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• Exitus Acta Probat: The Post-Processing Module

  - by Phil Factor

  Sometimes, one has to make certain ethical compromises to ensure the success of a corporate IT project. Exitus Acta Probat (literally 'the result validates the deeds' meaning that the ends justify the means)It was a while back, whilst working as a Technical Architect for a well-known international company, that I was given the task of designing the architecture of a rather specialized accounting system. We'd tried an off-the-shelf (OTS) Windows-based solution which crashed with dispiriting regularity, and didn't quite do what the business required. After a great deal of research and planning, we commissioned a Unux-based system that used X-terminals for the desktops of  the participating staff. X terminals are now obsolete, but were then hot stuff; stripped-down Unix workstations that provided client GUIs for networked applications long before the days of AJAX, Flash, Air and DHTML. I've never known a project go so smoothly: I'd been initially rather nervous about going the Unix route, believing then that  Unix programmers were excitable creatures who were prone to  indulge in role-play enactments of elves and wizards at the weekend, but the programmers I met from the company that did the work seemed to be rather donnish, earnest, people who quickly grasped our requirements and were faultlessly professional in their work.After thinking lofty thoughts for a while, there was considerable pummeling of keyboards by our suppliers, and a beautiful robust application was delivered to us ahead of dates.Soon, the department who had commissioned the work received shiny new X Terminals to replace their rather depressing lavatory-beige PCs. I modestly hung around as the application was commissioned and deployed to the department in order to receive the plaudits. They didn't come. Something was very wrong with the project. I couldn't put my finger on the problem, and the users weren't doing any more than desperately and futilely searching the application to find a fault with it.Many times in my life, I've come up against a predicament like this: The roll-out of an application goes wrong and you are hearing nothing that helps you to discern the cause but nit-*** noise. There is a limit to the emotional heat you can pack into a complaint about text being in the wrong font, or an input form being slightly cramped, but they tried their best. The answer is, of course, one that every IT executive should have tattooed prominently where they can read it in emergencies: In Vino Veritas (literally, 'in wine the truth', alcohol loosens the tongue. A roman proverb) It was time to slap the wallet and get the department down the pub with the tab in my name. It was an eye-watering investment, but hedged with an over-confident IT director who relished my discomfort. To cut a long story short, The real reason gushed out with the third round. We had deprived them of their PCs, which had been good for very little from the pure business perspective, but had provided them with many hours of happiness playing computer-based minesweeper and solitaire. There is no more agreeable way of passing away the interminable hours of wage-slavery than minesweeper or solitaire, and the employees had applauded the munificence of their employer who had provided them with the means to play it. I had, unthinkingly, deprived them of it.I held an emergency meeting with our suppliers the following day. I came over big with the notion that it was in their interests to provide a solution. They played it cool, probably knowing that it was my head on the block, not theirs. In the end, they came up with a compromise. they would temporarily descend from their lofty, cerebral stamping grounds  in order to write a server-based Minesweeper and Solitaire game for X Terminals, and install it in a concealed place within the system. We'd have to pay for it, though. I groaned. How could we do that? "Could we call it a 'post-processing module?" suggested their account executive.And so it came to pass. The application was a resounding success. Every now and then, the staff were able to indulge in some 'post-processing', with what turned out to be a very fine implementation of both minesweeper and solitaire. There were several refinements: A single click in a 'boss' button turned the games into what looked just like a financial spreadsheet.  They even threw in a multi-user version of Battleships. The extra payment for the post-processing module went through the change-control process without anyone untoward noticing, and peace once more descended. Only one thing niggles. Those games were good. Do they still survive, somewhere in a Linux library? If so, I'd like to claim a small part in their production.

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• Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL Definitions: CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) is an XML based markup language used in Microsoft SharePoint technologies  Anonymous: A camel is a horse designed by committee  Dov Trietsch: A CAML is a HORS designed by Microsoft  I was advised against putting any Camel and Sphinx rhymes in here. Look it up in Google!  _____ Now that we have dispensed with the dromedary jokes (BTW, I have many more, but they are not fit to print!), here is an interesting problem and its solution.  We have built a list where the title must be kept unique so I needed to verify the existence (or absence) of a list item with a particular title. Two methods came to mind:  1: Span the list until the title is found (result = found) or until the list ends (result = not found). This is an algorithm of complexity O(N) and for long lists it is a performance sucker. 2: Use a CAML query instead. Here, for short list we’ll encounter some overhead, but because the query results in an SQL query on the content database, it is of complexity O(LogN), which is significantly better and scales perfectly. Obviously I decided to go with the latter and this is where the CAML s--t hit the fan.   A CAML query returns a SPListItemCollection and I simply checked its Count. If it was 0, the item did not already exist and it was safe to add a new item with the given title. Otherwise I cancelled the operation and warned the user. The trouble was that I always got a positive. Most of the time a false positive. The count was greater than 0 regardles of the title I checked (except when the list was empty, which happens only once). This was very disturbing indeed. To solve my immediate problem which was speedy delivery, I reverted to the “Span the list” approach, but the problem bugged me, so I wrote a little console app by which I tested and tweaked and tested, time and again, until I found the solution. Yes, one can pass the proverbial CAML thru the ey of the needle (e’s missing on purpose).  So here are my conclusions:  CAML that does not work:  Note: QT is my quote:  char QT = Convert.ToChar((int)34); string titleQuery = "<Query>><Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where></Query>"; titleQuery += "<ViewFields><FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/></ViewFields>";  Why? Even though U2U generates it, the <Query> and </Query> tags do not belong in the query that you pass. Start your query with the <Where> clause.  Also the <ViewFiels> clause does not belong. I used this clause to limit the returned collection to a single column, and I still wish to do it. I’ll show how this is done a bit later.   When you use the <Query> </Query> tags in you query, it’s as if you did not specify the query at all. What you get is the all inclusive default query for the list. It returns evey column and every item. It is expensive for both server and network because it does all the extra processing and eats plenty of bandwidth.   Now, here is the CAML that works  string titleQuery = "<Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where>";  You’ll also notice that inside the unusable <ViewFields> clause above, we have a <FieldRef> clause. This is what we pass to the SPQuery object. Here is how:  SPQuery query = new SPQuery(); query.Query = titleQuery; query.ViewFields = "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; query.RowLimit = 1; SPListItemCollection col = masterList.GetItems(query);  Two thing to note: we enter the view fields into the SPQuery object and we also limited the number of rows that the query returns. The latter is not always done, but in an existence test, there is no point in returning hundreds of rows. The query will now return one item or none, which is all we need in order to verify the existence (or non-existence) of items. Limiting the number of columns and the number of rows is a great performance enhancer. That’s all folks!!

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• Help Prevent Carpal Tunnel Problems with Workrave

  - by Matthew Guay

  Whether for work or leisure, many of us spend entirely too much time on the computer everyday.  This puts us at risk of having or aggravating Carpal Tunnel problems, but thanks to Workrave you can help to divert these problems. Workrave helps Carpal Tunnel problems by reminding you to get away from your computer periodically.  Breaking up your computer time with movement can help alleviate many computer and office related health problems.  Workrave helps by reminding you to take short pauses after several minutes of computer use, and longer breaks after continued use.  You can also use it to keep from using the computer for too much You time in a day.  Since you can change the settings to suit you, this can be a great way to make sure you’re getting the breaks you need. Install Workrave on Windows If you’re using Workrave on Windows, download (link below) and install it with the default settings. One installation setting you may wish to change is the startup.  By default Workrave will run automatically when you start your computer; if you don’t want this, you can simply uncheck the box and proceed with the installation. Once setup is finished, you can run Workrave directly from the installer. Or you can open it from your start menu by entering “workrave” in the search box. Install Workrave in Ubuntu If you wish to use it in Ubuntu, you can install it directly from the Ubuntu Software Center.  Click the Applications menu, and select Ubuntu Software Center. Enter “workrave” into the search box in the top right corner of the Software Center, and it will automatically find it.  Click the arrow to proceed to Workrave’s page. This will give you information about Workrave; simply click Install to install Workrave on your system. Enter your password when prompted. Workrave will automatically download and install.   When finished, you can find Workrave in your Applications menu under Universal Access. Using Workrave Workrave by default shows a small counter on your desktop, showing the length of time until your next Micro break (30 second break), Rest break (10 minute break), and max amount of computer usage for the day. When it’s time for a micro break, Workrave will popup a reminder on your desktop. If you continue working, it will disappear at the end of the timer.  If you stop, it will start a micro-break which will freeze most on-screen activities until the timer is over.  You can click Skip or Postpone if you do not want to take a break right then. After an hour of work, Workrave will give you a 10 minute rest break.  During this it will show you some exercises that can help eliminate eyestrain, muscle tension, and other problems from prolonged computer usage.  You can click through the exercises, or can skip or postpone the break if you wish.   Preferences You can change your Workrave preferences by right-clicking on its icon in your system tray and selecting Preferences. Here you can customize the time between your breaks, and the length of your breaks.  You can also change your daily computer usage limit, and can even turn off the postpone and skip buttons on notifications if you want to make sure you follow Workrave and take your rests! From the context menu, you can also choose Statistics.  This gives you an overview of how many breaks, prompts, and more were shown on a given day.  It also shows a total Overdue time, which is the total length of the breaks you skipped or postponed.  You can view your Workrave history as well by simply selecting a date on the calendar.   Additionally, the Activity tab in the Statics pane shows more info about your computer usage, including total mouse movement, mouse button clicks, and keystrokes. Conclusion Whether you’re suffering with Carpal Tunnel or trying to prevent it, Workrave is a great solution to help remind you to get away from your computer periodically and rest.  Of course, since you can simply postpone or skip the prompts, you’ve still got to make an effort to help your own health.  But it does give you a great way to remind yourself to get away from the computer, and especially for geeks, this may be something that we really need! Download Workrave Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Switch to the Dvorak Keyboard Layout in XPAccess Your MySQL Server Remotely Over SSHHow to Secure Gaim Instant Messenger traffic at Work with SecureCRT and SSHConnect to VMware Server Console Over SSHDisclaimers TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader

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• F# for the C# Programmer

  - by mbcrump

  Are you a C# Programmer and can’t make it past a day without seeing or hearing someone mention F#?  Today, I’m going to walk you through your first F# application and give you a brief introduction to the language. Sit back this will only take about 20 minutes. Introduction Microsoft's F# programming language is a functional language for the .NET framework that was originally developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Don Syme. In October 2007, the senior vice president of the developer division at Microsoft announced that F# was being officially productized to become a fully supported .NET language and professional developers were hired to create a team of around ten people to build the product version. In September 2008, Microsoft released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP), an official beta release, of the F# distribution . In December 2008, Microsoft announced that the success of this CTP had encouraged them to escalate F# and it is now will now be shipped as one of the core languages in Visual Studio 2010 , alongside C++, C# 4.0 and VB. The F# programming language incorporates many state-of-the-art features from programming language research and ossifies them in an industrial strength implementation that promises to revolutionize interactive, parallel and concurrent programming. Advantages of F# F# is the world's first language to combine all of the following features: Type inference: types are inferred by the compiler and generic definitions are created automatically. Algebraic data types: a succinct way to represent trees. Pattern matching: a comprehensible and efficient way to dissect data structures. Active patterns: pattern matching over foreign data structures. Interactive sessions: as easy to use as Python and Mathematica. High performance JIT compilation to native code: as fast as C#. Rich data structures: lists and arrays built into the language with syntactic support. Functional programming: first-class functions and tail calls. Expressive static type system: finds bugs during compilation and provides machine-verified documentation. Sequence expressions: interrogate huge data sets efficiently. Asynchronous workflows: syntactic support for monadic style concurrent programming with cancellations. Industrial-strength IDE support: multithreaded debugging, and graphical throwback of inferred types and documentation. Commerce friendly design and a viable commercial market. Lets try a short program in C# then F# to understand the differences. Using C#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: Sample Program. using System;   namespace ConsoleApplication9 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             var a = 2;             Console.WriteLine(a);             Console.ReadLine();         }     } } A breeze right? 14 Lines of code. We could have condensed it a bit by removing the “using” statment and tossing the namespace. But this is the typical C# program. Using F#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: To start, open Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Note: If using VS2008, then please download the SDK first before getting started. If you are using VS2010 then you are already setup and ready to go. So, click File-> New Project –> Other Languages –> Visual F# –> Windows –> F# Application. You will get the screen below. Go ahead and enter a name and click OK. Now, you will notice that the Solution Explorer contains the following: Double click the Program.fs and enter the following information. Hit F5 and it should run successfully. Sample Program. open System let a = 2        Console.WriteLine a As Shown below: Hmm, what? F# did the same thing in 3 lines of code. Show me the interactive evaluation that I keep hearing about. The F# development environment for Visual Studio 2010 provides two different modes of execution for F# code: Batch compilation to a .NET executable or DLL. (This was accomplished above). Interactive evaluation. (Demo is below) The interactive session provides a > prompt, requires a double semicolon ;; identifier at the end of a code snippet to force evaluation, and returns the names (if any) and types of resulting definitions and values. To access the F# prompt, in VS2010 Goto View –> Other Window then F# Interactive. Once you have the interactive window type in the following expression: 2+3;; as shown in the screenshot below: I hope this guide helps you get started with the language, please check out the following books for further information. F# Books for further reading   Foundations of F# Author: Robert Pickering An introduction to functional programming with F#. Including many samples, this book walks through the features of the F# language and libraries, and covers many of the .NET Framework features which can be leveraged with F#.       Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# Authors: Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet An introduction to functional programming for existing C# developers written by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. This book explains the core principles using both C# and F#, shows how to use functional ideas when designing .NET applications and presents practical examples such as design of domain specific language, development of multi-core applications and programming of reactive applications.

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• Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can

  - by cabhilash

  Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can unlock it. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18486) SQL server has local password policies. If policy is enabled which locks down the account after X number of failed attempts then the account is automatically locked down.This error with 'sa' account is very common. sa is default administartor login available with SQL server. So there are chances that an ousider has tried to bruteforce your system. (This can cause even if a legitimate tries to access the account with wrong password.Sometimes a user would have changed the password without informing others. So the other users would try to lo) You can unlock the account with the following options (use another admin account or connect via windows authentication) Alter account & unlock ALTER LOGIN sa WITH PASSWORD='password' UNLOCK Use another account Almost everyone is aware of the sa account. This can be the potential security risk. Even if you provide strong password hackers can lock the account by providing the wrong password. ( You can provide extra security by installing firewall or changing the default port but these measures are not always practical). As a best practice you can disable the sa account and use another account with same privileges.ALTER LOGIN sa DISABLE You can edit the lock-ot options using gpedit.msc( in command prompt type gpedit.msc and press enter). Navigate to Account Lokout policy as shown in the figure The Following options are available Account lockout threshold This security setting determines the number of failed logon attempts that causes a user account to be locked out. A locked-out account cannot be used until it is reset by an administrator or until the lockout duration for the account has expired. You can set a value between 0 and 999 failed logon attempts. If you set the value to 0, the account will never be locked out. Failed password attempts against workstations or member servers that have been locked using either CTRL+ALT+DELETE or password-protected screen savers count as failed logon attempts. Account lockout duration This security setting determines the number of minutes a locked-out account remains locked out before automatically becoming unlocked. The available range is from 0 minutes through 99,999 minutes. If you set the account lockout duration to 0, the account will be locked out until an administrator explicitly unlocks it. If an account lockout threshold is defined, the account lockout duration must be greater than or equal to the reset time. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified. Reset account lockout counter after This security setting determines the number of minutes that must elapse after a failed logon attempt before the failed logon attempt counter is reset to 0 bad logon attempts. The available range is 1 minute to 99,999 minutes. If an account lockout threshold is defined, this reset time must be less than or equal to the Account lockout duration. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified.When creating SQL user you can set CHECK_POLICY=on which will enforce the windows password policy on the account. The following policies will be applied Define the Enforce password history policy setting so that several previous passwords are remembered. With this policy setting, users cannot use the same password when their password expires.  Define the Maximum password age policy setting so that passwords expire as often as necessary for your environment, typically, every 30 to 90 days. With this policy setting, if an attacker cracks a password, the attacker only has access to the network until the password expires.  Define the Minimum password age policy setting so that passwords cannot be changed until they are more than a certain number of days old. This policy setting works in combination with the Enforce password historypolicy setting. If a minimum password age is defined, users cannot repeatedly change their passwords to get around the Enforce password history policy setting and then use their original password. Users must wait the specified number of days to change their passwords.  Define a Minimum password length policy setting so that passwords must consist of at least a specified number of characters. Long passwords--seven or more characters--are usually stronger than short ones. With this policy setting, users cannot use blank passwords, and they have to create passwords that are a certain number of characters long.  Enable the Password must meet complexity requirements policy setting. This policy setting checks all new passwords to ensure that they meet basic strong password requirements.  Password must meet the following complexity requirement, when they are changed or created: Not contain the user's entire Account Name or entire Full Name. The Account Name and Full Name are parsed for delimiters: commas, periods, dashes or hyphens, underscores, spaces, pound signs, and tabs. If any of these delimiters are found, the Account Name or Full Name are split and all sections are verified not to be included in the password. There is no check for any character or any three characters in succession. Contain characters from three of the following five categories:  English uppercase characters (A through Z) English lowercase characters (a through z) Base 10 digits (0 through 9) Non-alphabetic characters (for example, !, $, #, %) A catch-all category of any Unicode character that does not fall under the previous four categories. This fifth category can be regionally specific.

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• What Did You Do? is a Bad Question

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Brian Moran (blog | Twitter) did a great presentation today for the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter on The Art of Questions.  One of the points that Brian made was that there are good questions and bad (or at least not-as-good) questions.  Good questions tend to open-up the conversation and engender positive reactions (perhaps even trust and respect) between the participants; and bad questions tend to close-down a conversation either through the narrow list of possible responses (e.g. strictly Yes/No) or through the negative reactions they can produce.  And this explains why I so frequently had problems troubleshooting real-time problems with users in the past.  I’ll explain that in more detail below, but before we go on, let me recommend that you watch the recording of Brian’s presentation to learn why the question Why is often problematic in the U.S. and yet we so often resort to it. For a short portion (3 years) of my career, I taught basic computer skills and Office applications in an adult vocational school, and this gave me ample opportunity to do live troubleshooting of user challenges with computers.  And like many people who ended up in computer related jobs, I also have had numerous times where I was called upon by less computer-savvy individuals to help them with some challenge they were having, whether it was part of my job or not.  One of the things that I noticed, especially during my time as a teacher, was that when I was helping somebody, typically the first question I would ask them was, “What did you do?”  This seemed to me like a good way to start my detective work trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to help the person avoid it again in the future.  I always asked it in a polite tone of voice as I was just trying to gather the facts before diving in deeper.  However; 99.999% of the time, I always got the same answer, “Nothing!”  For a long time this frustrated me because (remember I’m in detective mode at that point) I knew it could not possibly be true.  They HAD to have done SOMETHING…just tell me what were the last actions you took before this problem presented itself.  But no, they always stuck with “Nothing”.  At which point, with frustration growing, and not a little bit of disdain for their lack of helpfulness, I would usually ask them to move aside while I took over their machine and got them out of whatever they had gotten themselves into.  After a while I just grew used to the fact that this was the answer I would usually receive, but I always kept asking because for the .001% of the people who would actually tell me, I could then help them understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. Now, after hearing Brian’s talk, I understand what the problem was.  Even though I meant to just be in an information gathering mode, the words I was using, “What did YOU do?” have such a strong negative connotation that people would instinctively go into defense-mode and stop sharing information that might make them look bad.  Many of them probably were not even consciously aware that they had gone on the defensive, but the self-preservation instinct, especially self-preservation of the ego, is so strong that people would end up there without even realizing it. So, if “What did you do” is a bad question, what would have been better?  Well, one suggestion that Brian makes in his talk is something along the lines of, “Can you tell me what led up to this?” or “what was happening on the computer right before this came up?”  It’s subtle, but the point is to take the focus off of the person and their behavior; instead depersonalizing it and talk about events from more of a 3rd-party observer point of view.  With this approach, people will be more likely to talk about what the computer did and what they did in response to it without feeling the interrogation spotlight is on them.  They are also more likely to mention other events that occurred around the same time that may or may not be related, but which could certainly help you troubleshoot a larger problem if it is not just user actions.  And that is the ultimate goal of your asking the questions.  So yes, it does matter how you ask the question; and there are such things as good questions and bad questions.  Excellent topic Brian!  Thanks for getting the thinking gears churning! (Cross-posted to the Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog.)

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• The Krewe App Post-Mortem

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/05/23/the-krewe-app-post-mortem.aspxNow that teched has come and gone, I thought I would use this opportunity to do a little post-mortem on The Krewe app. It is one thing to test the app at home. It is a completely different animal to see how it responds in the environment TechEd creates. At a future time, I will list all the things that I would like to change with the app. At this point, I will find some good way to get community feedback. I want to break all this down screen by screen. We'll start with the screen I got right. The first of these is the events calendar. This is the one screen that, to you guys, just worked. However, there was an issue here. When I wrote v1 for last year, I was lazy and placed everything in CST. This caused problems with the achievements, which I will explain later. Furthermore, the event locations were not check-in locations. This created another problem with the achievements. Next, we get to the Twitter page. For what this page does, it works great. For those that don't know, I have an Azure Worker Role that polls Twitter pretty close to the rate limit. I cache these results in my database, and serve them upon request. This gives me great control over the content. I just have to remember to flush past tweets after a period, to save database growth. The next screen is the check-in screen. This screen has been the bane of my existence since I first created the thing. Last year, I used a background task to check people out of locations after they traveled. This year, I removed the background task in favor of a foursquare model. You are checked out after 3 hours or when you check-in to some other location. This seemed to work well, until those pesky achievements came into the mix. Again, more on this later. Next, I want to address the Connect and Connections screens together. I wanted to use some of the capabilities of the phone, and NFC seemed a natural choice. From this, I came up with the gamification aspects of the app. Since we are, fundamentally, a networking organization, I wanted to encourage people to actually network. Users could make and share a profile, similar to a virtual business card. I just had to figure out how to get people to use the feature. Why not just give someone a business card? Thus, the achievements were born. This was such a good idea. It would have been a great idea, if I have come up with it about two months earlier... When I came up with these ideas, I had about 2 weeks to implement them. Version 1 of the app was, basically, a pure consumption app. We provided data and centralized it. With version 2, the app became a much more interactive experience. The API was not ready for this change in such a short period of time. Most of this became apparent when I started implementing the achievements. The achievements based on count and specific person when fairly easy. The problem came with tying them to locations and events. This took some true SQL kung fu. This also showed me the rookie mistake of putting CST, not UTC, in the database. Once I got all of that cleaned up, I had to find a way to get the achievement system to talk to the phone. I knew I needed to be able to dynamically add achievements. I wouldn't know the precise location of some things until I got to Houston. I wanted the server to approve the achievements. This, unfortunately, required a decent data connection. Some achievements required GPS levels of location accuracy in areas of network triangulation. All of this became a huge nightmare. My flagship feature was based on some silly assumptions. Still, I managed to get 31 people to get the first achievement (Make 1 Connection.) Quite a few of those managed to get to the higher levels. Soon, I will post a list of the feature and changes that need to happen to the API. This includes things like proper objects for communication, geo-fencing, and caching. However, that is for another day.

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• Liskov Substitution Principle and the Oft Forgot Third Wheel

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) is a principle of object oriented programming that many might be familiar with from the SOLID principles mnemonic from Uncle Bob Martin. The principle highlights the relationship between a type and its subtypes, and, according to Wikipedia, is defined by Barbara Liskov and Jeanette Wing as the following principle:   Let be a property provable about objects of type . Then should be provable for objects of type where is a subtype of .   Rectangles gonna rectangulate The iconic example of this principle is illustrated with the relationship between a rectangle and a square. Let’s say we have a class named Rectangle that had a property to set width and a property to set its height. 1: Public Class Rectangle 2: Overridable Property Width As Integer 3: Overridable Property Height As Integer 4: End Class   We all at some point here that inheritance mocks an “IS A” relationship, and by gosh we all know square IS A rectangle. So let’s make a square class that inherits from rectangle. However, squares do maintain the same length on every side, so let’s override and add that behavior. 1: Public Class Square 2: Inherits Rectangle 3:  4: Private _sideLength As Integer 5:  6: Public Overrides Property Width As Integer 7: Get 8: Return _sideLength 9: End Get 10: Set(value As Integer) 11: _sideLength = value 12: End Set 13: End Property 14:  15: Public Overrides Property Height As Integer 16: Get 17: Return _sideLength 18: End Get 19: Set(value As Integer) 20: _sideLength = value 21: End Set 22: End Property 23: End Class   Now, say we had the following test: 1: Public Sub SetHeight_DoesNotAffectWidth(rectangle As Rectangle) 2: 'arrange 3: Dim expectedWidth = 4 4: rectangle.Width = 4 5:  6: 'act 7: rectangle.Height = 7 8:  9: 'assert 10: Assert.AreEqual(expectedWidth, rectangle.Width) 11: End Sub   If we pass in a rectangle, this test passes just fine. What if we pass in a square?   This is where we see the violation of Liskov’s Principle! A square might "IS A” to a rectangle, but we have differing expectations on how a rectangle should function than how a square should! Great expectations Here’s where we pat ourselves on the back and take a victory lap around the office and tell everyone about how we understand LSP like a boss. And all is good… until we start trying to apply it to our work. If I can’t even change functionality on a simple setter without breaking the expectations on a parent class, what can I do with subtyping? Did Liskov just tell me to never touch subtyping again? The short answer: NO, SHE DIDN’T. When I first learned LSP, and from those I’ve talked with as well, I overlooked a very important but not appropriately stressed quality of the principle: our expectations. Our inclination is to want a logical catch-all, where we can easily apply this principle and wipe our hands, drop the mic and exit stage left. That’s not the case because in every different programming scenario, our expectations of the parent class or type will be different. We have to set reasonable expectations on the behaviors that we expect out of the parent, then make sure that those expectations are met by the child. Any expectations not explicitly expected of the parent aren’t expected of the child either, and don’t register as a violation of LSP that prevents implementation. You can see the flexibility mentioned in the Wikipedia article itself: A typical example that violates LSP is a Square class that derives from a Rectangle class, assuming getter and setter methods exist for both width and height. The Square class always assumes that the width is equal with the height. If a Square object is used in a context where a Rectangle is expected, unexpected behavior may occur because the dimensions of a Square cannot (or rather should not) be modified independently. This problem cannot be easily fixed: if we can modify the setter methods in the Square class so that they preserve the Square invariant (i.e., keep the dimensions equal), then these methods will weaken (violate) the postconditions for the Rectangle setters, which state that dimensions can be modified independently. Violations of LSP, like this one, may or may not be a problem in practice, depending on the postconditions or invariants that are actually expected by the code that uses classes violating LSP. Mutability is a key issue here. If Square and Rectangle had only getter methods (i.e., they were immutable objects), then no violation of LSP could occur. What this means is that the above situation with a rectangle and a square can be acceptable if we do not have the expectation for width to leave height unaffected, or vice-versa, in our application. Conclusion – the oft forgot third wheel Liskov Substitution Principle is meant to act as a guidance and warn us against unexpected behaviors. Objects can be stateful and as a result we can end up with unexpected situations if we don’t code carefully. Specifically when subclassing, make sure that the subclass meets the expectations held to its parent. Don’t let LSP think you cannot deviate from the behaviors of the parent, but understand that LSP is meant to highlight the importance of not only the parent and the child class, but also of the expectations WE set for the parent class and the necessity of meeting those expectations in order to help prevent sticky situations.   Code examples, in both VB and C# Technorati Tags: LSV,Liskov Substitution Principle,Uncle Bob,Robert Martin,Barbara Liskov,Liskov

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• Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration

  - by Kiran Mundy

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration A typical implementation pattern we’re seeing with Fusion Apps early adopters is implementing a few Fusion HCM applications that bring the most benefit to their company with the least disruption to existing programs and interfaces. Very often this ends up being Fusion Goals & Performance, Talent, Compensation or Benefits, often with Taleo for recruiting. The implementation picture looks like what you see below: Here, you can see that all the “downstream integrations” from the On-Premise Core HR, are unaffected because the master for employee data is still your On-Premise Core HR system – all updates and new hires are made here (although they may be fed in from Taleo to start with). As a second phase when customers migrate Core HR to Fusion HCM, they have to come up with a strategy to manage integrations to all their downstream applications that require employee details. For customers coming from EBS HR, a short term strategy that allows for minimal impact, is to extract employee data from Fusion (Via HCM Extract), and load the shared EBS HR tables (which are part of an EBS Financials install anyways), and let your downstream integrations continue to function based on this data as shown below. If you are not coming from EBS HR and there are license implications, you may want to consider: Creating an On-Premise warehouse for extracting data from Fusion Apps. Leveraging Fusion Apps Web Services (available to SaaS customers starting R7) to directly retrieve/write data to Fusion Apps. Integration Tools File Based Loader This is the primary mechanism for loading HCM data (both initial load and incremental updates) into Fusion HCM. Employee & related data can be uploaded into Fusion HCM using File Based Loader. Note that ability to schedule File Based Loader to run on a pre-defined schedule will be available as a patch on top of Rel 5. Hr2Hr has been deprecated in favor of File Based Loader, but for existing customers using Hr2Hr, here are some sample scripts that show how to get more informative error messages. They can be run by creating data model sql queries in BI Publisher. The scripts currently have hard coded values for request id and loader batch id, which your developer will need to update to the correct values for you. The BI Publisher Training Session recorded on Apr 18th is available here (under "Recordings"). This will enable a somewhat technical resource to create a data model sql query. Links to Documentation & Traning Reference documentation for File Based Loader on docs.oracle.com FBL 1.1 MOS Doc Id 1533860.1 Sample demo data files for File Based Loader HCM SaaS Integrations ppt and recording. EBS api's Loading Information into EBS Full or Shared HCM This could be candidate information being loaded from Taleo into EBS or  Employee information being loaded from Fusion HCM into an EBS shared HR install (for downstream applications & EBS Financials). Oracle HRMS Product Family Publicly Callable Business Process APIs (A Reference Consolidation) [ID 216838.1] This is a guide to the EBS R12 Integration Repository accessible from an EBS instance. EBS HRMS Publicly Callable Business Process APIs in Release 11i & 12 [ID 121964.1] Fusion HCM Extract Fusion HCM Extract is the primary mechanism used to extract employee information from Fusion HCM. Refer to the "Configure Identity Sync" doc on MOS  for additional mechanisms. Additional documentation (you'll need an oracle.com account to access) HCM Extracts User Guides (Rel 4 & 5) HCM Extract Entity/Attributes (Rel 5) HCM Extract User Guide (Rel 5) If you don’t have an oracle.com account, download the zipped HCM Extract Rel 5 Docs (Click on File --> Download on next screen). View Training Recordings on Fusion HCM Extract Benefits Extract To setup the benefits extract, refer to the following guide. Page 2-15 of the User Documentation describes how to use the benefits extract. Benefit enrollments can also be uploaded into Fusion Benefits. Instructions are here along with a sample upload file. However, if the defined benefits extract does not meet your requirements, you can use BI Publisher (Link to BI Publisher presentation recording from Apr 18th) to create your own version of Benefits extract. You can start with the data model query underlying the benefits extract. Payroll Interface Fusion Payroll Interface enables you to capture personal payroll information, such as earnings and deductions, along with other data from Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management, and send that information to a third-party payroll provider. Documentation: Payroll interface guide Sample file DBI's used for the payroll interface.Usage Patterns always accessible @ http://www.finapps.com 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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Do Not Optimize Without Measuring

  - by Alois Kraus

  Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or even better under a profiler. The first rule of the performance club is not to think and then to optimize but to measure, think and then optimize. The second rule is to do this do this in a loop to prevent slipping in bad things for too long into your code base. If you skip for some reason the measure step and optimize directly it is like changing the wave function in quantum mechanics. This has no observable effect in our world since it does represent only a probability distribution of all possible values. In quantum mechanics you need to let the wave function collapse to a single value. A collapsed wave function has therefore not many but one distinct value. This is what we physicists call a measurement. If you optimize your application without measuring it you are just changing the probability distribution of your potential performance values. Which performance your application actually has is still unknown. You only know that it will be within a specific range with a certain probability. As usual there are unlikely values within your distribution like a startup time of 20 minutes which should only happen once in 100 000 years. 100 000 years are a very short time when the first customer tries your heavily distributed networking application to run over a slow WIFI network… What is the point of this? Every programmer/architect has a mental performance model in his head. A model has always a set of explicit preconditions and a lot more implicit assumptions baked into it. When the model is good it will help you to think of good designs but it can also be the source of problems. In real world systems not all assumptions of your performance model (implicit or explicit) hold true any longer. The only way to connect your performance model and the real world is to measure it. In the WIFI example the model did assume a low latency high bandwidth LAN connection. If this assumption becomes wrong the system did have a drastic change in startup time. Lets look at a example. Lets assume we want to cache some expensive UI resource like fonts objects. For this undertaking we do create a Cache class with the UI themes we want to support. Since Fonts are expensive objects we do create it on demand the first time the theme is requested. A simple example of a Theme cache might look like this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Drawing; struct Theme { public Color Color; public Font Font; } static class ThemeCache { static Dictionary<string, Theme> _Cache = new Dictionary<string, Theme> { {"Default", new Theme { Color = Color.AliceBlue }}, {"Theme12", new Theme { Color = Color.Aqua }}, }; public static Theme Get(string theme) { Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } return cached; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Theme item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); } } This cache does create font objects only once since on first retrieve of the Theme object the font is added to the Theme object. When we let the application run it should print “Creating new font” only once. Right? Wrong! The vigilant readers have spotted the issue already. The creator of this cache class wanted to get maximum performance. So he decided that the Theme object should be a value type (struct) to not put too much pressure on the garbage collector. The code Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } does work with a copy of the value stored in the dictionary. This means we do mutate a copy of the Theme object and return it to our caller. But the original Theme object in the dictionary will have always null for the Font field! The solution is to change the declaration of struct Theme to class Theme or to update the theme object in the dictionary. Our cache as it is currently is actually a non caching cache. The funny thing was that I found out with a profiler by looking at which objects where finalized. I found way too many font objects to be finalized. After a bit debugging I found the allocation source for Font objects was this cache. Since this cache was there for years it means that the cache was never needed since I found no perf issue due to the creation of font objects. the cache was never profiled if it did bring any performance gain. to make the cache beneficial it needs to be accessed much more often. That was the story of the non caching cache. Next time I will write something something about measuring.

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• Supporting users if they're not on your site

  - by Roger Hart

  Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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• SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – 5 Videos from Joes 2 Pros Series – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433

  - by pinaldave

  Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Learning series is indeed fun. Joes 2 Pros series is written for beginners and who wants to build expertise for SQL Server programming and development from fundamental. In the beginning of the series author Rick Morelan is not shy to explain the simplest concept of how to open SQL Server Management Studio. Honestly the book starts with that much basic but as it progresses further Rick discussing about various advanced concepts from query tuning to Core Architecture. This five part series is written with keeping SQL Server Exam 70-433. Instead of just focusing on what will be there in exam, this series is focusing on learning the important concepts thoroughly. This book no way take short cut to explain any concepts and at times, will go beyond the topic at length. The best part is that all the books has many companion videos explaining the concepts and videos. Every Wednesday I like to post a video which explains something in quick few seconds. Today we will go over five videos which I posted in my earlier posts related to Joes 2 Pros series. Introduction to XML Data Type Methods – SQL in Sixty Seconds #015 The XML data type was first introduced with SQL Server 2005. This data type continues with SQL Server 2008 where expanded XML features are available, most notably is the power of the XQuery language to analyze and query the values contained in your XML instance. There are five XML data type methods available in SQL Server 2008: query() – Used to extract XML fragments from an XML data type. value() – Used to extract a single value from an XML document. exist() – Used to determine if a specified node exists. Returns 1 if yes and 0 if no. modify() – Updates XML data in an XML data type. node() – Shreds XML data into multiple rows (not covered in this blog post). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Error Actions – SQL in Sixty Seconds #014 Most people believe that when SQL Server encounters an error severity level 11 or higher the remaining SQL statements will not get executed. In addition, people also believe that if any error severity level of 11 or higher is hit inside an explicit transaction, then the whole statement will fail as a unit. While both of these beliefs are true 99% of the time, they are not true in all cases. It is these outlying cases that frequently cause unexpected results in your SQL code. To understand how to achieve consistent results you need to know the four ways SQL Error Actions can react to error severity levels 11-16: Statement Termination – The statement with the procedure fails but the code keeps on running to the next statement. Transactions are not affected. Scope Abortion – The current procedure, function or batch is aborted and the next calling scope keeps running. That is, if Stored Procedure A calls B and C, and B fails, then nothing in B runs but A continues to call C. @@Error is set but the procedure does not have a return value. Batch Termination – The entire client call is terminated. XACT_ABORT – (ON = The entire client call is terminated.) or (OFF = SQL Server will choose how to handle all errors.) [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – SQL in Sixty Seconds #013 Query hints specify that the indicated hints should be used throughout the query. Query hints affect all operators in the statement and are implemented using the OPTION clause. Cautionary Note: Because the SQL Server Query Optimizer typically selects the best execution plan for a query, it is highly recommended that hints be used as a last resort for experienced developers and database administrators to achieve the desired results. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Hierarchical Query – SQL in Sixty Seconds #012 A CTE can be thought of as a temporary result set and are similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. A CTE is generally considered to be more readable than a derived table and does not require the extra effort of declaring a Temp Table while providing the same benefits to the user. However; a CTE is more powerful than a derived table as it can also be self-referencing, or even referenced multiple times in the same query. A recursive CTE requires four elements in order to work properly: Anchor query (runs once and the results ‘seed’ the Recursive query) Recursive query (runs multiple times and is the criteria for the remaining results) UNION ALL statement to bind the Anchor and Recursive queries together. INNER JOIN statement to bind the Recursive query to the results of the CTE. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Server Security – SQL in Sixty Seconds #011 Let’s get some basic definitions down first. Take the workplace example where “Tom” needs “Read” access to the “Financial Folder”. What are the Securable, Principal, and Permissions from that last sentence? A Securable is a resource that someone might want to access (like the Financial Folder). A Principal is anything that might want to gain access to the securable (like Tom). A Permission is the level of access a principal has to a securable (like Read). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Please leave a comment explain which one was your favorite video as that will help me understand what works and what needs improvement. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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• Backpacks and Booth Paint: TechEd 2012

  - by The Un-T Guy

  Arriving in the parking lot of the Orange County Convention Center, I immediately knew I was in the right place. As far as the eye could see, the acres of asphalt were awash in backpacks, quirky (to be kind) outfits, and bad haircuts. This was the place. This was Microsoft Mecca v2012 for geeks and nerds, the Central Florida event of the year, a gathering of high tech professionals whose skills I both greatly respect and, frankly, fear a little. I was wholly and completely out of element, a dork in a vast sea of geek jumbo. It like was wearing dockers and a golf shirt walking into a RenFaire, but one with really crappy costumes and no turkey legs...save those attached to some of the attendees. Of course the corporate whores...errrr, vendors were in place, ready to parlay the convention's fre-nerd-ic energy into millions of dollars by convincing the big-brained and under-sexed in the crowd (i.e., virtually all of them...present company excluded, of course) that their product or service was the only thing standing between them and professional success, industry fame, and clear skin. "With KramTech 2012," they seemed to scream, "you will be THE ROCK STAR of your company's IT department!" As car shows and tattoo parlors learned long ago, Tech companies seem to believe that the best way to attract the attention of this crowd is through the hint of the promise of sex. They recruit and deploy an army of "sales reps" whose primary qualifications appear to be long hair, short skirts, high heels, and a vagina. Unlike their distant cousins in the car and body art industries, however, this sub-species of booth paint (semi-gloss decoration that adds nothing to the substance of the product) seems torn between committing to being all-out sex objects and recognition that they are in the presence of intelligent, discerning people. People who are smart enough to know exactly what these vendors are doing. Also unlike their distant car show and tattoo shop cousins, these young women (what…are there no gay tech professionals who could use some eye candy?) seem to realize that while IT remains a male-dominated field, there are ever-increasing numbers of intelligent, capable, strong professional women – women who’ve battled to make it in this field through hard work and work performance rather than a hard body and performing after work. This is not to say that all of the young female sales reps are there only because of their physical attributes. Many are competent, intelligent, and driven -- not to mention attractive. They're working hard on the front lines of delivering the next generation of technology. The distinction is pretty clear, however, between these young professionals and the booth paint. The former enthusiastically deliver credible information about the products they’re hawking. The latter are positioned in the aisles, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they struggle to operate the badge readers. Surprisingly, not all of the women in attendance seemed to object to the objectification of their younger sisters. One IT professional woman who came of age in the industry (mostly in IT marketing) said, “I have no problem with it. I was a ‘booth babe’ for years and it doesn’t bother me at all.” Others, however, weren’t quite so gracious. One woman I spoke with, an IT manager from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said it was demeaning and frankly, as more and more women grow into IT management positions, not a great marketing idea. “Using these young women is, to me, no different than vendors giving out t-shirts to attract attention. It’s sad because it’s still hard for a woman to be respected in the IT field and this just perpetuates the outdated notion that IT is a male-dominated field.” She went on to say that decisions by vendors to employ these young women in this “inappropriate way” could impact her purchasing decisions. “I might be swayed toward a vendor who has women on staff who are intelligent and dynamic rather than the vendors who use the ‘decoration’ girls.” So in many ways, the IT industry is no different than most other industries as it struggles to maximize performance by finding and developing talent – all of the talent, not just the 50% with a penis. Women in IT, like their brethren, struggle to find their niche in the field, to grow professionally, and reach for the brass ring, struggling to overcome obstacles as they climb the mountain of professional success in a never-ending cycle of economic uncertainty. But as (generally) well-educated and highly-trained professionals, they are probably better positioned than those in many other industries. Beside, they’ve got one other advantage over their non-IT counterparts as they attempt their ascent to the summit: They’ve already got the backpacks.

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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• client problems - misaligned expectations & not following SDLC protocols

  - by louism

  hi guys, im having some serious problems with a client on a project - i could use some advice please the short version i have been working with this client now for almost 6 months without any problems (a classified website project in the range of 500 hours) over the last few days things have drastically deteriorated to the point where ive had to place the project on-hold whilst i work-out what to do (this has pissed the client off even more) to be simplistic, the root cause of the issue is this: the client doesnt read the specs i make for him, i code the feature, he than wants to change things, i tell him its not to the agreed spec and that that change will have to be postponed and possibly charged for, he gets upset and rants saying 'hes paid for the feature' and im not keeping to the agreement (<- misalignment of expectations) i think the root cause of the root cause is my clients failure to take my SDLC protocols seriously. i have a bug tracking system in place which he practically refuses to use (he still emails me bugs), he doesnt seem to care to much for the protocols i use for dealing with scope creep and change control the whole situation came to a head recently where he 'cracked it' (an aussie term for being fed-up). the more terms like 'postponed for post-launch implementation', 'costed feature addition', and 'not to agreed spec' i kept using, the worse it got finally, he began to bully me - basically insisting i shut-up and do the work im being paid for. i wrote a long-winded email explaining how wrong he was on all these different points, and explaining what all the SDLC protocols do to protect the success of the project. than i deleted that email and wrote a new one in the new email, i suggested as a solution i write up a list of grievances we both had. we than review the list and compromise on different points: he gets some things he wants, i get some things i want. sometimes youve got to give ground to get ground his response to this suggestion was flat-out refusal, and a restatement that i should just get on with the work ive been paid to do so there you have the very subjective short version. if you have the time and inclination, the long version may be a little less bias as it has the email communiques between me and my client the long version (with background) the long version works by me showing you the email communiques which lead to the situation coming to a head. so here it is, judge for yourself where the trouble started... 1. client asked me why something was missing from a feature i just uploaded, my response was to show him what was in the spec: it basically said the item he was looking for was never going to be included 2. [clients response...] Memo Louis, We are following your own title fields and keeping a consistent layout. Why the big fuss about not adding "Part". It simply replaces "model" and is consistent with your current title fields. 3. [my response...] hi [client], the 'part' field appeared to me as a redundancy / mistake. i requested clarification but never received any in a timely manner (about 2 weeks ago) the specification for this feature also indicated it wasnt going to be included: RE: "Why the big fuss about not adding "Part" " it may not appear so, but it would actually be a lot of work for me to now add a 'Part' field it could take me up to 15-20 minutes to properly explain why its such a big undertaking to do this, but i would prefer to use that time instead to work on completing your v1.1 features as a simplistic explanation - it connects to the change in paradigm from a 'generic classified ad' model to a 'specific attributes for specific categories' model basically, i am saying it is a big fuss, but i understand that it doesnt look that way - after all, it is just one ity-bitty field :) if you require a fuller explanation, please let me know and i will commit the time needed to write that out also, if you recall when we first started on the project, i said that with the effort/time required for features, you would likely not know off the top of your head. you may think something is really complex, but in reality its quite simple, you might think something is easy - but it could actually be a massive trauma to code (which is the case here with the 'Part' field). if you also recalled, i said the best course of action is to just ask, and i would let you know on a case-by-case basis 4. [email from me to client...] hi [client], the online catalogue page is now up live (see my email from a few days ago for information on how it works) note: the window of opportunity for input/revisions on what data the catalogue stores has now closed (as i have put the code up live now) RE: the UI/layout of the online catalogue page you may still do visual/ui tweaks to the page at the moment (this window for input/revisions will close in a couple of days time) 5. [email from client to me...] *(note: i had put up the feature & asked the client to review it, never heard back from them for a few days)* Memo Louis, Here you go again. CLOSED without a word of input from the customer. I don't think so. I will reply tomorrow regarding the content and functionality we require from this feature. 5. [from me to client...] hi [client]: RE: from my understanding, you are saying that the mini-sale yard control would change itself based on the fact someone was viewing for parts & accessories <- is that correct? this change is outside the scope of the v1.1 mini-spec and therefore will need to wait 'til post launch for costing/implementation 6. [email from client to me...] Memo Louis, Following your v1.1 mini-spec and all your time paid in full for the work selected. We need to make the situation clear. There will be no further items held for post-launch. Do not expect us to pay for any further items other than those we have agreed upon. You have undertaken to complete the Parts and accessories feature as follows. Obviously, as part of this process the "mini search" will be effected, and will require "adaption to make sense". 7. [email from me to client...] hi [client], RE: "There will be no further items held for post-launch. Do not expect us to pay for any further items other than those we have agreed upon." a few points to consider: 1) the specification for the 'parts & accessories' feature was as follows: (i.e. [what] "...we have agreed upon.") 2) you have received the 'parts & accessories' feature free of charge (you have paid $0 for it). ive spent two days coding that feature as a gesture of good will i would request that you please consider these two facts carefully and sincerely 8. [email from client to me...] Memo Louis, I don't see how you are giving us anything for free. From your original fee proposal you have deleted more than 30 hours of included features. Your title "shelved features". Further you have charged us twice by adding back into the site, at an addition cost, some of those "shelved features" features. See v1.1 mini-spec. Did include in your original fee proposal a change request budget but then charge without discussion items included in v1.1 mini-spec. Included a further Features test plan for a regression test, a fee of 10 hours that would not have been required if the "shelved features" were not left out of the agreed fee proposal. I have made every attempt to satisfy your your uneven business sense by offering you everything your heart desired, in the v1.1 mini-spec, to be left once again with your attitude of "its too hard, lets leave it for post launch". I am no longer accepting anything less than what we have contracted you to do. That is clearly defined in v1.1 mini-spec, and you are paid in advance for delivering those items as an acceptable function. a few notes about the above email... i had to cull features from the original spec because it didnt fit into the budget. i explained this to the client at the start of the project (he wanted more features than he had budget hours to do them all) nothing has been charged for twice, i didnt charge the client for culled features. im charging him to now do those culled features the draft version of the project schedule included a change request budget of 10 hours, but i had to remove that to meet the budget (the client may not have been aware of this to be fair to them) what the client refers to as my attitude of 'too hard/leave it for post-launch', i called a change request protocol and a method for keeping scope creep under control 9. [email from me to client...] hi [client], RE: "...all your grievances..." i had originally written out a long email response; it was fantastic, it had all these great points of how 'you were wrong' and 'i was right', you would of loved it (and by 'loved it', i mean it would of just infuriated you more) so, i decided to deleted it start over, for two reasons: 1) a long email is being disrespectful of your time (youre a busy businessman with things to do) 2) whos wrong or right gets us no closer to fixing the problems we are experiencing what i propose is this... i prepare a bullet point list of your grievances and my grievances (yes, im unhappy too about how things are going - and it has little to do with money) i submit this list to you for you to add to as necessary we then both take a good hard look at this list, and we decide which areas we are willing to give ground on as an example, the list may look something like this: "louis, you keep taking away features you said you would do" [your grievance 2] [your grievance 3] [your grievance ...] "[client], i feel you dont properly read the specs i prepare for you..." [my grievance 2] [my grievance 3] [my grievance ...] if you are willing to give this a try, let me know will it work? who knows. but if it doesnt, we can always go back to arguing some more :) obviously, this will only work if you are willing to give it a genuine try, and you can accept that you may have to 'give some ground to get some ground' what do you think? 10. [email from client to me ...] Memo Louis, Instead of wasting your time listing grievances, I would prefer you complete the items in v1.1 mini-spec, to a satisfactory conclusion. We almost had the website ready for launch until you brought the v1.1 mini-spec into the frame. Obviously I expected you could complete the v1.1 mini-spec in a two-week time frame as you indicated and give the site a more profession presentation. Most of the problems have been caused by you not following our instructions, but deciding to do what you feel like at the time. And then arguing with us how the missing information is not necessary. For instance "Parts and Accessories". Why on earth would you leave out the parts heading, when it ties-in with the fields you have already developed. It replaces "model" and is just as important in the context of information that appears in the "Details" panel. We are at a stage where the the v1.1 mini-spec needs to be completed without further time wasting and the site is complete (subject to all features working). We are on standby at this end to do just that. Let me know when you are back, working on the site and we will process and complete each v1.1 mini-spec, item by item, until the job is complete. 11. [last email from me to client...] hi [client], based on this reply, and your demonstrated unwillingness to compromise/give any ground on issues at hand, i have decided to place your project on-hold for the moment i will be considering further options on how to over-come our challenges over the next few days i will contact you by monday 17/may to discuss any new options i have come up with, and if i believe it is appropriate to restart work on your project at that point or not told you it was long... what do you think?

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• 3 Ways to Make Steam Even Faster

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Have you ever noticed how slow Steam’s built-in web browser can be? Do you struggle with slow download speeds? Or is Steam just slow in general? These tips will help you speed it up. Steam isn’t a game itself, so there are no 3D settings to change to achieve maximum performance. But there are some things you can do to speed it up dramatically. Speed Up the Steam Web Browser Steam’s built-in web browser — used in both the Steam store and in Steam’s in-game overlay to provide a web browser you can quickly use within games – can be frustratingly slow on many systems. Rather than the typical speed we’ve come to expect from Chrome, Firefox, or even Internet Explorer, Steam seems to struggle. When you click a link or go to a new page, there’s a noticeable delay before the new page appears — something that doesn’t happen in desktop browsers. Many people seem to have made peace with this slowness, accepting that Steam’s built-in browser is just bad. However, there’s a trick that will eliminate this delay on many systems and make the Steam web browser fast. This problem seems to arise from an incompatibility with the Automatically Detect Proxy Settings option, which is enabled by default on Windows. This is a compatibility option that very few people should actually need, so it’s safe to disable it. To disable this option, open the Internet Options dialog — press the Windows key to access the Start menu or Start screen, type Internet Options, and click the Internet Options shortcut. Select the Connections tab in the Internet Options window and click the LAN settings button. Uncheck the Automatically detect settings option here, then click OK to save your settings. If you experienced a significant delay every time a web page loaded in Steam’s web browser, it should now be gone. In the unlikely event that you encounter some sort of problem with your network connection, you could always re-enable this option. Increase Steam’s Game Download Speed Steam attempts to automatically select the nearest download server to your location. However, it may not always select the ideal download server. Or, in the case of high-traffic events like big seasonal sales and huge game launches, you may benefit from selecting a less-congested server. To do this, open Steam’s settings by clicking the Steam menu in Steam and selecting Settings. Click over to the Downloads tab and select the closest download server from the Download Region box. You should also ensure that Steam’s download bandwidth isn’t limited from here. You may want to restart Steam and see if your download speeds improve after changing this setting. In some cases, the closest server might not be the fastest. One a bit farther away could be faster if your local server is more congested, for example. Steam once provided information about content server load, which allowed you to select a regional server that wasn’t under high-load, but this information no longer seems to be available. Steam still provides a page that shows you the amount of download activity happening in different regions, including statistics about the difference in download speeds in different US states, but this information isn’t as useful. Accelerate Steam and Your Games One way to speed up all your games — and Steam itself —  is by getting a solid-state drive and installing Steam to it. Steam allows you to easily move your Steam folder — at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam by default — to another hard drive. Just move it like you would any other folder. You can then launch the Steam.exe program as if you had never moved Steam’s files. Steam also allows you to configure multiple game library folders. This means that you can set up a Steam library folder on a solid-state drive and one on your larger magnetic hard drive. Install your most frequently played games to the solid-state drive for maximum speed and your less frequently played ones to the slower magnetic hard drive to save SSD space. To set up additional library folders, open Steam’s Settings window and click the Downloads tab. You’ll find the Steam Library Folders option here. Click the Add Library Folder button and create a new game library on another hard drive. When you install a game in Steam, you’ll be asked which library folder you want to install it to. With the proxy compatibility option disabled, the correct download server chosen, and Steam installed to a fast SSD, it should be a speed demon. There’s not much more you can do to speed up Steam, short of upgrading other hardware like your computer’s CPU. Image Credit: Andrew Nash on Flickr     

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• Web Site Performance and Assembly Versioning – Part 2 Versioning Combined Files Using Subversion

  - by capgpilk

  Ok so it took a while to post this second part. Many apologies, we had a big roll out of a new platform at work and many things had to get sidelined. So this is the second part in a short series of website performance and using versioning to help improve it. Minification and Concatination of JavaScript and CSS Files Versioning Combined Files Using Subversion – this post Versioning Combined Files Using Mercurial – published shortly In the previous post we used AjaxMin to shrink js and css files then concatenated them into one file each which had the file name of site-script.combined.min.js and site-style.combined.min.css. These file names are fine, but you can configure IIS 7 to cache these static files and so lower the amount of data transferred between server and client. This is done by editing the response headers in IIS. 1. In IIS7 Manager, choose the directory where these files are located and select HTTP Response Headers. 2. Check the Expire Web Content and set a time period well into the future. 3. When refreshing the web page, the server will respond with HTTP 304 forcing the browser to retrieve the file from its cache. 4. As can be seen in FireBug, the Cache-Control header has a max age of 31536000 seconds which equates to 365 days.   The server will always send this HTTP 304 message unless the file changes forcing it to send new content. To help force this we can change the file name based on the latest build using the SVN revision number in the filename. So we have lowered data transfer on content that hasn’t changed, but forced it to be sent when you have made a change to the css or js files. Now to get the SVN revision number in to the file name. 1. Import the MSBuildCommunityTasks targets which can be dowloaded from here. 1: <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath) 2: \MSBuildCommunityTasks 3: \MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets" /> 2. Edit the BeforeBuild target to call out to svn and get the latest revision 1: <SvnVersion LocalPath="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)" 2: ToolPath="$(ProgramFiles)\VisualSVN Server\bin"> 3: <Output TaskParameter="Revision" PropertyName="Revision" /> 4: </SvnVersion> 3. Set it to update the project AssemblyInfo.cs file for the svn revision. 1: <FileUpdate Files="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" 2: Regex="(\d+)\.(\d+)\.(\d+)\.(\d+)" 3: ReplacementText="$1.$2.$3.$(Revision)" /> 4. Now edit the AfterBuild target to get the full dll version. You could combine these two steps and just get the version from svn, I am working on one project that updates the AssemblyInfo file and another project that allows manual editing of the file, but needs that version within the file name; so I just combined the two for this post. 1: <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Framework.Assembly 2: TaskAction="GetInfo" 3: NetAssembly="$(OutputPath)\mydll.dll"> 4: <Output TaskParameter="OutputItems" ItemName="Info" /> 5: </MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Framework.Assembly> 6: <Message Text="Version: %(Info.AssemblyVersion)" 7: Importance="High" /> 5. Use this Info.AssemblyVersion to write out the combined css and js files as described in the last post. 1: <WriteLinestoFile File="Scripts\site-%(Info.AssemblyVersion).combined.min.js" 2: Lines="@(JSLinesSite)" Overwrite="true" />   In the next post I will cover doing the same, but for a Mercurial repository.

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

  - by AjarnMark

  I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

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• A Semantic Model For Html: TagBuilder and HtmlTags

  - by Ryan Ohs

  In this post I look into the code smell that is HTML literals and show how we can refactor these pesky strings into a friendlier and more maintainable model.   The Problem When I started writing MVC applications, I quickly realized that I built a lot of my HTML inside HtmlHelpers. As I did this, I ended up moving quite a bit of HTML into string literals inside my helper classes. As I wanted to add more attributes (such as classes) to my tags, I needed to keep adding overloads to my helpers. A good example of this end result is the default html helpers that come with the MVC framework. Too many overloads make me crazy! The problem with all these overloads is that they quickly muck up the API and nobody can remember exactly what order the parameters go in. I've seen many presenters (including members of the ASP.NET MVC team!) stumble before realizing that their view wasn't compiling because they needed one more null parameter in the call to Html.ActionLink(). What if instead of writing Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", null, new { @class = "navigation" }) we could do Html.LinkToAction("Edit").Text("Edit").AddClass("navigation") ? Wouldn't that be much easier to remember and understand?  We can do this if we introduce a semantic model for building our HTML.   What is a Semantic Model? According to Martin Folwer, "a semantic model is an in-memory representation, usually an object model, of the same subject that the domain specific language describes." In our case, the model would be a set of classes that know how to render HTML. By using a semantic model we can free ourselves from dealing with strings and instead output the HTML (typically via ToString()) once we've added all the elements and attributes we desire to the model. There are two primary semantic models available in ASP.NET MVC: MVC 2.0's TagBuilder and FubuMVC's HtmlTags.   TagBuilder TagBuilder is the html builder that is available in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I'm not a huge fan but it gets the job done -- for simple jobs.  Here's an overview of how to use TagBuilder. See my Tips section below for a few comments on that example. The disadvantage of TagBuilder is that unless you wrap it up with our own classes, you still have to write the actual tag name over and over in your code. eg. new TagBuilder("div") instead of new DivTag(). I also think it's method names are a little too long. Why not have AddClass() instead of AddCssClass() or Text() instead of SetInnerText()? What those methods are doing should be pretty obvious even in the short form. I also don't like that it wants to generate an id attribute from your input instead of letting you set it yourself using external conventions. (See GenerateId() and IdAttributeDotReplacement)). Obviously these come from Microsoft's default approach to MVC but may not be optimal for all programmers.   HtmlTags HtmlTags is in my opinion the much better option for generating html in ASP.NET MVC. It was actually written as a part of FubuMVC but is available as a stand alone library. HtmlTags provides a much cleaner syntax for writing HTML. There are classes for most of the major tags and it's trivial to create additional ones by inheriting from HtmlTag. There are also methods on each tag for the common attributes. For instance, FormTag has an Action() method. The SelectTag class allows you to set the default option or first option independent from adding other options. With TagBuilder there isn't even an abstraction for building selects! The project is open source and always improving. I'll hopefully find time to submit some of my own enhancements soon.   Tips 1) It's best not to have insanely overloaded html helpers. Use fluent builders. 2) In html helpers, return the TagBuilder/tag itself (not a string!) so that you can continue to add attributes outside the helper; see my first sample above. 3) Create a static entry point into your builders. I created a static Tags class that gives me access all the HtmlTag classes I need. This way I don't clutter my code with "new" keywords. eg. Tags.Div returns a new DivTag instance. 4) If you find yourself doing something a lot, create an extension method for it. I created a Nest() extension method that reads much more fluently than the AddChildren() method. It also accepts a params array of tags so I can very easily nest many children.   I hope you have found this post helpful. Join me in my war against HTML literals! I’ll have some more samples of how I use HtmlTags in future posts.

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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• Red Gate in the Community

  - by Nick Harrison

  Much has been said recently about Red Gate's community involvement and commitment to the DotNet community. Much of this has been unduly negative. Before you start throwing stones and spewing obscenities, consider some additional facts: Red Gate's software is actually very good. I have worked on many projects where Red Gate's software was instrumental in finishing successfully. Red Gate is VERY good to the community. I have spoken at many user groups and code camps where Red Gate has been a sponsor. Red Gate consistently offers up money to pay for the venue or food, and they will often give away licenses as door prizes. There are many such community events that would not take place without Red Gate's support. All I have ever seen them ask for is to have their products mentioned or be listed as a sponsor. They don't insist on anyone following a specific script. They don't monitor how their products are showcased. They let their products speak for themselves. Red Gate sponsors the Simple Talk web site. I publish there regularly. Red Gate has never exerted editorial pressure on me. No one has ever told me we can't publish this unless you mention Red Gate products. No one has ever said, you need to say nice things about Red Gate products in order to be published. They have told me, "you need to make this less academic, so you don't alienate too many readers. "You need to actually write an introduction so people will know what you are talking about". "You need to write this so that someone who isn't a reflection nut will follow what you are trying to say." In short, they have been good editors worried about the quality of the content and what the readers are likely to be interested in. For me personally, Red Gate and Simple Talk have both been excellent to work with. As for the developer outrage… I am a little embarrassed by so much of the response that I am seeing. So much of the complaints remind me of little children whining "but you promised" Semantics aside. A promise is just a promise. It's not like they "pinky sweared". Sadly no amount name calling or "double dog daring" will change the economics of the situation. Red Gate is not a multibillion dollar corporation. They are a mid size company doing the best they can. Without a doubt, their pockets are not as deep as Microsoft's. I honestly believe that they did try to make the "freemium" model work. Sadly it did not. I have no doubt that they intended for it to work and that they tried to make it work. I also have no doubt that they labored over making this decision. This could not have been an easy decision to make. Many people are gleefully proclaiming a massive backlash against Red Gate swearing off their wonderful products and promising to bash them at every opportunity from now on. This is childish behavior that does not represent professionals. This type of behavior is more in line with bullies in the school yard than professionals in a professional community. Now for my own prediction… This back lash against Red Gate is not likely to last very long. We will all realize that we still need their products. We may look around for alternatives, but realize that they really do have the best in class for every product that they produce, and that they really are not exorbitantly priced. We will see them sponsoring Code Camps and User Groups and be reminded, "hey this isn't such a bad company". On the other hand, software shops like Red Gate, will remember this back lash and give a second thought to supporting open source projects. They will worry about getting involved when an individual wants to turn over control for a product that they developed but can no longer support alone. Who wants to run the risk of not being able to follow through on their best intentions. In the end we may all suffer, even the toddlers among us throwing the temper tantrum, "BUT YOU PROMISED!" Disclaimer Before anyone asks or jumps to conclusions, I do not get paid by Red Gate to say any of this. I have often written about their products, and I have long thought that they are a wonderful company with amazing products. If they ever open an office in the SE United States, I will be one of the first to apply.

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• Inside Red Gate - Project teams

  - by Simon Cooper

  Within each division in Red Gate, development effort is structured around one or more project teams; currently, each division contains 2-3 separate teams. These are self contained units responsible for a particular development project. Project team structure The typical size of a development team varies, but is normally around 4-7 people - one project manager, two developers, one or two testers, a technical author (who is responsible for the text within the application, website content, and help documentation) and a user experience designer (who designs and prototypes the UIs) . However, team sizes can vary from 3 up to 12, depending on the division and project. As an rule, all the team sits together in the same area of the office. (Again, this is my experience of what happens. I haven't worked in the DBA division, and SQL Tools might have changed completely since I moved to .NET. As I mentioned in my previous post, each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit.) Depending on the project, and the other needs in the division, the tech author and UX designer may be shared between several projects. Generally, developers and testers work on one project at a time. If the project is a simple point release, then it might not need a UX designer at all. However, if it's a brand new product, then a UX designer and tech author will be involved right from the start. Developers, testers, and the project manager will normally stay together in the same team as they work on different projects, unless there's a good reason to split or merge teams for a particular project. Technical authors and UX designers will normally go wherever they are needed in the division, depending on what each project needs at the time. In my case, I was working with more or less the same people for over 2 years, all the way through SQL Compare 7, 8, and Schema Compare for Oracle. This helped to build a great sense of camaraderie wihin the team, and helped to form and maintain a team identity. This, in turn, meant we worked very well together, and so the final result was that much better (as well as making the work more fun). How is a project started and run? The product manager within each division collates user feedback and ideas, does lots of research, throws in a few ideas from people within the company, and then comes up with a list of what the division should work on in the next few years. This is split up into projects, and after each project is greenlit (I'll be discussing this later on) it is then assigned to a project team, as and when they become available (I'm sure there's lots of discussions and meetings at this point that I'm not aware of!). From that point, it's entirely up to the project team. Just as divisions are autonomous, project teams are also given a high degree of autonomy. All the teams in Red Gate use some sort of vaguely agile methodology; most use some variations on SCRUM, some have experimented with Kanban. Some store the project progress on a whiteboard, some use our bug tracker, others use different methods. It all depends on what the team members think will work best for them to get the best result at the end. From that point, the project proceeds as you would expect; code gets written, tests pass and fail, discussions about how to resolve various problems are had and decided upon, and out pops a new product, new point release, new internal tool, or whatever the project's goal was. The project manager ensures that everyone works together without too much bloodshed and that thrown missiles are constrained to Nerf bullets, the developers write the code, the testers ensure it actually works, and the tech author and UX designer ensure that people will be able to use the final product to solve their problem (after all, developers make lousy UI designers and technical authors). Projects in Red Gate last a relatively short amount of time; most projects are less than 6 months. The longest was 18 months. This has evolved as the company has grown, and I suspect is a side effect of the type of software Red Gate produces. As an ISV, we sell packaged software; we only get revenue when customers purchase the ready-made tools. As a result, we only get a sellable piece of software right at the end of a project. Therefore, the longer the project lasts, the more time and money has to be invested by the company before we get any revenue from it, and the riskier the project becomes. This drives the average project time down. Small project teams are the core of how Red Gate produces software, and are what the whole development effort of the company is built around. In my next post, I'll be looking at the office itself, and how all 200 of us manage to fit on two floors of a small office building.

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• Stand-Up Desk 2012 Update

  - by BuckWoody

  One of the more popular topics here on my technical blog doesn't have to do with technology, per-se - it's about the choice I made to go to a stand-up desk work environment. If you're interested in the history of those, check here: Stand-Up Desk Part One Stand-Up Desk Part Two I have made some changes and I was asked to post those here.Yes, I'm still standing - I think the experiment has worked well, so I'm continuing to work this way. I've become so used to it that I notice when I sit for a long time. If I'm flying, or driving a long way, or have long meetings, I take breaks to stand up and move around. That being said, I don't stand as much as I did. I started out by standing the entire day - which did not end well. As you can read in my second post, I found that sitting down for a few minutes each hour worked out much better. And over time I would say that I now stand about 70-80% of the day, depending on the day. Some days I don't even notice I'm standing, so I don't sit as often. Other days I find that I really tire quickly - so I sit more often. But in both cases, I stand more than I sit. In the first post you can read about how I used a simple coffee-table from Ikea to elevate my desktop to the right height. I then adjusted the height where I stand by using a small plastic square and some carpet. Over time I found this did not work as well as I'd like. The primary reason is that the front of these are at the same depth - so my knees would hit the desk or table when I sat down. Also, the desk was at a certain height, and I had to adjust, rather than the other way around.  Also, I like a lot of surface area on top of a desk - almost more of a table. Routing cables and wiring was a pain, and of course moving it was out of the question.   So I've changed what I use. I found a perfect solution for what I was looking for - industrial wire shelving: I bought one, built only half of it (for the right height I wanted) and arranged the shelves the way I wanted. I then got a 5'x4' piece of wood from Lowes, and mounted it to where the top was balanced, but had an over-hang  I could get my knees under easily.My wife sewed a piece of fake-leather for the top. This arrangement provides the following benefits: Very strong Rolls easily, wheels can lock to prevent rolling Long, wide shelves Wire-frame allows me to route any kind of wiring and other things all over the desk I plugged in my UPS and ran it's longer power-cable to the wall outlet. I then ran the router's LAN connection along that wire, and covered both with a large insulation sleeve. I then plugged in everything to the UPS, and routed all the wiring. I can now roll the desk almost anywhere in the room so that I can record, look out the window, get closer to or farther away from the door and more. I put a few boxes on the shelves as "drawers" and tidied that part up. Even my printer fits on a shelf. Laser-dog not included - some assembly required In the second post you can read about the bar-stool I purchased from Target for the desk. I cheaped-out on this one, and it proved to be a bad choice. Because I had to raise it so high, and was constantly sitting on it and then standing up, the gas-cylinder in it just gave out. So it became a very short stool that I ended up getting rid of. In the end, this one from Ikea proved to be a better choice: And so this arrangement is working out perfectly. I'm finding myself VERY productive this way. I hope these posts help you if you decide to try working at a stand-up desk. Although I was skeptical at first, I've found it to be a very healthy, easy way to code, design and especially present over a web-cam. It's natural to stand to speak when you're presenting, and it feels more energetic than sitting down to talk to others.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #2 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  In the last installment, I used the SQL Monitor tool to get a snapshot view of the current state of the servers at Red Gate that are giving us trouble. That snapshot suggested some areas where I should focus some time, primarily in which queries were being called most frequently or were running the longest. But, you don't want to just run off & start tuning queries. Remember, the foundation for query tuning is the server itself. So, I want to be sure I'm not looking at some major hardware or configuration issues that I need to address first. Rather than look at the current status of the server, I'm going to look at historical data. Clicking on the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor I get a whole list of counters that I can look at. More importantly, I can look at them over a period of time. Even more importantly, I can compare past periods with current periods to see if we're looking at a progressive issue or not. There are counters here that will give me an indication of load, and there are counters here that will tell me specifics about that load. First, I want to just look at the load to understand where the pain points might be. Trying to drill down before you have detailed information is just bad planning. First thing I'm going to check is the CPU, just to see what's up there. I have two servers I'm interested in, so I'll show you both: Looking at the last 30 days for both servers, well, let's just say that the first server is about what I would expect. It has an average baseline behavior with occasional, regular, peaks. This looks like a system with a fairly steady & predictable load that probably has a nightly batch process that spikes the processor. In short, normal stuff. The points there where the CPU drops radically. that might be worth investigating further because something changed the processing on this system a lot. But the first server. It's all over the place. There's no steady CPU behavior at all. It's spike high for long periods of time. It's up, it's down. I'm really going to have to spend time looking at CPU issues on this server to try to figure out what's up. It might be other processes being shared on the server, it might be something else. Either way, I'm going to have to spend time evaluating this CPU, especially those peeks about a week ago. Looking at the Pages/sec, again, just a measure of load, I see that there are some peaks on the rg-sql02 server, but over all, it looks like a fairly standard load. Plus, the peaks are only up to 550 pages/sec. Remember, this isn't a performance measure, but just a load measurement, but from this, I don't think we're looking at major memory issues, but I may want to correlate these counters with the CPU counters. Again, the other server looks like there's stuff going on. The load is not at all consistent. In fact there was a point earlier in the year that looks pretty severe. Plus the spikes here are twice the size of the other system. We've got a lot more load going on here and I will probably need to drill down on memory usage on this server. Taking a look at the disk transfers/sec the load on both systems seems to roughly correspond to the other load indicators. Notice that drop right in the middle of the graph for rg-sql02. I wonder if the office was closed over that period or a system was down for maintenance. If I saw spikes in memory or disk that corresponded to the drip in CPU, you can assume something was using those other resources and causing a drop, but when everything goes down, it just means that the system isn't gettting used. The disk on the rg-sql01 system isn't spiking exactly the same way as the memory & cpu, so there's a good chance (chance mind you) that any performance issues might not be disk related. However, notice that huge jump at the beginning of the month. Several disks were used more than they were for the rest of the month. That's the load on the server. What about the load on SQL Server itself? Next time.

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