode it into different streaming formats: The portal includes a number of pre-set encoding formats that you can easily convert media content into: Once you select an encoding and click the ok button, Windows Azure Media Services will kick off an encoding job that will happen in the cloud (no need for you to stand-up or configure a custom encoding server).  When it’s finished, you can select the video in the “Content” tab and then click PUBLISH in the command bar to setup an origin streaming end-point to it: Once the media file is published you can point apps against the public URL and play the content using Windows Azure Media Services – no need to setup or run your own streaming server.  You can also now select the file and click the “Play” button in the command bar to play it using the streaming endpoint directly within the Portal: This makes it incredibly easy to try out and use Windows Azure Media Services and test out an end-to-end workflow without having to write any code.  Once you test things out you can of course automate it using script or code – providing you with an incredibly powerful Cloud Media platform that you can use. Enhancements to Virtual Network Experience Over the last few months, we have received feedback on the complexity of the Virtual Network creation experience. With these most recent Portal updates, we have added a Quick Create experience that makes the creation experience very simple. All that an administrator now needs to do is to provide a VNET name, choose an address space and the size of the VNET address space. They no longer need to understand the intricacies of the CIDR format or walk through a 4-page wizard or create a VNET / subnet. This makes creating virtual networks really simple: The portal also now has a “Register DNS Server” task that makes it easy to register DNS servers and associate them with a virtual network. Enhancements to Storage Experience The portal now lets you register custom domain names for your Windows Azure Storage Accounts.  To enable this, select a storage resource and then go to the CONFIGURE tab for a storage account, and then click MANAGE DOMAIN on the command bar: Clicking “Manage Domain” will bring up a dialog that allows you to register any CNAME you want: Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. One of the other cool features that is now live within the portal is our new Windows Azure Store – which makes it incredibly easy to try and purchase developer services from a variety of partners.  It is an incredibly awesome new capability – and something I’ll be doing a dedicated post about shortly. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• Announcing: Improvements to the Windows Azure Portal

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier today we released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Service Bus Management and Monitoring Support for Managing Co-administrators Import/Export support for SQL Databases Virtual Machine Experience Enhancements Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications Media Services Monitoring Support Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Service Bus Management and Monitoring The new Windows Azure Management Portal now supports Service Bus management and monitoring. Service Bus provides rich messaging infrastructure that can sit between applications (or between cloud and on-premise environments) and allow them to communicate in a loosely coupled way for improved scale and resiliency. With the new Service Bus experience, you can now create and manage Service Bus Namespaces, Queues, Topics, Relays and Subscriptions. You can also get rich monitoring for Service Bus Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. To create a Service Bus namespace, you can now select the “Service Bus” tab in the Windows Azure portal and then simply select the CREATE command: Doing so will bring up a new “Create a Namespace” dialog that allows you to name and create a new Service Bus Namespace: Once created, you can obtain security credentials associated with the Namespace via the ACCESS KEY command. This gives you the ability to obtain the connection string associated with the service namespace. You can copy and paste these values into any application that requires these credentials: It is also now easy to create Service Bus Queues and Topics via the NEW experience in the portal drawer.  Simply click the NEW command and navigate to the “App Services” category to create a new Service Bus entity: Once you provision a new Queue or Topic it can be managed in the portal.  Clicking on a namespace will display all queues and topics within it: Clicking on an item in the list will allow you to drill down into a dashboard view that allows you to monitor the activity and traffic within it, as well as perform operations on it. For example, below is a view of an “orders” queue – note how we now surface both the incoming and outgoing message flow rate, as well as the total queue length and queue size: To monitor pub/sub subscriptions you can use the ADD METRICS command within a topic and select a specific subscription to monitor. Support for Managing Co-Administrators You can now add co-administrators for your Windows Azure subscription using the new Windows Azure Portal. This allows you to share management of your Windows Azure services with other users. Subscription co-administrators share the same administrative rights and permissions that service administrator have - except a co-administrator cannot change or view billing details about the account, nor remove the service administrator from a subscription. In the SETTINGS section, click on the ADMINISTRATORS tab, and select the ADD button to add a co-administrator to your subscription: To add a co-administrator, you specify the email address for a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) or an organizational account, and choose the subscription you want to add them to: You can later update the subscriptions that the co-administrator has access to by clicking on the EDIT button, and then select or deselect the subscriptions to which they belong. Import/Export Support for SQL Databases The Windows Azure administration portal now supports importing and exporting SQL Databases to/from Blob Storage.  Databases can be imported/exported to blob storage using the same BACPAC file format that is supported with SQL Server 2012.  Among other benefits, this makes it easy to copy and migrate databases between on-premise and cloud environments. SQL Databases now have an EXPORT command in the bottom drawer that when pressed will prompt you to save your database to a Windows Azure storage container: The UI allows you to choose an existing storage account or create a new one, as well as the name of the BACPAC file to persist in blob storage: You can also now import and create a new SQL Database by using the NEW command.  This will prompt you to select the storage container and file to import the database from: The Windows Azure Portal enables you to monitor the progress of import and export operations. If you choose to log out of the portal, you can come back later and check on the status of all of the operations in the new history tab of the SQL Database server – this shows your entire import and export history and the status (success/fail) of each: Enhancements to the Virtual Machine Experience One of the common pain-points we have heard from customers using the preview of our new Virtual Machine support has been the inability to delete the associated VHDs when a VM instance (or VM drive) gets deleted. Prior to today’s release the VHDs would continue to be in your storage account and accumulate storage charges. You can now navigate to the Disks tab within the Virtual Machine extension, select a VM disk to delete, and click the DELETE DISK command: When you click the DELETE DISK button you have the option to delete the disk + associated .VHD file (completely clearing it from storage).  Alternatively you can delete the disk but still retain a .VHD copy of it in storage. Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications The Windows Azure portal now exposes more information of the health status of role instances.  If any of the instances are in a non-running state, the status at the top of the dashboard will summarize the status (and update automatically as the role health changes): Clicking the instance hyperlink within this status summary view will navigate you to a detailed role instance view, and allow you to get more detailed health status of each of the instances.  The portal has been updated to provide more specific status information within this detailed view – giving you better visibility into the health of your app: Monitoring Support for Media Services Windows Azure Media Services allows you to create media processing jobs (for example: encoding media files) in your Windows Azure Media Services account. In the Windows Azure Portal, you can now monitor the number of encoding jobs that are queued up for processing as well as active, failed and queued tasks for encoding jobs. On your media services account dashboard, you can visualize the monitoring data for last 6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days. Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support You can now create Windows Azure Storage storage containers from within the Windows Azure Portal.  After selecting a storage account, you can navigate to the CONTAINERS tab and click the ADD CONTAINER command: This will display a dialog that lets you name the new container and control access to it: You can also update the access setting as well as container metadata of existing containers by selecting one and then using the new EDIT CONTAINER command: This will then bring up the edit container dialog that allows you to change and save its settings: In addition to creating and editing containers, you can click on them within the portal to drill-in and view blobs within them.  Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming later this month – including support for the recent Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 releases (we will enable new web and worker role images with Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5, and support .NET 4.5 with Websites).  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as these new features become available. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• 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!

  Read the article

• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

  Read the article

• Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

  - by theo.spears

  Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

  Read the article

• Real World Nuget

  - by JoshReuben

  Why Nuget A higher level of granularity for managing references When you have solutions of many projects that depend on solutions of many projects etc à escape from Solution Hell. Links · Using A GUI (Package Explorer) to build packages - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/creating-packages/using-a-gui-to-build-packages · Creating a Nuspec File - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic2.aspx · consuming a Nuget Package - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic3 · Nuspec reference - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/nuspec-reference · updating packages - http://nuget.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Updating%20All%20Packages · versioning - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/versioning POC Folder Structure POC Setup Steps · Install package explorer · Source o Create a source solution – configure output directory for projects (Project > Properties > Build > Output Path) · Package o Add assemblies to package from output directory (D&D)- add net folder o File > Export – save .nuspec files and lib contents <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package > <metadata> <id>MyPackage</id> <version>1.0.0.3</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <summary /> </metadata> </package> o File > Save – saves .nupkg file · Create Target Solution o In Tools > Options: Configure package source & Add package Select projects: Output from package manager (powershell console) ------- Installing...MyPackage 1.0.0 ------- Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'MyPackage.1.0.0.nupkg' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0'. Successfully installed 'MyPackage 1.0.0'. Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyA' to project 'AssemblyX' Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyB' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'packages.config'. Added file 'packages.config' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'repositories.config'. Successfully added 'MyPackage 1.0.0' to AssemblyX. ============================== o Packages folder created at solution level o Packages.config file generated in each project: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <packages>   <package id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0" targetFramework="net40" /> </packages> A local Packages folder is created for package versions installed: Each folder contains the downloaded .nupkg file and its unpacked contents – eg of dlls that the project references Note: this folder is not checked in UpdatePackages o Configure Package Manager to automatically check for updates o Browse packages - It automatically picked up the updates Update Procedure · Modify source · Change source version in assembly info · Build source · Open last package in package explorer · Increment package version number and re-add assemblies · Save package with new version number and export its definition · In target solution – Tools > Manage Nuget Packages – click on All to trigger refresh , then click on recent packages to see updates · If problematic, delete packages folder Versioning uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.3 uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.4 Dependencies · <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd"> <metadata> <id>MyDependentPackage</id> <version>1.0.0</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <dependencies> <group targetFramework=".NETFramework4.0"> <dependency id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0.4" /> </group> </dependencies> </metadata> </package> Using NuGet without committing packages to source control http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/using-nuget-without-committing-packages Right click on the Solution node in Solution Explorer and select Enable NuGet Package Restore. — Recall that packages folder is not part of solution If you get downloading package ‘Nuget.build’ failed, config proxy to support certificate for https://nuget.org/api/v2/ & allow unrestricted access to packages.nuget.org To test connectivity: get-package –listavailable To test Nuget Package Restore – delete packages folder and open vs as admin. In nugget msbuild: <Import Project="$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\nuget.targets" /> TFSBuild Integration Modify Nuget.Targets file <RestorePackages Condition="  '$(RestorePackages)' == '' "> True </RestorePackages> … <PackageSource Include="\\IL-CV-004-W7D\Packages" /> Add System Environment variable EnableNuGetPackageRestore=true & restart the “visual studio team foundation build service host” service. Important: Ensure Network Service has access to Packages folder Nugetter TFS Build integration Add Nugetter build process templates to TFS source control For Build Controller - Specify location of custom assemblies Generate .nuspec file from Package Explorer: File > Export Edit the file elements – remove path info from src and target attributes <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd">     <metadata>         <id>Common</id>         <version>1.0.0</version>         <title />         <authors>josh-r</authors>         <owners />         <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>         <description>My package description.</description>         <dependencies>             <group targetFramework=".NETFramework3.5" />         </dependencies>     </metadata>     <files>         <file src="CommonTypes.dll" target="CommonTypes.dll" />         <file src="CommonTypes.pdb" target="CommonTypes.pdb" /> … Add .nuspec file to solution so that it is available for build: Dev\NovaNuget\Common\NuSpec\common.1.0.0.nuspec Add a Build Process Definition based on the Nugetter build process template: Configure the build process – specify: · .sln to build · Base path (output directory) · Nuget.exe file path · .nuspec file path Copy DLLs to a binary folder 1) Set copy local for an assembly reference to false 2)  MSBuild Copy Task – modify .csproj file: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3e54c37h.aspx <ItemGroup>     <MySourceFiles Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\SourceAssemblies\**\*.*" />   </ItemGroup>     <Target Name="BeforeBuild">     <Copy SourceFiles="@(MySourceFiles)" DestinationFolder="bin\debug\SourceAssemblies" />   </Target> 3) Set Probing assembly search path from app.config - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/823z9h8w(v=vs.80).aspx -                 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration>   <runtime>     <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">       <probing privatePath="SourceAssemblies"/>     </assemblyBinding>   </runtime> </configuration> Forcing 'copy local = false' The following generic powershell script was added to the packages install.ps1: param($installPath, $toolsPath, $package, $project) if( $project.Object.Project.Name -ne "CopyPackages") { $asms = $package.AssemblyReferences | %{$_.Name} foreach ($reference in $project.Object.References) { if ($asms -contains $reference.Name + ".dll") { $reference.CopyLocal = $false; } } } An empty project named "CopyPackages" was added to the solution - it references all the packages and is the only one set to CopyLocal="true". No MSBuild knowledge required.

  Read the article

• Oracle OpenWorld 2013 – Wrap up by Sven Bernhardt

  - by JuergenKress

  OOW 2013 is over and we’re heading home, so it is time to lean back and reflecting about the impressions we have from the conference. First of all: OOW was great! It was a pleasure to be a part of it. As already mentioned in our last blog article: It was the biggest OOW ever. Parallel to the conference the America’s Cup took place in San Francisco and the Oracle Team America won. Amazing job by the team and again congratulations from our side Back to the conference. The main topics for us are: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c Adaptive Case management (ACM) Big Data Fast Data Cloud Mobile Below we will go a little more into detail, what are the key takeaways regarding the mentioned points: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c During the five days at OOW, first details of the upcoming major release of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and Oracle BPM Suite 12c have been introduced. Some new key features are: Managed File Transfer (MFT) for transferring big files from a source to a target location Enhanced REST support by introducing a new REST binding Introduction of a generic cloud adapter, which can be used to connect to different cloud providers, like Salesforce Enhanced analytics with BAM, which has been totally reengineered (BAM Console now also runs in Firefox!) Introduction of templates (OSB pipelines, component templates, BPEL activities templates) EM as a single monitoring console OSB design-time integration into JDeveloper (Really great!) Enterprise modeling capabilities in BPM Composer These are only a few points from what is coming with 12c. We are really looking forward for the new realese to come out, because this seems to be really great stuff. The suite becomes more and more integrated. From 10g to 11g it was an evolution in terms of developing SOA-based applications. With 12c, Oracle continues it’s way – very impressive. Adaptive Case Management Another fantastic topic was Adaptive Case Management (ACM). The Oracle PMs did a great job especially at the demo grounds in showing the upcoming Case Management UI (will be available in 11g with the next BPM Suite MLR Patch), the roadmap and the differences between traditional business process modeling. They have been very busy during the conference because a lot of partners and customers have been interested Big Data Big Data is one of the current hype themes. Because of huge data amounts from different internal or external sources, the handling of these data becomes more and more challenging. Companies have a need for analyzing the data to optimize their business. The challenge is here: the amount of data is growing daily! To store and analyze the data efficiently, it is necessary to have a scalable and flexible infrastructure. Here it is important that hardware and software are engineered to work together. Therefore several new features of the Oracle Database 12c, like the new in-memory option, have been presented by Larry Ellison himself. From a hardware side new server machines like Fujitsu M10 or new processors, such as Oracle’s new M6-32 have been announced. The performance improvements, when using one of these hardware components in connection with the improved software solutions were really impressive. For more details about this, please take look at our previous blog post. Regarding Big Data, Oracle also introduced their Big Data architecture, which consists of: Oracle Big Data Appliance that is preconfigured with Hadoop Oracle Exdata which stores a huge amount of data efficently, to achieve optimal query performance Oracle Exalytics as a fast and scalable Business analytics system Analysis of the stored data can be performed using SQL, by streaming the data directly from Hadoop to an Oracle Database 12c. Alternatively the analysis can be directly implemented in Hadoop using “R”. In addition Oracle BI Tools can be used to analyze the data. Fast Data Fast Data is a complementary approach to Big Data. A huge amount of mostly unstructured data comes in via different channels with a high frequency. The analysis of these data streams is also important for companies, because the incoming data has to be analyzed regarding business-relevant patterns in real-time. Therefore these patterns must be identified efficiently and performant. To do so, in-memory grid solutions in combination with Oracle Coherence and Oracle Event Processing demonstrated very impressive how efficient real-time data processing can be. One example for Fast Data solutions that was shown during the OOW was the analysis of twitter streams regarding customer satisfaction. The feeds with negative words like “bad” or “worse” have been filtered and after a defined treshold has been reached in a certain timeframe, a business event was triggered. Cloud Another key trend in the IT market is of course Cloud Computing and what it means for companies and their businesses. Oracle announced their Cloud strategy and vision – companies can focus on their real business while all of the applications are available via Cloud. This also includes Oracle Database or Oracle Weblogic, so that companies can also build, deploy and run their own applications within the cloud. Three different approaches have been introduced: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) Using the IaaS approach only the infrastructure components will be managed in the Cloud. Customers will be very flexible regarding memory, storage or number of CPUs because those parameters can be adjusted elastically. The PaaS approach means that besides the infrastructure also the platforms (such as databases or application servers) necessary for running applications will be provided within the Cloud. Here customers can also decide, if installation and management of these infrastructure components should be done by Oracle. The SaaS approach describes the most complete one, hence all applications a company uses are managed in the Cloud. Oracle is planning to provide all of their applications, like ERP systems or HR applications, as Cloud services. In conclusion this seems to be a very forward-thinking strategy, which opens up new possibilities for customers to manage their infrastructure and applications in a flexible, scalable and future-oriented manner. As you can see, our OOW days have been very very interresting. We collected many helpful informations for our projects. The new innovations presented at the confernce are great and being part of this was even greater! We are looking forward to next years’ conference! Links: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/first-impressions-from-oracle-open-world-2013 SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: cattleCrew,Sven Bernhard,OOW2013,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• Five Key Strategies in Master Data Management

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Here is a very interesting Profit Magazine article on MDM: A recent customer survey reveals the deleterious effects of data fragmentation. by Trevor Naidoo, December 2010   Across industries and geographies, IT organizations have grown in complexity, whether due to mergers and acquisitions, or decentralized systems supporting functional or departmental requirements. With systems architected over time to support unique, one-off process needs, they are becoming costly to maintain, and the Internet has only further added to the complexity. Data fragmentation has become a key inhibitor in delivering flexible, user-friendly systems. The Oracle Insight team conducted a survey assessing customers' master data management (MDM) capabilities over the past two years to get a sense of where they are in terms of their capabilities. The responses, by 27 respondents from six different industries, reveal five key areas in which customers need to improve their data management in order to get better financial results. 1. Less than 15 percent of organizations surveyed understand the sources and quality of their master data, and have a roadmap to address missing data domains. Examples of the types of master data domains referred to are customer, supplier, product, financial and site. Many organizations have multiple sources of master data with varying degrees of data quality in each source -- customer data stored in the customer relationship management system is inconsistent with customer data stored in the order management system. Imagine not knowing how many places you stored your customer information, and whether a customer's address was the most up to date in each source. In fact, more than 55 percent of the respondents in the survey manage their data quality on an ad-hoc basis. It is important for organizations to document their inventory of data sources and then profile these data sources to ensure that there is a consistent definition of key data entities throughout the organization. Some questions to ask are: How do we define a customer? What is a product? How do we define a site? The goal is to strive for one common repository for master data that acts as a cross reference for all other sources and ensures consistent, high-quality master data throughout the organization. 2. Only 18 percent of respondents have an enterprise data management strategy to ensure that data is treated as an asset to the organization. Most respondents handle data at the department or functional level and do not have an enterprise view of their master data. The sales department may track all their interactions with customers as they move through the sales cycle, the service department is tracking their interactions with the same customers independently, and the finance department also has a different perspective on the same customer. The salesperson may not be aware that the customer she is trying to sell to is experiencing issues with existing products purchased, or that the customer is behind on previous invoices. The lack of a data strategy makes it difficult for business users to turn data into information via reports. Without the key building blocks in place, it is difficult to create key linkages between customer, product, site, supplier and financial data. These linkages make it possible to understand patterns. A well-defined data management strategy is aligned to the business strategy and helps create the governance needed to ensure that data stewardship is in place and data integrity is intact. 3. Almost 60 percent of respondents have no strategy to integrate data across operational applications. Many respondents have several disparate sources of data with no strategy to keep them in sync with each other. Even though there is no clear strategy to integrate the data (see #2 above), the data needs to be synced and cross-referenced to keep the business processes running. About 55 percent of respondents said they perform this integration on an ad hoc basis, and in many cases, it is done manually with the help of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. For example, a salesperson needs a report on global sales for a specific product, but the product has different product numbers in different countries. Typically, an analyst will pull all the data into Excel, manually create a cross reference for that product, and then aggregate the sales. The exact same procedure has to be followed if the same report is needed the following month. A well-defined consolidation strategy will ensure that a central cross-reference is maintained with updates in any one application being propagated to all the other systems, so that data is synchronized and up to date. This can be done in real time or in batch mode using integration technology. 4. Approximately 50 percent of respondents spend manual efforts cleansing and normalizing data. Information stored in various systems usually follows different standards and formats, making it difficult to match the data. A customer's address can be stored in different ways using a variety of abbreviations -- for example, "av" or "ave" for avenue. Similarly, a product's attributes can be stored in a number of different ways; for example, a size attribute can be stored in inches and can also be entered as "'' ". These types of variations make it difficult to match up data from different sources. Today, most customers rely on manual, heroic efforts to match, cleanse, and de-duplicate data -- clearly not a scalable, sustainable model. To solve this challenge, organizations need the ability to standardize data for customers, products, sites, suppliers and financial accounts; however, less than 10 percent of respondents have technology in place to automatically resolve duplicates. It is no wonder, therefore, that we get communications about products we don't own, at addresses we don't reside, and using channels (like direct mail) we don't like. An all-too-common example of a potential challenge follows: Customers end up receiving duplicate communications, which not only impacts customer satisfaction, but also incurs additional mailing costs. Cleansing, normalizing, and standardizing data will help address most of these issues. 5. Only 10 percent of respondents have the ability to share data that was mastered in a master data hub. Close to 60 percent of respondents have efforts in place that profile, standardize and cleanse data manually, and the output of these efforts are stored in spreadsheets in various parts of the organization. This valuable information is not easily shared with the rest of the organization and, more importantly, this enriched information cannot be sent back to the source systems so that the data is fixed at the source. A key benefit of a master data management strategy is not only to clean the data, but to also share the data back to the source systems as well as other systems that need the information. Aside from the source systems, another key beneficiary of this data is the business intelligence system. Having clean master data as input to business intelligence systems provides more accurate and enhanced reporting.  Characteristics of Stellar MDM When deciding on the right master data management technology, organizations should look for solutions that have four main characteristics: enterprise-grade MDM performance complete technology that can be rapidly deployed and addresses multiple business issues end-to-end MDM process management with data quality monitoring and assurance pre-built MDM business relevant applications with data stores and workflows These master data management capabilities will aid in moving closer to a best-practice maturity level, delivering tremendous efficiencies and savings as well as revenue growth opportunities as a result of better understanding your customers.  Trevor Naidoo is a senior director in Industry Strategy and Insight at Oracle. 

  Read the article

• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

  Read the article

• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise

  - by John Murphy

  During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems.  Case in point, almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 29, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 29, 2013Popular ReleasesAudioWordsDownloader: AudioWordsDownloader 1.1 build 88: New features -------- list of words (mp3 files) is available upon typing when a download path is defined list of download paths is added paths history settings added Bug fixed ----- case mismatch in word search field fixed path not exist bug fixed when history has been used path, when filled from dialog, not stored refresh autocomplete list after path change word sought is deleted when path is changed at the end sought word list is deleted word list not refreshed download end...Activity Viewer 2012: Activity Viewer 2012 V 5.0.0.3: Planning to add new features: 1. Import/Export rules 2. Tabular mode multi servers connections.Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Alpha 0.8.3.0: Version 0.8.3.0 emphasis on the FIlteredStream and ease how to manage Exceptions that can occur due to the network or any other issue you might encounter. Will be available through nuget the 29/09/2013. FilteredStream Features provided by the Twitter Stream API - Ability to track specific keywords - Ability to track specific users - Ability to track specific locations Additional features - Detect the reasons the tweet has been retrieved from the Filtered API. You have access to both the ma...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.5: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.5 ???? AcPlay????????v3.5 ????????，???????????30% ?? ???????GoodManga.net???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??Acfun?????????? ??Bilibili??????????? ?????????flvcd???????? ??SfAcg????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ????32...OfflineBrowser: Release v1.2: This release includes some multi-threading support, a better progress bar, more JavaScript fixes, and a help system. This release is also portable (can run with no issues from a flash drive).CtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.0.0.34288 Release: This release of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer includes the following significant features: Stereoscopic 3D display support. Based on Firestorm viewer 4.4.2 codebase. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-0-0-34288-release Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or supported by Linden Lab, the makers of ...CrmSvcUtil Generate Attribute Constants: Generate Attribute Constants (1.0.5018.28159): Built against version 5.0.15 of the CRM SDK Fixed issue where constant for primary key attribute was being duplicated in all entity classes Added ability to override base class for entity classesC# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.6.0: Added support for classless scripts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.CS-Script for Notepad++: Release v1.0.6.0: Added support for classless scripts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.SimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.02: SourceCode and SampleMagick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.001: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.0. Breaking changes: - ToBitmap method of MagickImage returns a png instead of a bmp. - Changed the value for full transparency from 255(Q8)/65535(Q16) to 0. - MagickColor now uses floats instead of Byte/UInt16.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.578b: With the feedback received over the renaming of Movie Folders, and files, there has been some refinement done. As well as I would like to introduce Blu-Ray movie folder support, for Pre-Frodo and Frodo onwards versions of XBMC. To start with, Context menu option for renaming movies, now has three sub options: Movie & Folder, Movie only & Folder only. The option Manual Movie Rename needs to be selected from Movie Preferences, but the autoscrape boxes do not need to be selected. Blu Ray Fo...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen v2.1.3.api release: This is for the brave at heart, this is the maint release to update to the new movie api. please send feedback on fix requests.FFXIV Crafting Simulator: Crafting Simulator 2.3: - Major refactoring of the code behind. - Added a current durability and a current CP textbox.DNN CMS Platform: 07.01.02: Major HighlightsAdded the ability to manage the Vanity URL prefix Added the ability to filter members in the member directory by role Fixed issue where the user could inadvertently click the login button multiple times Fixed issues where core classes could not be used in out of process cache provider Fixed issue where profile visibility submenu was not displayed correctly Fixed issue where the member directory was broken when Convert URL to lowercase setting was enabled Fixed issu...Rawr: Rawr 5.4.1: 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 Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We 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 ba...Sample MVC4 EF Codefirst Architecture: RazMVCWebApp ver 1.1: Signal R sample is added.CODE Framework: 4.0.30923.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.JayData -The unified data access library for JavaScript: JayData 1.3.2 - Indian Summer Edition: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like WebAPI, OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SQLite, HTML5 localStorage, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with KendoUI, Angular.js, Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video KendoUI examples: JayData example site Examples for map integration JayData example site What's new in JayData 1.3.2 - Indian Summer Edition For detai...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.12.0.0: sync with rev. 2892 of the java version new PDF417 decoder improved Aztec decoder global speed improvements direct Kinect support for ColorImageFrame better Structured Append support many other small bug fixes and improvementsNew ProjectsCACHEDB: CLIENT-DATABASE || CLIENT_CACHEDB-DATABASEClassic WiX Burn Theme: A WiX Burn theme inspired by the classic WiX wizard user interface.CryptStr.Fody: A post-build weaver that encrypts literal strings in your .NET assemblies without breaking ClickOnce.Easy Code: A setting framework.EduSoft: This is a school eg.GameStuff: GameStuff is a library of Physics and Geometrics concepts for video game. Nekora Test Project: Nekora test projectPopCorn Console Game: Simple console gameRadioController: This project started from people installing Tablets in Mustangs. You would typically loose most control of the radio. This projects brings that back!Random searcher i pochodne: Wyszukiwarka plików multimedialnych i czego dusza zapragnie.SporkRandom: A .NET (C#, Visual Basic) interface for the true random number generator service of random.org

  Read the article

• I Clobbered a Leopard with a Window Last Night

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are written by different teams, and Excel on the Mac is just different enough to be painful. The VM experience was adequate, but my MBP would heat up like crazy when running it and the experience trying to get Windows apps to interact with an OSX file system was awkward. And I found I was in the VM more than I thought I’d be. iMovie is not as easy to use for doing simple movie editing as Windows Movie Maker. There’s no free blog editing software for OSX that’s on par with Windows Live Writer. And really, all I was using OSX for was Twitter (which I can use a Windows client for) and web browsing (also something Windows can provide obviously). So I had to ask myself – why am I forcing myself to use an operating system I don’t like, on a laptop that can support Windows 7? And so I paved my MBP and am happily running Windows 7 on it…and its fantastic! All the good stuff with the hardware is still there with the goodness of Win 7. Happy happy. I did run into some snags doing this though, and that’s really what this blog post is about – things to be aware of if you want to install Win 7 directly on your MBP metal. First, Ensure You Have Your Original Mac Install Disk This was a warning my buddy Dylan, who’s been running Win 7 on his MBP for a while now, gave me early on. The reason you need that original disk is that the hardware drivers you need are all located there. Apparently you can’t easily download them, so make sure you have them ahead of time. Second, Forget BootCamp The only reason you need BootCamp is if you still want the option to boot into OSX. If you don’t, then you don’t need BootCamp. In fact, you don’t even need BootCamp to install Win 7. What you *will* need though is a DVD with Win 7 burnt on it. Apple doesn’t support bootable USB drives. Well, actually they do for Mac Book Airs which don’t come with optical drives…but to get it working you’ll need to edit a system file of BootCamp so your make of MBP is included in an XML document, and even then you *still* are using BootCamp meaning you’ll be making an OSX partition. So don’t worry about BootCamp, just burn a Windows 7 disc, put it into the DVD drive, and restart your MBP. Third, Know The Secret Commands So after putting in the Windows 7 DVD and restarting your MBP, you’ll want to hold down the ‘C’ key during boot up. This tells the MBP that it should boot from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive. Interestingly, it appears you don’t have to do this if its the Mac OSX install disc (more on that in a second), but regardless – hold down C and Windows will start the install process. Next up is the partition process. You’ll notice that there’s a partition called ETI or something like that. This has to do with the drive format that Apple uses and how they partition their system drives. What I did – I blew it away! At first I didn’t, but I was told I couldn’t install Windows on the remaining space due to the different drive format. Blowing away the ETI partition (and all other partitions) allowed me to continue the Windows install. *REMEMBER –  No warranty is provided or implied, just telling you what I did and how I got it to work. Ok, so now Windows is installed and I’m rebooting. Everything looks good, but I need drivers! So I put in the OSX install DVD and run the BootCamp assistant which installs all the Windows drivers I need. Fantastic! Oh, I need to restart – no problem. OH NO, PROBLEM! I left the OSX install DVD in the drive and now the MBP wants to boot from the drive and install OSX! I’m not holding down the C key, what the heck?! Ok, well there must be a way to eject this disk…hmm…no physical button on the side…the eject button doesn’t seem to work on the keyboard…no little pin hole to insert something to force the disc out…well what the…?! It turns out, if you want to eject a disc at boot up, you need (and I kid you not) to plug a mouse into the laptop and hold down the right-click button while its booting. This ejected the disc for me. Seriously. Finally, Things You Should Be Aware Of Once you have Windows up and running there’s a few things you need to be aware of, mainly new keyboard shortcuts. For instance, on the Mac keyboard there is no Home, End, PageUp or PageDown. There’s also no obvious way to do something like select large amounts of text (like you would by holding Shift-Home at the end of a line of text for instance). So here’s some shortcuts you need to know: Home – fn + left arrow End – fn + right arrow Select a line of text as you would with the Home key – Shift + fn + left arrow Select a line of text as you would with the End key – Shift + fn + right arrow Page Up – fn + up arrow Page Down – fn + down arrow Also, you’ll notice that the awesome Mac track pad doesn’t respond to taps as clicks. No fear, this is just a setting that needs to be altered in the BootCamp control panel (that controls the Mac Hardware-specific settings within Windows, you can access it easily from the system tray icon) One other thing, battery life seems a bit lower than with OSX, but then again I’m also doing more than Twitter or web browsing on this thing now. Conclusion My laptop runs awesome now that I have Windows 7 on there. It’s obviously up to individual taste, but for me I just didn’t see benefits to living in an OSX world when everything I needed lived in Windows. And also, I finally am back to an operating system that doesn’t require me to eject a USB drive before physically removing it! It’s 2012 folks, how has this not been fixed?! D

  Read the article

• Getting Started with jqChart for ASP.NET Web Forms

  - by jqChart

  Official Site | Samples | Download | Documentation | Forum | Twitter Introduction jqChart takes advantages of HTML5 Canvas to deliver high performance client-side charts and graphs across browsers (IE 6+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari) and devices, including iOS and Android mobile devices. Some of the key features are: High performance rendering. Animaitons. Scrolling/Zoooming. Support for unlimited number of data series and data points. Support for unlimited number of chart axes. True DateTime Axis. Logarithmic and Reversed axis scale. Large set of chart types - Bar, Column, Pie, Line, Spline, Area, Scatter, Bubble, Radar, Polar. Financial Charts - Stock Chart and Candlestick Chart. The different chart types can be easily combined.  System Requirements Browser Support jqChart supports all major browsers: Internet Explorer - 6+ Firefox Google Chrome Opera Safari jQuery version support jQuery JavaScript framework is required. We recommend using the latest official stable version of the jQuery library. Visual Studio Support jqChart for ASP.NET does not require using Visual Studio. You can use your favourite code editor. Still, the product has been tested with several versions of Visual Studio .NET and you can find the list of supported versions below: Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2012 ASP.NET Web Forms support Supported version - ASP.NET Web Forms 3.5, 4.0 and 4.5 Installation Download and unzip the contents of the archive to any convenient location. The package contains the following folders: [bin] - Contains the assembly DLLs of the product (JQChart.Web.dll) for WebForms 3.5, 4.0 and 4.5. This is the assembly that you can reference directly in your web project (or better yet, add it to your ToolBox and then drag & drop it from there). [js] - The javascript files of jqChart and jqRangeSlider (and the needed libraries). You need to include them in your ASPX page, in order to gain the client side functionality of the chart. The first file is "jquery-1.5.1.min.js" - this is the official jQuery library. jqChart is built upon jQuery library version 1.4.3. The second file you need is the "excanvas.js" javascript file. It is used from the versions of IE, which dosn't support canvas graphics. The third is the jqChart javascript code itself, located in "jquery.jqChart.min.js". The last one is the jqRangeSlider javascript, located in "jquery.jqRangeSlider.min.js". It is used when the chart zooming is enabled. [css] - Contains the Css files that the jqChart and the jqRangeSlider need. [samples] - Contains some examples that use the jqChart. For full list of samples plese visit - jqChart for ASP.NET Samples. [themes] - Contains the themes shipped with the products. It is used from the jqRangeSlider. Since jqRangeSlider supports jQuery UI Themeroller, any theme compatible with jQuery UI ThemeRoller will work for jqRangeSlider as well. You can download any additional themes directly from jQuery UI's ThemeRoller site available here: http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ or reference them from Microsoft's / Google's CDN. <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.ui/1.8.21/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.css" /> The final result you will have in an ASPX page containing jqChart would be something similar to that (assuming you have copied the [js] to the Script folder and [css] to Content folder of your ASP.NET site respectively). <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="samples_cs.Default" %> <%@ Register Assembly="JQChart.Web" Namespace="JQChart.Web.UI.WebControls" TagPrefix="jqChart" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head runat="server"> <title>jqChart ASP.NET Sample</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="~/Content/jquery.jqChart.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="~/Content/jquery.jqRangeSlider.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="~/Content/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui-1.8.21.css" /> <script src="<% = ResolveUrl("~/Scripts/jquery-1.5.1.min.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="<% = ResolveUrl("~/Scripts/jquery.jqRangeSlider.min.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="<% = ResolveUrl("~/Scripts/jquery.jqChart.min.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> <!--[if IE]><script lang="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="<% = ResolveUrl("~/Scripts/excanvas.js") %>"></script><![endif]--> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ObjectDataSource ID="ObjectDataSource1" runat="server" SelectMethod="GetData" TypeName="SamplesBrowser.Models.ChartData"></asp:ObjectDataSource> <jqChart:Chart ID="Chart1" Width="500px" Height="300px" runat="server" DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1"> <Title Text="Chart Title"></Title> <Animation Enabled="True" Duration="00:00:01" /> <Axes> <jqChart:CategoryAxis Location="Bottom" ZoomEnabled="true"> </jqChart:CategoryAxis> </Axes> <Series> <jqChart:ColumnSeries XValuesField="Label" YValuesField="Value1" Title="Column"> </jqChart:ColumnSeries> <jqChart:LineSeries XValuesField="Label" YValuesField="Value2" Title="Line"> </jqChart:LineSeries> </Series> </jqChart:Chart> </form> </body> </html>   Official Site | Samples | Download | Documentation | Forum | Twitter

  Read the article

• Screenshot Tour: Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on a Nexus 7

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will “form the basis of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets,” according to Canonical. We installed Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on our own hardware to see what those tablets will be like. We don’t recommend installing this yourself, as it’s still not a polished, complete experience. We’re using “Ubuntu Touch” as shorthand here — apparently this project’s new name is “Ubuntu For Devices.” The Welcome Screen Ubuntu’s touch interface is all about edge swipes and hidden interface elements — it has a lot in common with Windows 8, actually. You’ll see the welcome screen when you boot up or unlock a Ubuntu tablet or phone. If you have new emails, text messages, or other information, it will appear on this screen along with the time and date. If you don’t, you’ll just see a message saying “No data sources available.” The Dash Swipe in from the right edge of the welcome screen to access the Dash, or home screen. This is actually very similar to the Dash on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This isn’t a surprise — Canonical wants the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu to use the same code. In the future, the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu will use the same version of Unity and Unity will adjust its interface depending on what type of device your’e using. Here you’ll find apps you have installed and apps available to install. Tap an installed app to launch it or tap an available app to view more details and install it. Tap the My apps or Available headings to view a complete list of apps you have installed or apps you can install. Tap the Search box at the top of the screen to start searching — this is how you’d search for new apps to install. As you’d expect, a touch keyboard appears when you tap in the Search field or any other text field. The launcher isn’t just for apps. Tap the Apps heading at the top of the screen and you’ll see hidden text appear — Music, Video, and Scopes. This hidden navigation is used throughout Ubuntu’s different apps and can be easy to miss at first. Swipe to the left or right to move between these screens. These screens are also similar to the different panels in Unity on the desktop. The Scopes section allows you to view different search scopes you have installed. These are used to search different sources when you start a search from the Dash. Search from the Music or Videos scopes to search for local media files on your device or media files online. For example, searching in the Music scope will show you music results from Grooveshark by default. Navigating Ubuntu Touch Swipe in from the left edge anywhere on the system to open the launcher, a bar with shortcuts to apps. This launcher is very similar to the launcher on the left of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop — that’s the whole idea, after all. Once you’ve opened an app, you can leave the app by swiping in from the left. The launcher will appear — keep moving your finger towards the right edge of teh screen. This will swipe the current app off the screen, taking you back to the Dash. Once back on the Dash, you’ll see your open apps represented as thumbnails under Recent. Tap a thumbnail here to go back to a running app. To remove an app from here, long-press it and tap the X button that appears. Swipe in from the right edge in any app to quickly switch between recent apps. Swipe in from the right edge and hold your finger down to reveal an application switcher that shows all your recent apps and lets you choose between them. Swipe down from the top of the screen to access the indicator panel. Here you can connect to Wi-Fi networks, view upcoming events, control GPS and Bluetooth hardware, adjust sound settings, see incoming messages, and more. This panel is for quick access to hardware settings and notifications, just like the indicators on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. The Apps System settings not included in the pull-down panel are available in the System Settings app. To access it, tap My apps on the Dash and tap System Settings, search for the System Settings app, or open the launcher bar and tap the settings icon. The settings here a bit limited compared to other operating systems, but many of the important options are available here. You can add Evernote, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts from here. A free Ubuntu One account is mandatory for downloading and updating apps. A Google account can be used to sync contacts and calendar events. Some apps on Ubuntu are native apps, while many are web apps. For example, the Twitter, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay apps included by default are all web apps that open each service’s mobile website as an app. Other applications, such as the Weather, Calendar, Dialer, Calculator, and Notes apps are native applications. Theoretically, both types of apps will be able to scale to different screen resolutions. Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu desktop may one day share the same apps, which will adapt to different display sizes and input methods. Like Windows 8 apps, Ubuntu apps hide interface elements by default, providing you with a full-screen view of the content. Swipe up from the bottom of an app’s screen to view its interface elements. For example, swiping up from the bottom of the Web Browser app reveals Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons, along with an address bar and Activity button so you can view current and recent web pages. Swipe up even more from the bottom and you’ll see a button hovering in the middle of the app. Tap the button and you’ll see many more settings. This is an overflow area for application options and functions that can’t fit on the navigation bar. The Terminal app has a few surprising Easter eggs in this panel, including a “Hack into the NSA” option. Tap it and the following text will appear in the terminal: That’s not very nice, now tracing your location . . . . . . . . . . . .Trace failed You got away this time, but don’t try again. We’d expect to see such Easter eggs disappear before Ubuntu Touch actually ships on real devices. Ubuntu Touch has come a long way, but it’s still not something you want to use today. For example, it doesn’t even have a built-in email client — you’ll have to us your email service’s mobile website. Few apps are available, and many of the ones that are are just mobile websites. It’s not a polished operating system intended for normal users yet — it’s more of a preview for developers and device manufacturers. If you really want to try it yourself, you can install it on a Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, or Nexus 4 device. Follow Ubuntu’s installation instructions here.

  Read the article

• Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain – Part 3

  - by sxkumar

  I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation such as cloud will increase agility and efficiency of an organization if process re-engineering is part of the plan.  I have also stressed on the key enterprise requirements such as “broad and deep solutions, “running your mission critical applications” and “automated and integrated set of capabilities”. Let me walk you through some key cloud attributes such as “elasticity” and “self-service” and what they mean for an enterprise class cloud. I will also talk about how we at Oracle have taken a very enterprise centric view to developing cloud solutions and how our products have been specifically engineered to address enterprise cloud needs. Cloud Elasticity and Enterprise Applications Requirements Easy and quick scalability for a short-period of time is the signature of cloud based solutions. It is this elasticity that allows you to dynamically redistribute your resources according to business priorities, helps increase your overall resource utilization, and reduces operational costs by allowing you to get the most out of your existing investment. Most public clouds are offering a instant provisioning mechanism of compute power (CPU, RAM, Disk), customer pay for the instance-hours(and bandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peak times and removing them when they are no longer needed. This type of “just-in-time” serving of compute resources is well known for mid-tiers “state less” servers such as web application servers and web servers that just need another machine to start and run on it but what does it really mean for an enterprise application and its underlying data? Most enterprise applications are not as quite as “state less” and justifiably so. As such, how do you take advantage of cloud elasticity and make it relevant for your enterprise apps? This is where Cloud meets Grid Computing. At Oracle, we have invested enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating enterprise grid solutions. All our technology products offer built-in elasticity via clustering and dynamic scaling. With products like Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, WebLogic Clustering, and Coherence In-Memory Grid, we allow all your enterprise applications to benefit from Cloud elasticity –both vertically and horizontally - without requiring any application changes. A number of technology vendors take a rather simplistic route of starting up additional or removing unneeded VM as the "Cloud Scale-Out" solution. While this may work for stateless mid-tier servers where load balancers can handle the addition and remove of instances transparently but following a similar approach for the database tier - often called as "database sharding" - requires significant application modification and typically does not work with off the shelf packaged applications. Technologies like Oracle Database Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, etc. on the other hand bring the benefits of incremental scalability and on-demand elasticity to ANY application by providing a simplified abstraction layers where the application does not need deal with data spread over multiple database instances. Rather they just talk to a single database and the database software takes care of aggregating resources across multiple hardware components. It is the technologies like these that truly make a cloud solution relevant for enterprises.  For customers who are looking for a next generation hardware consolidation platform, our engineered systems (e.g. Exadata, Exalogic) not only provide incredible amount of performance and capacity, they also reduce the data center complexity and simplify operations. Assemble, Deploy and Manage Enterprise Applications for Cloud Products like Oracle Virtual assembly builder (OVAB) resolve the complex problem of bringing the cloud speed to complex multi-tier applications. With assemblies, you can not only provision all components of a multi-tier application and wire them together by push of a button, other aspects of application lifecycle, such as real-time application testing, scale-up/scale-down, performance and availability monitoring, etc., are also automated using Oracle Enterprise Manager.  An essential criteria for an enterprise cloud to succeed is the ability to ensure business service levels especially when business users have either full visibility on the usage cost with a “show back” or a “charge back”. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, we have created the most comprehensive cloud management solution in the industry that is capable of managing business service levels “applications-to-disk” in a enterprise private cloud – all from a single console. It is the only cloud management platform in the industry that allows you to deliver infrastructure, platform and application cloud services out of the box. Moreover, it offers integrated and complete lifecycle management of the cloud - including planning and set up, service delivery, operations management, metering and chargeback, etc .  Sounds unbelievable? Well, just watch this space for more details on how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is the nerve center of Oracle Cloud! Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry  - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry.  And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies.  Summary  But the intent of this blog post isn't to dwell on how great our solutions are (these are just some examples to illustrate how we at Oracle have approached this problem space). Rather it is to help you ask the right questions before you embark on your cloud journey.  So to summarize, here are the key takeaways.       It is critical that you are clear on why you are building the cloud. Successful organizations keep business benefits as the first and foremost cloud objective. On the other hand, those who approach this purely as a technology project are more likely to fail. Think about where you want to be in 3-5 years before you get started. Your long terms objectives should determine what your first step ought to be. As obvious as it may seem, more people than not make the first move without knowing where they are headed.  Don’t make the mistake of equating cloud to virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Spinning a VM on-demand will give some short term relief to your IT staff but is unlikely to solve your larger business problems. As such, even if IaaS is your first step towards a more comprehensive cloud, plan the roadmap around those higher level services before you begin. And ask your vendors on how they are going to be your partners in this journey. Capabilities like self-service access and chargeback/showback are absolutely critical if you really expect your cloud to be transformational. Your business won't see the full benefits of the cloud until it empowers them with same kind of control and transparency that they are used to while using a public cloud service.  Evaluate the benefits of integration, as opposed to blindly following the best-of-breed strategy. Integration is a huge challenge and more so in a cloud environment. There are enormous costs associated with stitching a solution out of disparate components and even more in maintaining it. Hope you found these ideas helpful. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.

  Read the article

• Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available

  - by ScottGu

  The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6.   The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available for queries and updates when running on .NET 4.5. Custom conventions now provide the ability to override the default conventions that Code First uses for mapping types, properties, etc. to your database. Multi-tenant migrations allow the same database to be used by multiple contexts with full Code First Migrations support for independently evolving the model backing each context. Using Enumerable.Contains in a LINQ query is now handled much more efficiently by EF and the SQL Server provider resulting greatly improved performance. All features of EF6 (except async) are available on both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5. This includes support for enums and spatial types and the performance improvements that were previously only available when using .NET 4.5. Start-up time for many large models has been dramatically improved thanks to improved view generation performance. Below are some additional details about a few of the improvements above: Async Support .NET 4.5 introduced the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern that uses the async and await keywords to help make writing asynchronous code easier. EF 6 now supports this pattern. This is great for ASP.NET applications as database calls made through EF can now be processed asynchronously – avoiding any blocking of worker threads. This can increase scalability on the server by allowing more requests to be processed while waiting for the database to respond. The following code shows an MVC controller that is querying a database for a list of location entities:     public class HomeController : Controller     {         LocationContext db = new LocationContext();           public async Task<ActionResult> Index()         {             var locations = await db.Locations.ToListAsync();               return View(locations);         }     } Notice above the call to the new ToListAsync method with the await keyword. When the web server reaches this code it initiates the database request, but rather than blocking while waiting for the results to come back, the thread that is processing the request returns to the thread pool, allowing ASP.NET to process another incoming request with the same thread. In other words, a thread is only consumed when there is actual processing work to do, allowing the web server to handle more concurrent requests with the same resources. A more detailed walkthrough covering async in EF is available with additional information and examples. Also a walkthrough is available showing how to use async in an ASP.NET MVC application. Custom Conventions When working with EF Code First, the default behavior is to map .NET classes to tables using a set of conventions baked into EF. For example, Code First will detect properties that end with “ID” and configure them automatically as primary keys. However, sometimes you cannot or do not want to follow those conventions and would rather provide your own. For example, maybe your primary key properties all end in “Key” instead of “Id”. Custom conventions allow the default conventions to be overridden or new conventions to be added so that Code First can map by convention using whatever rules make sense for your project. The following code demonstrates using custom conventions to set the precision of all decimals to 5. As with other Code First configuration, this code is placed in the OnModelCreating method which is overridden on your derived DbContext class:         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             modelBuilder.Properties<decimal>()                 .Configure(x => x.HasPrecision(5));           } But what if there are a couple of places where a decimal property should have a different precision? Just as with all the existing Code First conventions, this new convention can be overridden for a particular property simply by explicitly configuring that property using either the fluent API or a data annotation. A more detailed description of custom code first conventions is available here. Community Involvement I blogged a while ago about EF being released under an open source license.  Since then a number of community members have made contributions and these are included in EF6 alpha 2. Two examples of community contributions are: AlirezaHaghshenas contributed a change that increases the startup performance of EF for larger models by improving the performance of view generation. The change means that it is less often necessary to use of pre-generated views. UnaiZorrilla contributed the first community feature to EF: the ability to load all Code First configuration classes in an assembly with a single method call like the following: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) {        modelBuilder.Configurations            .AddFromAssembly(typeof(LocationContext).Assembly); } This code will find and load all the classes that inherit from EntityTypeConfiguration<T> or ComplexTypeConfiguration<T> in the assembly where LocationContext is defined. This reduces the amount of coupling between the context and Code First configuration classes, and is also a very convenient shortcut for large models. Other upcoming features coming in EF 6 Lots of information about the development of EF6 can be found on the EF CodePlex site, including a roadmap showing the other features that are planned for EF6. One of of the nice upcoming features is connection resiliency, which will automate the process of retying database operations on transient failures common in cloud environments and with databases such as the Windows Azure SQL Database. Another often requested feature that will be included in EF6 is the ability to map stored procedures to query and update operations on entities when using Code First. Summary EF6 is the first open source release of Entity Framework being developed in CodePlex. The alpha 2 preview release of EF6 is now available on NuGet, and contains some really great features for you to try. The EF team are always looking for feedback from developers - especially on the new features such as custom Code First conventions and async support. To provide feedback you can post a comment on the EF6 alpha 2 announcement post, start a discussion or file a bug on the CodePlex site. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202  | Next Page >