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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 26, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 26, 2014Popular ReleasesClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.1: More performance improvements. It's faster and consumes less memory.Role Based Views in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Role Based Views in CRM 2011 and 2013 - 1.1.0.0: Issues fixed in this build: 1. Works for CRM 2013 2. Lookup view not getting blockedSimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.3.1.0: Main New Features: Fixed Importing of Instance Names (get rid of the Dutch translations) Added advanced editor for Decal Dictionaries Added possibility to import .PNG to generate new decals Added advanced editor for Path display entriesSimple Connect To Db: SimpleConnectToDb_v1: SimpleConnectToDb_v1CRM 2011 / CRM 2013 Form Helper: v2014.05.25: v2014.05.25 Added PhoneFormat & PhoneFormatAreaCode v2014.05.24 Initial ReleaseCreate Word documents without MS Word: Release 3.0: Add support for Sections, Sections Headers and Footers and right to left languages.Corporate News App for SharePoint 2013: CorporateNewsApp v1.6.2.0: Important note This version contains a major bug fix about the generic error "Request failed. Unexpected response data from server null" This error occurs on SharePoint Online only, following an update of the Javascript API after May 2014. If you have installed this application manually in your applications company catalog, you can download the CorporateNewsApp.app file in the zip archive and update it manually. If you have installed this application directly from the SharePoint Store, it ...DevOS: DevOS: Plugin-system added Including:DevOS.exe DevOS API.dll Files must be in the some folderTiny Deduplicator: Tiny Deduplicator 1.0.1.0: Increased version number to 1.0.1.0 Moved all options to a separate 'Options' dialog window. Allows the user to specify a selection strategy which will help when dealing with large numbers of duplicate files. Available options are "None," "Keep First," and "Keep Last"C64 Studio: 3.5: Add: BASIC renumber function Add: !PET pseudo op Add: elseif for !if, } else { pseudo op Add: !TRACE pseudo op Add: Watches are saved/restored with a solution Add: Ctrl-A works now in export assembly controls Add: Preliminary graphic import dialog (not fully functional yet) Add: range and block selection in sprite/charset editor (Shift-Click = range, Alt-Click = block) Fix: Expression evaluator could miscalculate when both division and multiplication were in an expression without parenthesisSEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.031.009 Release 1: Added mirroring of ConveyorTubeCurved. Updated Ship cube rotation to rotate ship back to original location (cubes are reoriented but ship appears no different to outsider), and to rotate Grouped items. Repair now fixes the loss of Grouped controls due to changes in Space Engineers 01.030. Added export asteroids. Rejoin ships will merge grouping and conveyor systems (even though broken ships currently only maintain the Grouping on one part of the ship). Installation of this version wi...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP v2.0: Support for new Universal and Windows Phone 8.1 projects for both Xaml and JavaScript projects. See a detailed list of improvements, breaking changes and a general overview of version 2 ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8 Applications Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8.1 Applications Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows Phone 8.1 Applications Microsoft PlayReady Client SDK for Windows 8 Applications Microsoft PlayReady Client SDK for Windows 8.1 Applicat...TerraMap (Terraria World Map Viewer): TerraMap 1.0.6: Added support for the new Terraria v1.2.4 update. New items, walls, and tiles Added the ability to select multiple highlighted block types. Added a dynamic, interactive highlight opacity slider, making it easier to find highlighted tiles with dark colors (and fixed blurriness from 1.0.5 alpha). Added ability to find Enchanted Swords (in the stone) and Water Bolt books Fixed Issue 35206: Hightlight/Find doesn't work for Demon Altars Fixed finding Demon Hearts/Shadow Orbs Fixed inst...DotNet.Highcharts: DotNet.Highcharts 4.0 with Examples: DotNet.Highcharts 4.0 Tested and adapted to the latest version of Highcharts 4.0.1 Added new chart type: Heatmap Added new type PointPlacement which represents enumeration or number for the padding of the X axis. Changed target framework from .NET Framework 4 to .NET Framework 4.5. Closed issues: 974: Add 'overflow' property to PlotOptionsColumnDataLabels class 997: Split container from JS 1006: Series/Categories with numeric names don't render DotNet.Highcharts.Samples Updated s...ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140523 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" Aspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI SL - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI SL SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Slides for dealing with Microsoft Power Point. What's New ?Following Examples: Managing Slide Transitions Manage Smart Art Adding Media Player Adding Audio Frame to Slide Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.1.3: Added CompressLogs option to the config file. Each Install / Uninstall creates a timestamped zip file with all MSI and PSAppDeployToolkit logs contained within Added variable expansion to all paths in the configuration file Added documentation for each of the Toolkit internal variables that can be used Changed Install-MSUpdates to continue if any errors are encountered when installing updates Implement /Force parameter on Update-GroupPolicy (ensure that any logoff message is ignored) ...WordMat: WordMat v. 1.07: A quick fix because scientific notation was broken in v. 1.06 read more at http://wordmat.blogspot.com????: 《????》: 《????》（c???）??“????”???????，???????????????C?????????。???????,???????????????????????. ??????????????????????????????????；????????????????????????????。Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (1.0.72.457): Apologies for the previous update! FK issue fixed and also a template data cache issue.New ProjectsASP.Net MCV4 Simplified Code Samples: This project intended to simplify the same. In this project each task is implemented with minimum lines of code to reduces complicity.Calvin: net???CodeLatino by Latinosoft: A Modified version for codeShow -- Probably taking more than a month.freeasyBackup: A free and easy to use Backup Tool for everyone. Without any cloud restrictions. freeasyExplorer: A free and easy to use File Explorer for everyone.openPDFspeedreader: #spritz #pdfreader #speedreader PDF Editor to Edit PDF Files in your ASP.NET Applications: This sample application allows the users to edit PDF files online using Aspose.Pdf for .NET.SharePoint World Cup 2013: world cup 2014SSAS Long Running Query Performance Helper: This utility helps investigate long running multidimensional or mining queries in discovery, de-parameterization and re-parameterization back to source format.

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• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• PostSharp, Obfuscation, and IL

  - by simonc

  Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a relatively new programming paradigm. Originating at Xerox PARC in 1994, the paradigm was first made available for general-purpose development as an extension to Java in 2001. From there, it has quickly been adapted for use in all the common languages used today. In the .NET world, one of the primary AOP toolkits is PostSharp. Attributes and AOP Normally, attributes in .NET are entirely a metadata construct. Apart from a few special attributes in the .NET framework, they have no effect whatsoever on how a class or method executes within the CLR. Only by using reflection at runtime can you access any attributes declared on a type or type member. PostSharp changes this. By declaring a custom attribute that derives from PostSharp.Aspects.Aspect, applying it to types and type members, and running the resulting assembly through the PostSharp postprocessor, you can essentially declare 'clever' attributes that change the behaviour of whatever the aspect has been applied to at runtime. A simple example of this is logging. By declaring a TraceAttribute that derives from OnMethodBoundaryAspect, you can automatically log when a method has been executed: public class TraceAttribute : PostSharp.Aspects.OnMethodBoundaryAspect { public override void OnEntry(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Entering {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } public override void OnExit(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Leaving {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } } [Trace] public void MethodToLog() { ... } Now, whenever MethodToLog is executed, the aspect will automatically log entry and exit, without having to add the logging code to MethodToLog itself. PostSharp Performance Now this does introduce a performance overhead - as you can see, the aspect allows access to the MethodBase of the method the aspect has been applied to. If you were limited to C#, you would be forced to retrieve each MethodBase instance using Type.GetMethod(), matching on the method name and signature. This is slow. Fortunately, PostSharp is not limited to C#. It can use any instruction available in IL. And in IL, you can do some very neat things. Ldtoken C# allows you to get the Type object corresponding to a specific type name using the typeof operator: Type t = typeof(Random); The C# compiler compiles this operator to the following IL: ldtoken [mscorlib]System.Random call class [mscorlib]System.Type [mscorlib]System.Type::GetTypeFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeTypeHandle) The ldtoken instruction obtains a special handle to a type called a RuntimeTypeHandle, and from that, the Type object can be obtained using GetTypeFromHandle. These are both relatively fast operations - no string lookup is required, only direct assembly and CLR constructs are used. However, a little-known feature is that ldtoken is not just limited to types; it can also get information on methods and fields, encapsulated in a RuntimeMethodHandle or RuntimeFieldHandle: // get a MethodBase for String.EndsWith(string) ldtoken method instance bool [mscorlib]System.String::EndsWith(string) call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase::GetMethodFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeMethodHandle) // get a FieldInfo for the String.Empty field ldtoken field string [mscorlib]System.String::Empty call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo::GetFieldFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeFieldHandle) These usages of ldtoken aren't usable from C# or VB, and aren't likely to be added anytime soon (Eric Lippert's done a blog post on the possibility of adding infoof, methodof or fieldof operators to C#). However, PostSharp deals directly with IL, and so can use ldtoken to get MethodBase objects quickly and cheaply, without having to resort to string lookups. The kicker However, there are problems. Because ldtoken for methods or fields isn't accessible from C# or VB, it hasn't been as well-tested as ldtoken for types. This has resulted in various obscure bugs in most versions of the CLR when dealing with ldtoken and methods, and specifically, generic methods and methods of generic types. This means that PostSharp was behaving incorrectly, or just plain crashing, when aspects were applied to methods that were generic in some way. So, PostSharp has to work around this. Without using the metadata tokens directly, the only way to get the MethodBase of generic methods is to use reflection: Type.GetMethod(), passing in the method name as a string along with information on the signature. Now, this works fine. It's slower than using ldtoken directly, but it works, and this only has to be done for generic methods. Unfortunately, this poses problems when the assembly is obfuscated. PostSharp and Obfuscation When using ldtoken, obfuscators don't affect how PostSharp operates. Because the ldtoken instruction directly references the type, method or field within the assembly, it is unaffected if the name of the object is changed by an obfuscator. However, the indirect loading used for generic methods was breaking, because that uses the name of the method when the assembly is put through the PostSharp postprocessor to lookup the MethodBase at runtime. If the name then changes, PostSharp can't find it anymore, and the assembly breaks. So, PostSharp needs to know about any changes an obfuscator does to an assembly. The way PostSharp does this is by adding another layer of indirection. When PostSharp obfuscation support is enabled, it includes an extra 'name table' resource in the assembly, consisting of a series of method & type names. When PostSharp needs to lookup a method using reflection, instead of encoding the method name directly, it looks up the method name at a fixed offset inside that name table: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(ContainingClass).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: get_Prop1 21: set_Prop1 22: DoFoo 23: GetWibble When the assembly is later processed by an obfuscator, the obfuscator can replace all the method and type names within the name table with their new name. That way, the reflection lookups performed by PostSharp will now use the new names, and everything will work as expected: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(#kGy).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: #kkA 21: #zAb 22: #EF5a 23: #2tg As you can see, this requires direct support by an obfuscator in order to perform these rewrites. Dotfuscator supports it, and now, starting with SmartAssembly 6.6.4, SmartAssembly does too. So, a relatively simple solution to a tricky problem, with some CLR bugs thrown in for good measure. You don't see those every day! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Ops Center Jump-Start for Partners

  - by Get_Specialized!

  Following the Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} announcement at Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo, Partners can check out these resources to further learn about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Op Center and then use it to optimize your solution/services or offer new ones: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Product Documentation Oracle Technical Network Resources Online Learning Series for Partners in the OPN Enterprise Manager KnowledgeZone Whitepaper Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Making Infrastructure-as-a-Service in the Enterprise a Reality IDC report: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Embraces the Cloud with Integrated Lifecycle Management Follow-up webcast April 12th  Total Cloud Control for Systems Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is no extra charge and included in the support contract of Oracle Systems customers.To learn more see the Ops Center Everywhere Program And if you're not already a member, be sure and join the Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Enterprise Manager KnowledgeZone on the Oracle PartnerNetwork  Portal

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 3 of 3&ndash;Clrizr)

  - by ToString(theory);

  Welcome back!  In the first two posts in this series, I covered some of the awesome features in CSS precompilers such as SASS and LESS, as well as how to get an initial project setup up and running in ASP.Net MVC 4. In this post, I will cover an actual advanced example of using LESS in a project, and show some of the great productivity features we gain from its usage. Introduction In the first post, I mentioned two subjects that I will be using in this example – constants, and color functions.  I’ve always enjoyed using online color scheme utilities such as Adobe Kuler or Color Scheme Designer to come up with a scheme based off of one primary color.  Using these tools, and requesting a complementary scheme you can get a couple of shades of your primary color, and a couple of shades of a complementary/accent color to display. Because there is no way in regular css to do color operations or store variables, there was no way to accomplish something like defining a primary color, and have a site theme cascade off of that.  However with tools such as LESS, that impossibility becomes a reality!  So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this post is on the creation of a plugin/module/less file to drop into your project, plugin one color, and have your primary theme cascade from it.  I only went through the trouble of creating a module for getting Complementary colors.  However, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to go through other options such as Triad or Monochromatic to get a module that you could use off of that. Step 1 – Analysis I decided to mimic Adobe Kuler’s Complementary theme algorithm as I liked its simplicity and aesthetics.  Color Scheme Designer is great, but I do believe it can give you too many color options, which can lead to chaos and overload.  The first thing I had to check was if the complementary values for the color schemes were actually hues rotated by 180 degrees at all times – they aren’t.  Apparently Adobe applies some variance to the complementary colors to get colors that are actually more aesthetically appealing to users.  So, I opened up Excel and began to plot complementary hues based on rotation in increments of 10: Long story short, I completed the same calculations for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.  For Hue, I only had to record the Complementary hue values, however for saturation and lightness, I had to record the values for ALL of the shades.  Since the functions were too complicated to put into LESS since they aren’t constant/linear, but rather interval functions, I instead opted to extrapolate the HSL values using the trendline function for each major interval, onto intervals of spacing 1. For example, using the hue extraction, I got the following values: Interval Function 0-60 60-140 140-270 270-360 Saturation and Lightness were much worse, but in the end, I finally had functions for all of the intervals, and then went the route of just grabbing each shades value in intervals of 1.  Step 2 – Mapping I declared variable names for each of these sections as something that shouldn’t ever conflict with a variable someone would define in their own file.  After I had each of the values, I extracted the values and put them into files of their own for hue variables, saturation variables, and lightness variables…  Example: /*HUE CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-hue-source-0deg: 133.43;@clrizr-hue-source-1deg: 135.601;@clrizr-hue-source-2deg: 137.772;@clrizr-hue-source-3deg: 139.943;@clrizr-hue-source-4deg: 142.114;.../*SATURATION CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-saturation-s2SV0px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV1px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV2px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV3px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV4px: 0;.../*LIGHTNESS CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-lightness-s2LV0px: 30;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV1px: 31;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV2px: 32;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV3px: 33;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV4px: 34;...   In the end, I have 973 lines of mapping/conversion from source HSL to shade HSL for two extra primary shades, and two complementary shades. The last bit of the work was the file to compose each of the shades from these mappings. Step 3 – Clrizr Mapper The final step was the hardest to overcome as I was still trying to understand LESS to its fullest extent.  Imports As mentioned previously, I had separated the HSL mappings into different files, so the first necessary step is to import those for use into the Clrizr plugin: @import url("hue.less");@import url("saturation.less");@import url("lightness.less"); Extract Component Values For Each Shade Next, I extracted the necessary information for each shade HSL before shade composition: @clrizr-input-saturation: 1px+floor(saturation(@clrizr-input))-1;@clrizr-input-lightness: 1px+floor(lightness(@clrizr-input))-1; @clrizr-complementary-hue: formatstring("clrizr-hue-source-{0}", ceil(hue(@clrizr-input))); @clrizr-primary-2-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s2SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-primary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-c1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation); @clrizr-primary-2-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s2LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-c1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness); Here, you can see a couple of odd things…  On the first line, I am using operations to add units to the saturation and lightness.  This is due to some limitations in the operations that would give me saturation or lightness in %, which can’t be in a variable name.  So, I use first add 1px to it, which casts the result of the following functions as px instead of %, and then at the end, I remove that pixel.  You can also see here the formatstring method which is exactly what it sounds like – something like String.Format(string str, params object[] obj). Get Primary & Complementary Shades Now that I have components for each of the different shades, I can now compose them into each of their pieces.  For this, I use the @@ operator which will look for a variable with the name specified in a string, and then call that variable: @clrizr-primary-2: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-2-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-2-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-1-lightness);@clrizr-primary: @clrizr-input;@clrizr-complementary-1: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, @@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-2: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, saturation(@clrizr-input), lightness(@clrizr-input)); That’s is it, for the most part.  These variables now hold the theme for the one input color – @clrizr-input.  However, I have one last addition… Perceptive Luminance Well, after I got the colors, I decided I wanted to also get the best font color that would go on top of it.  Black or white depending on light or dark color.  Now I couldn’t just go with checking the lightness, as that is half the story.  You see, the human eye doesn’t see ALL colors equally well but rather has more cells for interpreting green light compared to blue or red.  So, using the ratio, we can calculate the perceptive luminance of each of the shades, and get the font color that best matches it! @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-2)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-2)))/255)*255; @clrizr-col-font-on-primary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2); Conclusion That’s it!  I have posted a project on clrizr.codePlex.com for this, and included a testing page for you to test out how it works.  Feel free to use it in your own project, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here as a comment, or on the contact page!

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• Delivering the Integrated Portal Experience!

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Guest post by Richard Maldonado, Principal Product Manager, Oracle WebCenter Portal Organizations are still struggling to standardize on a user interaction platform which can meet the needs of all their target audiences.  This has not only resulted in inefficient and inconsistent experiences for their users, but it also creates inefficiencies (productivity and costs) for the departments that manage the applications and information systems.  Portals have historically been the unifying platform that provide IT with a common interface which can securely surface the most relevant interactions for a given user and/or group of users.  However, organizations have found that the technologies available have either not provided the flexibility necessary to address all of their use cases, or they rely too much on IT resources to manage, maintain, and evolve.  Empowering  the Business Groups The core issue that IT departments face with delivering portal experiences is having enough resources to respond and address the influx of requirements which come in from the business.  Commonly, when a business group wants a new portal site established for their group, they will submit a request to the IT dept, the IT dept then assigns a resource to an administrator and/or developer to build.  Unfortunately, this approach is not scalable, it can be a time consuming activity which requires significant interaction between the business owner and the IT resource.  A modern user interaction platforms should empower the business groups by providing them tools which they can use to build and manage the portal experiences without the need for IT's involvement.  And because business groups rarely have technical resources (developers) on staff, the tools must be easy enough that virtually any business user could use.  In addition, the tool must be powerful enough to allow them to build the experience that they need, things such as creating a whole new portal, add/manage page and page hierarchy, manage user/group access, add/modify components within the page, etc.  This balance between ease-of-use and flexibility is key to the successful adoption of tools which will ultimately reduce the burden on IT, respond to the needs of the business, and deliver high-value experiences for the users.  Ready or Not, Here They Come: Smartphones and Tablets Recently, several studies have highlighted that smartphone and tablet-style devices have overtaken PC's in both sales and usage.  This shift is further driving organizations to revaluate how they're delivering data, information, and applications to their users.  Users are expecting to get the same level of access and interaction, but in a ways which are optimized for the capabilities of the device that they are using.  Expect More With the ever growing number of new IT projects and flat/shrinking budgets, organizations are looking for comprehensive solutions which can deliver integrated web experiences that are tailored for the users and optimized for mobile devices.  Piecing together a number of point solutions is no longer an option.  A modern portal technology should not only address the traditional needs of integrating and surfacing back-end applications/information, but it should enable the business through easy-to-use tools and accelerate the delivery of mobile optimized experiences.   v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} WebCenter in Action Series: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter Featuring Qualcomm & Keste 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; 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• Building an OpenStack Cloud for Solaris Engineering, Part 1

  - by Dave Miner

  One of the signature features of the recently-released Solaris 11.2 is the OpenStack cloud computing platform.  Over on the Solaris OpenStack blog the development team is publishing lots of details about our version of OpenStack Havana as well as some tips on specific features, and I highly recommend reading those to get a feel for how we've leveraged Solaris's features to build a top-notch cloud platform.  In this and some subsequent posts I'm going to look at it from a different perspective, which is that of the enterprise administrator deploying an OpenStack cloud.  But this won't be just a theoretical perspective: I've spent the past several months putting together a deployment of OpenStack for use by the Solaris engineering organization, and now that it's in production we'll share how we built it and what we've learned so far.In the Solaris engineering organization we've long had dedicated lab systems dispersed among our various sites and a home-grown reservation tool for developers to reserve those systems; various teams also have private systems for specific testing purposes.  But as a developer, it can still be difficult to find systems you need, especially since most Solaris changes require testing on both SPARC and x86 systems before they can be integrated.  We've added virtual resources over the years as well in the form of LDOMs and zones (both traditional non-global zones and the new kernel zones).  Fundamentally, though, these were all still deployed in the same model: our overworked lab administrators set up pre-configured resources and we then reserve them.  Sounds like pretty much every traditional IT shop, right?  Which means that there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies from greater use of virtualization and the self-service style of cloud computing.  As we were well into development of OpenStack on Solaris, I was recruited to figure out how we could deploy it to both provide more (and more efficient) development and test resources for the organization as well as a test environment for Solaris OpenStack.At this point, let's acknowledge one fact: deploying OpenStack is hard.  It's a very complex piece of software that makes use of sophisticated networking features and runs as a ton of service daemons with myriad configuration files.  The web UI, Horizon, doesn't often do a good job of providing detailed errors.  Even the command-line clients are not as transparent as you'd like, though at least you can turn on verbose and debug messaging and often get some clues as to what to look for, though it helps if you're good at reading JSON structure dumps.  I'd already learned all of this in doing a single-system Grizzly-on-Linux deployment for the development team to reference when they were getting started so I at least came to this job with some appreciation for what I was taking on.  The good news is that both we and the community have done a lot to make deployment much easier in the last year; probably the easiest approach is to download the OpenStack Unified Archive from OTN to get your hands on a single-system demonstration environment.  I highly recommend getting started with something like it to get some understanding of OpenStack before you embark on a more complex deployment.  For some situations, it may in fact be all you ever need.  If so, you don't need to read the rest of this series of posts!In the Solaris engineering case, we need a lot more horsepower than a single-system cloud can provide.  We need to support both SPARC and x86 VM's, and we have hundreds of developers so we want to be able to scale to support thousands of VM's, though we're going to build to that scale over time, not immediately.  We also want to be able to test both Solaris 11 updates and a release such as Solaris 12 that's under development so that we can work out any upgrade issues before release.  One thing we don't have is a requirement for extremely high availability, at least at this point.  We surely don't want a lot of down time, but we can tolerate scheduled outages and brief (as in an hour or so) unscheduled ones.  Thus I didn't need to spend effort on trying to get high availability everywhere.The diagram below shows our initial deployment design.  We're using six systems, most of which are x86 because we had more of those immediately available.  All of those systems reside on a management VLAN and are connected with a two-way link aggregation of 1 Gb links (we don't yet have 10 Gb switching infrastructure in place, but we'll get there).  A separate VLAN provides "public" (as in connected to the rest of Oracle's internal network) addresses, while we use VxLANs for the tenant networks. One system is more or less the control node, providing the MySQL database, RabbitMQ, Keystone, and the Nova API and scheduler as well as the Horizon console.  We're curious how this will perform and I anticipate eventually splitting at least the database off to another node to help simplify upgrades, but at our present scale this works.I had a couple of systems with lots of disk space, one of which was already configured as the Automated Installation server for the lab, so it's just providing the Glance image repository for OpenStack.  The other node with lots of disks provides Cinder block storage service; we also have a ZFS Storage Appliance that will help back-end Cinder in the near future, I just haven't had time to get it configured in yet.There's a separate system for Neutron, which is our Elastic Virtual Switch controller and handles the routing and NAT for the guests.  We don't have any need for firewalling in this deployment so we're not doing so.  We presently have only two tenants defined, one for the Solaris organization that's funding this cloud, and a separate tenant for other Oracle organizations that would like to try out OpenStack on Solaris.  Each tenant has one VxLAN defined initially, but we can of course add more.  Right now we have just a single /24 network for the floating IP's, once we get demand up to where we need more then we'll add them.Finally, we have started with just two compute nodes; one is an x86 system, the other is an LDOM on a SPARC T5-2.  We'll be adding more when demand reaches the level where we need them, but as we're still ramping up the user base it's less work to manage fewer nodes until then.My next post will delve into the details of building this OpenStack cloud's infrastructure, including how we're using various Solaris features such as Automated Installation, IPS packaging, SMF, and Puppet to deploy and manage the nodes.  After that we'll get into the specifics of configuring and running OpenStack itself.

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• A Bite With No Teeth&ndash;Demystifying Non-Compete Clauses

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  *DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this post in no way should be considered legal advice. I’m also in Canada, so references made are to Canadian court cases. I received a signed letter the other day, a reminder from my previous employer about some clauses associated with my employment and entry into an employee stock purchase program. So since this is in effect for the next 12 months, I guess I’m not starting that new job tomorrow. I’m kidding of course. How outrageous, how presumptuous, pompous, and arrogant that a company – any company – would actually place these conditions upon an employee. And yet, this is not uncommon. Especially in the IT industry, we see time and again similar wording in our employment agreements. But…are these legal? Is there any teeth behind the threat of the bite? Luckily, the answer seems to be ‘No’. I want to highlight two cases that support this. The first is Lyons v. Multari. In a nutshell, Dentist hires younger Dentist to be an associate. In their short, handwritten agreement, a non-compete clause was written stating “Protective Covenant. 3 yrs. – 5mi” (meaning you can’t set up shop within 5 miles for 3 years). Well, the young dentist left and did start an oral surgery office within 5 miles and within 3 years. Off to court they go! The initial judge sided with the older dentist, but on appeal it was overturned. Feel free to read the transcript of the decision here, but let me highlight one portion from section [19]: The general rule in most common law jurisdictions is that non-competition clauses in employment contracts are void. The sections following [19] explain further, and discuss Elsley v. J.G. Collins Insurance Agency Ltd. and its impact on Canadian law in this regard. The second case is Winnipeg Livestock Sales Ltd. v. Plewman. Desmond Plewman is an auctioneer, and worked at Winnipeg Livestock Sales. Part of his employment agreement was that he could not work for a competitor for 18 months if he left the company. Well, he left, and took up an important role in a competing company. The case went to court and as with Lyons v. Multari, the initial judge found in favour of the plaintiffs. Also as in the first case, that was overturned on appeal. Again, read through the transcript of the decision, but consider section [28]: In other words, even though Plewman has a great deal of skill as an auctioneer, Winnipeg Livestock has no proprietary interest in his professional skill and experience, even if they were acquired during his time working for Winnipeg Livestock.  Thus, Winnipeg Livestock has the burden of establishing that it has a legitimate proprietary interest requiring protection.  On this key question there is little evidence before the Court.  The record discloses that part of Plewman’s job was to “mingle with the … crowd” and to telephone customers and prospective customers about future prospects for the sale of livestock.  It may seem reasonable to assume that Winnipeg Livestock has a legitimate proprietary interest in its customer connections; but there is no evidence to indicate that there is any significant degree of “customer loyalty” in the business, as opposed to customers making choices based on other considerations such as cost, availability and the like. So are there any incidents where a non-compete can actually be valid? Yes, and these are considered “exceptional” cases, meaning that the situation meets certain circumstances. Michael Carabash has a great blog series discussing the above mentioned cases as well as the difference between a non-compete and non-solicit agreement. He talks about the exceptional criteria: In summary, the authorities reveal that the following circumstances will generally be relevant in determining whether a case is an “exceptional” one so that a general non-competition clause will be found to be reasonable: - The length of service with the employer. - The amount of personal service to clients. - Whether the employee dealt with clients exclusively, or on a sustained or     recurring basis. - Whether the knowledge about the client which the employee gained was of a   confidential nature, or involved an intimate knowledge of the client’s   particular needs, preferences or idiosyncrasies. - Whether the nature of the employee’s work meant that the employee had   influence over clients in the sense that the clients relied upon the employee’s   advice, or trusted the employee. - If competition by the employee has already occurred, whether there is   evidence that clients have switched their custom to him, especially without   direct solicitation. - The nature of the business with respect to whether personal knowledge of   the clients’ confidential matters is required. - The nature of the business with respect to the strength of customer loyalty,   how clients are “won” and kept, and whether the clientele is a recurring one. - The community involved and whether there were clientele yet to be exploited   by anyone. I close this blog post with a final quote, one from Zvulony & Co’s blog post on this subject. Again, all of this is not official legal advice, but I think we can see what all these sources are pointing towards. To answer my earlier question, there’s no teeth behind the threat of the bite. In light of this list, and the decisions in Lyons and Orlan, it is reasonably certain that in most employment situations a non-competition clause will be ineffective in protecting an employer from a departing employee who wishes to compete in the same business. The Courts have been relatively consistent in their position that if a non-solicitation clause can protect an employer’s interests, then a non-competition clause is probably unreasonable. Employers (or their solicitors) should avoid the inclination to draft restrictive covenants in broad, catch-all language. Or in other words, when drafting a restrictive covenant – take only what you need! D

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• How to implement smooth flocking

  - by Craig

  I'm working on a simple survival game, avoid the big guy and chase the the small guys to stay alive for as long as possible. I have taken the chase and evade example from MSDN create and drawn 20 mice on the screen. I want the small guys to flock when they arent evading. They are doing this, but it isnt as smooth as I would like it to be. How do i make the movement smoother? Its very jittery.# Below is what I have going at the moment, flocking code is within the IF statement, when it isnt set to evading. Any help would be greatly appreciated! :) namespace ChaseAndEvade { class MouseSprite { public enum MouseAiState { // evading the cat Evading, // the mouse can't see the "cat", and it's wandering around. Wander } // how fast can the mouse move? public float MaxMouseSpeed = 4.5f; // and how fast can it turn? public float MouseTurnSpeed = 0.20f; // MouseEvadeDistance controls the distance at which the mouse will flee from // cat. If the mouse is further than "MouseEvadeDistance" pixels away, he will // consider himself safe. public float MouseEvadeDistance = 100.0f; // this constant is similar to TankHysteresis. The value is larger than the // tank's hysteresis value because the mouse is faster than the tank: with a // higher velocity, small fluctuations are much more visible. public float MouseHysteresis = 60.0f; public Texture2D mouseTexture; public Vector2 mouseTextureCenter; public Vector2 mousePosition; public MouseAiState mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; public float mouseOrientation; public Vector2 mouseWanderDirection; int separationImpact = 4; int cohesionImpact = 6; int alignmentImpact = 2; int sensorDistance = 50; public void UpdateMouse(Vector2 position, MouseSprite [] mice, int numberMice, int index) { Vector2 catPosition = position; int enemies = numberMice; // first, calculate how far away the mouse is from the cat, and use that // information to decide how to behave. If they are too close, the mouse // will switch to "active" mode - fleeing. if they are far apart, the mouse // will switch to "idle" mode, where it roams around the screen. // we use a hysteresis constant in the decision making process, as described // in the accompanying doc file. float distanceFromCat = Vector2.Distance(mousePosition, catPosition); // the cat is a safe distance away, so the mouse should idle: if (distanceFromCat > MouseEvadeDistance + MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; } // the cat is too close; the mouse should run: else if (distanceFromCat < MouseEvadeDistance - MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Evading; } // if neither of those if blocks hit, we are in the "hysteresis" range, // and the mouse will continue doing whatever it is doing now. // the mouse will move at a different speed depending on what state it // is in. when idle it won't move at full speed, but when actively evading // it will move as fast as it can. this variable is used to track which // speed the mouse should be moving. float currentMouseSpeed; // the second step of the Update is to change the mouse's orientation based // on its current state. if (mouseState == MouseAiState.Evading) { // If the mouse is "active," it is trying to evade the cat. The evasion // behavior is accomplished by using the TurnToFace function to turn // towards a point on a straight line facing away from the cat. In other // words, if the cat is point A, and the mouse is point B, the "seek // point" is C. // C // B // A Vector2 seekPosition = 2 * mousePosition - catPosition; // Use the TurnToFace function, which we introduced in the AI Series 1: // Aiming sample, to turn the mouse towards the seekPosition. Now when // the mouse moves forward, it'll be trying to move in a straight line // away from the cat. mouseOrientation = ChaseAndEvadeGame.TurnToFace(mousePosition, seekPosition, mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // set currentMouseSpeed to MaxMouseSpeed - the mouse should run as fast // as it can. currentMouseSpeed = MaxMouseSpeed; } else { // if the mouse isn't trying to evade the cat, it should just meander // around the screen. we'll use the Wander function, which the mouse and // tank share, to accomplish this. mouseWanderDirection and // mouseOrientation are passed by ref so that the wander function can // modify them. for more information on ref parameters, see // http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14akc2c7(VS.80).aspx ChaseAndEvadeGame.Wander(mousePosition, ref mouseWanderDirection, ref mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // if the mouse is wandering, it should only move at 25% of its maximum // speed. currentMouseSpeed = .25f * MaxMouseSpeed; Vector2 separate = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveCloser = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveAligned = Vector2.Zero; // What the AI does when it sees other AIs for (int j = 0; j < enemies; j++) { if (index != j) { // Calculate a vector towards another AI Vector2 separation = mice[index].mousePosition - mice[j].mousePosition; // Only react if other AI is within a certain distance if ((separation.Length() < this.sensorDistance) & (separation.Length()> 0) ) { moveAligned += mice[j].mouseWanderDirection; float distance = Math.Abs(separation.Length()); if (distance == 0) distance = 1; moveCloser += mice[j].mousePosition; separation.Normalize(); separate += separation / distance; } } } if (moveAligned.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveAligned.Normalize(); } if (moveCloser.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveCloser.Normalize(); } moveCloser /= enemies; mice[index].mousePosition += (separate * separationImpact) + (moveCloser * cohesionImpact) + (moveAligned * alignmentImpact); } // The final step is to move the mouse forward based on its current // orientation. First, we construct a "heading" vector from the orientation // angle. To do this, we'll use Cosine and Sine to tell us the x and y // components of the heading vector. See the accompanying doc for more // information. Vector2 heading = new Vector2( (float)Math.Cos(mouseOrientation), (float)Math.Sin(mouseOrientation)); // by multiplying the heading and speed, we can get a velocity vector. the // velocity vector is then added to the mouse's current position, moving him // forward. mousePosition += heading * currentMouseSpeed; } } }

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked Read() and Exchange()

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Last time we discussed the Interlocked class and its Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods which are all useful for updating a value atomically by adding (or subtracting).  However, this begs the question of how do we set and read those values atomically as well? Read() – Read a value atomically Let’s begin by examining the following code: 1: public class Incrementor 2: { 3: private long _value = 0; 4:  5: public long Value { get { return _value; } } 6:  7: public void Increment() 8: { 9: Interlocked.Increment(ref _value); 10: } 11: } 12:  It uses an interlocked increment, as we discuss in my previous post (here), so we know that the increment will be thread-safe.  But, to realize what’s potentially wrong we have to know a bit about how atomic reads are in 32 bit and 64 bit .NET environments. When you are dealing with an item smaller or equal to the system word size (such as an int on a 32 bit system or a long on a 64 bit system) then the read is generally atomic, because it can grab all of the bits needed at once.  However, when dealing with something larger than the system word size (reading a long on a 32 bit system for example), it cannot grab the whole value at once, which can lead to some problems since this read isn’t atomic. For example, this means that on a 32 bit system we may read one half of the long before another thread increments the value, and the other half of it after the increment.  To protect us from reading an invalid value in this manner, we can do an Interlocked.Read() to force the read to be atomic (of course, you’d want to make sure any writes or increments are atomic also): 1: public class Incrementor 2: { 3: private long _value = 0; 4:  5: public long Value 6: { 7: get { return Interlocked.Read(ref _value); } 8: } 9:  10: public void Increment() 11: { 12: Interlocked.Increment(ref _value); 13: } 14: } Now we are guaranteed that we will read the 64 bit value atomically on a 32 bit system, thus ensuring our thread safety (assuming all other reads, writes, increments, etc. are likewise protected).  Note that as stated before, and according to the MSDN (here), it isn’t strictly necessary to use Interlocked.Read() for reading 64 bit values on 64 bit systems, but for those still working in 32 bit environments, it comes in handy when dealing with long atomically. Exchange() – Exchanges two values atomically Exchange() lets us store a new value in the given location (the ref parameter) and return the old value as a result. So just as Read() allows us to read atomically, one use of Exchange() is to write values atomically.  For example, if we wanted to add a Reset() method to our Incrementor, we could do something like this: 1: public void Reset() 2: { 3: _value = 0; 4: } But the assignment wouldn’t be atomic on 32 bit systems, since the word size is 32 bits and the variable is a long (64 bits).  Thus our assignment could have only set half the value when a threaded read or increment happens, which would put us in a bad state. So instead, we could write Reset() like this: 1: public void Reset() 2: { 3: Interlocked.Exchange(ref _value, 0); 4: } And we’d be safe again on a 32 bit system. But this isn’t the only reason Exchange() is valuable.  The key comes in realizing that Exchange() doesn’t just set a new value, it returns the old as well in an atomic step.  Hence the name “exchange”: you are swapping the value to set with the stored value. So why would we want to do this?  Well, anytime you want to set a value and take action based on the previous value.  An example of this might be a scheme where you have several tasks, and during every so often, each of the tasks may nominate themselves to do some administrative chore.  Perhaps you don’t want to make this thread dedicated for whatever reason, but want to be robust enough to let any of the threads that isn’t currently occupied nominate itself for the job.  An easy and lightweight way to do this would be to have a long representing whether someone has acquired the “election” or not.  So a 0 would indicate no one has been elected and 1 would indicate someone has been elected. We could then base our nomination strategy as follows: every so often, a thread will attempt an Interlocked.Exchange() on the long and with a value of 1.  The first thread to do so will set it to a 1 and return back the old value of 0.  We can use this to show that they were the first to nominate and be chosen are thus “in charge”.  Anyone who nominates after that will attempt the same Exchange() but will get back a value of 1, which indicates that someone already had set it to a 1 before them, thus they are not elected. Then, the only other step we need take is to remember to release the election flag once the elected thread accomplishes its task, which we’d do by setting the value back to 0.  In this way, the next thread to nominate with Exchange() will get back the 0 letting them know they are the new elected nominee. Such code might look like this: 1: public class Nominator 2: { 3: private long _nomination = 0; 4: public bool Elect() 5: { 6: return Interlocked.Exchange(ref _nomination, 1) == 0; 7: } 8: public bool Release() 9: { 10: return Interlocked.Exchange(ref _nomination, 0) == 1; 11: } 12: } There’s many ways to do this, of course, but you get the idea.  Running 5 threads doing some “sleep” work might look like this: 1: var nominator = new Nominator(); 2: var random = new Random(); 3: Parallel.For(0, 5, i => 4: { 5:  6: for (int j = 0; j < _iterations; ++j) 7: { 8: if (nominator.Elect()) 9: { 10: // elected 11: Console.WriteLine("Elected nominee " + i); 12: Thread.Sleep(random.Next(100, 5000)); 13: nominator.Release(); 14: } 15: else 16: { 17: // not elected 18: Console.WriteLine("Did not elect nominee " + i); 19: } 20: // sleep before check again 21: Thread.Sleep(1000); 22: } 23: }); And would spit out results like: 1: Elected nominee 0 2: Did not elect nominee 2 3: Did not elect nominee 1 4: Did not elect nominee 4 5: Did not elect nominee 3 6: Did not elect nominee 3 7: Did not elect nominee 1 8: Did not elect nominee 2 9: Did not elect nominee 4 10: Elected nominee 3 11: Did not elect nominee 2 12: Did not elect nominee 1 13: Did not elect nominee 4 14: Elected nominee 0 15: Did not elect nominee 2 16: Did not elect nominee 4 17: ... Another nice thing about the Interlocked.Exchange() is it can be used to thread-safely set pretty much anything 64 bits or less in size including references, pointers (in unsafe mode), floats, doubles, etc.  Summary So, now we’ve seen two more things we can do with Interlocked: reading and exchanging a value atomically.  Read() and Exchange() are especially valuable for reading/writing 64 bit values atomically in a 32 bit system.  Exchange() has value even beyond simply atomic writes by using the Exchange() to your advantage, since it reads and set the value atomically, which allows you to do lightweight nomination systems. There’s still a few more goodies in the Interlocked class which we’ll explore next time! Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked

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• Testing Workflows &ndash; Test-First

  - by Timothy Klenke

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-first.aspxThis is the second of two posts on some common strategies for approaching the job of writing tests.  The previous post covered test-after workflows where as this will focus on test-first.  Each workflow presented is a method of attack for adding tests to a project.  The more tools in your tool belt the better.  So here is a partial list of some test-first methodologies. Ping Pong Ping Pong is a methodology commonly used in pair programing.  One developer will write a new failing test.  Then they hand the keyboard to their partner.  The partner writes the production code to get the test passing.  The partner then writes the next test before passing the keyboard back to the original developer. The reasoning behind this testing methodology is to facilitate pair programming.  That is to say that this testing methodology shares all the benefits of pair programming, including ensuring multiple team members are familiar with the code base (i.e. low bus number). Test Blazer Test Blazing, in some respects, is also a pairing strategy.  The developers don’t work side by side on the same task at the same time.  Instead one developer is dedicated to writing tests at their own desk.  They write failing test after failing test, never touching the production code.  With these tests they are defining the specification for the system.  The developer most familiar with the specifications would be assigned this task. The next day or later in the same day another developer fetches the latest test suite.  Their job is to write the production code to get those tests passing.  Once all the tests pass they fetch from source control the latest version of the test project to get the newer tests. This methodology has some of the benefits of pair programming, namely lowering the bus number.  This can be good way adding an extra developer to a project without slowing it down too much.  The production coder isn’t slowed down writing tests.  The tests are in another project from the production code, so there shouldn’t be any merge conflicts despite two developers working on the same solution. This methodology is also a good test for the tests.  Can another developer figure out what system should do just by reading the tests?  This question will be answered as the production coder works there way through the test blazer’s tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a highly disciplined practice that calls for a new test and an new production code to be written every few minutes.  There are strict rules for when you should be writing test or production code.  You start by writing a failing (red) test, then write the simplest production code possible to get the code working (green), then you clean up the code (refactor).  This is known as the red-green-refactor cycle. The goal of TDD isn’t the creation of a suite of tests, however that is an advantageous side effect.  The real goal of TDD is to follow a practice that yields a better design.  The practice is meant to push the design toward small, decoupled, modularized components.  This is generally considered a better design that large, highly coupled ball of mud. TDD accomplishes this through the refactoring cycle.  Refactoring is only possible to do safely when tests are in place.  In order to use TDD developers must be trained in how to look for and repair code smells in the system.  Through repairing these sections of smelly code (i.e. a refactoring) the design of the system emerges. For further information on TDD, I highly recommend the series “Is TDD Dead?”.  It discusses its pros and cons and when it is best used. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Whereas TDD focuses on small unit tests that concentrate on a small piece of the system, Acceptance Tests focuses on the larger integrated environment.  Acceptance Tests usually correspond to user stories, which come directly from the customer. The unit tests focus on the inputs and outputs of smaller parts of the system, which are too low level to be of interest to the customer. ATDD generally uses the same tools as TDD.  However, ATDD uses fewer mocks and test doubles than TDD. ATDD often complements TDD; they aren’t competing methods.  A full test suite will usually consist of a large number of unit (created via TDD) tests and a smaller number of acceptance tests. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) BDD is more about audience than workflow.  BDD pushes the testing realm out towards the client.  Developers, managers and the client all work together to define the tests. Typically different tooling is used for BDD than acceptance and unit testing.  This is done because the audience is not just developers.  Tools using the Gherkin family of languages allow for test scenarios to be described in an English format.  Other tools such as MSpec or FitNesse also strive for highly readable behaviour driven test suites. Because these tests are public facing (viewable by people outside the development team), the terminology usually changes.  You can’t get away with the same technobabble you can with unit tests written in a programming language that only developers understand.  For starters, they usually aren’t called tests.  Usually they’re called “examples”, “behaviours”, “scenarios”, or “specifications”. This may seem like a very subtle difference, but I’ve seen this small terminology change have a huge impact on the acceptance of the process.  Many people have a bias that testing is something that comes at the end of a project.  When you say we need to define the tests at the start of the project many people will immediately give that a lower priority on the project schedule.  But if you say we need to define the specification or behaviour of the system before we can start, you’ll get more cooperation.   Keep these test-first and test-after workflows in your tool belt.  With them you’ll be able to find new opportunities to apply them.

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• How to Control Screen Layouts in LightSwitch

  - by ChrisD

  Visual Studio LightSwitch has a bunch of screen templates that you can use to quickly generate screens. They give you good starting points that you can customize further. When you add a new screen to your project you see a set of screen templates that you can choose from. These templates lay out all the related data you choose to put on a screen automatically for you. And don’t under estimate them; they do a great job of laying out controls in a smart way. For instance, a tab control will be used when you select more than one related set of data to display on a screen. However, you’re not limited to taking the layout as is. In fact, the screen designer is pretty flexible and allows you to create stacks of controls in a variety of configurations. You just need to visualize your screen as a series of containers that you can lay out in rows and columns. You then place controls or stacks of controls into these areas to align the screen exactly how you want. If you’re new in Visual Studio LightSwitch, you can see this tutorial. OK, Let’s start with a simple example. I have already designed my data entities for a simple order tracking system similar to the Northwind database. I also have added a Search Data  Screen to search my Products already. Now I will add a new Details Screen for my Products and make it the default screen via the “Add New Screen” dialog: The screen designer picks a simple layout for me based on the single entity I chose, in this case Product. Hit F5 to run the application, select a Product on the search screen to open the Product Details Screen. Notice that it’s pretty simple because my entity is simple. Click the “Customize” button in the top right of the screen so we can start tweaking it. The left side of the screen shows the containership of controls and data bindings (called the content tree) and the right side shows the live preview with data. Notice that we have a simple layout of two rows but only one row is populated (with a vertical stack of controls in this case). The bottom row is empty. You can envision the screen like this: Each container will display a group of data that you select. For instance in the above screen, the top row is set to a vertical stack control and the group of data to display is coming from Product. So when laying out screens you need to think in terms of containers of controls bound to groups of data. To change the data to which a container is bound, select the data item next to the container: You can select the “New Group” item in order to create more containers (or controls) within the current container. For instance to totally control the layout, select the Product in the top row and hit the delete key. This will delete the vertical stack and therefore all the controls on the screen. The content tree will still have two rows, but the rows are now both empty. If you want a layout of four containers (two rows and two columns) then select “New Group” for the data item and then change the vertical stack control to “Two Columns” for both of the rows as shown here: You can keep going on and on by selecting new groups and choosing between rows or columns. Here’s a layout with 8 containers, 4 rows and 2 columns: And here is a layout with 7 content areas; one row across the top of the screen and three rows with two columns below that: When you select Choose Content and select a data item like Product it will populate all the controls within the container (row or column in a vertical stack) however you have complete control on what to display within each group. You can delete fields you don’t want to display and/or change their controls. You can also change the size of controls and how they display by changing the settings in the properties window. If you are in the Screen Designer (and not the customization mode like we are here) you can also drag-drop data items from the left-hand side of the screen to the content tree. Note, however, that not all areas of the tree will allow you to drop a data item if there is a binding already set to a different set of data. For instance you can’t drop a Customer ID into the same group as a Product if they originate from different entities. To get around this, all you need to do is create a new group and content area as shown above. Let’s take a more complex example that deals with more than just product. I want to design a complex screen that displays Products and their Category, as well as all the OrderDetails for which that product is selected. This time I will create a new screen and select List and Details, select the Products screen data, and include the related OrderDetails. However I’m going to totally change the layout so that a Product grid is at the top left and below that is the selected Product detail. Below that will be the Category text fields and image in two columns below. On the right side I want the OrderDetails grid to take up the whole right side of the screen. All this can be done in customization mode while you’re debugging the application. To do this, I first deleted all the content items in the tree and then re-created the content tree as shown in the image below. I also set the image to be larger and the description textbox to be 5 rows using the property window below the live preview. I added the green lines to indicate the containers and show how it maps to the content tree (click to enlarge): I hope this demystifies the screen designer a little bit. Remember that screen templates are excellent starting points – you can take them as-is or customize them further. It takes a little fooling around with customizing screens to get them to do exactly what you want but there are a ton of possibilities once you get the hang of it. Stay tuned for more information on how to create your own screen templates that show up in the “Add New Screen” dialog. Enjoy! The tutorial that might be interested: Adding Custom Control In LightSwitch

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• Webcast Q&A: ING on How to Scale Role Management and Compliance

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live webcast we hosted on ING: Scaling Role Management and Access Certifications to Thousands of Applications on Wed, April 11th. Those of you who couldn’t join us, the webcast replay is now available. Many thanks to our guest speaker, Mark Robison, Enterprise Architect at ING for walking us through ING’s drivers and rationale for the platform approach, the phased implementation strategy, results & metrics, roadmap and recommendations. We greatly appreciate the insight he shared with us all on the deployment synergies between Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) to enforce streamlined user and role management and scalable compliance. Mark was also kind enough to walk us through specific solutions features that helped ING manage the problem of role explosion and implement closed loop remediation. Our host speaker, Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle rounded off the presentation by discussing common use cases and deployment scenarios we see organizations implement to automate user/identity administration and enforce closed-loop scalable compliance. Neil also called out the specific features in Oracle Identity Analytics 11gR1 that cater to expediting and streamlining compliance processes such as access certifications. While we tackled a few questions during the webcast, we have captured the responses to those that we weren’t able to get to here; our sincere thanks to Mark Robison for taking the time to respond to questions specific to ING’s implementation and strategy. Q. Did you include business friendly entitlment descriptions, or is the business seeing application descriptors A. We include very business friendly descriptions.  The OIA tool has the facility to allow this. Q. When doing attestation on job change, who is in the workflow to review and confirm that the employee should continue to have access? Is that a best practice?   A. The new and old manager  are in the workflow.  The tool can check for any Separation of Duties (SOD) violations with both having similiar accesses.  It may not be a best practice, but it is a reality of doing your old and new job for a transition period on a transfer. Q. What versions of OIM and OIA are being used at ING?   A. OIM 11gR1 and OIA 11gR1; the very latest versions available. Q. Are you using an entitlements / role catalog?   A. Yes. We use both roles and entitlements. Q. What specific unexpected benefits did the Identity Warehouse provide ING?   A. The most unanticipated was to help Legal Hold identify user ID's in the various applications.   Other benefits included providing a one stop shop for all aggregated ID information. Q. How fine grained are your application and entitlements? Did OIA, OIM support that level of granularity?   A. We have some very fine grained entitlements, but we role this up into approved Roles to allow for easier management.   For managing very fine grained entitlements, Oracle offers the Oracle Entitlement Server.  We currently do not own this software but are considering it. Q. Do you allow any individual access or is everything truly role based?   A. We are a hybrid environment with roles and individual positive and negative entitlements Q. Did you use an Agile methodology like scrum to deliver functionality during your project? A. We started with waterfall, but used an agile approach to provide benefits after the initial implementation Q. How did you handle rolling out the standard ID format to existing users? A. We just used the standard IDs for new users.  We have not taken on a project to address the existing nonstandard IDs. Q. To avoid role explosion, how do you deal with apps that require more than a couple of entitlement TYPES? For example, an app may have different levels of access and it may need to know the user's country/state to associate them with particular customers.   A. We focus on the functional user and craft the role around their daily job requirements.  The role captures the required application entitlements.  To keep role explosion down, we use role mining in OIA and also meet and interview the business.  It is an iterative process to get role consensus. Q. Great presentation! How many rounds of Certifications has ING performed so far?  A. Around 7 quarters and constant certifications on transfer. Q. Did you have executive support from the top down   A. Yes  The executive support was key to our success. Q. For your cloud instance are you using OIA or OIM as SaaS?  A. No.  We are just provisioning and deprovisioning to various Cloud providers.  (Service Now is an example) Q. How do you ensure a role owner does not get more priviliges as are intended and thus violates another role, e,g, a DBA Roles should not get tor rigt to run somethings as root, as this would affect the root role? A. We have SOD  checks.  Also all Roles are initially approved by external audit and the role owners have to certify the roles and any changes Q. What is your ratio of employees to roles?   A. We are still in process going through our various lines of business, so I do not have a final ratio.  From what we have seen, the ratio varies greatly depending on the Line of Business and the diversity of Job Functions.  For standardized lines of business such as call centers, the ratio is very good where we can have a single role that covers many employees.  For specialized lines of business like treasury, it can be one or two people per role. Q. Is ING using Oracle On Demand service ?   A. No Q. Do you have to implement or migrate to OIM in order to get the Identity Warehouse, or can OIA provide the identity warehouse as well if you haven't reached OIM yet? A. No, OIM deployment is not required to implement OIA’s Identity Warehouse but as you heard during the webcast, there are tremendous deployment synergies in deploying both OIA and OIM together. Q. When is the Security Governor product coming out? A. Oracle Security Governor for Healthcare is available today. Hope you enjoyed the webcast and we look forward to having you join us for the next webcast in the Customers Talk: Identity as a Platform webcast series: Toyota: Putting Customers First – Identity Platform as a Business Enabler Wednesday, May 16th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST Register Today You can also register for a live event at a city near you where Aberdeen’s Derek Brink will discuss the survey results from the recently published report “Analyzing Platform vs. Point Solution Approach in Identity”. And, you can do a quick (& free)  online assessment of your identity programs by benchmarking it against the 160 organizations surveyed  in the Aberdeen report, compliments of Oracle. Here’s the slide deck from our ING webcast: ING webcast platform View more presentations from OracleIDM

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 4

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Explain the characteristics of memory systems Describe the memory hierarchy Discuss cache memory principles Discuss issues relevant to cache design Describe the cache organization of the Pentium Computer Memory Systems There are key characteristics of memory… Location – internal or external Capacity – expressed in terms of bytes Unit of Transfer – the number of bits read out of or written into memory at a time Access Method – sequential, direct, random or associative From a users perspective the two most important characteristics of memory are… Capacity Performance – access time, memory cycle time, transfer rate The trade off for memory happens along three axis… Faster access time, greater cost per bit Greater capacity, smaller cost per bit Greater capacity, slower access time This leads to people using a tiered approach in their use of memory   As one goes down the hierarchy, the following occurs… Decreasing cost per bit Increasing capacity Increasing access time Decreasing frequency of access of the memory by the processor The use of two levels of memory to reduce average access time works in principle, but only if conditions 1 to 4 apply. A variety of technologies exist that allow us to accomplish this. Thus it is possible to organize data across the hierarchy such that the percentage of accesses to each successively lower level is substantially less than that of the level above. A portion of main memory can be used as a buffer to hold data temporarily that is to be read out to disk. This is sometimes referred to as a disk cache and improves performance in two ways… Disk writes are clustered. Instead of many small transfers of data, we have a few large transfers of data. This improves disk performance and minimizes processor involvement. Some data designed for write-out may be referenced by a program before the next dump to disk. In that case the data is retrieved rapidly from the software cache rather than slowly from disk. Cache Memory Principles Cache memory is substantially faster than main memory. A caching system works as follows.. When a processor attempts to read a word of memory, a check is made to see if this in in cache memory… If it is, the data is supplied, If it is not in the cache, a block of main memory, consisting of a fixed number of words is loaded to the cache. Because of the phenomenon of locality of references, when a block of data is fetched into the cache, it is likely that there will be future references to that same memory location or to other words in the block. Elements of Cache Design While there are a large number of cache implementations, there are a few basic design elements that serve to classify and differentiate cache architectures… Cache Addresses Cache Size Mapping Function Replacement Algorithm Write Policy Line Size Number of Caches Cache Addresses Almost all non-embedded processors support virtual memory. Virtual memory in essence allows a program to address memory from a logical point of view without needing to worry about the amount of physical memory available. When virtual addresses are used the designer may choose to place the cache between the MMU (memory management unit) and the processor or between the MMU and main memory. The disadvantage of virtual memory is that most virtual memory systems supply each application with the same virtual memory address space (each application sees virtual memory starting at memory address 0), which means the cache memory must be completely flushed with each application context switch or extra bits must be added to each line of the cache to identify which virtual address space the address refers to. Cache Size We would like the size of the cache to be small enough so that the overall average cost per bit is close to that of main memory alone and large enough so that the overall average access time is close to that of the cache alone. Also, larger caches are slightly slower than smaller ones. Mapping Function Because there are fewer cache lines than main memory blocks, an algorithm is needed for mapping main memory blocks into cache lines. The choice of mapping function dictates how the cache is organized. Three techniques can be used… Direct – simplest technique, maps each block of main memory into only one possible cache line Associative – Each main memory block to be loaded into any line of the cache Set Associative – exhibits the strengths of both the direct and associative approaches while reducing their disadvantages For detailed explanations of each approach – read the text book (page 148 – 154) Replacement Algorithm For associative and set associating mapping a replacement algorithm is needed to determine which of the existing blocks in the cache must be replaced by a new block. There are four common approaches… LRU (Least recently used) FIFO (First in first out) LFU (Least frequently used) Random selection Write Policy When a block resident in the cache is to be replaced, there are two cases to consider If no writes to that block have happened in the cache – discard it If a write has occurred, a process needs to be initiated where the changes in the cache are propagated back to the main memory. There are several approaches to achieve this including… Write Through – all writes to the cache are done to the main memory as well at the point of the change Write Back – when a block is replaced, all dirty bits are written back to main memory The problem is complicated when we have multiple caches, there are techniques to accommodate for this but I have not summarized them. Line Size When a block of data is retrieved and placed in the cache, not only the desired word but also some number of adjacent words are retrieved. As the block size increases from very small to larger sizes, the hit ratio will at first increase because of the principle of locality, which states that the data in the vicinity of a referenced word are likely to be referenced in the near future. As the block size increases, more useful data are brought into cache. The hit ratio will begin to decrease as the block becomes even bigger and the probability of using the newly fetched information becomes less than the probability of using the newly fetched information that has to be replaced. Two specific effects come into play… Larger blocks reduce the number of blocks that fit into a cache. Because each block fetch overwrites older cache contents, a small number of blocks results in data being overwritten shortly after they are fetched. As a block becomes larger, each additional word is farther from the requested word and therefore less likely to be needed in the near future. The relationship between block size and hit ratio is complex, and no set approach is judged to be the best in all circumstances.   Pentium 4 and ARM cache organizations The processor core consists of four major components: Fetch/decode unit – fetches program instruction in order from the L2 cache, decodes these into a series of micro-operations, and stores the results in the L2 instruction cache Out-of-order execution logic – Schedules execution of the micro-operations subject to data dependencies and resource availability – thus micro-operations may be scheduled for execution in a different order than they were fetched from the instruction stream. As time permits, this unit schedules speculative execution of micro-operations that may be required in the future Execution units – These units execute micro-operations, fetching the required data from the L1 data cache and temporarily storing results in registers Memory subsystem – This unit includes the L2 and L3 caches and the system bus, which is used to access main memory when the L1 and L2 caches have a cache miss and to access the system I/O resources

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• Accessing your web server via IPv6

  Being able to run your systems on IPv6, have automatic address assignment and the ability to resolve host names are the necessary building blocks in your IPv6 network infrastructure. Now, that everything is in place it is about time that we are going to enable another service to respond to IPv6 requests. The following article will guide through the steps on how to enable Apache2 httpd to listen and respond to incoming IPv6 requests. This is the fourth article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. Surfing the web - IPv6 style Enabling IPv6 connections in Apache 2 is fairly simply. But first let's check whether your system has a running instance of Apache2 or not. You can check this like so: $ service apache2 status Apache2 is running (pid 2680). In case that you got a 'service unknown' you have to install Apache to proceed with the following steps: $ sudo apt-get install apache2 Out of the box, Apache binds to all your available network interfaces and listens to TCP port 80. To check this, run the following command: $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "apache2\W*$"tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      28306/apache2 In this case Apache2 is already binding to IPv6 (and implicitly to IPv4). If you only got a tcp output, then your HTTPd is not yet IPv6 enabled. Check your Listen directive, depending on your system this might be in a different location than the default in Ubuntu. $ sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf # If you just change the port or add more ports here, you will likely also# have to change the VirtualHost statement in# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default# This is also true if you have upgraded from before 2.2.9-3 (i.e. from# Debian etch). See /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/NEWS.Debian.gz and# README.Debian.gzNameVirtualHost *:80Listen 80<IfModule mod_ssl.c>    # If you add NameVirtualHost *:443 here, you will also have to change    # the VirtualHost statement in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl    # to <VirtualHost *:443>    # Server Name Indication for SSL named virtual hosts is currently not    # supported by MSIE on Windows XP.    Listen 443</IfModule><IfModule mod_gnutls.c>    Listen 443</IfModule> Just in case that you don't have a ports.conf file, look for it like so: $ cd /etc/apache2/$ fgrep -r -i 'listen' ./* And modify the related file instead of the ports.conf. Which most probably might be either apache2.conf or httpd.conf anyways. Okay, please bear in mind that Apache can only bind once on the same interface and port. So, eventually, you might be interested to add another port which explicitly listens to IPv6 only. In that case, you would add the following in your configuration file: Listen 80Listen [2001:db8:bad:a55::2]:8080 But this is completely optional... Anyways, just to complete all steps, you save the file, and then check the syntax like so: $ sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK Ok, now let's apply the modifications to our running Apache2 instances: $ sudo service apache2 reload * Reloading web server config apache2   ...done. $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "apache2\W*$"                                                                                               tcp6       0      0 2001:db8:bad:a55:::8080 :::*                    LISTEN      5922/apache2    tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      5922/apache2 There we have two daemons running and listening to different TCP ports. Now, that the basics are in place, it's time to prepare any website to respond to incoming requests on the IPv6 address. Open up any configuration file you have below your sites-enabled folder. $ ls -al /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/... $ sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default <VirtualHost *:80 [2001:db8:bad:a55::2]:8080>        ServerAdmin [email protected]        ServerName server.ios.mu        ServerAlias server Here, we have to check and modify the VirtualHost directive and enable it to respond to the IPv6 address and port our web server is listening to. Save your changes, run the configuration test and reload Apache2 in order to apply your modifications. After successful steps you can launch your favourite browser and navigate to your IPv6 enabled web server. Accessing an IPv6 address in the browser That looks like a successful surgery to me... Note: In case that you received a timeout, check whether your client is operating on IPv6, too.

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• Right-Time Retail Part 1

  - by David Dorf

  This is the first in a three-part series. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Revolution Technology enables some amazing feats in retail. I can order flowers for my wife while flying 30,000 feet in the air. I can order my groceries in the subway and have them delivered later that day. I can even see how clothes look on me without setting foot in a store. Who knew that a TV, diamond necklace, or even a car would someday be as easy to purchase as a candy bar? Can technology make a mattress an impulse item? Wake-up and your back is hurting, so you rollover and grab your iPad, then a new mattress is delivered the next day. Behind the scenes the many processes are being choreographed to make the sale happen. This includes moving data between systems with the least amount for friction, which in some cases is near real-time. But real-time isn’t appropriate for all the integrations. Think about what a completely real-time retailer would look like. A consumer grabs toothpaste off the shelf, and all systems are immediately notified so that the backroom clerk comes running out and pushes the consumer aside so he can replace the toothpaste on the shelf. Such a system is not only cost prohibitive, but it’s also very inefficient and ineffectual. Retailers must balance the realities of people, processes, and systems to find the right speed of execution. That’ what “right-time retail” means. Retailers used to sell during the day and count the money and restock at night, but global expansion and the Web have complicated that simplistic viewpoint. Our 24hr society demands not only access but also speed, which constantly pushes the boundaries of our IT systems. In the last twenty years, there have been three major technology advancements that have moved us closer to real-time systems. Networking is the first technology that drove the real-time trend. As systems became connected, it became easier to move data between them. In retail we no longer had to mail the daily business report back to corporate each day as the dial-up modem could transfer the data. That was soon replaced with trickle-polling, when sale transactions were occasionally sent from stores to corporate throughout the day, often through VSAT. Then we got terrestrial networks like DSL and Ethernet that allowed the constant stream of data between stores and corporate. When corporate could see the sales transactions coming from stores, it could better plan for replenishment and promotions. That drove the need for speed into the supply chain and merchandising, but for many years those systems were stymied by the huge volumes of data. Nordstrom has 150 million SKU/Store combinations when planning (RPAS); The Gap generates 110 million price changes during end-of-season (RPM); Argos does 1.78 billion calculations executed each day for replenishment planning (AIP). These areas are now being alleviated by the second technology, storage. The typical laptop disk drive runs at 5,400rpm with PCs stepping up to 7,200rpm and servers hitting 15,000rpm. But the platters can only spin so fast, so to squeeze more performance we’ve had to rely on things like disk striping. Then solid state drives (SSDs) were introduced and prices continue to drop. (Augmenting your harddrive with a SSD is the single best PC upgrade these days.) RAM continues to be expensive, but compressing data in memory has allowed more efficient use. So a few years back, Oracle decided to build a box that incorporated all these advancements to move us closer to real-time. This family of products, often categorized as engineered systems, combines the hardware and software so that they work together to provide better performance. How much better? If Exadata powered a 747, you’d go from New York to Paris in 42 minutes, and it would carry 5,000 passengers. If Exadata powered baseball, games would last only 18 minutes and Boston’s Fenway would hold 370,000 fans. The Exa-family enables processing more data in less time. So with faster networks and storage, that brings us to the third and final ingredient. If we continue to process data in traditional ways, we won’t be able to take advantage of the faster networks and storage. Enter what Harvard calls “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” – the data scientist. New technologies like the Hadoop-powered Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Advanced Analytics, and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery change the way in which we organize data. These technologies allow us to extract actionable information from raw data at incredible speeds, often ad-hoc. So the foundation to support the real-time enterprise exists, but how does a retailer begin to take advantage? The most visible way is through real-time marketing, but I’ll save that for part 3 and instead begin with improved integrations for the assets you already have in part 2.

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• Query optimization using composite indexes

  - by xmarch

  Many times, during the process of creating a new Coherence application, developers do not pay attention to the way cache queries are constructed; they only check that these queries comply with functional specs. Later, performance testing shows that these perform poorly and it is then when developers start working on improvements until the non-functional performance requirements are met. This post describes the optimization process of a real-life scenario, where using a composite attribute index has brought a radical improvement in query execution times.  The execution times went down from 4 seconds to 2 milliseconds! E-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca In the context of a new e-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca, Oracle Coherence has been used to calculate and store SKU prices. In this architecture, a Coherence cache stores the final SKU prices used for Endeca baseline indexing. Each SKU price is calculated from a base SKU price and a series of calculations based on information from corporate global discounts. Corporate global discounts information is stored in an auxiliary Coherence cache with over 800.000 entries. In particular, to obtain each price the process needs to execute six queries over the global discount cache. After the implementation was finished, we discovered that the most expensive steps in the price calculation discount process were the global discounts cache query. This query has 10 parameters and is executed 6 times for each SKU price calculation. The steps taken to optimise this query are described below; Starting point Initial query was: String filter = "levelId = :iLevelId AND  salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId "+ "AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND brand = :iBrand AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Map<String, Object> params = new HashMap<String, Object>(10); // Fill all parameters. params.put("iLevelId", xxxx); // Executing filter. Filter globalDiscountsFilter = QueryHelper.createFilter(filter, params); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(globalDiscountsFilter); With the small dataset used for development the cache queries performed very well. However, when carrying out performance testing with a real-world sample size of 800,000 entries, each query execution was taking more than 4 seconds. First round of optimizations The first optimisation step was the creation of separate Coherence index for each of the 10 attributes used by the filter. This avoided object deserialization while executing the query. Each index was created as follows: globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(new ReflectionExtractor("getXXX" ) , false, null); After adding these indexes the query execution time was reduced to between 450 ms and 1s. However, these execution times were still not good enough.  Second round of optimizations In this optimisation phase a Coherence query explain plan was used to identify how many entires each index reduced the results set by, along with the cost in ms of executing that part of the query. Though the explain plan showed that all the indexes for the query were being used, it also showed that the ordering of the query parameters was "sub-optimal".  Parameters associated to object attributes with high-cardinality should appear at the beginning of the filter, or more specifically, the attributes that filters out the highest of number records should be placed at the beginning. But examining corporate global discount data we realized that depending on the values of the parameters used in the query the “good” order for the attributes was different. In particular, if the attributes brand and family had specific values it was more optimal to have a different query changing the order of the attributes. Ultimately, we ended up with three different optimal variants of the query that were used in its relevant cases: String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId AND brand = :iBrand "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId  AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Using the appropriate query depending on the value of brand and family parameters the query execution time dropped to between 100 ms and 150 ms. But these these execution times were still not good enough and the solution was cumbersome. Third and last round of optimizations The third and final optimization was to introduce a composite index. However, this did mean that it was not possible to use the Coherence Query Language (CohQL), as composite indexes are not currently supporte in CohQL. As the original query had 8 parameters using EqualsFilter, 1 using GreaterEqualsFilter and 1 using LessEqualsFilter, the composite index was built for the 8 attributes using EqualsFilter. The final query had an EqualsFilter for the multiple extractor, a GreaterEqualsFilter and a LessEqualsFilter for the 2 remaining attributes.  All individual indexes were dropped except the ones being used for LessEqualsFilter and GreaterEqualsFilter. We were now running in an scenario with an 8-attributes composite filter and 2 single attribute filters. The composite index created was as follows: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(me, false, null); And the final query was: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); // Fill composite parameters.String SalesCompanyId = xxxx;...AndFilter composite = new AndFilter(new EqualsFilter(me,                   Arrays.asList(iSalesChannelId, iLevelId, iAreaId, iDepartmentId, iFamilyId, iManufacturer, iBrand, SalesCompanyId)),                                     new GreaterEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getEndDate" ), iEndDate)); AndFilter finalFilter = new AndFilter(composite, new LessEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getStartDate" ), iStartDate)); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(finalFilter);      Using this composite index the query improved dramatically and the execution time dropped to between 2 ms and  4 ms.  These execution times completely met the non-functional performance requirements . It should be noticed than when using the composite index the order of the attributes inside the ValueExtractor was not relevant.

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• Silverlight 4 Twitter Client &ndash; Part 3

  - by Max

  Finally Silverlight 4 RC is released and also that Windows 7 Phone Series will rely heavily on Silverlight platform for apps platform. its a really good news for Silverlight developers and designers. More information on this here. You can use SL 4 RC with VS 2010. SL 4 RC does not come with VS 2010, you need to download it separately and install it. So for the next part, be ready with VS 2010 and SL4 RC, we will start using them and not With this momentum, let us go to the next part of our twitter client tutorial. This tutorial will cover setting your status in Twitter and also retrieving your 1) As everything in Silverlight is asynchronous, we need to have some visual representation showing that something is going on in the background. So what I did was to create a progress bar with indeterminate animation. The XAML is here below. <ProgressBar Maximum="100" Width="300" Height="50" Margin="20" Visibility="Collapsed" IsIndeterminate="True" Name="progressBar1" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" /> 2) I will be toggling this progress bar to show the background work. So I thought of writing this small method, which I use to toggle the visibility of this progress bar. Just pass a bool to this method and this will toggle it based on its current visibility status. public void toggleProgressBar(bool Option){ if (Option) { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Visible; } else { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Visible) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed; }} 3) Now let us create a grid to hold a textbox and a update button. The XAML will look like something below <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="50"></RowDefinition> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="400"></ColumnDefinition> <ColumnDefinition Width="200"></ColumnDefinition> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox Name="TwitterStatus" Width="380" Height="50"></TextBox> <Button Name="UpdateStatus" Content="Update" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="2" Width="200" Height="50" Click="UpdateStatus_Click"></Button></Grid> 4) The click handler for this update button will be again using the Web Client to post values. Posting values using Web Client. The code is: private void UpdateStatus_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){ toggleProgressBar(true); string statusupdate = "status=" + TwitterStatus.Text; WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);  WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(GlobalVariable.getUserName(), GlobalVariable.getPassword());  myService.UploadStringCompleted += new UploadStringCompletedEventHandler(myService_UploadStringCompleted); myService.UploadStringAsync(new Uri("https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"), statusupdate);  this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => ClearTextBoxValue());} 5) In the above code, we have a event handler which will be fired on this request is completed – !! Remember SL is Asynch !! So in the myService_UploadStringCompleted, we will just toggle the progress bar and change some status text to say that its done. The code for this will be StatusMessage is just another textblock conveniently positioned in the page.  void myService_UploadStringCompleted(object sender, UploadStringCompletedEventArgs e){ if (e.Error != null) { StatusMessage.Text = "Status Update Failed: " + e.Error.Message.ToString(); } else { toggleProgressBar(false); TwitterCredentialsSubmit(); }} 6) Now let us look at fetching the friends updates of the logged in user and displaying it in a datagrid. So just define a data grid and set its autogenerate columns as true. 7) Let us first create a data structure for use with fetching the friends timeline. The code is something like below: namespace MaxTwitter.Classes{ public class Status { public Status() {} public string ID { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } public string Source { get; set; } public string UserID { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } }} You can add as many fields as you want, for the list of fields, have a look at here. It will ask for your Twitter username and password, just provide them and this will display the xml file. Go through them pick and choose your desired fields and include in your Data Structure. 8) Now the web client request for this is similar to the one we saw in step 4. Just change the uri in the last but one step to https://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml Be sure to change the event handler to something else and within that we will use XLINQ to fetch the required details for us. Now let us how this event handler fetches details. public void parseXML(string text){ XDocument xdoc; if(text.Length> 0) xdoc = XDocument.Parse(text); else xdoc = XDocument.Parse(@"I USED MY OWN LOCAL COPY OF XML FILE HERE FOR OFFLINE TESTING"); statusList = new List<Status>(); statusList = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("status") select new Status { ID = status.Element("id").Value, Text = status.Element("text").Value, Source = status.Element("source").Value, UserID = status.Element("user").Element("id").Value, UserName = status.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value, }).ToList(); //MessageBox.Show(text); //this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => CallDatabindMethod(StatusCollection)); //MessageBox.Show(statusList.Count.ToString()); DataGridStatus.ItemsSource = statusList; StatusMessage.Text = "Datagrid refreshed."; toggleProgressBar(false);} in the event handler, we call this method with e.Result.ToString() Parsing XML files using LINQ is super cool, I love it.   I am stopping it here for  this post. Will post the completed files in next post, as I’ve worked on a few more features in this page and don’t want to confuse you. See you soon in my next post where will play with Twitter lists. Have a nice day! Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LINQ,XLINQ,Twitter API,Twitter,Network Credentials

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• Using Unity – Part 5

  - by nmarun

  In the previous article of the series, I talked about constructor and property (setter) injection. I wanted to write about how to work with arrays and generics in Unity in this blog, after seeing how lengthy this one got, I’ve decided to write about generics in the next one. This one will only concentrate on arrays. My Product4 class has the following definition: 1: public interface IProduct 2: { 3: string WriteProductDetails(); 4: } 5:  6: public class Product4 : IProduct 7: { 8: public string Name { get; set; } 9: public ILogger[] Loggers { get; set; } 10:  11: public Product4(string productName, ILogger[] loggers) 12: { 13: Name = productName; 14: Loggers = loggers; 15: } 16:  17: public string WriteProductDetails() 18: { 19: StringBuilder productDetails = new StringBuilder(); 20: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Name); 21: for (int i = 0; i < Loggers.Count(); i++) 22: { 23: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Loggers[i].WriteLog()); 24: } 25: 26: return productDetails.ToString(); 27: } 28: } The key parts are line 4 where we declare an array of ILogger and line 5 where-in the constructor passes an instance of an array of ILogger objects. I’ve created another class – FakeLogger: 1: public class FakeLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: public string WriteLog() 4: { 5: return string.Format("Type: {0}", GetType()); 6: } 7: } It’s implementation is the same as what we had for the FileLogger class. Coming to the web.config file, first add the following aliases. The alias for FakeLogger should make sense right away. ILoggerArray defines an array of ILogger objects. I’ll tell why we need an alias for System.String data type. 1: <typeAlias alias="string" type="System.String, mscorlib" /> 2: <typeAlias alias="ILoggerArray" type="ProductModel.ILogger[], ProductModel" /> 3: <typeAlias alias="FakeLogger" type="ProductModel.FakeLogger, ProductModel"/> Next is to create mappings for the FileLogger and FakeLogger classes: 1: <type type="ILogger" mapTo="FileLogger" name="logger1"> 2: <lifetime type="singleton" /> 3: </type> 4: <type type="ILogger" mapTo="FakeLogger" name="logger2"> 5: <lifetime type="singleton" /> 6: </type> Finally, for the real deal: 1: <type type="IProduct" mapTo="Product4" name="ArrayProduct"> 2: <typeConfig extensionType="Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.TypeInjectionElement,Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration, Version=1.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"> 3: <constructor> 4: <param name="productName" parameterType="string" > 5: <value value="Product name from config file" type="string"/> 6: </param> 7: <param name="loggers" parameterType="ILoggerArray"> 8: <array> 9: <dependency name="logger2" /> 10: <dependency name="logger1" /> 11: </array> 12: </param> 13: </constructor> 14: </typeConfig> 15: </type> Here’s where I’m saying, that if a type of IProduct is requested to be resolved, map it to type Product4. Furthermore, the Product4 has two constructor parameters – a string and an array of type ILogger. You might have observed the first parameter of the constructor is named ‘productName’ and that matches the value in the name attribute of the param element. The parameterType of ‘string’ maps to ‘System.String, mscorlib’ and is defined in the type alias above. The set up is similar for the second constructor parameter. The name matches the name of the parameter (loggers) and is of type ILoggerArray, which maps to an array of ILogger objects. We’ve also decided to add two elements to this array when unity resolves it – an instance of FileLogger and one of FakeLogger. The click event of the button does the following: 1: //unityContainer.RegisterType<IProduct, Product4>(); 2: //IProduct product4 = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>(); 3: IProduct product4 = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>("ArrayConstructor"); 4: productDetailsLabel.Text = product4.WriteProductDetails(); It’s worth mentioning here about the change in the format of resolving the IProduct to create an instance of Product4. You cannot use the regular way (the commented lines) to get an instance of Product4. The reason is due to the behavior of Unity which Alex Ermakov has brilliantly explained here. The corresponding output of the action is: You have a couple of options when it comes to adding dependency elements in the array node. You can: - leave it empty (no dependency elements declared): This will only create an empty array of loggers. This way you can check for non-null condition, in your mock classes. - add multiple dependency elements with the same name 1: <param name="loggers" parameterType="ILoggerArray"> 2: <array> 3: <dependency name="logger2" /> 4: <dependency name="logger2" /> 5: </array> 6: </param> With this you’ll see two instances of FakeLogger in the output. This article shows how Unity allows you to instantiate objects with arrays. Find the code here.

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• Yet another UITableView Question

  - by barbgal

  Hi, I have a strange issue in my iPhone application. I have created a UITableView with 4 Sections and 3 Rows so totally 12 Rows. But - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath The above method only gets called for 9 times instead of 12 times.why this happenning. My 4th section is not getting constructed but my 1st section gets duplicated as 4th section. Thanks for your time and help. Plese refer my code below @interface MainViewController : UITableViewController<UITextFieldDelegate,UITableViewDelegate,UITableViewDataSource> { } @end // Implement viewDidLoad to do additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib. - (void)viewDidLoad { CGRect frameRect = CGRectMake(0,0,320,460); UITableView *tableView = [[UITableView alloc] initWithFrame:frameRect style:UITableViewStyleGrouped]; tableView.delegate = self; tableView.dataSource = self; tableView.backgroundColor = [UIColor purpleColor]; tableView.scrollEnabled = YES; self.view = tableView; [tableView release]; [super viewDidLoad]; } - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { // Return the number of rows in the section. return 3; } - (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView { // Return the number of sections. return 4; } // Customize the appearance of table view cells. - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { NSLog(@"CELL IS NIL %i", indexPath.section); static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; if (indexPath.section == 0) { if(indexPath.row == 0) { cell.text = @"Tmail"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else if ( indexPath.row == 1 ) { cell.text = @"English"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else { cell.text = @"Hindi"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } } else if (indexPath.section == 1) { if(indexPath.row == 0) { cell.text = @"Street"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else if ( indexPath.row == 1 ) { cell.text = @"City"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else { cell.text = @"State"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } } else if (indexPath.section == 2) { if(indexPath.row == 0) { cell.text = @"Salem"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else if ( indexPath.row == 1 ) { cell.text = @"Samalpatti"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else { cell.text = @"Chennai"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } } else if (indexPath.section == 3) { if(indexPath.row == 0) { cell.text = @"NOKIA"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else if ( indexPath.row == 1) { cell.text = @"SAMSUNG"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } else { cell.text = @"SONY"; UITextField *aField = [[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,10,200,40)]; aField.placeholder = @"Mandatory"; aField.delegate = self; aField.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; [cell addSubview:aField]; [aField release]; } } } return cell; }

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• WCF on Windows Phone 7 (Silverlight 4)

  - by Igor Zevaka

  Has anyone been able to communicate using WCF on Windows Phone Series 7 emulator? I've been trying for the past two days and it's just happening for me. I can get a normal Silverlight control to work in both Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, but not the phone version. Here are two versions that I've tried: Version 1 - Using Async Pattern BasicHttpBinding basicHttpBinding = new BasicHttpBinding(); EndpointAddress endpointAddress = new EndpointAddress("http://localhost/wcf/Authentication.svc"); Wcf.IAuthentication auth1 = new ChannelFactory<Wcf.IAuthentication>(basicHttpBinding, endpointAddress).CreateChannel(endpointAddress); AsyncCallback callback = (result) => { Action<string> write = (str) => { this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate { //Display something }); }; try { Wcf.IAuthentication auth = result.AsyncState as Wcf.IAuthentication; Wcf.AuthenticationResponse response = auth.EndLogin(result); write(response.Success.ToString()); } catch (Exception ex) { write(ex.Message); System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(ex.Message); } }; auth1.BeginLogin("user0", "test0", callback, auth1); This version breaks on this line: Wcf.IAuthentication auth1 = new ChannelFactory<Wcf.IAuthentication>(basicHttpBinding, endpointAddress).CreateChannel(endpointAddress); Throwing System.NotSupportedException. The exception is not very descriptive and the callstack is equally not very helpful: at System.ServiceModel.DiagnosticUtility.ExceptionUtility.BuildMessage(Exception x) at System.ServiceModel.DiagnosticUtility.ExceptionUtility.LogException(Exception x) at System.ServiceModel.DiagnosticUtility.ExceptionUtility.ThrowHelperError(Exception e) at System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactory`1.CreateChannel(EndpointAddress address) at WindowsPhoneApplication2.MainPage.DoLogin() .... Version 2 - Blocking WCF call Here is the version that doesn't use the async pattern. [System.ServiceModel.ServiceContract] public interface IAuthentication { [System.ServiceModel.OperationContract] AuthenticationResponse Login(string user, string password); } public class WcfClientBase<TChannel> : System.ServiceModel.ClientBase<TChannel> where TChannel : class { public WcfClientBase(string name, bool streaming) : base(GetBinding(streaming), GetEndpoint(name)) { ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = WcfConfig.UserName; ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = WcfConfig.Password; } public WcfClientBase(string name) : this(name, false) {} private static System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding GetBinding(bool streaming) { System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpBinding binding = new System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpBinding(); binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 1073741824; if(streaming) { //binding.TransferMode = System.ServiceModel.TransferMode.Streamed; } /*if(XXXURLXXX.StartsWith("https")) { binding.Security.Mode = BasicHttpSecurityMode.Transport; binding.Security.Transport.ClientCredentialType = HttpClientCredentialType.None; }*/ return binding; } private static System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress GetEndpoint(string name) { return new System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress(WcfConfig.Endpoint + name + ".svc"); } protected override TChannel CreateChannel() { throw new System.NotImplementedException(); } } auth.Login("test0", "password0"); This version crashes in System.ServiceModel.ClientBase<TChannel> constructor. The call stack is a bit different: at System.Reflection.MethodInfo.get_ReturnParameter() at System.ServiceModel.Description.ServiceReflector.HasNoDisposableParameters(MethodInfo methodInfo) at System.ServiceModel.Description.TypeLoader.CreateOperationDescription(ContractDescription contractDescription, MethodInfo methodInfo, MessageDirection direction, ContractReflectionInfo reflectionInfo, ContractDescription declaringContract) at System.ServiceModel.Description.TypeLoader.CreateOperationDescriptions(ContractDescription contractDescription, ContractReflectionInfo reflectionInfo, Type contractToGetMethodsFrom, ContractDescription declaringContract, MessageDirection direction) at System.ServiceModel.Description.TypeLoader.CreateContractDescription(ServiceContractAttribute contractAttr, Type contractType, Type serviceType, ContractReflectionInfo& reflectionInfo, Object serviceImplementation) at System.ServiceModel.Description.TypeLoader.LoadContractDescriptionHelper(Type contractType, Type serviceType, Object serviceImplementation) at System.ServiceModel.Description.TypeLoader.LoadContractDescription(Type contractType) at System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactory1.CreateDescription() at System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactory.InitializeEndpoint(Binding binding, EndpointAddress address) at System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactory1..ctor(Binding binding, EndpointAddress remoteAddress) at System.ServiceModel.ClientBase1..ctor(Binding binding, EndpointAddress remoteAddress) at Wcf.WcfClientBase1..ctor(String name, Boolean streaming) at Wcf.WcfClientBase`1..ctor(String name) at Wcf.AuthenticationClient..ctor() at WindowsPhoneApplication2.MainPage.DoLogin() ... Any ideas?

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• MSChart on ASP.NET MVC 2

  - by Adron

  I upgraded my MVC Application using MSChart to MVC 2 and have ended up with broken image links for the charts. See my blog entry here: http://blog.adronbhall.com/post/2010/04/12/MVC-2-Breaks-my-Charts.aspx I get no build errors anymore, and have completed the following steps. First, I setup the following web.config lines. add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting" assembly="System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" and add path="ChartImg.axd" verb="GET,HEAD" type="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler, System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false" (NOTE: I took the chevrons off so the lines would appear) The next thing I did was create this page with the following code. Which should, according to it working in MVC<1, showed 4 charts. <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> <%@ Import Namespace="Scorecard.Views" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Scorecard </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="applicationTitle" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolderApplicationName" runat="server"> <%=Html.Encode(ViewData["ApplicationTitle"])%> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <h2> Web Analysis Scorecard </h2> <table> <tr> <td> <% ChartHelper chartHelper = new ChartHelper("Top Countries", (double[])ViewData["TopCountryCounts"], (string[])ViewData["TopCountries"], SeriesChartType.Pie); Chart chartPieTwo = chartHelper.ResultingChart; // Explode data point with label "USA" chartPieTwo.Series["DefaultSeries"].Points[3]["Exploded"] = "true"; chartHelper.RenderChart(this); %> </td> <td> <% chartHelper = new ChartHelper("View Cart Trend", (double[])ViewData["LineValues"], (string[])ViewData["TopEngines"], SeriesChartType.Line); chartHelper.RenderChart(this); %> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <% chartHelper = new ChartHelper("Yesterday's Page Views", (double[])ViewData["ColumnStats"], (string[])ViewData["ColumnStatHeaders"], SeriesChartType.Column); chartHelper.RenderChart(this); %> </td> <td> <% double[] theValues = (double[])ViewData["ColumnStats"]; double[] newValues = new double[] { 0, 0, 0, 0 }; int count = 0; int daysInMonth = DateTime.DaysInMonth(DateTime.Now.Year, DateTime.Now.Month); foreach (double d in theValues) { newValues[count] += d * daysInMonth; count++; } chartHelper = new ChartHelper("Current Month Page Views", newValues, (string[])ViewData["ColumnStatHeaders"], SeriesChartType.Bar); chartHelper.RenderChart(this); %> </td> </tr> </table> </form>

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• Fixing predicated NSFetchedResultsController/NSFetchRequest performance with SQLite backend?

  - by Jaanus

  I have a series of NSFetchedResultsControllers powering some table views, and their performance on device was abysmal, on the order of seconds. Since it all runs on main thread, it's blocking my app at startup, which is not great. I investigated and turns out the predicate is the problem: NSPredicate *somePredicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"ANY somethings == %@", something]; [fetchRequest setPredicate:somePredicate]; I.e the fetch entity, call it "things", has a many-to-many relation with entity "something". This predicate is a filter that limits the results to only things that have a relation with a particular "something". When I removed the predicate for testing, fetch time (the initial performFetch: call) dropped (for some extreme cases) from 4 seconds to around 100ms or less, which is acceptable. I am troubled by this, though, as it negates a lot of the benefit I was hoping to gain with Core Data and NSFRC, which otherwise seems like a powerful tool. So, my question is, how can I optimize this performance? Am I using the predicate wrong? Should I modify the model/schema somehow? And what other ways there are to fix this? Is this kind of degraded performance to be expected? (There are on the order of hundreds of <1KB objects.) EDIT WITH DETAILS: Here's the code: [fetchRequest setFetchLimit:200]; NSLog(@"before fetch"); BOOL success = [frc performFetch:&error]; if (!success) { NSLog(@"Fetch request error: %@", error); } NSLog(@"after fetch"); Updated logs (previously, I had some application inefficiencies degrading the performance here. These are the updated logs that should be as close to optimal as you can get under my current environment): 2010-02-05 12:45:22.138 Special Ppl[429:207] before fetch 2010-02-05 12:45:22.144 Special Ppl[429:207] CoreData: sql: SELECT DISTINCT 0, t0.Z_PK, t0.Z_OPT, <model fields> FROM ZTHING t0 LEFT OUTER JOIN Z_1THINGS t1 ON t0.Z_PK = t1.Z_2THINGS WHERE t1.Z_1SOMETHINGS = ? ORDER BY t0.ZID DESC LIMIT 200 2010-02-05 12:45:22.663 Special Ppl[429:207] CoreData: annotation: sql connection fetch time: 0.5094s 2010-02-05 12:45:22.668 Special Ppl[429:207] CoreData: annotation: total fetch execution time: 0.5240s for 198 rows. 2010-02-05 12:45:22.706 Special Ppl[429:207] after fetch If I do the same fetch without predicate (by commenting out the two lines in the beginning of the question): 2010-02-05 12:44:10.398 Special Ppl[414:207] before fetch 2010-02-05 12:44:10.405 Special Ppl[414:207] CoreData: sql: SELECT 0, t0.Z_PK, t0.Z_OPT, <model fields> FROM ZTHING t0 ORDER BY t0.ZID DESC LIMIT 200 2010-02-05 12:44:10.426 Special Ppl[414:207] CoreData: annotation: sql connection fetch time: 0.0125s 2010-02-05 12:44:10.431 Special Ppl[414:207] CoreData: annotation: total fetch execution time: 0.0262s for 200 rows. 2010-02-05 12:44:10.457 Special Ppl[414:207] after fetch 20-fold difference in times. 500ms is not that great, and there does not seem to be a way to do it in background thread or otherwise optimize that I can think of. (Apart from going to a binary store where this becomes a non-issue, so I might do that. Binary store performance is consistently ~100ms for the above 200-object predicated query.) (I nested another question here previously, which I now moved away).

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