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• Becoming A Great Developer

  - by Lee Brandt

  Image via Wikipedia I’ve been doing the whole programming thing for awhile and reading and watching some of the best in the business. I have come to notice that the really great developers do a few things that (I think) makes them great. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that I am one of these few. I still struggle with doing some of the things that makes one great at development. Coincidently, many of these things also make you a better person period. Believe That Guidance Is Better Than Answers This is one I have no problem with. I prefer guidance any time I am learning from another developer. Answers may get you going, but guidance will leave you stranded. At some point, you will come across a problem that can only be solved by thinking for yourself and this is where that guidance will really come in handy. You can use that guidance and extrapolate whatever technology to salve that problem (if it’s the right tool for solving that problem). The problem is, lots of developers simply want someone to tell them, “Do this, then this, then set that, and write this.” Favor thinking and learn the guidance of doing X and don’t ask someone to show you how to do X, if that makes sense. Read, Read and Read If you don’t like reading, you’re probably NOT going to make it into the Great Developer group. Great developers read books, they read magazines and they read code. Open source playgrounds like SourceForge, CodePlex and GitHub, have made it extremely easy to download code from developers you admire and see how they do stuff. Chances are, if you read their blog too, they’ll even explain WHY they did what they did (see “Guidance” above). MSDN and Code Magazine have not only code samples, but explanations of how to use certain technologies and sometimes even when NOT to use that same technology. Books are also out on just about every topic. I still favor the less technology centric books. For instance, I generally don’t buy books like, “Getting Started with Jiminy Jappets”. I look for titles like, “How To Write More Effective Code” (again, see guidance). The Addison-Wesley Signature Series is a great example of these types of books. They teach technology-agnostic concepts. Head First Design Patterns is another great guidance book. It teaches the "Gang Of Four" Design Patterns in a very easy-to-understand, picture-heavy way (I LIKE pictures). Hang Your Balls Out There Even though the advice came from a 3rd-shift Kinko’s attendant, doesn’t mean it’s not sound advice. Write some code and put it out for others to read, criticize and castigate you for. Understand that there are some real jerks out there who are absolute geniuses. Don’t be afraid to get some great advice wrapped in some really nasty language. Try to take what’s good about it and leave what’s not. I have a tough time with this myself. I don’t really have any code out there that is available for review (other than my demo code). It takes some guts to do, but in the end, there is no substitute for getting a community of developers to critique your code and give you ways to improve. Get Involved Speaking of community, the local and online user groups and discussion forums are a great place to hear about technologies and techniques you might never come across otherwise. Mostly because you might not know to look. But, once you sit down with a bunch of other developers and start discussing what you’re interested in, you may open up a whole new perspective on it. Don’t just go to the UG meetings and watch the presentations either, get out there and talk, socialize. I realize geeks weren’t meant to necessarily be social creatures, but if you’re amongst other geeks, it’s much easier. I’ve learned more in the last 3-4 years that I have been involved in the community that I did in my previous 8 years of coding without it. Socializing works, even if socialism doesn’t. Continuous Improvement Lean proponents might call this “Kaizen”, but I call it progress. We all know, especially in the technology realm, if you’re not moving ahead, you’re falling behind. It may seem like drinking from a fire hose, but step back and pick out the technologies that speak to you. The ones that may you’re little heart go pitter-patter. Concentrate on those. If you’re still overloaded, pick the best of the best. Just know that if you’re not looking at the code you wrote last week or at least last year with some embarrassment, you’re probably stagnating. That’s about all I can say about that, cause I am all out of clichés to throw at it. :0) Write Code Great painters paint, great writers write, and great developers write code. The most sure-fire way to improve your coding ability is to continue writing code. Don’t just write code that your work throws on you, pick that technology you love or are curious to know more about and walk through some blog demo examples. Take the language you use everyday and try to get it to do something crazy. Who knows, you might create the next Google search algorithm! All in all, being a great developer is about finding yourself in all this code. If it is just a job to you, you will probably never be one of the “Great Developers”, but you’re probably okay with that. If, on the other hand, you do aspire to greatness, get out there and GET it. No one’s going hand it to you.

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• The standards that fail us and the intellectual bubble

  - by Jeff

  There has been a great deal of noise in the techie community about standards, and a sudden and unexplainable hate for Flash. This noise isn't coming from consumers... the countless soccer moms, teens and your weird uncle Bob, it's coming from the people who build (or at least claim to build) the stuff those consumers consume. If you could survey the position of consumers on the topic, they'd likely tell you that they just want stuff on the Web to work.The noise goes something like this: Web standards are the correct and right thing to use across the Intertubes, and anything not a part of those standards (Flash) is bad. Furthermore, the more recent noise is centered around the idea that HTML 5, along with Javascript, is the right thing to use. The arguments against Flash are, well, the truth is I haven't seen a good argument. I see anecdotal nonsense about high CPU usage and things I'd never think to check when I'm watching Piano Cat on YouTube, but these aren't arguments to me. Sure, I've seen it crash a browser a few times, but it's totally rare.But let's go back to standards. Yes, standards have played an important role in establishing the ubiquity of the Web. The protocols themselves, TCP/IP and HTTP, have been critical. HTML, which has served us well for a very long time, established an incredible foundation. Javascript did an OK job, and thanks to clever programmers writing great frameworks like JQuery, is becoming more and more useful. CSS is awful (there, I said it, I feel SO much better), and I'll never understand why it's so disconnected and different from anything else. It doesn't help that it's so widely misinterpreted by different browsers. Still, there's no question that standards are a good thing, and they've been good for the Web, consumers and publishers alike.HTML 4 has been with us for more than a decade. In Web years, that might as well be 80. HTML 5, contrary to popular belief, is not a standard, and likely won't be for many years to come. In fact, the Web hasn't really evolved at all in terms of its standards. The tools that generate the standard markup and script have, but at the end of the day, we're still living with standards that are more than ten years old. The "official" standards process has failed us.The Web evolved anyway, and did not wait for standards bodies to decide what to do next. It evolved in part because Macromedia, then Adobe, kept evolving Flash. In the earlier days, it mostly just did obnoxious splash pages, but then it started doing animation, and then rich apps as they added form input. Eventually it found its killer app: video. Now more than 95% of browsers have Flash installed. Consumers are better for it.But I'll do it one better... I'll go out on a limb and say that Flash is a standard. If it's that pervasive, I don't care what you tell me, it's a standard. Just because a company owns it doesn't mean that it's evil or not a standard. And hey, it pains me to say that as a developer, because I think the dev tools are the suck (more on that in a minute). But again, consumers don't care. They don't even pay for Flash. The bottom line is that if I put something Flash based on the Internet, it's likely that my audience will see it.And what about the speed of standards owned by a company? Look no further than Silverlight. Silverlight 2 (which I consider the "real" start to the story) came out about a year and a half ago. Now version 4 is out, and it has come a very long way in its capabilities. If you believe Riastats.com, more than half of browsers have it now. It didn't have to wait for standards bodies and nerds drafting documents, it's out today. At this rate, Silverlight will be on version 6 or 7 by the time HTML 5 is a ratified standard.Back to the noise, one of the things that has continually disappointed me about this profession is the number of people who get stuck in an intellectual bubble, color it with dogmatic principles, and completely ignore the actual marketplace where this stuff all has to live. We aren't machines; Binary thinking that forces us to choose between "open standards" and "proprietary lock-in" (the most loaded b.s. FUD term evar) isn't smart at all. The truth is that the <object> tag has allowed us to build incredible stuff on top of the old standards, and consumers have benefitted greatly. Consumer desire, capitalism, and yes, standards ratified by nerds who think about this stuff for years have all played a role in the broad adoption of the Interwebs.We could all do without the noise. At the end of the day, I'm going to build stuff for the Web that's good for my users, and I'm not going to base my decisions on a techie bubble religion. Imagine what the brilliant minds behind the noise could do for the Web if they joined me in that pursuit.

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• 5 minutes WIF: Make your ASP.NET application use test-STS

  - by DigiMortal

  Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) provides us with simple and dummy STS application we can use to develop our system with no actual STS in place. In this posting I will show you how to add STS support to your existing application and how to generate dummy application that plays you real STS. Word of caution! Although it is relatively easy to build your own STS using WIF tools I don’t recommend you to build it. Identity providers must be highly secure and stable in every means and this makes development of your own STS very complex task. If it is possible then use some known STS solution. I suppose you have WIF and WIF SDK installed on your development machine. If you don’t then here are the links to download pages: Windows Identity Foundation Windows Identity Foundation SDK Adding STS support to your web application Suppose you have web application and you want to externalize authentication so your application is able to detect users, send unauthenticated users to login and work in other terms exactly like it worked before. WIF tools provide you with all you need. 1. Click on your web application project and select “Add STS reference…” from context menu to start adding or updating STS settings for web application. 2. Insert your application URI in application settings window. Note that web.config file is already selected for you. I inserted URI that corresponds to my web application address under IIS Express. This URI must exist (later) because otherwise you cannot use dummy STS service. 3. Select “Create a new STS project in the current solution” and click Next button. 4. Summary screen gives you information about how your site will use STS. You can run this wizard always when you have to modify STS parameters. Click Finish. If everything goes like expected then new web site will be added to your solution and it is named as YourWebAppName_STS. Dummy STS application Image on right shows you dummy STS web site. Yes, it is created as web site project not as web application. But it still works nice and you don’t have to make there any modifications. It just works but it is dummy one. Why dummy STS? Some points about dummy STS web site: Dummy STS is not template for your own custom STS identity provider. Dummy STS is very good and simple replacement of real STS so you have more flexible development environment and you don’t have to authenticate yourself in real service. Of course, you can modify dummy STS web site to mimic some behavior of your real STS. Pages in dummy STS Dummy STS has two pages – Login.aspx and  Default.aspx. Default.aspx is the page that handles requests to STS service. Login.aspx is the page where authentication takes place. Dummy STS authenticates users using FBA. You can insert whatever username you like and dummy STS still works. You can take a look at the code behind these pages to get some idea about how this dummy service is built up. But again – this service is there to simplify your life as developer. Authenticating users using dummy STS If you are using development web server that ships with Visual Studio 2010 I suggest you to switch over to IIS or IIS Express and make some more configuration changes as described in my previous posting Making WIF local STS to work with your ASP.NET application. When you are done with these little modifications you are ready to run your application and see how authentication works. If everything is okay then you are redirected to dummy STS login page when running your web application. Adam Carter is provided as username by default. If you click on submit button you are authenticated and redirected to application page. In my case it looks like this. Conclusion As you saw it is very easy to set up your own dummy STS web site for testing purposes. You coded nothing. You just ran wizard, inserted some data, modified configuration a little bit and you were done. Later, when your application goes to production you can run again this STS configuration utility and it generates correct settings for your real STS service automatically.

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• Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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• Interview with Ronald Bradford about MySQL Connect

  - by Keith Larson

  Ronald Bradford,  an Oracle ACE Director has been busy working with  database consulting, book writing (EffectiveMySQL) while traveling and speaking around the world in support of MySQL. I was able to take some of his time to get an interview on this thoughts about theMySQL Connect conference. Keith Larson: What where your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to provide the community the MySQL Conference ?Ronald Bradford: Oracle has already been providing various different local community events including OTN Tech Days and  MySQL community days. These are great for local regions both in the US and abroad.  In previous years there has been an increase of content at Oracle Open World, however that benefits the Oracle community far more then the MySQL community.  It is good to see that Oracle is realizing the benefit in providing a large scale dedicated event for the MySQL community that includes speakers from the MySQL development teams, invested companies in the ecosystem and other community evangelists.I fully expect a successful event and look forward to hopefully seeing MySQL Connect at the upcoming Brazil and Japan OOW conferences and perhaps an event on the East Coast.Keith Larson: Since you are part of the content committee, what did you think of the submissions that were received during call for papers?Ronald Bradford: There was a large number of quality submissions to the number of available presentation sessions. As with the previous years as a committee member for the annual MySQL conference, there is always a large variety of common cornerstone MySQL features as well as new products and upcoming companies sharing their MySQL experiences. All of the usual major players in the ecosystem will in presenting at MySQL Connect including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Continuent, Percona, Tokutek, Sphinx and Amazon to name a few.  This is ensuring the event will have a large number of quality speakers and a difficult time in choosing what to attend. Keith Larson: What sessions do you look forwarding to attending? Ronald Bradford: As with most quality conferences you can only be in one place at one time, so with multiple tracks per session it is always difficult to decide. The continued work and success with MySQL Cluster, and with a number of sessions I am sure will be popular. The features that interest me the most are around the optimizer, where there are several sessions on new features, and on the importance of backups. There are three presentations in this area to choose from.Keith Larson: Are you going to cover any of the content in your books at your MySQL Connect sessions?Ronald Bradford: I will be giving two presentations at MySQL Connect. The first will include the techniques available for creating better indexes where I will be touching on some aspects of the first Effective MySQL book on Optimizing SQL Statements.  In my second presentation from experiences of managing 500+ AWS MySQL instances, I will be touching on areas including SQL tuning, backup and recovery and scale out with replication.   These are the key topics of the initial books in the Effective MySQL series that focus on performance, scalability and business continuity.  The books however cover a far greater amount of detail then can be presented in a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: What features of MySQL 5.6 do you look forward to the most ?Ronald Bradford: I am very impressed with the optimizer trace feature. The ability to see exposed information is invaluable not just for MySQL 5.6, but to also apply information discerned for optimizing SQL statements in earlier versions of MySQL.  Not everybody understands that it is easy to deploy a MySQL 5.6 slave into an existing topology running an older version if MySQL for evaluation of many new features.  You can use the new mysqlbinlog streaming feature for duplicating master binary logs on an older version with a MySQL 5.6 slave.  The improvements in instrumentation in the Performance Schema are exciting.   However, as with my upcoming Replication Techniques in Depth title, that will be available for sale at MySQL Connect, there are numerous replication features, some long overdue with provide significant management benefits. Crash Save Slaves, Global transaction Identifiers (GTID)  and checksums just to mention a few.Keith Larson: You have been to numerous conferences, what would you recommend for people at the conference? Ronald Bradford: Make the time to meet and introduce yourself to the speakers that cover the topics that most interest you. The MySQL ecosystem has a very strong community.  The relationships you build with presenters, developers and architects in MySQL can be invaluable, however they are created over time. Get to know these people, interact with them over time.  This is the opportunity to learn more then just the content from a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: Any additional tips to handling the long hours ? Ronald Bradford: Conferences can be hard, especially with all the post event drinking.  This is a two day event and I am sure will include additional events on Friday and Saturday night so come well prepared, and leave work behind. Take the time to learn something new.   You can always catchup on sleep later. Keith Larson: Thank you so much for taking some time to do this I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference.  Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. 

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• Introducing jLight &ndash; Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery.

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Introduction With the recent news about Silverlight on the Windows Phone and all the great Out-Of-Browser features in the upcoming Silverlight 4 you almost forget Silverlight is a browser plugin. It most often runs in a web browser and often as a control. In many cases you need to communicate with the browser to get information about textboxes, events or details about the browser itself. To do this you can use JavaScript from Silverlight. Although Silverlight works the same on every browser, JavaScript does not and it won’t be long before problems arise. To overcome differences in browser I like to use jQuery. The only downside of doing this is that there’s a lot more code needed that you would normally use when you write jQuery in JavaScript. Lately, I had to catch changes is the browser scrollbar and act to the new position. I also had to move the scrollbar when the user dragged around in the Silverlight application. With jQuery it was peanuts to get and set the right attributes, but I found that I had to write a lot of code on Silverlight side.  With a few refactoring I had a separated out the plumbing into a new class and could call only a few methods on that to get the same thing done. The idea for jLight was born. jLight vs. jQuery The main purpose of jLight is to take the ease of use of jQuery and bring it into Silverlight for handling DOM interaction. For example, to change the text color of a DIV to red, in jQuery you would write: jQuery("div").css("color","red"); In jLight the same thing looks like so: jQuery.Select("div").Css("color","red");   Another example. To change the offset in of the last SPAN you could write this in jQuery : jQuery("span:last").offset({left : 10, top : 100});   In jLight this would do the same: jQuery.Select("span:last").Offset(new {left = 10, top = 100 });   Callbacks Nothing too special so far. To get the same thing done using the “normal” HtmlPage.Window.Eval, it wouldn’t require too much effort. But to wire up a handler for events from the browser it’s a whole different story. Normally you need to register ScriptMembers, ScriptableTypes or write some code in JavaScript. jLight takes care of the plumbing and provide you with an simple interface in the same way jQuery would. If you would like to handle the scroll event of the BODY of your html page, you’ll have to bind the event using jQuery and have a function call back to a registered function in Silverlight. In the example below I assume there’s a method “SomeMethod” and it is registered as a ScriptableObject as “RegisteredFromSilverlight” from Silverlight.   jQuery("body:first").scroll(function() { var sl = document.getElementbyId("SilverlightControl"); sl.content.RegisteredFromSilverlight.SomeMethod($(this)); });       Using jLight  in Silverlight the code would be even simpler. The registration of RegisteredFromSilverlight  as ScriptableObject can be omitted.  Besides that, you don’t have to write any JavaScript or evaluate strings with JavaScript.   jQuery.Select("body:first").scroll(SomeMethod);   Lambdas Using a lambda in Silverlight can make it even simpler.  Each is the jQuery equivalent of foreach in C#. It calls a function for every element found by jQuery. In this example all INPUT elements of the text type are selected. The FromObject method is used to create a jQueryObject from an object containing a ScriptObject. The Val method from jQuery is used to get the value of the INPUT elements.   jQuery.Select("input:text").Each((element, index) => { textBox1.Text += jQueryObject.FromObject(element).Val(); return null; });   Ajax One thing jQuery is often used for is making Ajax calls. Making calls to services to external services can be done from Silverlight, but as easy as using jQuery. As an example I would like to show how jLight does this. Below is the entire code behind. It searches my name on twitter and shows the result. This example can be found in the source of the project. The GetJson method passes a Silverlight JsonValue to a callback. This callback instantiates Twit objects and adds them to a ListBox called TwitList.   public partial class DemoPage2 : UserControl { public DemoPage2() { InitializeComponent(); jQuery.Load(); }   private void CallButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { jQuery.GetJson("http://search.twitter.com/search.json?lang=en&q=sorskoot", Done); }   private void Done(JsonValue arg) { var tweets = new List<Twit>(); foreach (JsonObject result in arg["results"]) { tweets.Add(new Twit() { Text = (string)result["text"], Image = (string)result["profile_image_url"], User = (string)result["from_user"] } ); } TwitList.ItemsSource = tweets; } }   public class Twit { public string User { get; set; } public string Image { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } }   Conclusion Although jLight is still in development it can be used already.There isn’t much documentation yet, but if you know jQuery jLight isn’t very hard to use.  If you would like to try it, please let me know what you think and report any problems you run in to. jLight can be found at:   http://jlight.codeplex.com

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• Deciding On Features For Open Source

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. It already works that way at work. I don’t want to come home from work and work on things that others decide for me unless they are paying me for those features. So how do I decide on features for our open source projects? I think there are at least three paths to feature selection and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Feature Selection IS the Set of Features For the Domain Your product, in whatever domain it is in, needs to have the basic set of features that make it answer the needs of that domain. That is different for every product, but if you take for example a build tool, at the very least it needs to be able to compile source. And these basic needed features are not always objective either. Two people could completely disagree what makes for a required feature to meet a domain need for a product. Even one person may disagree with himself/herself about what features are needed based on different timeframes. So that leads us down to subjective. Feature Selection IS An Answer To Competition Some features go in because the competition adds a feature that may draw others away from your product offering. With OSS, there are all free alternatives, so if your competition adds a killer feature and you don’t, there isn’t much other than learning (how to use the other product) to move your customers off to the competition. If you want to keep your customers, you need to be ready to answer the questions of adding the features your competition has added.  Sometimes it’s about adding a feature that your competition charges for, but you add it for free. That draws people to the free alternative – so sometimes that adds a motivation to select a feature. Sometimes it’s because you want those features in your product, either to learn how you can answer the question of how to do something and/or because you have a need for that feature and you want it in your product. That also leads us down the road to subjective. Feature Selection IS Subjective I decide on features based on what I want to see in the product I am working on. Things I am interested in or have the biggest need for usually get picked first, with things that do not interest me either coming later or not at all. Most people get interested in an area of OSS because it solves a need for them and/or they find it interesting. If one of these two things is not happening and they are not being paid, it’s likely that person will move on to something else they find interesting or just stop OSS altogether. OSS feature selection is just that – subjective. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be opinionated and it wouldn’t have a personality about it. Most people like certain OSS because they like where the product is going or the personalities behind the product. For me, I want my products to be easy to use and solve an important problem. If it takes you more than 5-10 minutes to learn how to use my product, I know you are probably going somewhere else. So I pick features that make the product easy to use and learn, and those are not always the simplest features to work on. I work for conventions and make the product opinionated, because I think that is what makes using a product easier, if it already works with little setup. And I like to provide the ability for power users to get in and change the conventions to suit their needs. So those are required features for me above and beyond the domain features. I like to think I do a pretty good job at this. Usually when I present on something I’ve created, I like seeing people’s eyes light up when they see how simple it is to set up a powerful product like UppercuT. Patches And/Or Donations But remember before you say I’m a bad person or won’t use my product, I’ll always accept patches or I might like the feature that you suggest. If you like using the products I provide and they solve a problem for you the two biggest compliments you can provide are either a patch or a donation.  If you think the product is great, but if it could do this one other thing, it would be awesome(!), then consider contacting me and providing a patch, or consider contacting me with a donation and a request to put the feature in. And alternatively, if it’s a big feature, you could hire me to work on the product to make it even better. What If There Are Multiple Committers? In the question of multiple committers, I choose that someone always makes the ultimate decision to select whether a feature should be part of a product or not. But for other OSS project maybe this is not the case. If there is not an ultimate decision maker, then there is the possibility of either adding every feature suggested or having a deadlock on two conflicting features.   So let me pose this question. If you work on Open Source, how do you decide on what features to put in your open source projects? How do you decide what doesn’t belong? What do you do when there are conflicting features?

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• Build Environment setup - Using .net, java, hudson, and ruby - Could really use a critique

  - by Jeff D

  I'm trying to figure out the best way to stitch together a fast, repeatable, unbreakable build process for the following environment. I've got a plan for how to do it, but I'd really appreciate a critique. (I'd also appreciate some sample code, but more on that later) Ecosystem - Logical: Website - asp.net MVC 2, .net 3.5, Visual Studio 2010. IIS 6, Facebook iframe application application. This website/facebook app uses a few services. An internal search api, an internal read/write api, facebook, and an IP geolocation service. More details on these below Internal search api - .net, restful, built using old school .ashx handlers. The api uses lucene, and a sql server database behind the scenes. My project won't touch the lucene code, but does potentially touch the database and the web services. internal read/write api - java, restful, running on Tomcat Facebook web services A mocking site that emulates the internal read/write api, and parts of the facebook api Hudson - Runs unit tests on checkin, and creates some installers that behave inconsistently. Ecosystem - Physical: All of these machines can talk to one another, except for Hudson. Hudson can't see any of the target machines. So code must be pulled, rather than pushed. (Security thing) 1. Web Server - Holds the website, and the read/write api. (The api itself writes to a replicated sql server environment). 2. Search Server - Houses the search api. 3. Hudson Server - Does not have permissions to push to any environment. They have to pull. 4. Lucene Server 5. Database Server Problem I've been trying to set this site up to run in a stress environment, but the number of setup steps, the amount of time it takes to update a component, the black-box nature of the current installers, and the time it takes to generate data into the test system is absolutely destroying my productivity. I tweak one setting, have to redeploy, restart in a certain order, resetup some of the settings, and rebuild test data. Errors result in headscratching, and then basically starting over. Very bad. This problem is complicated further by my stress testing. I need to be able to turn on and off different external components, so that I can effectively determine the scalability of each piece. I've got strategies in place for how to do that for each dependency, but it further complicates my setup strategy, because now each component has 2 options. A mock version, or a real version. Configurations everywhere must be updated accordingly. Goals Fast - I want to drop this from a 20 minute exercise when things go perfectly, to a 3 minute one Stupid simple - I want to tell the environment what to do with as few commands as possible, and not have to remember how to stitch the environments together Repeatable - I want the script to be idempotent. Kind of a corollary to the Stupid Simple thing. The Plan So Far Here's what I've come up with so far, and what I've come looking for feedback on: Use VisualStudio's new web.config transformations to permit easily altering configs based on envrionment. This solution isn't really sufficient though. I will leave web.config set up to let the site run locally, but when deploying elsewhere, I have as many as 6 different possible outputs for the stress environment alone (because of the mocks of the various dependencies), let alone the settings for prod, QA, and dev. Each of these would then require it's own setup, or a setup that would then post-process the configs. So I'm currently leaning toward just having the dev version, and a version that converts key configuration values into a ruby string interpolation syntax. ({#VAR_NAME} kinda thing) Create a ruby script for each server that is essentially a bootstrapping script. That is to say, it will do nothing but load the ruby code that does the 'real' work from hudson/subversion, so that the script's functionality can evolve with the application, making it easy to build the site at any point in time by reference the appropriate version of the script. So in a nutshell, this script loads another script, and runs it. The 'real' ruby script will then accept commandline parameters that describe how the environment should look. From there, 1 configuration file can be used, and ruby will download the current installers, run them, post-process the configs, restart IIS/Tomcat, and kick off any data setup code that is needed. So that's it. I'm in a real time crunch to get this site stress-tested, so any feedback that you think could abbreviate the time this might take would be appreciated. That includes a shameless request for sample ruby code. I've not gotten too much further than puts "Hello World". :-) Just guidance would be helpful. Is this something that Rake would be useful for? How would you recommend I write tests for this animal? (I use interfaces and automocking frameworks to mock out things like http requests in .net. With ducktyping, it seems that this might be easier, but I don't know how to tell my code to use a fake duck in test, but a real one in practice) Thanks all. Sorry for such such a long-winded, open-ended question.

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• Row Count Plus Transformation

  As the name suggests we have taken the current Row Count Transform that is provided by Microsoft in the Integration Services toolbox and we have recreated the functionality and extended upon it. There are two things about the current version that we thought could do with cleaning up Lack of a custom UI You have to type the variable name yourself In the Row Count Plus Transformation we solve these issues for you. Another thing we thought was missing is the ability to calculate the time taken between components in the pipeline. An example usage would be that you want to know how many rows flowed between Component A and Component B and how long it took. Again we have solved this issue. Credit must go to Erik Veerman of Solid Quality Learning for the idea behind noting the duration. We were looking at one of his packages and saw that he was doing something very similar but he was using a Script Component as a transformation. Our philosophy is that if you have to write or Copy and Paste the same piece of code more than once then you should be thinking about a custom component and here it is. The Row Count Plus Transformation populates variables with the values returned from; Counting the rows that have flowed through the path Returning the time in seconds between when it first saw a row come down this path and when it saw the final row. It is possible to leave both these boxes blank and the component will still work.   All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, you are not permitted to change or add to the inputs or outputs of this component. Optionally you can set the component to fire an event, which happens during the PostExecute phase of the execution. This can be useful to improve visibility of this information, such that it is captured in package logging, or can be used to drive workflow in the case of an error event. Properties Property Data Type Description OutputRowCountVariable String The name of the variable into which the amount of row read will be passed (Optional). OutputDurationVariable String The name of the variable into which the duration in seconds will be passed. (Optional). EventType RowCountPlusTransform.EventType The type of event to fire during post execute, included in which are the row count and duration values. RowCountPlusTransform.EventType Enumeration Name Value Description None 0 Do not fire any event. Information 1 Fire an Information event. Warning 2 Fire a Warning event. Error 3 Fire an Error event. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. For 2005/2008 Only - Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Row Count Plus Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations, and this component requires a minimum of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Downloads The Row Number Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.5 - SQL Server 2008 release. (15 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.43 - Bug fix for duration. For long running processes the duration second count may have been incorrect. (8 Sep 2006) Version 1.1.0.42 - SP1 Compatibility Testing. Added the ability to raise an event with the count and duration data for easier logging or workflow. (18 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. Made available as general public release. (20 Mar 2006) Screenshot Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you get an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component?

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• My First Weeks at Red Gate

  - by Jess Nickson

  Hi, my name’s Jess and early September 2012 I started working at Red Gate as a Software Engineer down in The Agency (the Publishing team). This was a bit of a shock, as I didn’t think this team would have any developers! I admit, I was a little worried when it was mentioned that my role was going to be different from normal dev. roles within the company. However, as luck would have it, I was placed within a team that was responsible for the development and maintenance of Simple-Talk and SQL Server Central (SSC). I felt rather unprepared for this role. I hadn’t used many of the technologies involved and of those that I had, I hadn’t looked at them for quite a while. I was, nevertheless, quite excited about this turn of events. As I had predicted, the role has been quite challenging so far. I expected that I would struggle to get my head round the large codebase already in place, having never used anything so much as a fraction of the size of this before. However, I was perhaps a bit naive when it came to how quickly things would move. I was required to start learning/remembering a number of different languages and technologies within time frames I would never have tried to set myself previously. Having said that, my first week was pretty easy. It was filled with meetings that were designed to get the new starters up to speed with the different departments, ideals and rules within the company. I also attended some lightning talks being presented by other employees, which were pretty useful. These occur once a fortnight and normally consist of around four speakers. In my spare time, we set up the Simple-Talk codebase on my computer and I started exploring it and worked on my first feature – redirecting requests for URLs that used incorrect casing! It was also during this time that I was given my first introduction to test-driven development (TDD) with Michael via a code kata. Although I had heard of the general ideas behind TDD, I had definitely never tried it before. Indeed, I hadn’t really done any automated testing of code before, either. The session was therefore very useful and gave me insights as to some of the coding practices used in my team. Although I now understand the importance of TDD, it still seems odd in my head and I’ve yet to master how to sensibly step up the functionality of the code a bit at a time. The second week was both easier and more difficult than the first. I was given a new project to work on, meaning I was no longer using the codebase already in place. My job was to take some designs, a WordPress theme, and some initial content and build a page that allowed users of the site to read provided resources and give feedback. This feedback could include their thoughts about the resource, the topics covered and the page design itself. Although it didn’t sound the most challenging of projects when compared to fixing bugs in our current codebase, it nevertheless provided a few sneaky problems that had me stumped. I really enjoyed working on this project as it allowed me to play around with HTML, CSS and JavaScript; all things that I like working with but rarely have a chance to use. I completed the aims for the project on time and was happy with the final outcome – though it still needs a good designer to take a look at it! I am now into my third week at Red Gate and I have temporarily been pulled off the website from week 2. I am again back to figuring out the Simple-Talk codebase. Monday provided me with the chance to learn a bunch of new things: system level testing, Selenium and Python. I was set the challenge of testing a bug fix dealing with the search bars in Simple-Talk. The exercise was pretty fun, although Mike did have to point me in the right direction when I started making the tests a bit too complex. The rest of the week looks set to be focussed on pair programming with Mike as we work together on a new feature. I look forward to the challenges that still face me and hope that I will be able to get up to speed quickly. *fingers crossed*

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• PASS: Bylaw Changes

  - by Bill Graziano

  While you’re reading this, a post should be going up on the PASS blog on the plans to change our bylaws.  You should be able to find our old bylaws, our proposed bylaws and a red-lined version of the changes.  We plan to listen to feedback until March 31st.  At that point we’ll decide whether to vote on these changes or take other action. The executive summary is that we’re adding a restriction to prevent more than two people from the same company on the Board and eliminating the Board’s Officer Appointment Committee to have Officers directly elected by the Board.  This second change better matches how officer elections have been conducted in the past. The Gritty Details Our scope was to change bylaws to match how PASS actually works and tackle a limited set of issues.  Changing the bylaws is hard.  We’ve been working on these changes since the March board meeting last year.  At that meeting we met and talked through the issues we wanted to address.  In years past the Board has tried to come up with language and then we’ve discussed and negotiated to get to the result.  In March, we gave HQ guidance on what we wanted and asked them to come up with a starting point.  Hannes worked on building us an initial set of changes that we could work our way through.  Discussing changes like this over email is difficult wasn’t very productive.  We do a much better job on this at the in-person Board meetings.  Unfortunately there are only 2 or 3 of those a year. In August we met in Nashville and spent time discussing the changes.  That was also the day after we released the slate for the 2010 election. The discussion around that colored what we talked about in terms of these changes.  We talked very briefly at the Summit and again reviewed and revised the changes at the Board meeting in January.  This is the result of those changes and discussions. We made numerous small changes to clean up language and make wording more clear.  We also made two big changes. Director Employment Restrictions The first is that only two people from the same company can serve on the Board at the same time.  The actual language in section VI.3 reads: A maximum of two (2) Directors who are employed by, or who are joint owners or partners in, the same for-profit venture, company, organization, or other legal entity, may concurrently serve on the PASS Board of Directors at any time. The definition of “employed” is at the sole discretion of the Board. And what a mess this turns out to be in practice.  Our membership is a hodgepodge of interlocking relationships.  Let’s say three Board members get together and start a blog service for SQL Server bloggers.  It’s technically for-profit.  Let’s assume it makes $8 in the first year.  Does that trigger this clause?  (Technically yes.)  We had a horrible time trying to write language that covered everything.  All the sample bylaws that we found were just as vague as this. That led to the third clause in this section.  The first sentence reads: The Board of Directors reserves the right, strictly on a case-by-case basis, to overrule the requirements of Section VI.3 by majority decision for any single Director’s conflict of employment. We needed some way to handle the trivial issues and exercise some judgment.  It seems like a public vote is the best way.  This discloses the relationship and gets each Board member on record on the issue.   In practice I think this clause will rarely be used.  I think this entire section will only be invoked for actual employment issues and not for small side projects.  In either case we have the mechanisms in place to handle it in a public, transparent way. That’s the first and third clauses.  The second clause says that if your situation changes and you fall afoul of this restriction you need to notify the Board.  The clause further states that if this new job means a Board members violates the “two-per-company” rule the Board may request their resignation.  The Board can also  allow the person to continue serving with a majority vote.  I think this will also take some judgment.  Consider a person switching jobs that leads to three people from the same company.  I’m very likely to ask for someone to resign if all three are two weeks into a two year term.  I’m unlikely to ask anyone to resign if one is two weeks away from ending their term.  In either case, the decision will be a public vote that we can be held accountable for. One concern that was raised was whether this would affect someone choosing to accept a job.  I think that’s a choice for them to make.  PASS is clearly stating its intent that only two directors from any one organization should serve at any time.  Once these bylaws are approved, this policy should not come as a surprise to any potential or current Board members considering a job change.  This clause isn’t perfect.  The biggest hole is business relationships that aren’t defined above.  Let’s say that two employees from company “X” serve on the Board.  What happens if I accept a full-time consulting contract with that company?  Let’s assume I’m working directly for one of the two existing Board members.  That doesn’t violate section VI.3.  But I think it’s clearly the kind of relationship we’d like to prevent.  Unfortunately that was even harder to write than what we have now.  I fully expect that in the next revision of the bylaws we’ll address this.  It just didn’t make it into this one. Officer Elections The officer election process received a slightly different rewrite.  Our goal was to codify in the bylaws the actual process we used to elect the officers.  The officers are the President, Executive Vice-President (EVP) and Vice-President of Marketing.  The Immediate Past President (IPP) is also an officer but isn’t elected.  The IPP serves in that role for two years after completing their term as President.  We do that for continuity’s sake.  Some organizations have a President-elect that serves for one or two years.  The group that founded PASS chose to have an IPP. When I started on the Board, the Nominating Committee (NomCom) selected the slate for the at-large directors and the slate for the officers.  There was always one candidate for each officer position.  It wasn’t really an election so much as the NomCom decided who the next person would be for each officer position.  Behind the scenes the Board worked to select the best people for the role. In June 2009 that process was changed to bring it line with what actually happens.  An Officer Appointment Committee was created that was a subset of the Board.  That committee would take time to interview the candidates and present a slate to the Board for approval.  The majority vote of the Board would determine the officers for the next two years.  In practice the Board itself interviewed the candidates and conducted the elections.  That means it was time to change the bylaws again. Section VII.2 and VII.3 spell out the process used to select the officers.  We use the phrase “Officer Appointment” to separate it from the Director election but the end result is that the Board elects the officers.  Section VII.3 starts: Officers shall be appointed bi-annually by a majority of all the voting members of the Board of Directors. Everything else revolves around that sentence.  We use the word appoint but they truly are elected.  There are details in the bylaws for term limits, minimum requirements for President (1 prior term as an officer), tie breakers and filling vacancies. In practice we will have an election for President, then an election for EVP and then an election for VP Marketing.  That means that losing candidates will be able to fall down the ladder and run for the next open position.  Another point to note is that officers aren’t at-large directors.  That means if a current sitting officer loses all three elections they are off the Board.  Having Board member votes public will help with the transparency of this approach. This process has a number of positive and negatives.  The biggest concern I expect to hear is that our members don’t directly choose the officers.  I’m going to try and list all the positives and negatives of this approach. Many non-profits value continuity and are slower to change than a business.  On the plus side this promotes that.  On the negative side this promotes that.  If we change too slowly the members complain that we aren’t responsive.  If we change too quickly we make mistakes and fail at various things.  We’ve been criticized for both of those lately so I’m not entirely sure where to draw the line.  My rough assumption to this point is that we’re going too slow on governance and too quickly on becoming “more than a Summit.”  This approach creates competition in the officer elections.  If you are an at-large director there is no consequence to losing an election.  If you are an officer the only way to stay on the Board is to win an officer election or an at-large election.  If you are an officer and lose an election you can always run for the next office down.  This makes it very easy for multiple people to contest an election. There is value in a person moving through the officer positions up to the Presidency.  Having the Board select the officers promotes this.  The down side is that it takes a LOT of time to get to the Presidency.  We’ve had good people struggle with burnout.  We’ve had lots of discussion around this.  The process as we’ve described it here makes it possible for someone to move quickly through the ranks but doesn’t prevent people from working their way up through each role. We talked long and hard about having the officers elected by the members.  We had a self-imposed deadline to complete these changes prior to elections this summer. The other challenge was that our original goal was to make the bylaws reflect our actual process rather than create a new one.  I believe we accomplished this goal. We ran out of time to consider this option in the detail it needs.  Having member elections for officers needs a number of problems solved.  We would need a way for candidates to fall through the election.  This is what promotes competition.  Without this few people would risk an election and we’ll be back to one candidate per slot.  We need to do this without having multiple elections.  We may be able to copy what other organizations are doing but I was surprised at how little I could find on other organizations.  We also need a way for people that lose an officer election to win an at-large election.  Otherwise we’ll have very little competition for officers. This brings me to an area that I think we as a Board haven’t done a good job.  We haven’t built a strong process to tell you who is doing a good job and who isn’t.  This is a double-edged sword.  I don’t want to highlight Board members that are failing.  That’s not a good way to get people to volunteer and run for the Board.  But I also need a way let the members make an informed choice about who is doing a good job and would make a good officer.  Encouraging Board members to blog, publishing minutes and making votes public helps in that regard but isn’t the final answer.  I don’t know what the final answer is yet.  I do know that the Board members themselves are uniquely positioned to know which other Board members are doing good work.  They know who speaks up in meetings, who works to build consensus, who has good ideas and who works with the members.  What I Could Do Better I’ve learned a lot writing this about how we communicated with our members.  The next time we revise the bylaws I’d do a few things differently.  The biggest change would be to provide better documentation.  The March 2009 minutes provide a very detailed look into what changes we wanted to make to the bylaws.  Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how closely they matched our final changes and covered the various arguments.  If you just read those you’d get 90% of what we eventually changed.  Nearly everything else was just details around implementation.  I’d also consider publishing a scope document defining exactly what we were doing any why.  I think it really helped that we had a limited, defined goal in mind.  I don’t think we did a good job communicating that goal outside the meeting minutes though. That said, I wish I’d blogged more after the August and January meeting.  I think it would have helped more people to know that this change was coming and to be ready for it. Conclusion These changes address two big concerns that the Board had.  First, it prevents a single organization from dominating the Board.  Second, it codifies and clearly spells out how officers are elected.  This is the process that was previously followed but it was somewhat murky.  These changes bring clarity to this and clearly explain the process the Board will follow. We’re going to listen to feedback until March 31st.  At that time we’ll decide whether to approve these changes.  I’m also assuming that we’ll start another round of changes in the next year or two.  Are there other issues in the bylaws that we should tackle in the future?

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• Real-world SignalR example, ditching ghetto long polling

  - by Jeff

  One of the highlights of BUILD last week was the announcement that SignalR, a framework for real-time client to server (or cloud, if you will) communication, would be a real supported thing now with the weight of Microsoft behind it. Love the open source flava! If you aren’t familiar with SignalR, watch this BUILD session with PM Damian Edwards and dev David Fowler. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll be in a happy place within the first ten minutes. If you skip to the end, you’ll see that they plan to ship this as a real first version by the end of the year. Insert slow clap here. Writing a few lines of code to move around a box from one browser to the next is a way cool demo, but how about something real-world? When learning new things, I find it difficult to be abstract, and I like real stuff. So I thought about what was in my tool box and the decided to port my crappy long-polling “there are new posts” feature of POP Forums to use SignalR. A few versions back, I added a feature where a button would light up while you were pecking out a reply if someone else made a post in the interim. It kind of saves you from that awkward moment where someone else posts some snark before you. While I was proud of the feature, I hated the implementation. When you clicked the reply button, it started polling an MVC URL asking if the last post you had matched the last one the server, and it did it every second and a half until you either replied or the server told you there was a new post, at which point it would display that button. The code was not glam: // in the reply setup PopForums.replyInterval = setInterval("PopForums.pollForNewPosts(" + topicID + ")", 1500); // called from the reply setup and the handler that fetches more posts PopForums.pollForNewPosts = function (topicID) { $.ajax({ url: PopForums.areaPath + "/Forum/IsLastPostInTopic/" + topicID, type: "GET", dataType: "text", data: "lastPostID=" + PopForums.currentTopicState.lastVisiblePost, success: function (result) { var lastPostLoaded = result.toLowerCase() == "true"; if (lastPostLoaded) { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "hidden"); } else { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "visible"); clearInterval(PopForums.replyInterval); } }, error: function () { } }); }; What’s going on here is the creation of an interval timer to keep calling the server and bugging it about new posts, and setting the visibility of a button appropriately. It looks like this if you’re monitoring requests in FireBug: Gross. The SignalR approach was to call a message broker when a reply was made, and have that broker call back to the listening clients, via a SingalR hub, to let them know about the new post. It seemed weird at first, but the server-side hub’s only method is to add the caller to a group, so new post notifications only go to callers viewing the topic where a new post was made. Beyond that, it’s important to remember that the hub is also the means to calling methods at the client end. Starting at the server side, here’s the hub: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Hubs; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public class Topics : Hub { public void ListenTo(int topicID) { Groups.Add(Context.ConnectionId, topicID.ToString()); } } } Have I mentioned how awesomely not complicated this is? The hub acts as the channel between the server and the client, and you’ll see how JavaScript calls the above method in a moment. Next, the broker class and its associated interface: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR; using Topic = PopForums.Models.Topic; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public interface IBroker { void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID); } public class Broker : IBroker { public void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID) { var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>(); context.Clients.Group(topic.TopicID.ToString()).notifyNewPosts(lasPostID); } } } The NotifyNewPosts method uses the static GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>() method to get a reference to the hub, and then makes a call to clients in the group matched by the topic ID. It’s calling the notifyNewPosts method on the client. The TopicService class, which handles the reply data from the MVC controller, has an instance of the broker new’d up by dependency injection, so it took literally one line of code in the reply action method to get things moving. _broker.NotifyNewPosts(topic, post.PostID); The JavaScript side of things wasn’t much harder. When you click the reply button (or quote button), the reply window opens up and fires up a connection to the hub: var hub = $.connection.topics; hub.client.notifyNewPosts = function (lastPostID) { PopForums.setReplyMorePosts(lastPostID); }; $.connection.hub.start().done(function () { hub.server.listenTo(topicID); }); The important part to look at here is the creation of the notifyNewPosts function. That’s the method that is called from the server in the Broker class above. Conversely, once the connection is done, the script calls the listenTo method on the server, letting it know that this particular connection is listening for new posts on this specific topic ID. This whole experiment enables a lot of ideas that would make the forum more Facebook-like, letting you know when stuff is going on around you.

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• Highlights from the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development The Oracle Customer Experience Summit was the first-ever event covering the full breadth of Oracle's CX portfolio -- Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and Service. The purpose of the Summit was to articulate the customer experience imperative and to showcase the suite of Oracle products that can help our customers create the best possible customer experience. This topic has always been a very important one, but now that there are so many alternative companies to do business with and because people have such public ways to voice their displeasure, it's necessary for vendors to have multiple listening posts in place to gauge consumer sentiment. They need to know what is going on in real time and be able to react quickly to turn negative situations into positive ones. Those can then be shared in a social manner to enhance the brand and turn the customer into a repeat customer. The Summit was focused on Oracle's portfolio of products and entirely dedicated to customers who are committed to building great customer experiences within their businesses. Rather than DBAs, the attendees were business people looking to collaborate with other like-minded experts and find out how Oracle can help in terms of technology, best practices, and expertise. The event was at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld. We had eight hundred people attend, which was great for the first year. Next year, there's no doubt in my mind, we can raise that number to 5,000. Alignment and Logic Oracle's Customer Experience portfolio is made up of a combination of acquired and organic products owned by many people who are new to Oracle. We include homegrown Fusion CRM, as well as RightNow, Inquira, OPA, Vitrue, ATG, Endeca, and many others. The attendees knew of the acquisitions, so naturally they wanted to see how the products all fit together and hear the logic behind the portfolio. To tell them about our alignment, we needed to be aligned. To accomplish that, a cross functional team at Oracle agreed on the messaging so that every single Oracle presenter could cover the big picture before going deep into a product or topic. Talking about the full suite of products in one session produced overflow value for other products. And even though this internal coordination was a huge effort, everyone saw the value for our customers and for our long-term cooperation and success. Keynotes, Workshops, and Tents of Innovation We scored by having Seth Godin as our keynote speaker ? always provocative and popular. The opening keynote was a session orchestrated by Mark Hurd, Anthony Lye, and me. Mark set the stage by giving real-world examples of bad customer experiences, Anthony clearly articulated the business imperative for addressing these experiences, and I brought it all to life by taking the audience around the Customer Lifecycle and showing demos and videos, with partners included at each of the stops around the lifecycle. Brian Curran, a VP for RightNow Product Strategy, presented a session that was in high demand called The Economics of Customer Experience. People loved hearing how to build a business case and justify the cost of building a better customer experience. John Kembel, another VP for RightNow Product Strategy, held a workshop that customers raved about. It was based on the journey mapping methodology he created, which is a way to talk to customers about where they want to make improvements to their customers' experiences. He divided the audience into groups led by facilitators. Each person had the opportunity to engage with experts and peers and construct some real takeaways. From left to right: Brian Curran, John Kembel, Seth Godin, and George Kembel The conference hotel was across from Union Square so we used that space to set up Innovation Tents. During the day we served lunch in the tents and partners showed their different innovative ideas. It was very interesting to see all the technologies and advancements. It also gave people a place to mix and mingle and to think about the fringe of where we could all take these ideas. Product Portfolio Plus Thought Leadership Of course there is always room for improvement, but the feedback on the format of the conference was positive. Ninety percent of the sessions had either a partner or a customer teamed with an Oracle presenter. The presentations weren't dry, one-way information dumps, but more interactive. I just followed up with a CEO who attended the conference with his Head of Marketing. He told me that they are using John Kembel's journey mapping methodology across the organization to pull people together. This sort of thought leadership in these highly competitive areas gives Oracle permission to engage around the technology. We have to differentiate ourselves and it's harder to do on the product side because everyone looks the same on paper. But on thought leadership ? we can, and did, take some really big steps. David VapGroup Vice PresidentOracle Applications Product Development

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• Searching a set of data with multiple terms using Linq

  - by Cj Anderson

  I'm in the process of moving from ADO.NET to Linq. The application is a directory search program to look people up. The users are allowed to type the search criteria into a single textbox. They can separate each term with a space, or wrap a phrase in quotes such as "park place" to indicate that it is one term. Behind the scenes the data comes from a XML file that has about 90,000 records in it and is about 65 megs. I load the data into a DataTable and then use the .Select method with a SQL query to perform the searches. The query I pass is built from the search terms the user passed. I split the string from the textbox into an array using a regular expression that will split everything into a separate element that has a space in it. However if there are quotes around a phrase, that becomes it's own element in the array. I then end up with a single dimension array with x number of elements, which I iterate over to build a long query. I then build the search expression below: query = query & _ "((userid LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(nickname LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(lastname LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(firstname LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(department LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(telephoneNumber LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(email LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(Office LIKE '" & tempstr & "%'))" Each term will have a set of the above query. If there is more than one term, I put an AND in between, and build another query like above with the next term. I'm not sure how to do this in Linq. So far, I've got the XML file loading correctly. I'm able to search it with specific criteria, but I'm not sure how to best implement the search over multiple terms. 'this works but far too simple to get the job done Dim results = From c In m_DataSet...<Users> _ Where c.<userid>.Value = "XXXX" _ Select c The above code also doesn't use the LIKE operator either. So partial matches don't work. It looks like what I'd want to use is the .Startswith but that appears to be only in Linq2SQL. Any guidance would be appreciated. I'm new to Linq, so I might be missing a simple way to do this. The XML file looks like so: <?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <theusers> <Users> <userid>person1</userid> <nickname></nickname> <lastname></lastname> <firstname></firstname> <department></department> <telephoneNumber></telephoneNumber> <email></email> </Users> <Users> <userid>person2</userid> <nickname></nickname> <lastname></lastname> <firstname></firstname> <department></department> <telephoneNumber></telephoneNumber> <email></email> </Users>

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• Subterranean IL: Generics and array covariance

  - by Simon Cooper

  Arrays in .NET are curious beasts. They are the only built-in collection types in the CLR, and SZ-arrays (single dimension, zero-indexed) have their own commands and IL syntax. One of their stranger properties is they have a kind of built-in covariance long before generic variance was added in .NET 4. However, this causes a subtle but important problem with generics. First of all, we need to briefly recap on array covariance. SZ-array covariance To demonstrate, I'll tweak the classes I introduced in my previous posts: public class IncrementableClass { public int Value; public virtual void Increment(int incrementBy) { Value += incrementBy; } } public class IncrementableClassx2 : IncrementableClass { public override void Increment(int incrementBy) { base.Increment(incrementBy); base.Increment(incrementBy); } } In the CLR, SZ-arrays of reference types are implicitly convertible to arrays of the element's supertypes, all the way up to object (note that this does not apply to value types). That is, an instance of IncrementableClassx2[] can be used wherever a IncrementableClass[] or object[] is required. When an SZ-array could be used in this fashion, a run-time type check is performed when you try to insert an object into the array to make sure you're not trying to insert an instance of IncrementableClass into an IncrementableClassx2[]. This check means that the following code will compile fine but will fail at run-time: IncrementableClass[] array = new IncrementableClassx2[1]; array[0] = new IncrementableClass(); // throws ArrayTypeMismatchException These checks are enforced by the various stelem* and ldelem* il instructions in such a way as to ensure you can't insert a IncrementableClass into a IncrementableClassx2[]. For the rest of this post, however, I'm going to concentrate on the ldelema instruction. ldelema This instruction pops the array index (int32) and array reference (O) off the stack, and pushes a pointer (&) to the corresponding array element. However, unlike the ldelem instruction, the instruction's type argument must match the run-time array type exactly. This is because, once you've got a managed pointer, you can use that pointer to both load and store values in that array element using the ldind* and stind* (load/store indirect) instructions. As the same pointer can be used for both input and output to the array, the type argument to ldelema must be invariant. At the time, this was a perfectly reasonable restriction, and maintained array type-safety within managed code. However, along came generics, and with it the constrained callvirt instruction. So, what happens when we combine array covariance and constrained callvirt? .method public static void CallIncrementArrayValue() { // IncrementableClassx2[] arr = new IncrementableClassx2[1] ldc.i4.1 newarr IncrementableClassx2 // arr[0] = new IncrementableClassx2(); dup newobj instance void IncrementableClassx2::.ctor() ldc.i4.0 stelem.ref // IncrementArrayValue<IncrementableClass>(arr, 0) // here, we're treating an IncrementableClassx2[] as IncrementableClass[] dup ldc.i4.0 call void IncrementArrayValue<class IncrementableClass>(!!0[],int32) // ... ret } .method public static void IncrementArrayValue<(IncrementableClass) T>( !!T[] arr, int32 index) { // arr[index].Increment(1) ldarg.0 ldarg.1 ldelema !!T ldc.i4.1 constrained. !!T callvirt instance void IIncrementable::Increment(int32) ret } And the result: Unhandled Exception: System.ArrayTypeMismatchException: Attempted to access an element as a type incompatible with the array. at IncrementArrayValue[T](T[] arr, Int32 index) at CallIncrementArrayValue() Hmm. We're instantiating the generic method as IncrementArrayValue<IncrementableClass>, but passing in an IncrementableClassx2[], hence the ldelema instruction is failing as it's expecting an IncrementableClass[]. On features and feature conflicts What we've got here is a conflict between existing behaviour (ldelema ensuring type safety on covariant arrays) and new behaviour (managed pointers to object references used for every constrained callvirt on generic type instances). And, although this is an edge case, there is no general workaround. The generic method could be hidden behind several layers of assemblies, wrappers and interfaces that make it a requirement to use array covariance when calling the generic method. Furthermore, this will only fail at runtime, whereas compile-time safety is what generics were designed for! The solution is the readonly. prefix instruction. This modifies the ldelema instruction to ignore the exact type check for arrays of reference types, and so it lets us take the address of array elements using a covariant type to the actual run-time type of the array: .method public static void IncrementArrayValue<(IncrementableClass) T>( !!T[] arr, int32 index) { // arr[index].Increment(1) ldarg.0 ldarg.1 readonly. ldelema !!T ldc.i4.1 constrained. !!T callvirt instance void IIncrementable::Increment(int32) ret } But what about type safety? In return for ignoring the type check, the resulting controlled mutability pointer can only be used in the following situations: As the object parameter to ldfld, ldflda, stfld, call and constrained callvirt instructions As the pointer parameter to ldobj or ldind* As the source parameter to cpobj In other words, the only operations allowed are those that read from the pointer; stind* and similar that alter the pointer itself are banned. This ensures that the array element we're pointing to won't be changed to anything untoward, and so type safety within the array is maintained. This is a typical example of the maxim that whenever you add a feature to a program, you have to consider how that feature interacts with every single one of the existing features. Although an edge case, the readonly. prefix instruction ensures that generics and array covariance work together and that compile-time type safety is maintained. Tune in next time for a look at the .ctor generic type constraint, and what it means.

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• Configuring Application/User Settings in WPF the easy way.

  - by mbcrump

  In this tutorial, we are going to configure the application/user settings in a WPF application the easy way. Most example that I’ve seen on the net involve the ConfigurationManager class and involve creating your own XML file from scratch. I am going to show you a easier way to do it. (in my humble opinion) First, the definitions: User Setting – is designed to be something specific to the user. For example, one user may have a requirement to see certain stocks, news articles or local weather. This can be set at run-time. Application Setting – is designed to store information such as a database connection string. These settings are read-only at run-time. 1) Lets create a new WPF Project and play with a few settings. Once you are inside VS, then paste the following code snippet inside the <Grid> tags. <Grid> <TextBox Height="23" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="12,11,0,0" Name="textBox1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="285" Grid.ColumnSpan="2" /> <Button Content="Set Title" Name="button2" Click="button2_Click" Margin="108,40,96,114" /> <TextBlock Height="23" Name="textBlock1" Text="TextBlock" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Width="377" /> </Grid> Basically, its just a Textbox, Button and TextBlock. The main Window should look like the following:   2) Now we are going to setup our Configuration Settings. Look in the Solution Explorer and double click on the Settings.settings file. Make sure that your settings file looks just like mine included below:   What just happened was the designer created an XML file and created the Settings.Designer.cs file which looks like this: //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated by a tool. // Runtime Version:4.0.30319.1 // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace WPFExam.Properties { [global::System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CompilerGeneratedAttribute()] [global::System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editors.SettingsDesigner.SettingsSingleFileGenerator", "10.0.0.0")] internal sealed partial class Settings : global::System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase { private static Settings defaultInstance = ((Settings)(global::System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase.Synchronized(new Settings()))); public static Settings Default { get { return defaultInstance; } } [global::System.Configuration.UserScopedSettingAttribute()] [global::System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()] [global::System.Configuration.DefaultSettingValueAttribute("ApplicationName")] public string ApplicationName { get { return ((string)(this["ApplicationName"])); } set { this["ApplicationName"] = value; } } [global::System.Configuration.ApplicationScopedSettingAttribute()] [global::System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()] [global::System.Configuration.DefaultSettingValueAttribute("SQL_SRV342")] public string DatabaseServerName { get { return ((string)(this["DatabaseServerName"])); } } } } The XML File is named app.config and looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="userSettings" type="System.Configuration.UserSettingsGroup, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" > <section name="WPFExam.Properties.Settings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" allowExeDefinition="MachineToLocalUser" requirePermission="false" /> </sectionGroup> <sectionGroup name="applicationSettings" type="System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsGroup, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" > <section name="WPFExam.Properties.Settings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" requirePermission="false" /> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <userSettings> <WPFExam.Properties.Settings> <setting name="ApplicationName" serializeAs="String"> <value>ApplicationName</value> </setting> </WPFExam.Properties.Settings> </userSettings> <applicationSettings> <WPFExam.Properties.Settings> <setting name="DatabaseServerName" serializeAs="String"> <value>SQL_SRV342</value> </setting> </WPFExam.Properties.Settings> </applicationSettings> </configuration> 3) The only left now is the code behind the button. Double click the button and replace the MainWindow() method with the following code snippet. public MainWindow() { InitializeComponent(); this.Title = Properties.Settings.Default.ApplicationName; textBox1.Text = Properties.Settings.Default.ApplicationName; textBlock1.Text = Properties.Settings.Default.DatabaseServerName; } private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { Properties.Settings.Default.ApplicationName = textBox1.Text.ToString(); Properties.Settings.Default.Save(); } Run the application and type something in the textbox and hit the Set Title button. Now, restart the application and you should see the text that you entered earlier.   If you look at the button2 click event, you will see that it was actually 2 lines of codes to save to the configuration file. I hope this helps, for more information consult MSDN.

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• Build 2012, some thoughts..

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  I think you probably read my rant about the logistics at Build 2012, as posted here, so I am not going into that anymore. Instead, let’s look at the content. (BTW If you did read that post and want some more info then read Nia Angelina’s post about Build. I have nothing to add to that.) As usual, there were good speakers and some speakers who could benefit from some speaker training. I find it hard to understand why Microsoft allows certain people on stage, people who speak English with such strong accents it’s hard for people, especially from abroad, to understand. Some basic training might be useful for some of them. However, it is nice to see that most speakers are project managers, program managers or even devs on the teams that build the stuff they talk about: there was a lot of knowledge on stage! And that means when you ask questions you get very relevant information. I realize I am not the average audience member here, I am regular speaker myself so I tend to look for other things when I am in a room than most audience members so my opinion might differ from others. All in all the knowledge of the speakers was above average but the presentation skills were most of the times below what I would describe as adequate. But let us look at the contents. Since the official name of the conference is Build Windows 2012 it is not surprising most of the talks were focused on building Windows 8 apps. Next to that, there was a lot of focus on Azure and of course Windows Phone 8 that launched the day before Build started. Most sessions dealt with C# and JavaScript although I did see a tendency to use C++ more. Touch. Well, that was the focus on a lot of sessions, that goes without saying. Microsoft is really betting on Touch these days and being a Touch oriented developer I can only applaud this. The term NUI is getting a bit outdated but the principles behind it certainly aren’t. The sessions did cover quite a lot on how to make your applications easy to use and easy to understand. However, not all is touch nowadays; still the majority of people use keyboard and mouse to interact with their machines (or, as I do, use keyboard, mouse AND touch at the same time). Microsoft understands this and has spend some serious thoughts on this as well. It was all about making your apps run everywhere on all sorts of devices and in all sorts of scenarios. I have seen a couple of sessions focusing on the portable class library and on sharing code between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. You get the feeling Microsoft is enabling us devs to write software that will be ubiquitous. They want your stuff to be all over the place and they do anything they can to help. To achieve that goal they provide us with brilliant SDK’s, great tooling, a very, very good backend in the form of Windows Azure (I was particularly impressed by the Mobility part of Azure) and some fantastic hardware. And speaking of hardware: the partners such as Acer, Lenovo and Dell are making hardware that puts Apple to a shame nowadays. To illustrate: in Bellevue (very close to Redmond where Microsoft HQ is) they have the Microsoft Store located very close to the Apple Store, so it’s easy to compare devices. And I have to say: the Microsoft offerings are much, much more appealing that what the Cupertino guys have to offer. That was very visible by the number of people visiting the stores: even on the day that Apple launched the iPad Mini there were more people in the Microsoft store than in the Apple store. So, the future looks like it’s going to be fun. Great hardware (did I mention the Nokia Lumia 920? No? It’s brilliant), great software (Windows 8 is in a league of its own), the best dev tools (Visual Studio 2012 is still the champion here) and a fantastic backend (Azure.. need I say more?). It’s up to us devs to fill up the stores with applications that matches this. To summarize: it is great to be a Windows developer. PS. Did I mention Surface RT? Man….. People were drooling all over it wherever I went. It is fantastic :-) Technorati Tags: Build,Windows 8,Windows Phone,Lumia,Surface,Microsoft

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• FAQ: Highlight GridView Row on Click and Retain Selected Row on Postback

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  A couple of months ago I’ve written a simple demo about “Highlighting GridView Row on MouseOver”. I’ve noticed many members in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) are asking how to highlight row in GridView and retain the selected row across postbacks. So I’ve decided to write this post to demonstrate how to implement it as reference to others who might need it. In this demo I going to use a combination of plain JavaScript and jQuery to do the client-side manipulation. I presumed that you already know how to bind the grid with data because I will not include the codes for populating the GridView here. For binding the gridview you can refer this post: Binding GridView with Data the ADO.Net way or this one: GridView Custom Paging with LINQ. To get started let’s implement the highlighting of GridView row on row click and retain the selected row on postback.  For simplicity I set up the page like this: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>You have selected Row: (<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" />)</h2> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfCurrentRowIndex" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfParentContainer" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Trigger Postback" /> <asp:GridView ID="grdCustomer" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="grdCustomer_RowDataBound"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Company" HeaderText="Company" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Title" HeaderText="Title" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Address" HeaderText="Address" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </asp:Content>   Note: Since the action is done at the client-side, when we do a postback like (clicking on a button) the page will be re-created and you will lose the highlighted row. This is normal because the the server doesn't know anything about the client/browser not unless if you do something to notify the server that something has changed. To persist the settings we will use some HiddenFields control to store the data so that when it postback we can reference the value from there. Now here’s the JavaScript functions below: <asp:content id="Content1" runat="server" contentplaceholderid="HeadContent"> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript">       var prevRowIndex;       function ChangeRowColor(row, rowIndex) {           var parent = document.getElementById(row);           var currentRowIndex = parseInt(rowIndex) + 1;                 if (prevRowIndex == currentRowIndex) {               return;           }           else if (prevRowIndex != null) {               parent.rows[prevRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFFF";           }                 parent.rows[currentRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFD6";                 prevRowIndex = currentRowIndex;                 $('#<%= Label1.ClientID %>').text(currentRowIndex);                 $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val(row);           $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val(rowIndex);       }             $(function () {           RetainSelectedRow();       });             function RetainSelectedRow() {           var parent = $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val();           var currentIndex = $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val();           if (parent != null) {               ChangeRowColor(parent, currentIndex);           }       }          </script> </asp:content>   The ChangeRowColor() is the function that sets the background color of the selected row. It is also where we set the previous row and rowIndex values in HiddenFields.  The $(function(){}); is a short-hand for the jQuery document.ready event. This event will be fired once the page is posted back to the server that’s why we call the function RetainSelectedRow(). The RetainSelectedRow() function is where we referenced the current selected values stored from the HiddenFields and pass these values to the ChangeRowColor() function to retain the highlighted row. Finally, here’s the code behind part: protected void grdCustomer_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", string.Format("ChangeRowColor('{0}','{1}');", e.Row.ClientID, e.Row.RowIndex)); } } The code above is responsible for attaching the javascript onclick event for each row and call the ChangeRowColor() function and passing the e.Row.ClientID and e.Row.RowIndex to the function. Here’s the sample output below:   That’s it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: jQuery,GridView,JavaScript,TipTricks

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• The Joy Of Hex

  - by Jim Giercyk

  While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is not a knock on programmers; in the age of IntelliSense, what reason do we have to work with data at the bit level? Many computer theory classes treat bit-level programming as a thing of the past, no longer necessary now that storage space is plentiful. The trouble with that mindset is that the world is full of legacy systems that run programs written in the 1970’s.  Today our jobs require us to extract data from those systems, regardless of the format, and that often involves low-level programming. Because it seems knowledge of the low-level concepts is waning in recent times, I thought a review would be in order.       CHARACTER: See Spot Run HEX: 53 65 65 20 53 70 6F 74 20 52 75 6E DECIMAL: 83 101 101 32 83 112 111 116 32 82 117 110 BINARY: 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110000 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101110 In this example, I have broken down the words “See Spot Run” to a level computers can understand – machine language.     CHARACTER:  The character level is what is rendered by the computer.  A “Character Set” or “Code Page” contains 256 characters, both printable and unprintable.  Each character represents 1 BYTE of data.  For example, the character string “See Spot Run” is 12 Bytes long, exclusive of the quotation marks.  Remember, a SPACE is an unprintable character, but it still requires a byte.  In the example I have used the default Windows character set, ASCII, which you can see here:  http://www.asciitable.com/ HEX:  Hex is short for hexadecimal, or Base 16.  Humans are comfortable thinking in base ten, perhaps because they have 10 fingers and 10 toes; fingers and toes are called digits, so it’s not much of a stretch.  Computers think in Base 16, with numeric values ranging from zero to fifteen, or 0 – F.  Each decimal place has a possible 16 values as opposed to a possible 10 values in base 10.  Therefore, the number 10 in Hex is equal to the number 16 in Decimal.  DECIMAL:  The Decimal conversion is strictly for us humans to use for calculations and conversions.  It is much easier for us humans to calculate that [30 – 10 = 20] in decimal than it is for us to calculate [1E – A = 14] in Hex.  In the old days, an error in a program could be found by determining the displacement from the entry point of a module.  Since those values were dumped from the computers head, they were in hex. A programmer needed to convert them to decimal, do the equation and convert back to hex.  This gets into relative and absolute addressing, a topic for another day.  BINARY:  Binary, or machine code, is where any value can be expressed in 1s and 0s.  It is really Base 2, because each decimal place can have a possibility of only 2 characters, a 1 or a 0.  In Binary, the number 10 is equal to the number 2 in decimal. Why only 1s and 0s?  Very simply, computers are made up of lots and lots of transistors which at any given moment can be ON ( 1 ) or OFF ( 0 ).  Each transistor is a bit, and the order that the transistors fire (or not fire) is what distinguishes one value from  another in the computers head (or CPU).  Consider 32 bit vs 64 bit processing…..a 64 bit processor has the capability to read 64 transistors at a time.  A 32 bit processor can only read half as many at a time, so in theory the 64 bit processor should be much faster.  There are many more factors involved in CPU performance, but that is the fundamental difference.    DECIMAL HEX BINARY 0 0 0000 1 1 0001 2 2 0010 3 3 0011 4 4 0100 5 5 0101 6 6 0110 7 7 0111 8 8 1000 9 9 1001 10 A 1010 11 B 1011 12 C 1100 13 D 1101 14 E 1110 15 F 1111   Remember that each character is a BYTE, there are 2 HEX characters in a byte (called nibbles) and 8 BITS in a byte.  I hope you enjoyed reading about the theory of data processing.  This is just a high-level explanation, and there is much more to be learned.  It is safe to say that, no matter how advanced our programming languages and visual studios become, they are nothing more than a way to interpret bits and bytes.  There is nothing like the joy of hex to get the mind racing.

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• Phones, Nokia, Microsoft and More

  - by Bill Evjen

  The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan that took it to the next level and now all TVs are from somewhere else other than the USA. Really there are two camps for the phones – the Cool Kids and other kids that no one wants to hang out with anymore. When it comes to cool – for some reason, the phone is an important part of that factor. Everyone wants to show their phone and its configuration (apps installed, etc) to their friends as a sign of (1) “I have money” and (2) I have smarts/tastes/style/etc when it comes to my applications that are on my phone. For those that don’t know – the Cool Kids include: Apple – this is quite obvious as everything Apple produces is in the cool camp. Just having an Apple product on your person means you can dance. Google – this is one of the more interesting releases as they have created something called Android (which in it’s own right is a major brand in itself). Microsoft – you might be saying “Really, Microsoft is cool?”. I would argue that they are indeed cool as it is now associated with XBOX 360, Kinect, and Windows 7. Gone are the days of Bob and that silly paperclip. Well – that’s it. There is nobody else I would stick in that camp. The other kids that weren’t picked for that dodgeball team include: Nokia Motorola Palm Blackberry and many many more The sad part of all this is that no matter what this second camp does now, it won’t be able to get out of this bucket easily. They will always be associated as yesterday’s technology and that association will drive the sales of the phone purchasers of the world. For those in that group, the only possible way out is to get invited to the cool club by one of the cool club members in the hope that their coolness somehow rubs off. To me, this is the move that Nokia is making. They are at this point where they have realized that they don’t have the full scope of the required end to end solution to make this all work. They have the plants to build the phones and the reach of the retailers that sell what they have. What they are missing is the proper operating system for the new world of multi-touch form factor phones. Even the companies that come up with some sort of new operating system for this type of new device, they are still associated with the yesterday and lack the developer community behind them to be the real wave of adoption that this market needs. Think about that – this is a major different between Nokia/Blackberry when you compare it to the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. These three powerhouses having a very large and strong development community that will eagerly take on new initiatives using the skillsets that they have already cultivated over the years of already working with the company. This then results in a plethora of applications that are then placed on an app store of some kind. The developer gets a cut and then Apple/Google/Microsoft then get their cut. It is definitely a win-win. None of the other phone companies and wannabies can provide the same results. What Microsoft was missing was the major phone manufactures coming on board to create and push forward with the phones that are required to start the wave. This is where Nokia can come in and help Microsoft. They have the ability to promote the Windows Phone operating system on a new wave of phones. This does mean that Nokia will sell phones, but they lose out on the application store that they might have been thinking about making some money on as well as controlling the end to end solution. What is interesting is in questioning to oneself if Microsoft will purchase Nokia. It really depends upon how they want to compete and with whom Microsoft views as the major competitor. For instance, they can purchase Nokia and have their own hardware company and distribution network for phones – thereby taking on a model that is quite similar to Apple. On the other hand, they could just leave it up to the phone hardware companies such as Nokia and others to build and promote phones in a model that is similar to Google. Both ways have pluses and minuses. If they own the phone manufacturer, they really can put some thought into the design and technical specifications of the phone that is really designed to exactly how they want it. Microsoft has shown that they have this ability – especially with the XBOX initiative they have done over the years. Think about how good and powerful they have moved forward with XBOX – and I am not talking about just copying what others are doing, but coming up with leapfrog products that are steps ahead of everyone else. Though, if they didn’t do it themselves, they could then leave it up to the phone manufacturers to drive each other to build better and better phones that run the Microsoft OS – competition drives better products. We have seen this with the Android line of phones that are out there on the market. I have read a lot about Nokia investors really upset about the new Microsoft relationship – but really, this is a great thing. I for one am a fan of this relationship (I am also a Nokia stock holder btw). This will mean better days for Nokia.

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• Creating the Business Card Request InfoPath Form

  - by JKenderdine

  Business Card Request Demo Files Back in January I spoke at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach about InfoPath forms and Web Part deployment.  Below is some of the information and details regarding the form I created for the session.  There are many blogs and Microsoft articles on how to create a basic form so I won’t repeat that information here.   This blog will just explain a few of the options I chose when creating the solutions for SPS Virginia Beach.  The above link contains the zipped package files of the two InfoPath forms(no code solution and coded solution), the list template for the Location list I used, and the PowerPoint deck.  If you plan to use these templates, you will need to update the forms to work within your own environments (change data connections, code links, etc.).  Also, you must have the SharePoint Enterprise version, with InfoPath Services configured in order to use the Web Browser enabled forms. So what are the requirements for this template? Business Card Request Form Template Design Plan: Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site Submitted directly to form library The base form was created using the blank template.  The table and rows were added using Insert tab and selecting Custom Table.  The use of tables is a great way to make sure everything lines up.  You do have to split the tables from time to time.  If you’ve ever split cells and then tried to re-align one to find that you impacted the others, you know why.  Here is what the base form looks like in InfoPath.   Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements You will notice I also used Sections within the form.  These show or hide depending on options selected or whether or not fields are blank.  This is a great way to prevent your users from feeling overwhelmed with a large form (this one wouldn’t apply).  Although not used in this one, you can also use various views with a tab interface.  I’ll show that in another post. Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Utilizing rules you can load data when the form initiates (Data tab, Form Load).  Anything you can automate is always appreciated by the user as that is data they don’t have to enter.  For example, loading their user id or other user information on load: Always keep in mind though how much data you load and the method for loading that data (through rules, code, etc.).  They have an impact on form performance.  The form will take longer to load if you bring in a ton of data from external sources.  Laura Rogers has a great blog post on using the User Information List to load user information.   If the user has logged into SharePoint, then this can be used quite effectively and without a huge performance hit.   What I have found is that using the User Profile service via code behind or the Web Service “GetUserProfileByName” (as above) can take more time to load the user data.  Just food for thought. You must add the data connection in order for the above rules to work.  You can connect to the data connection through the Data tab, Data Connections or select Manage Data Connections link which appears under the main data source.  The data connections can be SharePoint lists or libraries, SQL data tables, XML files, etc.  Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. You can also create multiple views for the users to enhance their experience.  Once they’ve entered the information and submitted their request for business cards, they don’t really need to see the main data input screen any more.  They just need to view what they entered. From the Page Design tab, select New View and give the view a name.  To review the existing views, click the down arrow under View: The ReviewView shows just what the user needs and nothing more: Once you have everything configured, the form should be tested within a Test SharePoint environment before final deployment to production.  This validates you don’t have any rules or code that could impact the server negatively. Submitted directly to form library   You will need to know the form library that you will be submitting to when publishing the template.  Configure the Submit data connection to connect to this library.  There is already one configured in the sample,  but it will need to be updated to your environment prior to publishing. The Design template is different from the Published template.  While both have the .XSN extension, the published template contains all the “package” information for the form.  The published form is what is loaded into Central Admin, not the design template. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site In Central Admin, under General Settings, select Manage Form Templates.  Upload the published form template and Activate it to a site collection. Now it is available as a content type to select in the form library.  Some documentation on publishing form templates:  Technet – Manage administrator approved form templates And that’s all our base requirements.  Hope this helps to give a good start.

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• In Social Relationship Management, the Spirit is Willing, but Execution is Weak

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our final talk in this series with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we wanted to find out if enterprise organizations are actually doing anything about what they’re learning around the importance of communicating via social and using social listening for a deeper understanding of customers and prospects. We found out that if your brand is lagging behind, you’re not alone. Spotlight: How was Aberdeen able to find out if companies are putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to implementing social across the enterprise? Trip: One way to think about the relative challenges a business has in a given area is to look at the gap between “say” and “do.” The first of those words reveals the brand’s priorities, while the second reveals their ability to execute on those priorities. In Aberdeen’s research, we capture this by asking firms to rank the value of a set of activities from one on the low end to five on the high end. We then ask them to rank their ability to execute those same activities, again on a one to five, not effective to highly effective scale. Spotlight: And once you get their self-assessments, what is it you’re looking for? Trip: There are two things we’re looking for in this analysis. The first is we want to be able to identify the widest gaps between perception of value and execution. This suggests impediments to adoption or simply a high level of challenge, be it technical or otherwise. It may also suggest areas where we can expect future investment and innovation. Spotlight: So the biggest potential pain points surface, places where they know something is critical but also know they aren’t doing much about it. What’s the second thing you look for? Trip: The second thing we want to do is look at specific areas in which high-performing companies, the Leaders, are out-executing the Followers. This points to the business impact of these activities since Leaders are defined by a set of business performance metrics. Put another way, we’re correlating adoption of specific business competencies with performance, looking for what high-performers do differently. Spotlight: Ah ha, that tells us what steps the winners are taking that are making them winners. So what did you find out? Trip: Generally speaking, we see something of a glass curtain when it comes to the social relationship management execution gap. There isn’t a single social media activity in which more than 50% of respondents indicated effectiveness, which would be a 4 or 5 on that 1-5 scale. This despite the fact that 70% of firms indicate that generating positive social media mentions is valuable or very valuable, a 4 or 5 on our 1-5 scale. Spotlight: Well at least they get points for being honest. The verdict they’re giving themselves is that they just aren’t cutting it in these highly critical social development areas. Trip: And the widest gap is around directly engaging with customers and/or prospects on social networks, which 69% of firms rated as valuable but only 34% of companies say they are executing well. Perhaps even more interesting is that these two are interdependent since you’re most likely to generate goodwill on social through happy, engaged customers. This data also suggests that social is largely being used as a broadcast channel rather than for one-to-one engagement. As we’ve discussed previously, social is an inherently personal media. Spotlight: And if they’re still using it as a broadcast channel, that shows they still fail to understand the root of social and see it as just another outlet for their ads and push-messaging. That’s depressing. Trip: A second way to evaluate this data is by using Aberdeen’s performance benchmarking. The story is both a bit different, but consistent in its own way. The first thing we notice is that Leaders are more effective in their execution of several key social relationship management capabilities, namely generating positive mentions and engaging with “influencers” and customers. Based on the fact that Aberdeen uses a broad set of performance metrics to rank the respondents as either “Leaders” (top 35% in weighted performance) or “Followers” (bottom 65% in weighted performance), from website conversion to annual revenue growth, we can then correlated high social effectiveness with company performance. We can also connect the specific social capabilities used by Leaders with effectiveness. We spoke about a few of those key capabilities last time and also discuss them in a new report: Social Powers Activate: Engineering Social Engagement to Win the Hidden Sales Cycle. Spotlight: What all that tells me is there are rewards for making the effort and getting it right. That’s how you become a Leader. Trip: But there’s another part of the story, which is that overall effectiveness, even among Leaders, is muted. There’s just one activity in which more than a majority of Leaders cite high effectiveness, effectiveness being the generation of positive buzz. While 80% of Leaders indicate “directly engaging with customers” through social media channels is valuable, the highest rated activity among Leaders, only 42% say they’re effective. This gap even among Leaders shows the challenges still involved in effective social relationship management. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• When is my View too smart?

  - by Kyle Burns

  In this posting, I will discuss the motivation behind keeping View code as thin as possible when using patterns such as MVC, MVVM, and MVP.  Once the motivation is identified, I will examine some ways to determine whether a View contains logic that belongs in another part of the application.  While the concepts that I will discuss are applicable to most any pattern which favors a thin View, any concrete examples that I present will center on ASP.NET MVC. Design patterns that include a Model, a View, and other components such as a Controller, ViewModel, or Presenter are not new to application development.  These patterns have, in fact, been around since the early days of building applications with graphical interfaces.  The reason that these patterns emerged is simple – the code running closest to the user tends to be littered with logic and library calls that center around implementation details of showing and manipulating user interface widgets and when this type of code is interspersed with application domain logic it becomes difficult to understand and much more difficult to adequately test.  By removing domain logic from the View, we ensure that the View has a single responsibility of drawing the screen which, in turn, makes our application easier to understand and maintain. I was recently asked to take a look at an ASP.NET MVC View because the developer reviewing it thought that it possibly had too much going on in the view.  I looked at the .CSHTML file and the first thing that occurred to me was that it began with 40 lines of code declaring member variables and performing the necessary calculations to populate these variables, which were later either output directly to the page or used to control some conditional rendering action (such as adding a class name to an HTML element or not rendering another element at all).  This exhibited both of what I consider the primary heuristics (or code smells) indicating that the View is too smart: Member variables – in general, variables in View code are an indication that the Model to which the View is being bound is not sufficient for the needs of the View and that the View has had to augment that Model.  Notable exceptions to this guideline include variables used to hold information specifically related to rendering (such as a dynamically determined CSS class name or the depth within a recursive structure for indentation purposes) and variables which are used to facilitate looping through collections while binding. Arithmetic – as with member variables, the presence of arithmetic operators within View code are an indication that the Model servicing the View is insufficient for its needs.  For example, if the Model represents a line item in a sales order, it might seem perfectly natural to “normalize” the Model by storing the quantity and unit price in the Model and multiply these within the View to show the line total.  While this does seem natural, it introduces a business rule to the View code and makes it impossible to test that the rounding of the result meets the requirement of the business without executing the View.  Within View code, arithmetic should only be used for activities such as incrementing loop counters and calculating element widths. In addition to the two characteristics of a “Smart View” that I’ve discussed already, this View also exhibited another heuristic that commonly indicates to me the need to refactor a View and make it a bit less smart.  That characteristic is the existence of Boolean logic that either does not work directly with properties of the Model or works with too many properties of the Model.  Consider the following code and consider how logic that does not work directly with properties of the Model is just another form of the “member variable” heuristic covered earlier: @if(DateTime.Now.Hour < 12) {     <div>Good Morning!</div> } else {     <div>Greetings</div> } This code performs business logic to determine whether it is morning.  A possible refactoring would be to add an IsMorning property to the Model, but in this particular case there is enough similarity between the branches that the entire branching structure could be collapsed by adding a Greeting property to the Model and using it similarly to the following: <div>@Model.Greeting</div> Now let’s look at some complex logic around multiple Model properties: @if (ModelPageNumber + Model.NumbersToDisplay == Model.PageCount         || (Model.PageCount != Model.CurrentPage             && !Model.DisplayValues.Contains(Model.PageCount))) {     <div>There's more to see!</div> } In this scenario, not only is the View code difficult to read (you shouldn’t have to play “human compiler” to determine the purpose of the code), but it also complex enough to be at risk for logical errors that cannot be detected without executing the View.  Conditional logic that requires more than a single logical operator should be looked at more closely to determine whether the condition should be evaluated elsewhere and exposed as a single property of the Model.  Moving the logic above outside of the View and exposing a new Model property would simplify the View code to: @if(Model.HasMoreToSee) {     <div>There’s more to see!</div> } In this posting I have briefly discussed some of the more prominent heuristics that indicate a need to push code from the View into other pieces of the application.  You should now be able to recognize these symptoms when building or maintaining Views (or the Models that support them) in your applications.

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• About Solaris 11 and UltraSPARC II/III/IV/IV+

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  I know that I will get the usual amount of comments like "Oh, Jörg ? you can't be negative about Oracle" for this article. However as usual I want to explain the logic behind my reasoning. Yes ? I know that there is a lot of UltraSPARC III, IV and IV+ gear out there. But there are some very basic questions: Does your application you are currently running on this gear stops running just because you can't run Solaris 11 on it? What is the need to upgrade a system already in production to Solaris 11? I have the impression, that some people think that the systems get useless in the moment Oracle releases Solaris 11. I know that Sun sold UltraSPARC IV+ systems until 2009. The Sun SF490 introduced 2004 for example, that was a Sun SF480 with UltraSPARC IV and later with UltraSPARC IV+. And yes, Sun made some speedbumps. At that time the systems of the UltraSPARC III to IV+ generations were supported on Solaris 8, on Solaris 9 and on Solaris 10. However from my perspective we sold them to customers, which weren't able to migrate to Solaris 10 because they used applications not supported on Solaris 9 or who just didn't wanted to migrate to Solaris 10. Believe it or not ? I personally know two customers that migrated core systems to Solaris 10 in ? well 2008/9. This was especially true when the M3000 was announced in 2008 when it closed the darned single socket gap. It may be different at you site, however that's what I remember about that time when talking with customers. At first: Just because there is no Solaris 11 for UltraSPARC III, IV and IV+, it doesn't mean that Solaris 10 will go away anytime soon. I just want to point you to "Expect Lifetime Support - Hardware and Operating Systems". It states about Premier Support:Maintenance and software upgrades are included for Oracle operating systems and Oracle VM for a minimum of eight years from the general availability date.GA for Solaris 10 was in 2005. Plus 8 years ? 2013 ? at minimum. Then you can still opt for 3 years of "Extended Support" ? 2016 ? at minimum. 2016 your systems purchased in 2009 are 7 years old. Even on systems purchased at the very end of the lifetime of that system generation. That are the rules as written in the linked document. I said minimum The actual dates are even further in the future: Premier Support for Solaris 10 ends in 2015, Extended support ends 2018. Sustaining support ? indefinite. You will find this in the document "Oracle Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle Hardware and Operating Systems".So I don't understand when some people write, that Oracle is less protective about hardware investments than Sun. And for hardware it's the same as with Sun: Service 5 years after EOL as part of Premier Support. I would like to write about a different perspective as well: I have to be a little cautious here, because this is going in the roadmap area, so I will mention the public sources here: John Fowler told last year that we have to expect at at least 3x the single thread performance of T3 for T4. We have 8 cores in T4, as stated by Rick Hetherington. Let's assume for a moment that a T4 core will have the performance of a UltraSPARC core (just to simplify math and not to disclosing anything about the performance, all existing SPARC cores are considered equal). So given this pieces of information, you could consolidate 8 V215, 4 or 8 V245, 2 full blown V445,2 full blown 490, 2 full blown M3000 on a single T4 SPARC processor. The Fowler roadmap prezo talked about 4-socket systems with T4. So 32 V215, 16 to 8 V245, 8 fullblown V445, 8 full blown V490, 8 full blown M3000 in a system image. I think you get the idea. That said, most of the systems we are talking about have already amortized and perhaps it's just time to invest in new systems to yield other advantages like reduced space consumptions, like reduced power consumption, like some of the neat features sun4v gives you, and yes ? reduced number of processor licenses for Oracle and less money for Oracle HW/SW support. As much as I dislike it myself that my own UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC II based systems won't run on Solaris 11 (and I have quite a few of them in my personal lab), I really think that the impact on production environments will be much less than most people think now. By the way: The reason for this move is a quite significant new feature. I will tell you that it was this feature, when it's out. I assume, telling just a word more could lead to much more time to blog.

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