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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 10, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 10, 2013Popular ReleasesWindow Embedded Compact (CE) Component Wizard: Version 4.0 Improved Compact13Minshell Support: This version will work with Platform Builder for Compact 2013 in Visual Studio 2012 (Update 2) as well as CE 6 (VS2005) and Compact 7 (VS2008) Select files for direct inclusion in the OS when built. Select where shortcuts are placed in the OS FileSystem for them During the build of the subproject, the selected files are copied to FlatRelease directory, along with the BIB file etc, for inclusion in the OS build. A .inf file is also generated along with the subproject for .cab file gener...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.587b: Fixed* TV - Locked shows display correctly after refresh * TV - missing episodes display in correct colour for missed or to be aired * TV - Rescrape of Multi-episodes working. * TV - Cache fix where was writing episodes multiple times * TV - Fixed Cache writing missing episodes when Display missing eps was disabled. Revision HistoryGenerate report of user mailbox size for Exchange 2010: Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Generate-report-of-user-e4e9afcaCheck SQL Server a specified database index fragmentation percentage (SQL): Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Check-SQL-Server-a-a5758043Save attachments from multiple selected items in Outlook (VBA): Script Download: Script Download: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Save-attachments-from-5b6bf54bRemove Windows Store apps in Windows 8: Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Remove-Windows-Store-Apps-a00ef4a4PCSX-Reloaded: 1.9.94: General changes:Support for compressed audio in cue files. ECM support. OS X changes:32-bit support has been dropped Partial French and Hungarian translationsDynamics AX 2012 R2 Kitting: AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of Kitting: Here is the AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of kitting. Released both as a XPO and a model.PantheR's GraphX for .NET: GraphX for .NET RELEASE v1.0.1: PLEASE RATE THIS RELEASE IF YOU LIKED IT! THANKS! :) RELEASE 1.0.1 + Changed ExportToImage() parameters: added useZoomControlSurface param that enables zoom control parent visual space to be used for export instead whole GraphArea panel. Using this technique it is possible to export graphs with negative vertices coordinates. + Added common interface IZoomControl for all included Zoom controls + Added new method GraphArea.GenerateGraph() that accepts only optional parameters and will use in...VidCoder: 1.5.12 Beta: Added an option to preserve Created and Last Modified times when converting files. In Options -> Advanced. Added an option to mark an automatically selected subtitle track as "Default". Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5878. Fixed auto passthrough not applying just after switching to it. Fixed bug where preset/profile/tune could disappear when reverting a preset.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.9.25): XrmToolbox improvement Correct changing connection from the status dropdown Tools improvement Updated tool Audit Center (v1.2013.9.10) -> Publish entities Iconator (v1.2013.9.27) -> Optimized asynchronous loading of images and entities MetadataDocumentGenerator (v1.2013.11.6) -> Correct system entities reading with incorrect attribute type Script Manager (v1.2013.9.27) -> Retrieve only custom events SiteMapEditor (v1.2013.11.7) -> Reset of CRM 2013 SiteMap ViewLayoutReplicator (v1.201...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: SQL Server 2014 CTP2 In-Memory OLTP Sample, based: This sample showcases the new In-Memory OLTP feature, which is part of SQL Server 2014 CTP2. It shows the new memory-optimized tables and natively-compiled stored procedures, and can be used to show the performance benefit of in-memory OLTP. Installation instructions for the sample are included in the file ‘awinmemsample.doc’, which is part of the download. You can ask a question about this sample at the SQL Server Samples Forum Composite C1 CMS - Open Source on .NET: Composite C1 4.1: Composite C1 4.1 (4.1.5058.34326) Write a review for this release - help us improve, recommend us. Getting started If you are new to Composite C1 and want to install it: http://docs.composite.net/Getting-started What's new in Composite C1 4.1 The following are highlights of major changes since Composite C1 4.0: General user features: Drag-and-drop images and files like PDF and Word directly from own your desktop and folders into page content Allow you to install Composite Form Builder ...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.9.0: Implemented Recent Scripts list Added checking for plugin updates from AboutBox Multiple formatting improvements/fixes Implemented selection of the CLR version when preparing distribution package Added project panel button for showing plugin shortcuts list Added 'What's New?' panel Fixed auto-formatting scrolling artifact Implemented navigation to "logical" file (vs. auto-generated) file from output panel To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.9.1): This new version includes: - Include me option is back - Fixed the login bug reported latelyVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0c: Changes between 1.0b and 1.0c (11 November 2013) : Set correctly the minimum required version in volumes header (this value must always follow the program version after any major changes). This also solves also the hidden volume issueCaptcha MVC: Captcha MVC 2.5: v 2.5: Added support for MVC 5. The DefaultCaptchaManager is no longer throws an error if the captcha values was entered incorrectly. Minor changes. v 2.4.1: Fixed issues with deleting incorrect values of the captcha token in the SessionStorageProvider. This could lead to a situation when the captcha was not working with the SessionStorageProvider. Minor changes. v 2.4: Changed the IIntelligencePolicy interface, added ICaptchaManager as parameter for all methods. Improved font size ...Duplica: duplica 0.2.498: this is first stable releaseDNN Blog: 06.00.01: 06.00.01 ReleaseThis is the first bugfix release of the new v6 blog module. These are the changes: Added some robustness in v5-v6 scripts to cater for some rare upgrade scenarios Changed the name of the module definition to avoid clash with Evoq Social Addition of sitemap providerVG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.50: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageHostHQ.com" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgMoney.net" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgSavy.com" links NEW: Added Support for "PixTreat.com" links Bug fixesNew Projects3389????? Wpf: 3389?????BitwiseEncoding: Bitwise encodeing with a key and XOR function.C++ language Tests: Just some tests on C++ language features.Check SQL Server a specified database index fragmentation percentage (SQL): This T-SQL sample script illustrates how to check index fragmentation of a specified database in SQL Server. Generate report of user mailbox size for Exchange 2010: This script could be used to export mailboxes’ information to a CSV file, including SamAccountName, DisplayName, TotalItemSize. IUAIMS: AI managment system MineCraftMODDevelopSupportKit: MineCraftMOD?????????? MineCraftMOD development integrated assistance systemRecording Audio in the Browser and Uploading it with ASP.NET MVC: This project is described on blog.falafel.comRemove Windows Store apps in Windows 8: This script can be used to remove multiple Windows Store apps from a user account in Windows 8. It provides a list of installed Windows Store apps. You can speSave attachments from multiple selected items in Outlook (VBA): This VBA sample illustrates how to save attachments from multiple selected items in Outlook.SMW: El presente proyecto es una aplicación orientada al manejo de información de la empresa Jamecl que se encarga del alquiler de camionetasSS-eye-S: An easy to use simplified API surrounding the SSIS components to allow the creation of SSIS packages within code.STAR FOX XNA: Remake of a classic videogame. In this case, that videogame will be Star Fox (1993) for SNES game console. wooyang: ???

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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• Delight and Excite

  - by Applications User Experience

  Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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• PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

  - by Bill Graziano

  The PASS Board recently decided that we wouldn’t put another US-based SQLRally on the calendar until we had a chance to review the program. I wanted to provide some of my thinking around this. Keep in mind that this is the opinion of one Board member. The Board committed to complete two SQLRally events to determine if an event modeled between SQL Saturday and the Summit was viable. We’ve completed the two events and now it’s time to step back and review the program. This is my seventh year on the PASS Board. Over that time people have asked me why PASS does certain things. Many, many times my answer has been “Because that’s the way we did it last year”. And I am tired of giving that answer. We need to take a step back and review the US-based SQLRally before we schedule another one. It would be irresponsible for me as a Board member to commit resources to this without validating that what we’re doing makes sense for the organization and our members. I have no doubt that this was a great event for the attendees. We just need to validate it’s the best use of our resources. Please keep in mind that we haven’t cancelled the event. We’ve just said we need to review it before scheduling another one. My opinion is that some fairly serious changes are needed to the model before we consider it again – IF we do it again. I’ve come to that conclusion after speaking with the Dallas organizers, our HQ team, our Marketing team, other Board members (including one of the Orlando organizers), attendees in Orlando and Dallas and visiting other similar events. I should point out that their views aren’t unanimous on nearly any part of this event -- which is one of the reasons I want to take some time and think about this before continuing. I think it’s helpful to look at the original goals of what we were trying to accomplish. Andy Warren wrote these up in August of 2010. My summary of these goals and some thoughts on each one is below. Many of these thoughts revolve around the growth of SQL Saturdays. In the two years since that document was written these events have grown significantly. The largest SQL Saturdays are now over 500 people which mean they are nearly the same size as our recent SQLRally. Our goals included: Geographic diversity. We wanted an event in an area of the country that was away from any given Summit location. I think that’s still a valid goal. But we also have SQL Saturdays all over the country. What does SQLRally bring to this that SQLSaturday doesn’t? Speaker growth. One of the stated goals was to build a “farm club” for speakers. This gives us a way for speakers to work up to speaking at Summit by speaking in front of larger crowds. What does SQLRally bring to this that the larger SQL Saturdays aren’t providing? Pre-Conference speakers is one obvious answer here. Lower price. On a per-day basis, SQLRally is roughly 1/4th the price of the Summit. We wanted a way for people to experience something Summit-like at a lower price point. The challenge is that we are very budget constrained at that lower price point. International Event Model.  (I need to write more about this but I’m out of time.  I’ll cover it in the next installment.) There are a number of things I really like about SQLRally. I love the smaller conferences. They give me a chance to meet more people than at something the size of Summit. I like the two day format. That gives you two evenings to be at social events with people. Seeing someone a second day is a great way to build a bond with that person. That’s more difficult to do at a SQL Saturday. We also need to talk about the financial aspects of the event. Last year generated a small $17,000 profit on revenues of $200,000. Percentage-wise that’s reasonable but on an absolute basis it’s not a huge amount in our budget. We think this year will lose between $30,000 and $50,000 and take roughly 1,000 hours of HQ time. We don’t have detailed financials back yet but that’s our best guess at this point. Part of that was driven by using a convention center instead of a hotel. Until we get detailed financials back we won’t have the full picture around the financial impact. This event also takes time and mindshare from our Marketing team. This may sound like a small thing but please don’t underestimate it. Our original vision for this was something that would take very little time from our Marketing team and just a few mentions in the Connector. It turned out to need more than that. And all those mentions and emails take up space we could use to talk about other events and other programs. Last I wanted to talk about some of the things I’m thinking about. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying if we just fix “X” it all gets better. Is this that much better of an event than SQL Saturdays? What if we gave a few SQL Saturdays some extra resources? When SQL Saturdays were around 250 people that wasn’t as viable. With some of those events over 500 we need to reconsider this. We need to get back to a hotel venue. That will help with cost and networking. Is this the best use of the 1,000 HQ hours that we invested in the event? Is our price-point correct? I’m leaning toward raising our price closer to Summit on a per-day basis. I think this will let us put on a higher quality event and alleviate much of the budget pressure. Should growing speakers be a focus? Having top-line pre-conference speakers helps market the event. It will also have an impact on pricing and overall profit. We should also ask if it actually does grow speakers. How many of these people will eventually register for Summit? Attend chapters? Is SQLRally a driver into PASS or is it something that chapters, etc. drive people to? Should we have one paid day and one free instead of two paid days? This is a very interesting model that is used by SQLBits in the UK. This gives you the two day aspect as well as offering options for paid and free attendees. I’m very intrigued by this. Should we focus on a topic? Buried in the minutes is a discussion of whether PASS should have a Business Analytics conference separate from Summit. This is an interesting question to consider. Would making SQLRally be focused on a particular topic make it more attractive? Would that even be a SQLRally? Can PASS effectively manage the two events? (FYI - Probably not.) Would it help differentiate it from Summit and SQL Saturday? These are all questions that I think should be asked and answered before we do this event again. And we can’t do that if we don’t take time to have the discussion. I wanted to get this published before I take off for a few days of vacation. When I get back I’d like to write more about why the international events are different and talk about where we go from here.

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• A more concise example that illustrates that type inference can be very costly?

  - by mrrusof

  It was brought to my attention that the cost of type inference in a functional language like OCaml can be very high. The claim is that there is a sequence of expressions such that for each expression the length of the corresponding type is exponential on the length of the expression. I devised the sequence below. My question is: do you know of a sequence with more concise expressions that achieves the same types? # fun a -> a;; - : 'a -> 'a = <fun> # fun b a -> b a;; - : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'b = <fun> # fun c b a -> c b (b a);; - : (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'c = <fun> # fun d c b a -> d c b (c b (b a));; - : ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'd = <fun> # fun e d c b a -> e d c b (d c b (c b (b a)));; - : (((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'd -> 'e) -> ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'e = <fun> # fun f e d c b a -> f e d c b (e d c b (d c b (c b (b a))));; - : ((((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'd -> 'e) -> ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'e -> 'f) -> (((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'd -> 'e) -> ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'f = <fun>

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• SOA Implementation Challenges

  Why do companies think that if they put up a web service that they are doing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Unfortunately, the IT and business world love to run on the latest hype or buzz words of which very few even understand the meaning. One of the largest issues companies have today as they consider going down the path of SOA, is the lack of knowledge regarding the architectural style and the over usage of the term SOA. So how do we solve this issue?I am sure most of you are thinking by now that you know what SOA is because you developed a few web services.  Isn’t that SOA, right? No, that is not SOA, but instead Just Another Web Service (JAWS). For us to better understand what SOA is let’s look at a few definitions.Douglas K. Bary defines service-oriented architecture as a collection of services. These services are enabled to communicate with each other in order to pass data or coordinating some activity with other services.If you look at this definition closely you will notice that Bary states that services communicate with each other. Let us compare this statement with my first statement regarding companies that claim to be doing SOA when they have just a collection of web services. In order for these web services to for an SOA application they need to be interdependent on one another forming some sort of architectural hierarchy. Just because a company has a few web services does not mean that they are all interconnected.SearchSOA from TechTarget.com states that SOA defines how two computing entities work collectively to enable one entity to perform a unit of work on behalf of another. Once again, just because a company has a few web services does not guarantee that they are even working together let alone if they are performing work for each other.SearchSOA also points out service interactions should be self-contained and loosely-coupled so that all interactions operate independent of each other.Of all the definitions regarding SOA Thomas Erl’s seems to shed the most light on this concept. He states that “SOA establishes an architectural model that aims to enhance the efficiency, agility, and productivity of an enterprise by positioning services as the primary means through which solution logic is represented in support of the realization of the strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing.” (Erl, 2011) Once again this definition proves that a collection of web services does not mean that a company is doing SOA. However, it does mean that a company has a collection of web services, and that is it.In order for a company to start to go down the path of SOA, they must take  a hard look at their existing business process while abstracting away any technology so that they can define what is they really want to accomplish. Once a company has done this, they can begin to factor out common sub business process like credit card process, user authentication or system notifications in to small components that can be built independent of each other and then reassembled to form new and dynamic services that are loosely coupled and agile in that they can change as a business grows.Another key pitfall of companies doing SOA is the fact that they let vendors drive their architecture. Why do companies do this? Vendors’ do not hold your company’s success as their top priority; in fact they hold their own success as their top priority by selling you as much stuff as you are willing to buy. In my experience companies tend to strive for the maximum amount of benefits with a minimal amount of cost. Does anyone else see any conflicts between this and the driving force behind vendors.Mike Kavis recommends in an article written in CIO.com that companies need to figure out what they need before they talk to a vendor or at least have some idea of what they need. It is important to thoroughly evaluate each vendor and watch them perform a live demo of their system so that you as the company fully understand what kind of product or service the vendor is actually offering. In addition, do research on each vendor that you are considering, check out blog posts, online reviews, and any information you can find on the vendor through various search engines.Finally he recommends companies to verify any recommendations supplied by a vendor. From personal experience this is very important. I can remember when the company I worked for purchased a $200,000 add-on to their phone system that never actually worked as it was intended. In fact, just after my departure from the company started the process of attempting to get their money back from the vendor. This potentially could have been avoided if the company had done the research before selecting this vendor to ensure that their product and vendor would live up to their claims. I know that some SOA vendor offer free training regarding SOA because they know that there are a lot of misconceptions about the topic. Superficially this is a great thing for companies to take part in especially if the company is starting to implement SOA architecture and are still unsure about some topics or are looking for some guidance regarding the topic. However beware that some companies will focus on their product line only regarding the training. As an example, InfoWorld.com claims that companies providing deep seminars disguised as training, focusing more about ESBs and SOA governance technology, and less on how to approach and solve the architectural issues of the attendees.In short, it is important to remember that we as software professionals are responsible for guiding a business’s technology sections should be well informed and fully understand any new concepts that may be considered for implementation. As I have demonstrated already a company that has a few web services does not mean that they are doing SOA.  Additionally, we must not let the new buzz word of the day drive our technology, but instead our technology decisions should be driven from research and proven experience. Finally, it is important to rely on vendors when necessary, however, always take what they say with a grain of salt while cross checking any claims that they may make because we have to live with the aftermath of a system after the vendors are gone.   References: Barry, D. K. (2011). Service-oriented architecture (SOA) definition. Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from Service-Architecture.com: http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html Connell, B. (2003, 9). service-oriented architecture (SOA). Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from SearchSOA: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/service-oriented-architecture Erl, T. (2011, 12 12). Service-Oriented Architecture. Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from WhatIsSOA: http://www.whatissoa.com/p10.php InfoWorld. (2008, 6 1). Should you get your SOA knowledge from SOA vendors? . Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from InfoWorld.com: http://www.infoworld.com/d/architecture/should-you-get-your-soa-knowledge-soa-vendors-453 Kavis, M. (2008, 6 18). Top 10 Reasons Why People are Making SOA Fail. Retrieved 12 13, 2011, from CIO.com: http://www.cio.com/article/438413/Top_10_Reasons_Why_People_are_Making_SOA_Fail?page=5&taxonomyId=3016  

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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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 11, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 11, 2013Popular ReleasesULS Log Viewer Feature: ULS Log Viewer Feature: What's getting installed? - The solution include Custom Action (New action in Site Menu). Features: - Only Site Administrators can see Custom Action in site menu. - Multi-Language SUPPORT! (English, Hebrew). - Works against Secure Store Service to use administrator rights for getting access to ULS Logs Path on farm servers (Use the guide for creating new SSA). - Load only the last log file from ULS log path. - Gets automatically the ULS log path from Central Administration. - Choose from whi...Lib.Web.Mvc & Yet another developer blog: Lib.Web.Mvc 6.3.3: Lib.Web.Mvc is a library which contains some helper classes for ASP.NET MVC such as strongly typed jqGrid helper, XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionResult, FileResult with range request support, custom attributes and more. Release contains: Lib.Web.Mvc.dll with xml documentation file Standalone documentation in chm file and change log Library source code Sample application for strongly typed jqGrid helper is available here. Sample application for XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionRe...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.501: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.5. Breaking changes: - Refactored MagickImageStatistics to prepare for upcoming changes in ImageMagick 7. - Renamed MagickImage.SetOption to SetDefine.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.587b: Fixed* TV - Locked shows display correctly after refresh * TV - missing episodes display in correct colour for missed or to be aired * TV - Rescrape of Multi-episodes working. * TV - Cache fix where was writing episodes multiple times * TV - Fixed Cache writing missing episodes when Display missing eps was disabled. Revision HistoryGenerate report of user mailbox size for Exchange 2010: Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Generate-report-of-user-e4e9afcaCheck SQL Server a specified database index fragmentation percentage (SQL): Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Check-SQL-Server-a-a5758043Save attachments from multiple selected items in Outlook (VBA): Script Download: Script Download: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Save-attachments-from-5b6bf54bRemove Windows Store apps in Windows 8: Script Download: Script Download http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Remove-Windows-Store-Apps-a00ef4a4PCSX-Reloaded: 1.9.94: General changes:Support for compressed audio in cue files. ECM support. OS X changes:32-bit support has been dropped Partial French and Hungarian translationsDynamics AX 2012 R2 Kitting: AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of Kitting: Here is the AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of kitting. Released both as a XPO and a model.VidCoder: 1.5.12 Beta: Added an option to preserve Created and Last Modified times when converting files. In Options -> Advanced. Added an option to mark an automatically selected subtitle track as "Default". Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5878. Fixed auto passthrough not applying just after switching to it. Fixed bug where preset/profile/tune could disappear when reverting a preset.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.9.25): XrmToolbox improvement Correct changing connection from the status dropdown Tools improvement Updated tool Audit Center (v1.2013.9.10) -> Publish entities Iconator (v1.2013.9.27) -> Optimized asynchronous loading of images and entities MetadataDocumentGenerator (v1.2013.11.6) -> Correct system entities reading with incorrect attribute type Script Manager (v1.2013.9.27) -> Retrieve only custom events SiteMapEditor (v1.2013.11.7) -> Reset of CRM 2013 SiteMap ViewLayoutReplicator (v1.201...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: SQL Server 2014 CTP2 In-Memory OLTP Sample, based: This sample showcases the new In-Memory OLTP feature, which is part of SQL Server 2014 CTP2. It shows the new memory-optimized tables and natively-compiled stored procedures, and can be used to show the performance benefit of in-memory OLTP. Installation instructions for the sample are included in the file ‘awinmemsample.doc’, which is part of the download. You can ask a question about this sample at the SQL Server Samples Forum Composite C1 CMS - Open Source on .NET: Composite C1 4.1: Composite C1 4.1 (4.1.5058.34326) Write a review for this release - help us improve, recommend us. Getting started If you are new to Composite C1 and want to install it: http://docs.composite.net/Getting-started What's new in Composite C1 4.1 The following are highlights of major changes since Composite C1 4.0: General user features: Drag-and-drop images and files like PDF and Word directly from own your desktop and folders into page content Allow you to install Composite Form Builder ...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.9.0: Implemented Recent Scripts list Added checking for plugin updates from AboutBox Multiple formatting improvements/fixes Implemented selection of the CLR version when preparing distribution package Added project panel button for showing plugin shortcuts list Added 'What's New?' panel Fixed auto-formatting scrolling artifact Implemented navigation to "logical" file (vs. auto-generated) file from output panel To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.Resources Editor: Resources Editor: Stable releaseWPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.10 binaries: Now row summaries are updated whenever autofilter value sis modified.Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.9.1): This new version includes: - Include me option is back - Fixed the login bug reported latelyVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0c: Changes between 1.0b and 1.0c (11 November 2013) : Set correctly the minimum required version in volumes header (this value must always follow the program version after any major changes). This also solves also the hidden volume issueCaptcha MVC: Captcha MVC 2.5: v 2.5: Added support for MVC 5. The DefaultCaptchaManager is no longer throws an error if the captcha values was entered incorrectly. Minor changes. v 2.4.1: Fixed issues with deleting incorrect values of the captcha token in the SessionStorageProvider. This could lead to a situation when the captcha was not working with the SessionStorageProvider. Minor changes. v 2.4: Changed the IIntelligencePolicy interface, added ICaptchaManager as parameter for all methods. Improved font size ...New ProjectsASP.NET Web API: ASP.NET Web API is a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices. ASP.NET WebDungeonPaper: DungeonPaper will be a platform for RPG players to utilize computers to replace traditional pen and paper in their campaigns.EMS: demoEvent Dispatcher: Event Dispatcher is a powershell module for centralized logging. Supports filtering events, and outputs to flat files or the Windows event log.Koopakiller.Numerics: A growing Math-Library for .NET, provided as a portable class library.NetroTrix: NetroTrix is a LAN Messenger Project.....Sharp Explorer: Sort of an alpha Play with C# to make a treeView Windows explorer. Currently multi-threaded dbl click to explore, r-click to preview some text files.TI Sensor Tag Library: A library to access the Texas Instruments Sensor Tag in Windows Store apps with Bluetooth GATT. Written in C#.ULS Log Viewer Feature: "ULS Log Viewer Feature" used by SharePoint Administrators, Developers and SharePoint Site Managers for get easily the real error behind the Correlation ID.Visual Studio Code Line Counter: VS Code Line Counter parses a Visual Studio solution file (.sln), reads each included project, and counts the number of lines in each included file.Vulcanus: TODOWax - The WiX Setup Project Editor: An interactive editor for WiX setup projects.

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• LINQ to Twitter Maintenance Feedback

  - by Joe Mayo

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WinAZ/archive/2013/06/16/linq-to-twitter-maintenance-feedback.aspxIt’s always fun to receive positive feedback on your work. If you receive a sufficient amount of positive feedback, you know you’re doing something right. Sometimes, people provide negative feedback too. There are a couple ways to handle it: come back fighting or engage for clarification. The way you handle the negative feedback depends on what your goals are. Feedback Approaches If you know the feedback is incorrect and you need to promote your idea or product, you might want to come back fighting. The feedback might just be comments by a troll or competitor wanting to spread FUD. However, this could be the totally wrong approach if you misjudge the source and intentions of the feedback. In a lot of cases, feedback is a golden opportunity. Sometimes, a problem exists that you either don’t know about or don’t realize the true impact of the problem. If you decide to come back fighting, you might loose the opportunity to learn something new. However, if you engage the person providing the feedback, looking for clarification, you might learn something very important. Negative feedback and it’s clarification can lead to the collection of useful and actionable data. In my case, something that prompted this blog post, I noticed someone who tweeted a negative comment about LINQ to Twitter. Normally, any less than stellar comments are usually from folks that need help – so I help if I can. This was different. I was like “Don’t use LINQ to Twitter”. This is an open source project, the comment didn’t come from a competing project, and  sounded more like an expression of frustration. So I engaged. Not only did the person respond, but I got some decent quality feedback. What’s also interesting is a couple other side conversations sprouted on the subject, which gave me more useful data. LINQ to Twitter Thread Actions Essentially, this particular issue centered around maintenance. There are actually several sub-issues at play here: dependencies, error handling, debugging, and visibility. I’ll describe each one and my interpretation. Dependencies Dependencies are where a library has references to other libraries. This means that when you build your application, you need DLLs for the entire dependency graph for your application. There are several potential problems with this that include more libraries for configuration management, potential versioning mismatches, and lack of cross-platform support. In the early days of LINQ to Twitter, I allowed developers to contribute and add dependencies, but it became very problematic (for reasons stated). It was like a ball and chain that kept me from moving forward. So, I refactored and pulled other open-source into my project to eliminate external dependencies. This lets me fix the code in my project without relying on someone else to upgrade or fix their DLL. The motivation for this was from early negative feedback that translated as important data and acted on it. Today, LINQ to Twitter has zero dependencies. Note: Rejecting good code from community members who worked hard to make your project better is a painful experience in itself. I have to point out that any contribution was not in vain because they had a positive influence on my subsequent refactoring that resulted in a better developer experience. Error Handling Error handling has been a problem in the past. I have this combination of supporting both synchronous and asynchronous (APM) processing that can be complex at times. Within the last 6 months, I did a fair amount of refactoring to detect errors and process them properly. I also refactored TwitterQueryException so it includes important data from Twitter. During this refactoring, I’ve made breaking changes that I felt would improve the development experience (small things like renaming a callback property to Exception, rather than Error). I think the async error handling is much better than it was a year ago. For all the work I’ve done, there is more to do. I think that a combination of more error handling support, e.g. improving semantics, and education through documentation and samples will improve the error handling story. Because of what I’ve done so far, it isn’t bad, but I see opportunities for improvement. Debugging Debugging can be painful. Here’s why: you have multiple layers of technology to navigate and figure out where the real problem is – Twitter API, Security, HTTP, LINQ to Twitter, and application. You can probably add your own nuances to that list, but the point is that debugging in this environment can be complex. I think that my plans for error handling will contribute to making the debugging process easier. However, there’s more I can do in the way of documentation and guidance. Some of the questions to be answered revolve around when something goes wrong, how does the developer figure out that there is a problem, what the problem is, and what to do about it. One example that has gone a long way to helping LINQ to Twitter developers is the 401 FAQ. A 401 Unauthorized is the error that the Twitter API returns when a use isn’t able to authenticate and is one of the most difficult problems faced by LINQ to Twitter developers. What I did was read guidance from Twitter and collect techniques from my own development and actions helping other developers to compile an extensive list of reasons for the 401 and ways to fix the problem. At one time, over half of the questions I answered in the forums were to help solve 401 issues. After publishing the 401 FAQ, I rarely get a 401 question and it’s because the person didn’t know about the FAQ. If the person is too lazy to read the FAQ, that’s not my issue, but the results in support issues have been dramatic. I think debugging can benefit from the education and documentation approach, but I’m always open to suggestions on whatever else I can do. Visibility Visibility is a nuance of the error handling/debugging discussion but is deeply rooted in comfort and control. The questions to ask in this area are what is happening as my code runs and how testable is the code. In support of these areas, LINQ to Twitter does have logging and TwitterContext properties that help see what’s happening on requests. The logging functionality allows any developer to connect a TextWriter to the Log property of TwitterContext to see what’s happening. Further, TwitterContext has a Headers property to see the headers Twitter returns and a RawResults property to show the Json string Twitter returns. From a testing perspective, I’ve been able to write hundreds of unit tests, over 600 when this post is published, and growing. If you write your own library, you have full control over all of these aspects. The tradeoff here is that while you have access to the LINQ to Twitter source code and modify it for all the visibility, LINQ to Twitter *will* change (which is good) and you will have to figure out how to merge that with your changes (which is hard). The fact is that this is a limitation of any 3rd party library, not just LINQ to Twitter. So, it’s a design decision where the tradeoff is between control and productivity. That said, there are things I can do with LINQ to Twitter to make the visibility story more compelling. I think there are opportunities to improve diagnostics. This would be a ton of work because it would need to provide multi-level logging that can be tuned for production and support any logging provider you want to attach. I’ve considered approaches such as how the new Semantic Logging application block connects to Windows Error Reporting as a potential target. Whatever I do would need to be extensible without creating native external dependencies. e.g. how many 3rd party libraries force a dependency on a logging framework that you don’t use. So, this won’t be an easy feat, but I believe it can be part of the roadmap. I think that a lot of developers are unaware of existing visibility features, so the first step would be to provide more documentation and guidance. My thought are that this would lead to more feedback that will help improve this area. Summary Recent feedback highlights some of items that are important to LINQ to Twitter developers, such as dependencies, error handling, debugging, and visibility. I know that there are maintenance issues that have been problems for LINQ to Twitter developers in the past. I’ve done a lot of work in this area, such as improving error handling, adding visibility features, and providing extensive API documentation. That said, there is more to be done to make LINQ to Twitter the best Twitter API experience available for .NET developers and I welcome anyone’s thoughts on what I’ve written here or new improvements. @JoeMayo

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• Data Source Connection Pool Sizing

  - by Steve Felts

  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:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} One of the most time-consuming procedures of a database application is establishing a connection. The connection pooling of the data source can be used to minimize this overhead.  That argues for using the data source instead of accessing the database driver directly. Configuring the size of the pool in the data source is somewhere between an art and science – this article will try to move it closer to science.  From the beginning, WLS data source has had an initial capacity and a maximum capacity configuration values.  When the system starts up and when it shrinks, initial capacity is used.  The pool can grow to maximum capacity.  Customers found that they might want to set the initial capacity to 0 (more on that later) but didn’t want the pool to shrink to 0.  In WLS 10.3.6, we added minimum capacity to specify the lower limit to which a pool will shrink.  If minimum capacity is not set, it defaults to the initial capacity for upward compatibility.   We also did some work on the shrinking in release 10.3.4 to reduce thrashing; the algorithm that used to shrink to the maximum of the currently used connections or the initial capacity (basically the unused connections were all released) was changed to shrink by half of the unused connections. The simple approach to sizing the pool is to set the initial/minimum capacity to the maximum capacity.  Doing this creates all connections at startup, avoiding creating connections on demand and the pool is stable.  However, there are a number of reasons not to take this simple approach. When WLS is booted, the deployment of the data source includes synchronously creating the connections.  The more connections that are configured in initial capacity, the longer the boot time for WLS (there have been several projects for parallel boot in WLS but none that are available).  Related to creating a lot of connections at boot time is the problem of logon storms (the database gets too much work at one time).   WLS has a solution for that by setting the login delay seconds on the pool but that also increases the boot time. There are a number of cases where it is desirable to set the initial capacity to 0.  By doing that, the overhead of creating connections is deferred out of the boot and the database doesn’t need to be available.  An application may not want WLS to automatically connect to the database until it is actually needed, such as for some code/warm failover configurations. There are a number of cases where minimum capacity should be less than maximum capacity.  Connections are generally expensive to keep around.  They cause state to be kept on both the client and the server, and the state on the backend may be heavy (for example, a process).  Depending on the vendor, connection usage may cost money.  If work load is not constant, then database connections can be freed up by shrinking the pool when connections are not in use.  When using Active GridLink, connections can be created as needed according to runtime load balancing (RLB) percentages instead of by connection load balancing (CLB) during data source deployment. Shrinking is an effective technique for clearing the pool when connections are not in use.  In addition to the obvious reason that there times where the workload is lighter,  there are some configurations where the database and/or firewall conspire to make long-unused or too-old connections no longer viable.  There are also some data source features where the connection has state and cannot be used again unless the state matches the request.  Examples of this are identity based pooling where the connection has a particular owner and XA affinity where the connection is associated with a particular RAC node.  At this point, WLS does not re-purpose (discard/replace) connections and shrinking is a way to get rid of the unused existing connection and get a new one with the correct state when needed. So far, the discussion has focused on the relationship of initial, minimum, and maximum capacity.  Computing the maximum size requires some knowledge about the application and the current number of simultaneously active users, web sessions, batch programs, or whatever access patterns are common.  The applications should be written to only reserve and close connections as needed but multiple statements, if needed, should be done in one reservation (don’t get/close more often than necessary).  This means that the size of the pool is likely to be significantly smaller then the number of users.   If possible, you can pick a size and see how it performs under simulated or real load.  There is a high-water mark statistic (ActiveConnectionsHighCount) that tracks the maximum connections concurrently used.  In general, you want the size to be big enough so that you never run out of connections but no bigger.   It will need to deal with spikes in usage, which is where shrinking after the spike is important.  Of course, the database capacity also has a big influence on the decision since it’s important not to overload the database machine.  Planning also needs to happen if you are running in a Multi-Data Source or Active GridLink configuration and expect that the remaining nodes will take over the connections when one of the nodes in the cluster goes down.  For XA affinity, additional headroom is also recommended.  In summary, setting initial and maximum capacity to be the same may be simple but there are many other factors that may be important in making the decision about sizing.

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• Beyond Cloud Technology, Enabling A More Agile and Responsive Organization

  - by sxkumar

  This is the second part of the blog “Clouds, Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain”. In the first part,  I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative, I will describe in this section how it requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. People: Most IT organizations have a fairly complex organizational structure. There are different groups, managing different pieces of the puzzle, and yet, they don't always work together. Provisioning a new application therefore may require a request to float endlessly through system administrators, DBAs and middleware admin worlds – resulting in long delays and constant finger pointing.  Cloud users expect end-to-end automation - which requires these silos to be greatly simplified, if not completely eliminated.  Most customers I talk to acknowledge this problem but are quick to admit that such a transformation is hard. As hard as it may be, I am afraid that the status quo is no longer an option. Sticking to an organizational structure that was created ages back will not only impede cloud adoption,  it also risks making the IT skills increasingly irrelevant in a world that is rapidly moving towards converged applications and infrastructure.   Process: Most IT organizations today operate with a mindset that they must fully "control" access to any and all types of IT services. This in turn leads to people clinging on to outdated manual approval processes .  While requiring approvals for scarce resources makes sense, insisting that every single request must be manually approved defeats the very purpose of cloud. Not only this causes delays, thereby at least partially negating the agility benefits, it also results in gross inefficiency. In a cloud environment, self-service access should be governed by policies, quotas that the administrators can define upfront . For a cloud initiative to be successful, IT organizations MUST be ready to empower users by giving them real control rather than insisting on brokering every single interaction between users and the cloud resources. Technology: From a technology perspective, cloud is about consolidation, standardization and automation. A consolidated and standardized infrastructure helps increase utilization and reduces cost. Additionally, it  enables a much higher degree of automation - thereby providing users the required agility while minimizing operational costs.  Obviously, automation is the key to cloud. Unfortunately it hasn’t received as much attention within enterprises as it should have.  Many organizations are just now waking up to the criticality of automation and it still often gets relegated to back burner in favor of other "high priority" projects. However, it is important to understand that without the right type and level of automation, cloud will remain a distant dream for most enterprises. This in turn makes the choice of the cloud management software extremely critical.  For a cloud management software to be effective in an enterprise environment, it must meet the following qualifications: Broad and Deep Solution It should offer a broad and deep solution to enable the kind of broad-based transformation we are talking about.  Its footprint must cover physical and virtual systems, as well as infrastructure, database and application tiers. Too many enterprises choose to equate cloud with virtualization. While virtualization is a critical component of a cloud solution, it is just a component and not the whole solution. Similarly, too many people tend to equate cloud with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). While it is perfectly reasonable to treat IaaS as a starting point, it is important to realize that it is just the first stepping stone - and on its own it can only provide limited business benefits. It is actually the higher level services, such as (application) platform and business applications, that will bring about a more meaningful transformation to your enterprise. Run and Manage Efficiently Your Mission Critical Applications It should not only be able to run your mission critical applications, it should do so better than before.  For enterprises, applications and data are the critical business assets  As such, if you are building a cloud platform that cannot run your ERP application, it isn't truly a "enterprise cloud".  Also, be wary of  vendors who try to sell you the idea that your applications must be written in a certain way to be able to run on the cloud. That is nothing but a bogus, self-serving argument. For the cloud to be meaningful to enterprises, it should adopt to your applications - and not the other way around.  Automated, Integrated Set of Cloud Management Capabilities At the root of many of the problems plaguing enterprise IT today is complexity. A complex maze of tools and technology, coupled with archaic  processes, results in an environment which is inflexible, inefficient and simply too hard to manage. Management tool consolidation, therefore, is key to the success of your cloud as tool proliferation adds to complexity, encourages compartmentalization and defeats the very purpose that you are building the cloud for. Decision makers ought to be extra cautious about vendors trying to sell them a "suite" of disparate and loosely integrated products as a cloud solution.  An effective enterprise cloud management solution needs to provide a tightly integrated set of capabilities for all aspects of cloud lifecycle management. A simple question to ask: will your environment be more or less complex after you implement your cloud? More often than not, the answer will surprise you.  At Oracle, we have understood these challenges and have been working hard to create cloud solutions that are relevant and meaningful for enterprises.  And we have been doing it for much longer than you may think. Oracle was one of the very first enterprise software companies to make our products available on the Amazon Cloud. As far back as in 2007, we created new cloud solutions such as Cloud Database Backup that are helping customers like Amazon save millions every year.  Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry  - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry.  And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies. I will dedicated the third and final part of the blog “Clouds, Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain” to Oracle Cloud Technologies Building Blocks and how they mapped into our vision of Enterprise Cloud. Stay Tuned.

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• How to reduce iOS AVPlayer start delay

  - by Bernt Habermeier

  Note, for the below question: All assets are local on the device -- no network streaming is taking place. The videos contain audio tracks. I'm working on an iOS application that requires playing video files with minimum delay to start the video clip in question. Unfortunately we do not know what specific video clip is next until we actually need to start it up. Specifically: When one video clip is playing, we will know what the next set of (roughly) 10 video clips are, but we don't know which one exactly, until it comes time to 'immediately' play the next clip. What I've done to look at actual start delays is to call addBoundaryTimeObserverForTimes on the video player, with a time period of one millisecond to see when the video actually started to play, and I take the difference of that time stamp with the first place in the code that indicates which asset to start playing. From what I've seen thus-far, I have found that using the combination of AVAsset loading, and then creating an AVPlayerItem from that once it's ready, and then waiting for AVPlayerStatusReadyToPlay before I call play, tends to take between 1 and 3 seconds to start the clip. I've since switched to what I think is roughly equivalent: calling [AVPlayerItem playerItemWithURL:] and waiting for AVPlayerItemStatusReadyToPlay to play. Roughly same performance. One thing I'm observing is that the first AVPlayer item load is slower than the rest. Seems one idea is to pre-flight the AVPlayer with a short / empty asset before trying to play the first video might be of good general practice. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/900461/slow-start-for-avaudioplayer-the-first-time-a-sound-is-played] I'd love to get the video start times down as much as possible, and have some ideas of things to experiment with, but would like some guidance from anyone that might be able to help. Update: idea 7, below, as-implemented yields switching times of around 500 ms. This is an improvement, but it it'd be nice to get this even faster. Idea 1: Use N AVPlayers (won't work) Using ~ 10 AVPPlayer objects and start-and-pause all ~ 10 clips, and once we know which one we really need, switch to, and un-pause the correct AVPlayer, and start all over again for the next cycle. I don't think this works, because I've read there is roughly a limit of 4 active AVPlayer's in iOS. There was someone asking about this on StackOverflow here, and found out about the 4 AVPlayer limit: fast-switching-between-videos-using-avfoundation Idea 2: Use AVQueuePlayer (won't work) I don't believe that shoving 10 AVPlayerItems into an AVQueuePlayer would pre-load them all for seamless start. AVQueuePlayer is a queue, and I think it really only makes the next video in the queue ready for immediate playback. I don't know which one out of ~10 videos we do want to play back, until it's time to start that one. ios-avplayer-video-preloading Idea 3: Load, Play, and retain AVPlayerItems in background (not 100% sure yet -- but not looking good) I'm looking at if there is any benefit to load and play the first second of each video clip in the background (suppress video and audio output), and keep a reference to each AVPlayerItem, and when we know which item needs to be played for real, swap that one in, and swap the background AVPlayer with the active one. Rinse and Repeat. The theory would be that recently played AVPlayer/AVPlayerItem's may still hold some prepared resources which would make subsequent playback faster. So far, I have not seen benefits from this, but I might not have the AVPlayerLayer setup correctly for the background. I doubt this will really improve things from what I've seen. Idea 4: Use a different file format -- maybe one that is faster to load? I'm currently using .m4v's (video-MPEG4) H.264 format. I have not played around with other formats, but it may well be that some formats are faster to decode / get ready than others. Possible still using video-MPEG4 but with a different codec, or maybe quicktime? Maybe a lossless video format where decoding / setup is faster? Idea 5: Combination of lossless video format + AVQueuePlayer If there is a video format that is fast to load, but maybe where the file size is insane, one idea might be to pre-prepare the first 10 seconds of each video clip with a version that is boated but faster to load, but back that up with an asset that is encoded in H.264. Use an AVQueuePlayer, and add the first 10 seconds in the uncompressed file format, and follow that up with one that is in H.264 which gets up to 10 seconds of prepare/preload time. So I'd get 'the best' of both worlds: fast start times, but also benefits from a more compact format. Idea 6: Use a non-standard AVPlayer / write my own / use someone else's Given my needs, maybe I can't use AVPlayer, but have to resort to AVAssetReader, and decode the first few seconds (possibly write raw file to disk), and when it comes to playback, make use of the raw format to play it back fast. Seems like a huge project to me, and if I go about it in a naive way, it's unclear / unlikely to even work better. Each decoded and uncompressed video frame is 2.25 MB. Naively speaking -- if we go with ~ 30 fps for the video, I'd end up with ~60 MB/s read-from-disk requirement, which is probably impossible / pushing it. Obviously we'd have to do some level of image compression (perhaps native openGL/es compression formats via PVRTC)... but that's kind crazy. Maybe there is a library out there that I can use? Idea 7: Combine everything into a single movie asset, and seekToTime One idea that might be easier than some of the above, is to combine everything into a single movie, and use seekToTime. The thing is that we'd be jumping all around the place. Essentially random access into the movie. I think this may actually work out okay: avplayer-movie-playing-lag-in-ios5 Which approach do you think would be best? So far, I've not made that much progress in terms of reducing the lag.

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• Problems configuring nameserver in plesk

  - by Saif Bechan

  Hello, i have some troubles with setting up a nameserver in PLESK for months now. I have tried all possible scenario's but i can not get this to work. I am really in need for some help, and if you can i will really appreciate it. Basically what i want is to just set up a nameserver in PLESK. I have a primary IP, and my host gave me a secondary nameserver i can use. My host is leaseweb in the netherlands. I have made some screenshots of the important parts in my opinion, maybe you guys can see some errors in them. To use the secondary nameserver provided by leaseweb i had to enable ACL on that account, i did so and made a screenshot of that too. The DNS recursion is set to localnets. These settings have not changed for months, so the dns should be fully updated everywhere. The check i run is the following: https://www.sidn.nl/over-nl/aanvraag...-server-check/ Domeinnaam (inclusief .nl): rdshosting.nl Eerste Nameserver: ns1.rdshosting.nl Eerste IP: 62.212.66.33 Tweede Nameserver: ns7.leaseweb.net Tweede ip: 62.212.76.50 If i run the dns check of the netherlands it gives me the following errors: primary name server "ns1.rdshosting.nl." Error: specified name server is not listed as NS record. All public name servers for a domain must also be listed as NS records in the zone of the domain. This domain was specified explicitly as a name server, but not found in the zone description of the primary name server. TE.6a rdshosting.nl. 86400 IN SOA ns1.rdspartners.nl. saif2k.hotmail.com. (2010031102 12H 1H 7D 3H) Error: the MNAME in SOA says "ns1.rdspartners.nl." is the primary name server. The MNAME field in the SOA record (first parameter) lists a different primary name server from the one specified for this check. RFC1035 section 3.3.13 rdshosting.nl. 86400 IN NS ns1.rdspartners.nl. Warning: hidden name server "ns1.rdspartners.nl." never used for first contact. The zone contains an NS record for a host which is not in the list of specified name servers. Hence, this name server will not be used to initiate contact to the domain. It may be used in sequential lookups, so it may still be useful. secondary name server "ns1.rdspartners.nl." [BROKEN] [HIDDEN] Failure: name server at 77.232.85.129 cannot be reached: (unknown error) The name server could not be contacted, which may be due to temporary technical problems or global DNS configuration mistakes. The internal error is shown, but not always clear about the cause. secondary name server "ns7.leaseweb.net." Info: name server looks correctly configured. I have the content of the file etc/named.conf also: // $Id: named.conf,v 1.1.1.1 2001/10/15 07:44:36 kap Exp $ // // Refer to the named(8) man page for details. If you are ever going // to setup a primary server, make sure you've understood the hairy // details of how DNS is working. Even with simple mistakes, you can // break connectivity for affected parties, or cause huge amount of // useless Internet traffic. options { allow-recursion { localnets; }; directory "/var"; auth-nxdomain no; pid-file "/var/run/named/named.pid"; // In addition to the "forwarders" clause, you can force your name // server to never initiate queries of its own, but always ask its // forwarders only, by enabling the following line: // // forward only; // If you've got a DNS server around at your upstream provider, enter // its IP address here, and enable the line below. This will make you // benefit from its cache, thus reduce overall DNS traffic in the Internet. /* forwarders { 127.0.0.1; }; */ /* * If there is a firewall between you and nameservers you want * to talk to, you might need to uncomment the query-source * directive below. Previous versions of BIND always asked * questions using port 53, but BIND 8.1 uses an unprivileged * port by default. */ // query-source address * port 53; /* * If running in a sandbox, you may have to specify a different * location for the dumpfile. */ // dump-file "s/named_dump.db"; }; //Use with the following in named.conf, adjusting the allow list as needed: key "rndc-key" { algorithm hmac-md5; secret "CeMgS23y0oWE20nyv0x40Q=="; }; controls { inet 127.0.0.1 port 953 allow { 127.0.0.1; } keys { "rndc-key"; }; }; // Note: the following will be supported in a future release. /* host { any; } { topology { 127.0.0.0/8; }; }; */ // Setting up secondaries is way easier and the rough picture for this // is explained below. // // If you enable a local name server, don't forget to enter 127.0.0.1 // into your /etc/resolv.conf so this server will be queried first. // Also, make sure to enable it in /etc/rc.conf. zone "." { type hint; file "named.root"; }; zone "0.0.127.IN-ADDR.ARPA" { type master; file "localhost.rev"; }; // NB: Do not use the IP addresses below, they are faked, and only // serve demonstration/documentation purposes! // // Example secondary config entries. It can be convenient to become // a secondary at least for the zone where your own domain is in. Ask // your network administrator for the IP address of the responsible // primary. // // Never forget to include the reverse lookup (IN-ADDR.ARPA) zone! // (This is the first bytes of the respective IP address, in reverse // order, with ".IN-ADDR.ARPA" appended.) // // Before starting to setup a primary zone, better make sure you fully // understand how DNS and BIND works, however. There are sometimes // unobvious pitfalls. Setting up a secondary is comparably simpler. // // NB: Don't blindly enable the examples below. :-) Use actual names // and addresses instead. // // NOTE!!! FreeBSD runs bind in a sandbox (see named_flags in rc.conf). // The directory containing the secondary zones must be write accessible // to bind. The following sequence is suggested: // // mkdir /etc/namedb/s // chown bind.bind /etc/namedb/s // chmod 750 /etc/namedb/s zone "rdshosting.nl" { type master; file "rdshosting.nl"; allow-transfer { 77.232.85.129; 62.212.76.50; common-allow-transfer; }; }; zone "66.212.62.in-addr.arpa" { type master; file "66.212.62.in-addr.arpa"; allow-transfer { common-allow-transfer; }; }; acl common-allow-transfer { 62.212.76.50; }; As i mentioned i made some screenshots of some parts: First the dns settings in plesk: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/2480faed5e.jpg Second the acl settings in plesk: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/777f5e69b0.jpg Third my settings at leaseweb: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/de7122b19c.jpg And last the secondary nameserver settings from leaseweb: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/fd1da38a8f.jpg If someone has anysuggestion at all on this this will be highly appriciated. Thank you for your time! PS. I am dutch so dutch answers are welcome aswell

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• GAE formpreview

  - by Niklas R

  I'm trying to enable form preview with Google App Engine. Getting the following error message I suspect being mistaken somewhere: ... handler = handler_class() TypeError: __call__() takes at least 2 arguments (1 given) Can you tell what's wrong with my attempt? Here is some of the code. from django.contrib.formtools.preview import FormPreview class AFormPreview(FormPreview): def done(self, request, cleaned_data): # Do something with the cleaned_data, then redirect # to a "success" page. self.response.out.write('Done!') class AForm(djangoforms.ModelForm): text = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea(attrs={'rows':'11','cols':'70','class':'foo'}),label=_("content").capitalize()) def clean(self): cleaned_data = self.clean_data name = cleaned_data.get("name") if not name: raise forms.ValidationError("No name.") # Always return the full collection of cleaned data. return cleaned_data class Meta: model = A fields = ['category','currency','price','title','phonenumber','postaladress','name','text','email'] #change the order ... ('/aformpreview/([^/]*)', AFormPreview(AForm)), UPDATE: Here's a complete app where the preview is not working. Any ideas are most welcome: import cgi from google.appengine.api import users from google.appengine.ext import db from google.appengine.ext import webapp from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template from google.appengine.ext.webapp.util import run_wsgi_app from google.appengine.ext.db import djangoforms class Item(db.Model): name = db.StringProperty() quantity = db.IntegerProperty(default=1) target_price = db.FloatProperty() priority = db.StringProperty(default='Medium',choices=[ 'High', 'Medium', 'Low']) entry_time = db.DateTimeProperty(auto_now_add=True) added_by = db.UserProperty() class ItemForm(djangoforms.ModelForm): class Meta: model = Item exclude = ['added_by'] from django.contrib.formtools.preview import FormPreview class ItemFormPreview(FormPreview): def done(self, request, cleaned_data): # Do something with the cleaned_data, then redirect # to a "success" page. return HttpResponseRedirect('/') class MainPage(webapp.RequestHandler): def get(self): self.response.out.write('<html><body>' '<form method="POST" ' 'action="/">' '<table>') # This generates our shopping list form and writes it in the response self.response.out.write(ItemForm()) self.response.out.write('</table>' '<input type="submit">' '</form></body></html>') def post(self): data = ItemForm(data=self.request.POST) if data.is_valid(): # Save the data, and redirect to the view page entity = data.save(commit=False) entity.added_by = users.get_current_user() entity.put() self.redirect('/items.html') else: # Reprint the form self.response.out.write('<html><body>' '<form method="POST" ' 'action="/">' '<table>') self.response.out.write(data) self.response.out.write('</table>' '<input type="submit">' '</form></body></html>') class ItemPage(webapp.RequestHandler): def get(self): query = db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM Item ORDER BY name") for item in query: self.response.out.write('<a href="/edit?id=%d">Edit</a> - ' % item.key().id()) self.response.out.write("%s - Need to buy %d, cost $%0.2f each<br>" % (item.name, item.quantity, item.target_price)) class EditPage(webapp.RequestHandler): def get(self): id = int(self.request.get('id')) item = Item.get(db.Key.from_path('Item', id)) self.response.out.write('<html><body>' '<form method="POST" ' 'action="/edit">' '<table>') self.response.out.write(ItemForm(instance=item)) self.response.out.write('</table>' '<input type="hidden" name="_id" value="%s">' '<input type="submit">' '</form></body></html>' % id) def post(self): id = int(self.request.get('_id')) item = Item.get(db.Key.from_path('Item', id)) data = ItemForm(data=self.request.POST, instance=item) if data.is_valid(): # Save the data, and redirect to the view page entity = data.save(commit=False) entity.added_by = users.get_current_user() entity.put() self.redirect('/items.html') else: # Reprint the form self.response.out.write('<html><body>' '<form method="POST" ' 'action="/edit">' '<table>') self.response.out.write(data) self.response.out.write('</table>' '<input type="hidden" name="_id" value="%s">' '<input type="submit">' '</form></body></html>' % id) def main(): application = webapp.WSGIApplication( [('/', MainPage), ('/edit', EditPage), ('/items.html', ItemPage), ('/itemformpreview', ItemFormPreview(ItemForm)), ], debug=True) run_wsgi_app(application)

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• Create user in Oracle 11g with same priviledges as in Oracle 10g XE

  - by Álvaro G. Vicario

  I'm a PHP developer (not a DBA) and I've been working with Oracle 10g XE for a while. I'm used to XE's simplified user management: Go to Administration/ Users/ Create user Assign user name and password Roles: leave the default ones (connect and resource) Privileges: click on "Enable all" to select the 11 possible ones Create This way I get a user that has full access to its data and no access to everything else. This is fine since I only need it to develop my app. When the app is to be deployed, the client's DBAs configure the environment. Now I have to create users in a full Oracle 11g server and I'm completely lost. I have a new concept (profiles) and there're like 20 roles and hundreds of privileges in various categories. What steps do I need to complete in Oracle Enterprise Manager in order to obtain a user with the same privileges I used to assign in XE? ==== UPDATE ==== I think I'd better provide a detailed explanation so I make myself clearer. This is how I create a user in 10g XE: Roles: [X] CONNECT [X] RESOURCE [ ] DBA Direct Asignment System Privileges: [ ] CREATE DATABASE LINK [ ] CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW [ ] CREATE PROCEDURE [ ] CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM [ ] CREATE ROLE [ ] CREATE SEQUENCE [ ] CREATE SYNONYM [ ] CREATE TABLE [ ] CREATE TRIGGER [ ] CREATE TYPE [ ] CREATE VIEW I click on Enable All and I'm done. This is what I'm asked when doing the same in 11g: Profile: (*) DEFAULT ( ) WKSYS_PROF ( ) MONITORING_PROFILE Roles: CONNECT: [ ] Admin option [X] Default value Edit List: AQ_ADMINISTRATOR_ROLE AQ_USER_ROLE AUTHENTICATEDUSER CSW_USR_ROLE CTXAPP CWM_USER DATAPUMP_EXP_FULL_DATABASE DATAPUMP_IMP_FULL_DATABASE DBA DELETE_CATALOG_ROLE EJBCLIENT EXECUTE_CATALOG_ROLE EXP_FULL_DATABASE GATHER_SYSTEM_STATISTICS GLOBAL_AQ_USER_ROLE HS_ADMIN_ROLE IMP_FULL_DATABASE JAVADEBUGPRIV JAVAIDPRIV JAVASYSPRIV JAVAUSERPRIV JAVA_ADMIN JAVA_DEPLOY JMXSERVER LOGSTDBY_ADMINISTRATOR MGMT_USER OEM_ADVISOR OEM_MONITOR OLAPI_TRACE_USER OLAP_DBA OLAP_USER OLAP_XS_ADMIN ORDADMIN OWB$CLIENT OWB_DESIGNCENTER_VIEW OWB_USER RECOVERY_CATALOG_OWNER RESOURCE SCHEDULER_ADMIN SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE SPATIAL_CSW_ADMIN SPATIAL_WFS_ADMIN WFS_USR_ROLE WKUSER WM_ADMIN_ROLE XDBADMIN XDB_SET_INVOKER XDB_WEBSERVICES XDB_WEBSERVICES_OVER_HTTP XDB_WEBSERVICES_WITH_PUBLIC System Privileges: <Empty> Edit List: ACCESS_ANY_WORKSPACE ADMINISTER ANY SQL TUNING SET ADMINISTER DATABASE TRIGGER ADMINISTER RESOURCE MANAGER ADMINISTER SQL MANAGEMENT OBJECT ADMINISTER SQL TUNING SET ADVISOR ALTER ANY ASSEMBLY ALTER ANY CLUSTER ALTER ANY CUBE ALTER ANY CUBE DIMENSION ALTER ANY DIMENSION ALTER ANY EDITION ALTER ANY EVALUATION CONTEXT ALTER ANY INDEX ALTER ANY INDEXTYPE ALTER ANY LIBRARY ALTER ANY MATERIALIZED VIEW ALTER ANY MINING MODEL ALTER ANY OPERATOR ALTER ANY OUTLINE ALTER ANY PROCEDURE ALTER ANY ROLE ALTER ANY RULE ALTER ANY RULE SET ALTER ANY SEQUENCE ALTER ANY SQL PROFILE ALTER ANY TABLE ALTER ANY TRIGGER ALTER ANY TYPE ALTER DATABASE ALTER PROFILE ALTER RESOURCE COST ALTER ROLLBACK SEGMENT ALTER SESSION ALTER SYSTEM ALTER TABLESPACE ALTER USER ANALYZE ANY ANALYZE ANY DICTIONARY AUDIT ANY AUDIT SYSTEM BACKUP ANY TABLE BECOME USER CHANGE NOTIFICATION COMMENT ANY MINING MODEL COMMENT ANY TABLE CREATE ANY ASSEMBLY CREATE ANY CLUSTER CREATE ANY CONTEXT CREATE ANY CUBE CREATE ANY CUBE BUILD PROCESS CREATE ANY CUBE DIMENSION CREATE ANY DIMENSION CREATE ANY DIRECTORY CREATE ANY EDITION CREATE ANY EVALUATION CONTEXT CREATE ANY INDEX CREATE ANY INDEXTYPE CREATE ANY JOB CREATE ANY LIBRARY CREATE ANY MATERIALIZED VIEW CREATE ANY MEASURE FOLDER CREATE ANY MINING MODEL CREATE ANY OPERATOR CREATE ANY OUTLINE CREATE ANY PROCEDURE CREATE ANY RULE CREATE ANY RULE SET CREATE ANY SEQUENCE CREATE ANY SQL PROFILE CREATE ANY SYNONYM CREATE ANY TABLE CREATE ANY TRIGGER CREATE ANY TYPE CREATE ANY VIEW CREATE ASSEMBLY CREATE CLUSTER CREATE CUBE CREATE CUBE BUILD PROCESS CREATE CUBE DIMENSION CREATE DATABASE LINK CREATE DIMENSION CREATE EVALUATION CONTEXT CREATE EXTERNAL JOB CREATE INDEXTYPE CREATE JOB CREATE LIBRARY CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW CREATE MEASURE FOLDER CREATE MINING MODEL CREATE OPERATOR CREATE PROCEDURE CREATE PROFILE CREATE PUBLIC DATABASE LINK CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM CREATE ROLE CREATE ROLLBACK SEGMENT CREATE RULE CREATE RULE SET CREATE SEQUENCE CREATE SESSION CREATE SYNONYM CREATE TABLE CREATE TABLESPACE CREATE TRIGGER CREATE TYPE CREATE USER CREATE VIEW CREATE_ANY_WORKSPACE DEBUG ANY PROCEDURE DEBUG CONNECT SESSION DELETE ANY CUBE DIMENSION DELETE ANY MEASURE FOLDER DELETE ANY TABLE DEQUEUE ANY QUEUE DROP ANY ASSEMBLY DROP ANY CLUSTER DROP ANY CONTEXT DROP ANY CUBE DROP ANY CUBE BUILD PROCESS DROP ANY CUBE DIMENSION DROP ANY DIMENSION DROP ANY DIRECTORY DROP ANY EDITION DROP ANY EVALUATION CONTEXT DROP ANY INDEX DROP ANY INDEXTYPE DROP ANY LIBRARY DROP ANY MATERIALIZED VIEW DROP ANY MEASURE FOLDER DROP ANY MINING MODEL DROP ANY OPERATOR DROP ANY OUTLINE DROP ANY PROCEDURE DROP ANY ROLE DROP ANY RULE DROP ANY RULE SET DROP ANY SEQUENCE DROP ANY SQL PROFILE DROP ANY SYNONYM DROP ANY TABLE DROP ANY TRIGGER DROP ANY TYPE DROP ANY VIEW DROP PROFILE DROP PUBLIC DATABASE LINK DROP PUBLIC SYNONYM DROP ROLLBACK SEGMENT DROP TABLESPACE DROP USER ENQUEUE ANY QUEUE EXECUTE ANY ASSEMBLY EXECUTE ANY CLASS EXECUTE ANY EVALUATION CONTEXT EXECUTE ANY INDEXTYPE EXECUTE ANY LIBRARY EXECUTE ANY OPERATOR EXECUTE ANY PROCEDURE EXECUTE ANY PROGRAM EXECUTE ANY RULE EXECUTE ANY RULE SET EXECUTE ANY TYPE EXECUTE ASSEMBLY EXPORT FULL DATABASE FLASHBACK ANY TABLE FLASHBACK ARCHIVE ADMINISTER FORCE ANY TRANSACTION FORCE TRANSACTION FREEZE_ANY_WORKSPACE GLOBAL QUERY REWRITE GRANT ANY OBJECT PRIVILEGE GRANT ANY PRIVILEGE GRANT ANY ROLE IMPORT FULL DATABASE INSERT ANY CUBE DIMENSION INSERT ANY MEASURE FOLDER INSERT ANY TABLE LOCK ANY TABLE MANAGE ANY FILE GROUP MANAGE ANY QUEUE MANAGE FILE GROUP MANAGE SCHEDULER MANAGE TABLESPACE MERGE ANY VIEW MERGE_ANY_WORKSPACE ON COMMIT REFRESH QUERY REWRITE READ ANY FILE GROUP REMOVE_ANY_WORKSPACE RESTRICTED SESSION RESUMABLE ROLLBACK_ANY_WORKSPACE SELECT ANY CUBE SELECT ANY CUBE DIMENSION SELECT ANY DICTIONARY SELECT ANY MINING MODEL SELECT ANY SEQUENCE SELECT ANY TABLE SELECT ANY TRANSACTION UNDER ANY TABLE UNDER ANY TYPE UNDER ANY VIEW UNLIMITED TABLESPACE UPDATE ANY CUBE UPDATE ANY CUBE BUILD PROCESS UPDATE ANY CUBE DIMENSION UPDATE ANY TABLE Object Privileges: <Empty> Add: Clase Java Clases de Trabajos Cola Columna de Tabla Columna de Vista Espacio de Trabajo Función Instantánea Origen Java Paquete Planificaciones Procedimiento Programas Secuencia Sinónimo Tabla Tipos Trabajos Vista Consumer Group Privileges: <Empty> Default Consumer Group: (*) None Edit List: AUTO_TASK_CONSUMER_GROUP BATCH_GROUP DEFAULT_CONSUMER_GROUP INTERACTIVE_GROUP LOW_GROUP ORA$AUTOTASK_HEALTH_GROUP ORA$AUTOTASK_MEDIUM_GROUP ORA$AUTOTASK_SPACE_GROUP ORA$AUTOTASK_SQL_GROUP ORA$AUTOTASK_STATS_GROUP ORA$AUTOTASK_URGENT_GROUP ORA$DIAGNOSTICS SYS_GROUP And, of course, I wonder what options I should pick.

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• C++ custom exceptions: run time performance and passing exceptions from C++ to C

  - by skyeagle

  I am writing a custom C++ exception class (so I can pass exceptions occuring in C++ to another language via a C API). My initial plan of attack was to proceed as follows: //C++ myClass { public: myClass(); ~myClass(); void foo() // throws myException int foo(const int i, const bool b) // throws myException } * myClassPtr; // C API #ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" { #endif myClassPtr MyClass_New(); void MyClass_Destroy(myClassPtr p); void MyClass_Foo(myClassPtr p); int MyClass_FooBar(myClassPtr p, int i, bool b); #ifdef __cplusplus }; #endif I need a way to be able to pass exceptions thrown in the C++ code to the C side. The information I want to pass to the C side is the following: (a). What (b). Where (c). Simple Stack Trace (just the sequence of error messages in order they occured, no debugging info etc) I want to modify my C API, so that the API functions take a pointer to a struct ExceptionInfo, which will contain any exception info (if an exception occured) before consuming the results of the invocation. This raises two questions: Question 1 1. Implementation of each of the C++ methods exposed in the C API needs to be enclosed in a try/catch statement. The performance implications for this seem quite serious (according to this article): "It is a mistake (with high runtime cost) to use C++ exception handling for events that occur frequently, or for events that are handled near the point of detection." At the same time, I remember reading somewhere in my C++ days, that all though exception handling is expensive, it only becmes expensive when an exception actually occurs. So, which is correct?. what to do?. Is there an alternative way that I can trap errors safely and pass the resulting error info to the C API?. Or is this a minor consideration (the article after all, is quite old, and hardware have improved a bit since then). Question 2 I wuld like to modify the exception class given in that article, so that it contains a simple stack trace, and I need some help doing that. Again, in order to make the exception class 'lightweight', I think its a good idea not to include any STL classes, like string or vector (good idea/bad idea?). Which potentially leaves me with a fixed length C string (char*) which will be stack allocated. So I can maybe just keep appending messages (delimted by a unique separator [up to maximum length of buffer])... Its been a while since I did any serious C++ coding, and I will be grateful for the help. BTW, this is what I have come up with so far (I am intentionally, not deriving from std::exception because of the performance reasons mentioned in the article, and I am instead, throwing an integral exception (based on an exception enumeration): class fast_exception { public: fast_exception(int what, char const* file=0, int line=0) : what_(what), line_(line), file_(file) {/*empty*/} int what() const { return what_; } int line() const { return line_; } char const* file() const { return file_; } private: int what_; int line_; char const[MAX_BUFFER_SIZE] file_; }

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• NHibernate, VS 2010

  - by ??????

  ????????????, ANRY! ?????? ??????? ??? ??????????? ???????? ?? ????????????, ?????????? ? NHibernate. ??? ?? ???????? ???? ?????? "Hello NHibernate!". ???????????? ??????????? ????? ??????? ????????: ?? ????, ???? ?????, ??????, ?????. ?????????????? ?????? 4 ??????? ? MSSQL 2010: ?????(id_??????, ????????, ????), ??????(id_???????, ???, ???????), ?????(id_??????, id_???????, ?????????) ? ?????? ??????(id_?????? ??????, id_??????, id_??????, ??????????). ??????????????, ?????? 4 ??????: ?????, ??????, ?????, ?????? ??????. ?????? ??? ?????: ????? ?? ????????? 4 mapping-?????, ??? ?? ????? ???????????? ?????? ? ????? ???? Debug ???????? ????????? ??????: "Could not compile the mapping document: Sklad.products.hbm.xml". ?????? "????????" ?????????, ??? ??????. ? ??? ????? ???? ???????? ? ??? ?? ????? ??????? ? ?????????, ??????. P.S. ???? ?? ??????, ?????? ???????? ?? ?????: [email protected] Google translation (I cleaned this up a but, don't don't speak russian, someone else please improve if it's wrong) Hello, ANRY! Most recently, during the passage of the practice of the university, faced with NHibernate. I read your article "Hello NHibernate!". Took to implement something like a store: that is, a product, the customer order. Accordingly created 4 tables in MSSQL 2010: Goods (id_tovara, name, price) Client (id_klienta, name, surname) Order (id_zakaza, id_klienta, cost) Order Line (id_stroki order id_zakaza, id_tovara, quantity) Accordingly, created 4 classes: Product, Customer, Order, Order Line. my question is this: whether you want to create 4 mapping-file, or you can make only one? And when there is a Debug gives the following error: "Could not compile the mapping document: Sklad.products.hbm.xml. And "Build" is normal, no errors. In what may be the problem and how it can solve? Regards, Andrew. PS if not difficult, you can reply to e-mail: [email protected]

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• Why C# doesn't implement indexed properties ?

  - by Thomas Levesque

  I know, I know... Eric Lippert's answer to this kind of question is usually something like "because it wasn't worth the cost of designing, implementing, testing and documenting it". But still, I'd like a better explanation... I was reading this blog post about new C# 4 features, and in the section about COM Interop, the following part caught my attention : By the way, this code uses one more new feature: indexed properties (take a closer look at those square brackets after Range.) But this feature is available only for COM interop; you cannot create your own indexed properties in C# 4.0. OK, but why ? I already knew and regretted that it wasn't possible to create indexed properties in C#, but this sentence made me think again about it. I can see several good reasons to implement it : the CLR supports it (for instance, PropertyInfo.GetValue has an index parameter), so it's a pity we can't take advantage of it in C# it is supported for COM interop, as shown in the article (using dynamic dispatch) it is implemented in VB.NET it is already possible to create indexers, i.e. to apply an index to the object itself, so it would probably be no big deal to extend the idea to properties, keeping the same syntax and just replacing this with a property name It would allow to write that kind of things : public class Foo { private string[] _values = new string[3]; public string Values[int index] { get { return _values[index]; } set { _values[index] = value; } } } Currently the only workaround that I know is to create an inner class (ValuesCollection for instance) that implements an indexer, and change the Values property so that it returns an instance of that inner class. This is very easy to do, but annoying... So perhaps the compiler could do it for us ! An option would be to generate an inner class that implements the indexer, and expose it through a public generic interface : // interface defined in the namespace System public interface IIndexer<TIndex, TValue> { TValue this[TIndex index] { get; set; } } public class Foo { private string[] _values = new string[3]; private class <>c__DisplayClass1 : IIndexer<int, string> { private Foo _foo; public <>c__DisplayClass1(Foo foo) { _foo = foo; } public string this[int index] { get { return _foo._values[index]; } set { _foo._values[index] = value; } } } private IIndexer<int, string> <>f__valuesIndexer; public IIndexer<int, string> Values { get { if (<>f__valuesIndexer == null) <>f__valuesIndexer = new <>c__DisplayClass1(this); return <>f__valuesIndexer; } } } But of course, in that case the property would actually return a IIndexer<int, string>, and wouldn't really be an indexed property... It would be better to generate a real CLR indexed property. What do you think ? Would you like to see this feature in C# ? If not, why ?

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• Recommended ASP.NET Shared Hosting (USA)

  - by coffeeaddict

  Ok, I have to admit I'm getting fed up with www.discountasp.net's pricing model and this annoyance has built up over the past 8 years or so. I've been with them for years and absolutely love them on the technical side, however it's getting ridiculously expensive for so little that you get. I mean here's my scenario: 1) I am running 2 SQL Server databases which costs me $10/ea per month so that's $20/month for 2 and I only get 500 mb disk space which is horrible 2) I am paying $10/mo just for the hosting itself which I only get 1 gig of disk space! I mean common! 3) I am simply running 2 small apps (Screwturn Wiki & Subtext Blog)...so I don't really care if it's up 99% or not, it's not worth paying a total of $300 just to keep these 2 apps running over discountasp.net Anyone else feel the same? Yes, I know they have great support, probably have great servers running behind this but in the end I really don't care as long as my site is up 95% or better. Yes, the hosting toolset rocks. But you know I bet you I can find a similar set somewhere else. I like how I can totally control IIS 7 at discountasp and I can control my own app pool etc. That's very powerful and essential. But anyone have any good alternatives to discountasp that gives me close to the same at a much more reasonable cost point? I mean http://www.m6.net/prices.aspx gives you 10 SQL Databases for $7 and 200 gigs disk space! I don't know about their tools or support but just looking at those numbers and some other hosts I've seen, I feel that discountasp.net is way out of line. They don't even offer any purchasing discounts such as it would be nice if my 2nd SQL Server is only $5/month not $10...stuff like this, to make it much more realistic and fair. Opinions (people who do have discountasp.net, people who have left them, or people who have another host they like)??? But geez $300 just to host a couple DBs and lightweight open source apps? Not worth the price they are charging. I'm almost at a price point that enables me to get a decent dedicated server! I really don't care about beta ASP.NET frameworks support. Not a big deal to me. If you have alternative suggestions rather than your experience with discountasp, I'd like to know how their toolset is. Do you have complete control over your DB in terms of adding users, and same goes for the web app pool, etc.? Discountasp.net's control panel rocks. I don't want to loose the ability to at least control and add virtual directories, recycle my dedicated app pool myself, backup my sql database myself, through tools which is what discountasp does give you. I'd also want to know that the hoster at least gets the latest and greatest in terms of non-beta ASP.NET related frameworks available to its shared hosters.

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• PHP framework question

  - by iconiK

  I'm currently working on a browser-based MMO and have chosen the LAMP stack because of the extremely low cost to start with in production (versus Windows + IIS + ASP.NET/C# + SQL Server, even though I have MSDN Universal). However I will need a PHP framework for this as it's no easy task. I am not restricted by anything other than the ability to run on Linux, as I will use a dedicated cloud hosting solution (and a VMWare image for development) and can configure it as needed. In no specific order: It has to be easily scalable; this is crucial. If the game becomes a steady success it will eventually outgrow the server beyond what the host provides and would have to be moved to several load-balanced servers. It is crucial that this can be done with minimum effort. I do know this might require following strict conventions, so if you know of any for your suggested framework please explain what would be needed. It has to provide modules for all the core tasks: authentication, ACL, database access, MVC, and so on. One or two missing modules are fine, as long as they can easily be written and integrated. It should support internationalization. I think there is no excuse for any web framework not to provide means of translating the application and switching between languages without a lot of effort from the programmer. Must have very good community support and preferably commercial support as well. Yes, I do know QCodo/QCubed is so nice, but it is not mature enough for this task. Smooth AJAX support is required. Whether the framework comes with AJAX-capable widgets or has an easy way of adding AJAX is not relevant, as long as AJAX is easily doable. I plan to use jQuery + Dojo or one of them alone - not exactly sure. Auto-magically doing stuff when it improves readability and relieves a lot of effort would be especially nice if it is generally reliable and does not interfere with other requirements. This seems to be the case of CakePHP. I have read a lot of comparisons and I know it's a really hot debate. The general answer is "try and see for yourself what suits you". However, I can't say it is easy for this task and I'm calling for your experience with building applications with similar requirements. So far I'm tied up between Zend and CakePHP by the general criteria, however, all well-known frameworks offer the same functionality in some way or another with different approaches each with it's own advantages and disadvantages. Edits: I am kinda new to MVC, however, I am willing to learn it and I don't care if a framework is easier for those new to MVC. I have lots of time to learn MVC and any other architectures (or whatever they're called) you recommend. I will use Zend as a utility "framework", even though it's just a collection of libraries (some good ones though, as I have been told). Current PHP contenders are: CakePHP, Kohana, Zend alone.

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• Prefer extension methods for encapsulation and reusability?

  - by tzaman

  edit4: wikified, since this seems to have morphed more into a discussion than a specific question. In C++ programming, it's generally considered good practice to "prefer non-member non-friend functions" instead of instance methods. This has been recommended by Scott Meyers in this classic Dr. Dobbs article, and repeated by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu in C++ Coding Standards (item 44); the general argument being that if a function can do its job solely by relying on the public interface exposed by the class, it actually increases encapsulation to have it be external. While this confuses the "packaging" of the class to some extent, the benefits are generally considered worth it. Now, ever since I've started programming in C#, I've had a feeling that here is the ultimate expression of the concept that they're trying to achieve with "non-member, non-friend functions that are part of a class interface". C# adds two crucial components to the mix - the first being interfaces, and the second extension methods: Interfaces allow a class to formally specify their public contract, the methods and properties that they're exposing to the world. Any other class can choose to implement the same interface and fulfill that same contract. Extension methods can be defined on an interface, providing any functionality that can be implemented via the interface to all implementers automatically. And best of all, because of the "instance syntax" sugar and IDE support, they can be called the same way as any other instance method, eliminating the cognitive overhead! So you get the encapsulation benefits of "non-member, non-friend" functions with the convenience of members. Seems like the best of both worlds to me; the .NET library itself providing a shining example in LINQ. However, everywhere I look I see people warning against extension method overuse; even the MSDN page itself states: In general, we recommend that you implement extension methods sparingly and only when you have to. (edit: Even in the current .NET library, I can see places where it would've been useful to have extensions instead of instance methods - for example, all of the utility functions of List<T> (Sort, BinarySearch, FindIndex, etc.) would be incredibly useful if they were lifted up to IList<T> - getting free bonus functionality like that adds a lot more benefit to implementing the interface.) So what's the verdict? Are extension methods the acme of encapsulation and code reuse, or am I just deluding myself? (edit2: In response to Tomas - while C# did start out with Java's (overly, imo) OO mentality, it seems to be embracing more multi-paradigm programming with every new release; the main thrust of this question is whether using extension methods to drive a style change (towards more generic / functional C#) is useful or worthwhile..) edit3: overridable extension methods The only real problem identified so far with this approach, is that you can't specialize extension methods if you need to. I've been thinking about the issue, and I think I've come up with a solution. Suppose I have an interface MyInterface, which I want to extend - I define my extension methods in a MyExtension static class, and pair it with another interface, call it MyExtensionOverrider. MyExtension methods are defined according to this pattern: public static int MyMethod(this MyInterface obj, int arg, bool attemptCast=true) { if (attemptCast && obj is MyExtensionOverrider) { return ((MyExtensionOverrider)obj).MyMethod(arg); } // regular implementation here } The override interface mirrors all of the methods defined in MyExtension, except without the this or attemptCast parameters: public interface MyExtensionOverrider { int MyMethod(int arg); string MyOtherMethod(); } Now, any class can implement the interface and get the default extension functionality: public class MyClass : MyInterface { ... } Anyone that wants to override it with specific implementations can additionally implement the override interface: public class MySpecializedClass : MyInterface, MyExtensionOverrider { public int MyMethod(int arg) { //specialized implementation for one method } public string MyOtherMethod() { // fallback to default for others MyExtension.MyOtherMethod(this, attemptCast: false); } } And there we go: extension methods provided on an interface, with the option of complete extensibility if needed. Fully general too, the interface itself doesn't need to know about the extension / override, and multiple extension / override pairs can be implemented without interfering with each other. I can see three problems with this approach - It's a little bit fragile - the extension methods and override interface have to be kept synchronized manually. It's a little bit ugly - implementing the override interface involves boilerplate for every function you don't want to specialize. It's a little bit slow - there's an extra bool comparison and cast attempt added to the mainline of every method. Still, all those notwithstanding, I think this is the best we can get until there's language support for interface functions. Thoughts?

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• jQuery show hide divs on radio buttons

  - by RyanP13

  I have got a group of radio buttons that when clicked need to display a corresponding unordered list. I have got as far as showing the correct list according to which radio button is clicked but cannot figure out how to hide the other lists that need to be hidden. So if i click the second benefits radion then the second 'spend' ul will display and the other 'spend' uls will hide. This is my jQuery: // hide all except first ul $('div.chevron ul').not(':first').hide(); // $('div.chevron > ul > li > input[name=benefits]').live('click',function() { // work out which radio has been clicked var $radioClick = $(this).index('div.chevron > ul > li > input[name=benefits]'); var $radioClick = $radioClick + 1; $('div.chevron > ul').eq($radioClick).show(); }); // trigger click event to show spend list var $defaultRadio = $('div.chevron > ul > li > input:first[name=benefits]') $defaultRadio.trigger('click'); And this is my HTML: <div class="divider chevron"> <ul> <li><strong>What benefit are you most interested in?</strong></li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="benefits" id="firstBenefit" value="Dental" checked="checked" /> <label for="firstBenefit">Dental</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="benefits" id="secondBenefit" value="Optical" /> <label for="secondBenefit">Optical</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="benefits" id="thirdBenefit" value="Physiotherapy" /> <label for="thirdBenefit">Physiotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture</label> </li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>How much do you spend a year on Dental?</strong></li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate1a" value="£50" /> <label for="rate1a">&pound;50</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate2a" value="£100" /> <label for="rate2a">&pound;100</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate3a" value="£150" /> <label for="rate3a">&pound;150</label> </li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>How much do you spend a year on Optical?</strong></li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate1b" value="£50" /> <label for="rate1a">&pound;50</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate2b" value="£100" /> <label for="rate2a">&pound;100</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate3b" value="£150" /> <label for="rate3a">&pound;150</label> </li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>How much do you spend a year on Physiotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture?</strong></li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate1c" value="£50" /> <label for="rate1a">&pound;50</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate2c" value="£100" /> <label for="rate2a">&pound;100</label> </li> <li> <input type="radio" class="inlineSpace" name="spend" id="rate3c" value="£150" /> <label for="rate3a">&pound;150</label> </li> </ul> <label class="button"><input type="submit" value="View your quote" class="submit" /></label> </div> I tried using: $('div.chevron > ul').not($radioClick).hide(); But that yielded a bad result where all the lists where hidden. Thanks in advance.

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• Is SQL Server DRI (ON DELETE CASCADE) slow?

  - by Aaronaught

  I've been analyzing a recurring "bug report" (perf issue) in one of our systems related to a particularly slow delete operation. Long story short: It seems that the CASCADE DELETE keys were largely responsible, and I'd like to know (a) if this makes sense, and (b) why it's the case. We have a schema of, let's say, widgets, those being at the root of a large graph of related tables and related-to-related tables and so on. To be perfectly clear, deleting from this table is actively discouraged; it is the "nuclear option" and users are under no illusions to the contrary. Nevertheless, it sometimes just has to be done. The schema looks something like this: Widgets | +--- Anvils (1:1) | | | +--- AnvilTestData (1:N) | +--- WidgetHistory (1:N) | +--- WidgetHistoryDetails (1:N) Nothing too scary, really. A Widget can be different types, an Anvil is a special type, so that relationship is 1:1 (or more accurately 1:0..1). Then there's a large amount of data - perhaps thousands of rows of AnvilTestData per Anvil collected over time, dealing with hardness, corrosion, exact weight, hammer compatibility, usability issues, and impact tests with cartoon heads. Then every Widget has a long, boring history of various types of transactions - production, inventory moves, sales, defect investigations, RMAs, repairs, customer complaints, etc. There might be 10-20k details for a single widget, or none at all, depending on its age. So, unsurprisingly, there's a CASCADE DELETE relationship at every level here. If a Widget needs to be deleted, it means something's gone terribly wrong and we need to erase any records of that widget ever existing, including its history, test data, etc. Again, nuclear option. Relations are all indexed, statistics are up to date. Normal queries are fast. The system tends to hum along pretty smoothly for everything except deletes. Getting to the point here, finally, for various reasons we only allow deleting one widget at a time, so a delete statement would look like this: DELETE FROM Widgets WHERE WidgetID = @WidgetID Pretty simple, innocuous looking delete... that takes over 2 minutes to run, for a widget with no data! After slogging through execution plans I was finally able to pick out the AnvilTestData and WidgetHistoryDetails deletes as the sub-operations with the highest cost. So I experimented with turning off the CASCADE (but keeping the actual FK, just setting it to NO ACTION) and rewriting the script as something very much like the following: DECLARE @AnvilID int SELECT @AnvilID = AnvilID FROM Anvils WHERE WidgetID = @WidgetID DELETE FROM AnvilTestData WHERE AnvilID = @AnvilID DELETE FROM WidgetHistory WHERE HistoryID IN ( SELECT HistoryID FROM WidgetHistory WHERE WidgetID = @WidgetID) DELETE FROM Widgets WHERE WidgetID = @WidgetID Both of these "optimizations" resulted in significant speedups, each one shaving nearly a full minute off the execution time, so that the original 2-minute deletion now takes about 5-10 seconds - at least for new widgets, without much history or test data. Just to be absolutely clear, there is still a CASCADE from WidgetHistory to WidgetHistoryDetails, where the fanout is highest, I only removed the one originating from Widgets. Further "flattening" of the cascade relationships resulted in progressively less dramatic but still noticeable speedups, to the point where deleting a new widget was almost instantaneous once all of the cascade deletes to larger tables were removed and replaced with explicit deletes. I'm using DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS and DBCC FREEPROCCACHE before each test. I've disabled all triggers that might be causing further slowdowns (although those would show up in the execution plan anyway). And I'm testing against older widgets, too, and noticing a significant speedup there as well; deletes that used to take 5 minutes now take 20-40 seconds. Now I'm an ardent supporter of the "SELECT ain't broken" philosophy, but there just doesn't seem to be any logical explanation for this behaviour other than crushing, mind-boggling inefficiency of the CASCADE DELETE relationships. So, my questions are: Is this a known issue with DRI in SQL Server? (I couldn't seem to find any references to this sort of thing on Google or here in SO; I suspect the answer is no.) If not, is there another explanation for the behaviour I'm seeing? If it is a known issue, why is it an issue, and are there better workarounds I could be using?

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• A* (A-star) implementation in AS3

  - by Bryan Hare

  Hey, I am putting together a project for a class that requires me to put AI in a top down Tactical Strategy game in Flash AS3. I decided that I would use a node based path finding approach because the game is based on a circular movement scheme. When a player moves a unit he essentially draws a series of line segments that connect that a player unit will follow along. I am trying to put together a similar operation for the AI units in our game by creating a list of nodes to traverse to a target node. Hence my use of Astar (the resulting path can be used to create this line). Here is my Algorithm function findShortestPath (startN:node, goalN:node) { var openSet:Array = new Array(); var closedSet:Array = new Array(); var pathFound:Boolean = false; startN.g_score = 0; startN.h_score = distFunction(startN,goalN); startN.f_score = startN.h_score; startN.fromNode = null; openSet.push (startN); var i:int = 0 for(i= 0; i< nodeArray.length; i++) { for(var j:int =0; j<nodeArray[0].length; j++) { if(!nodeArray[i][j].isPathable) { closedSet.push(nodeArray[i][j]); } } } while (openSet.length != 0) { var cNode:node = openSet.shift(); if (cNode == goalN) { resolvePath (cNode); return true; } closedSet.push (cNode); for (i= 0; i < cNode.dirArray.length; i++) { var neighborNode:node = cNode.nodeArray[cNode.dirArray[i]]; if (!(closedSet.indexOf(neighborNode) == -1)) { continue; } neighborNode.fromNode = cNode; var tenativeg_score:Number = cNode.gscore + distFunction(neighborNode.fromNode,neighborNode); if (openSet.indexOf(neighborNode) == -1) { neighborNode.g_score = neighborNode.fromNode.g_score + distFunction(neighborNode,cNode); if (cNode.dirArray[i] >= 4) { neighborNode.g_score -= 4; } neighborNode.h_score=distFunction(neighborNode,goalN); neighborNode.f_score=neighborNode.g_score+neighborNode.h_score; insertIntoPQ (neighborNode, openSet); //trace(" F Score of neighbor: " + neighborNode.f_score + " H score of Neighbor: " + neighborNode.h_score + " G_score or neighbor: " +neighborNode.g_score); } else if (tenativeg_score <= neighborNode.g_score) { neighborNode.fromNode=cNode; neighborNode.g_score=cNode.g_score+distFunction(neighborNode,cNode); if (cNode.dirArray[i]>=4) { neighborNode.g_score-=4; } neighborNode.f_score=neighborNode.g_score+neighborNode.h_score; openSet.splice (openSet.indexOf(neighborNode),1); //trace(" F Score of neighbor: " + neighborNode.f_score + " H score of Neighbor: " + neighborNode.h_score + " G_score or neighbor: " +neighborNode.g_score); insertIntoPQ (neighborNode, openSet); } } } trace ("fail"); return false; } Right now this function creates paths that are often not optimal or wholly inaccurate given the target and this generally happens when I have nodes that are not path able, and I am not quite sure what I am doing wrong right now. If someone could help me correct this I would appreciate it greatly. Some Notes My OpenSet is essentially a Priority Queue, so thats how I sort my nodes by cost. Here is that function function insertIntoPQ (iNode:node, pq:Array) { var inserted:Boolean=true; var iterater:int=0; while (inserted) { if (iterater==pq.length) { pq.push (iNode); inserted=false; } else if (pq[iterater].f_score >= iNode.f_score) { pq.splice (iterater,0,iNode); inserted=false; } ++iterater; } } Thanks!

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