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• Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from Microsoft who provided me with most of my material He is a Scrum and Power Point genius. Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010 Synopsis Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a team to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft is heavily investing in Scrum and has already started moving some teams across to using it. Martin will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even asses your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Visual Studio ALM MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you: How to successfully gather requirements with User stories How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010 The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010 Tracking your progress The right way to use work items What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard The important reports to give your Product Owner / Project Manager Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by teams. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help managers better support the software development processes. During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. If you want to know more about how to do Scrum with TFS then there is a new course that has been created in collaboration with Microsoft and Scrum.org that is going to be the official course for working with TFS 2010. SSW has Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools. Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development Technorati Tags: Scrum,VS ALM,VS 2010,TFS 2010

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• Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from Microsoft who provided me with most of my material He is a Scrum and Power Point genius. Updated 9th May 2010 – I have now presented at both of these sessions  and posted about it. Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010 Synopsis Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a team to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft is heavily investing in Scrum and has already started moving some teams across to using it. Martin will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even asses your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Visual Studio ALM MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you: How to successfully gather requirements with User stories How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010 The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010 Tracking your progress The right way to use work items What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard The important reports to give your Product Owner / Project Manager Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by teams. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help managers better support the software development processes. During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. If you want to know more about how to do Scrum with TFS then there is a new course that has been created in collaboration with Microsoft and Scrum.org that is going to be the official course for working with TFS 2010. SSW has Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools. Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development Technorati Tags: Scrum,VS ALM,VS 2010,TFS 2010

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• Knockout.js - Filtering, Sorting, and Paging

  - by jtimperley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jtimperley/archive/2013/07/28/knockout.js---filtering-sorting-and-paging.aspxKnockout.js is fantastic! Maybe I missed it but it appears to be missing flexible filtering, sorting, and pagination of its grids. This is a summary of my attempt at creating this functionality which has been working out amazingly well for my purposes. Before you continue, this post is not intended to teach you the basics of Knockout. They have already created a fantastic tutorial for this purpose. You'd be wise to review this before you continue. http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ Please view the full source code and functional example on jsFiddle. Below you will find a brief explanation of some of the components. http://jsfiddle.net/JTimperley/pyCTN/13/ First we need to create a model to represent our records. This model is a simple container with defined and guaranteed members. function CustomerModel(data) { if (!data) { data = {}; } var self = this; self.id = data.id; self.name = data.name; self.status = data.status; } Next we need a model to represent the page as a whole with an array of the previously defined records. I have intentionally overlooked the filtering and sorting options for now. Note how the filtering, sorting, and pagination are chained together to accomplish all three goals. This strategy allows each of these pieces to be used selectively based on the page's needs. If you only need sorting, just sort, etc. function CustomerPageModel(data) { if (!data) { data = {}; } var self = this; self.customers = ExtractModels(self, data.customers, CustomerModel); var filters = […]; var sortOptions = […]; self.filter = new FilterModel(filters, self.customers); self.sorter = new SorterModel(sortOptions, self.filter.filteredRecords); self.pager = new PagerModel(self.sorter.orderedRecords); } The code currently supports text box and drop down filters. Text box filters require defining the current 'Value' and the 'RecordValue' function to retrieve the filterable value from the provided record. Drop downs allow defining all possible values, the current option, and the 'RecordValue' as before. Once defining these filters, they are automatically added to the screen and any changes to their values will automatically update the results, causing their sort and pagination to be re-evaluated. var filters = [ { Type: "text", Name: "Name", Value: ko.observable(""), RecordValue: function(record) { return record.name; } }, { Type: "select", Name: "Status", Options: [ GetOption("All", "All", null), GetOption("New", "New", true), GetOption("Recently Modified", "Recently Modified", false) ], CurrentOption: ko.observable(), RecordValue: function(record) { return record.status; } } ]; Sort options are more simplistic and are also automatically added to the screen. Simply provide each option's name and value for the sort drop down as well as function to allow defining how the records are compared. This mechanism can easily be adapted for using table headers as the sort triggers. That strategy hasn't crossed my functionality needs at this point. var sortOptions = [ { Name: "Name", Value: "Name", Sort: function(left, right) { return CompareCaseInsensitive(left.name, right.name); } } ]; Paging options are completely contained by the pager model. Because we will be chaining arrays between our filtering, sorting, and pagination models, the following utility method is used to prevent errors when handing an observable array to another observable array. function GetObservableArray(array) { if (typeof(array) == 'function') { return array; }   return ko.observableArray(array); }

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• Guidance and Pricing for MSDN 2010

  - by John Alexander

  Sorry for the rather lengthy post here. I get asked this all the time so I decided to post it…Visual Studio 2010 editions will be available on April 12, 2010. Product Features Professional with MSDN Essentials Professional with MSDN Premium with MSDN Ultimate with MSDN Test Professional with MSDN Debugging and Diagnostics IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger)         Static Code Analysis       Code Metrics       Profiling       Debugger   Testing Tools Unit Testing   Code Coverage       Test Impact Analysis       Coded UI Test       Web Performance Testing         Load Testing1         Microsoft Test Manager 2010       Test Case Management2       Manual Test Execution       Fast-Forward for Manual Testing       Lab Management Configuration3       Integrated Development Environment Multiple Monitor Support   Multi-Targeting   One Click Web Deployment   JavaScript and jQuery Support   Extensible WPF-Based Environment Database Development Database Deployment       Database Change Management2       Database Unit Testing       Database Test Data Generation       Data Access   Development Platform Support Windows Development   Web Development   Office and SharePoint Development   Cloud Development   Customizable Development Experience   Architecture and Modeling Architecture Explorer         UML® 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity, Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component)         Layer Diagram and Dependency Validation         Read-only diagrams (UML, Layer, DGML Graphs)         Lab Management Virtual environment setup & tear down3       Provision environment from template3       Checkpoint environment3       Team Foundation Server Version Control2   Work Item Tracking2   Build Automation2   Team Portal2   Reporting & Business Intelligence2   Agile Planning Workbook2   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010   Test Case Management2       MSDN Subscription – Software and Services for Production Use Windows Azure Platform 20 hrs/mo † 50 hrs/mo † 100 hrs/mo † 250 hrs/mo † n/a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL   1 1 1 1 Microsoft Expression Studio 3       Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Project Professional 2010, Visio Premium 2010 (following Office 2010 launch)       MSDN Subscription – Software for Development and Testing 4 Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 Toolkits, Software Development Kits, Driver Development Kits Previous versions of Windows (client and server operation systems)   Previous versions of Microsoft SQL Server   Microsoft Office       Microsoft Dynamics       All other Servers       Windows Embedded operating systems       Teamprise         MSDN Subscription – Other Benefits Technical support incidents 0 2 4 4 2 Priority support in MSDN Forums Microsoft e-learning collections (typically 10 courses or 20 hours) 0 1 2 2 1 MSDN Flash newsletter MSDN Online Concierge MSDN Magazine   System Requirements View View View View View Buy from (MSRP) $799 $1,199 $5,469 $11,899 $2,169 Renew from (MSRP) $549 (upgrade) $799 $2,299 $3,799 $899 † Availability varies by country and subscription level.  Details available on the MSDN site 1. May require one or more Microsoft Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 2. Requires Team Foundation Server and a Team Foundation Server CAL 3. Requires Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 4. Per-user license allows unlimited installations and use for designing, developing, testing, and demonstrating applications. UML is a registered trademark of Object Management Group, Inc. Windows is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

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• FREE Windows Azure evening in London on April 15th including FREE access to Windows Azure

  - by Eric Nelson

  [Did I overdo the use of FREE in the title? :-)] April 12th to 16th is Microsoft Tech Days – 5 days of sessions on Visual Studio 2010 through to Windows 7 Phone Series. Many of these days are now full (Tip - Thursday still has room if rich client applications is your thing) but the good news is the development community in the UK has pulled together an awesome series of “fringe events” during April in London and elsewhere in the UK. There are sessions on Silverlight, SQL Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint 2010 and … the Windows Azure Platform. The UK AzureNET user group is planning to put on a great evening and AzureNET will be giving away hundreds of free subscriptions to the Windows Azure Platform during the evening. The subscription includes up to 20 Windows Azure Compute nodes and 3 SQL Azure databases for you to play with over the 2 weeks following the event. This is a great opportunity to really explore the Windows Azure Platform in detail – without a credit card! Register now! (and you might also want to join the UK Fans of Azure Community while I have your attention) FYI The Thursday day time event includes an introduction to Windows Azure session delivered by my colleague David – which would be an ideal session to attend if you are new to Azure and want to get the most out of the evening session. 7:00pm: See the difference: How Windows Azure helped build a new way of giving Simon Evans and James Broome (@broomej) They will cover the business context for Azure and then go into patterns used and lessons learnt from the project....as well as showing off the app of course! 8:00pm: UK AzureNET update 8:15pm: NoSQL databases or: How I learned to love the hash table Mark Rendle (@markrendle) In this session Mark will look at how Azure Table Service works and how to use it. We’ll look briefly at the high-level Data Services SDK, talk about its limitations, and then quickly move on to the REST API and how to use it to improve performance and reduce costs. We’ll make-up some pretend real-world problems and solve them in new and interesting ways. We’ll denormalise data (for fun and profit). We’ll talk about how certain social networking sites can deal with huge volumes of data so quickly, and why it sometimes goes wrong. Check out the complete list of fringe events which covers the UK fairly well:

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• Microsoft ReportViewer SetParameters continuous refresh issue

  - by Ilya Verbitskiy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/ilich/archive/2013/10/16/microsoft-reportviewer-setparameters-continuous-refresh-issue.aspxI am a big fun of using ASP.NET MVC for building web-applications. It allows us to create simple, robust and testable solutions. However, .NET world is not perfect. There is tons of code written in ASP.NET web-forms. You cannot simply ignore it, even if you want to. Sometimes ASP.NET web-forms controls bring us non-obvious issues. The good example is Microsoft ReportViewer control. I have an example for you. 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %> 2: <%@ Register Assembly="Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" Namespace="Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms" TagPrefix="rsweb" %> 3:   4: <!DOCTYPE html> 5:   6: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 7: <head runat="server"> 8: <title>Report Viewer Continiuse Resfresh Issue Example</title> 9: </head> 10: <body> 11: <form id="form1" runat="server"> 12: <div> 13: <asp:ScriptManager runat="server"></asp:ScriptManager> 14: <rsweb:ReportViewer ID="_reportViewer" runat="server" Width="100%" Height="100%"></rsweb:ReportViewer> 15: </div> 16: </form> 17: </body> 18: </html>   The back-end code is simple as well. I want to show a report with some parameters to a user. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: _reportViewer.ProcessingMode = ProcessingMode.Remote; 4: _reportViewer.ShowParameterPrompts = false; 5:   6: var serverReport = _reportViewer.ServerReport; 7: serverReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri("http://localhost/ReportServer_SQLEXPRESS"); 8: serverReport.ReportPath = "/Reports/TestReport"; 9:   10: var reportParameter1 = new ReportParameter("Parameter1"); 11: reportParameter1.Values.Add("Hello World!"); 12:   13: var reportParameter2 = new ReportParameter("Parameter2"); 14: reportParameter2.Values.Add("10/16/2013"); 15:   16: var reportParameter3 = new ReportParameter("Parameter3"); 17: reportParameter3.Values.Add("10"); 18:   19: serverReport.SetParameters(new[] { reportParameter1, reportParameter2, reportParameter3 }); 20: }   I set ShowParametersPrompts to false because I do not want user to refine the search. It looks good until you run the report. The report will refresh itself all the time. The problem caused by ServerReport.SetParameters method in Page_Load. The method cause ReportViewer control to execute the report on the NEXT post back. That is why the page has continuous post-backs. The fix is very simple: do nothing if Page_Load method executed during post-back. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: if (IsPostBack) 4: { 5: return; 6: } 7:   8: _reportViewer.ProcessingMode = ProcessingMode.Remote; 9: _reportViewer.ShowParameterPrompts = false; 10:   11: var serverReport = _reportViewer.ServerReport; 12: serverReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri("http://localhost/ReportServer_SQLEXPRESS"); 13: serverReport.ReportPath = "/Reports/TestReport"; 14:   15: var reportParameter1 = new ReportParameter("Parameter1"); 16: reportParameter1.Values.Add("Hello World!"); 17:   18: var reportParameter2 = new ReportParameter("Parameter2"); 19: reportParameter2.Values.Add("10/16/2013"); 20:   21: var reportParameter3 = new ReportParameter("Parameter3"); 22: reportParameter3.Values.Add("10"); 23:   24: serverReport.SetParameters(new[] { reportParameter1, reportParameter2, reportParameter3 }); 25: } You can download sample code from GitHub - https://github.com/ilich/Examples/tree/master/ReportViewerContinuousRefresh

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• Text Trimming in Silverlight 4

  - by dwahlin

  Silverlight 4 has a lot of great features that can be used to build consumer and Line of Business (LOB) applications. Although Webcam support, RichTextBox, MEF, WebBrowser and other new features are pretty exciting, I’m actually enjoying some of the more simple features that have been added such as text trimming, built-in wheel scrolling with ScrollViewer and data binding enhancements such as StringFormat. In this post I’ll give a quick introduction to a simple yet productive feature called text trimming and show how it eliminates a lot of code compared to Silverlight 3. The TextBlock control contains a new property in Silverlight 4 called TextTrimming that can be used to add an ellipsis (…) to text that doesn’t fit into a specific area on the user interface. Before the TextTrimming property was available I used a value converter to trim text which meant passing in a specific number of characters that I wanted to show by using a parameter: public class StringTruncateConverter : IValueConverter { #region IValueConverter Members public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { int maxLength; if (int.TryParse(parameter.ToString(), out maxLength)) { string val = (value == null) ? null : value.ToString(); if (val != null && val.Length > maxLength) { return val.Substring(0, maxLength) + ".."; } } return value; } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } #endregion } To use the StringTruncateConverter I'd define the standard xmlns prefix that referenced the namespace and assembly, add the class into the application’s Resources section and then use the class while data binding as shown next: <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="3" ToolTipService.ToolTip="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectManagers}" Text="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectManagers, Converter={StaticResource StringTruncateConverter},ConverterParameter=16}" Style="{StaticResource SummaryValueStyle}" /> With Silverlight 4 I can define the TextTrimming property directly in XAML or use the new Property window in Visual Studio 2010 to set it to a value of WordEllipsis (the default value is None): <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="4" ToolTipService.ToolTip="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectCoordinators}" Text="{Binding ReportSummary.ProjectCoordinators}" TextTrimming="WordEllipsis" Style="{StaticResource SummaryValueStyle}"/> The end result is a nice trimming of the text that doesn’t fit into the target area as shown with the Coordinator and Foremen sections below. My data binding statements are now much smaller and I can eliminate the StringTruncateConverter class completely.   For more information about onsite, online and video training, mentoring and consulting solutions for .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.

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• Ranking Part III

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved   Ranking Part III In a previous blogs “Ranking an Introduction” and  “Ranking Part II” , you have already praised me in “Rank the Author” and learned how to create a new element on a page and how to place it where you need it. For this installment, I just added code to keep the number of votes (you vote by clicking one of the stars) and the total vote. Using these two, we can compute the average rating. It’s a small step, but its purpose is to show that we do not need a detailed history in order to compute the average. A running total is sufficient. Please note that once you close the game, you will lose your previous total. In real life, we persist the totals in the list itself. We also keep a list of actual votes, but its purpose is to prevent double votes. If a person has already voted, his user id is already on the list and our program will check for it and bar the person from voting again. This is coded in an event receiver, which is a SharePoint server piece of code. I will show you how to do this part in a subsequent blog. Again, go to the page and look at the code. The gist of it is here. avg, votes, and stars are global variables that I defined before. function sendRate(sel){//I hate long line so I created pieces of the message in their own vars            var s1 = "Your Rating Was: ";            var s2 = ".. ";            var s3 = "\nVotes = ";            var s4 = "\nTotal Stars = ";            var s5 = "\nAverage = ";            var s;            s = parseInt(sel.id.replace("_", '')); // Get the selected star number            votes = parseInt(votes) + 1;            stars = parseInt(stars) + s;            avg = parseFloat(stars) / parseFloat(votes);            alert(s1 + sel.id + s2 +sel.title + s3 + votes + s4 + stars + s5 + avg);} Click on the link to play and examine “Ranking with Stats” That’s all folks!

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• Not Dead, Just Busy

  - by MOSSLover

  So I didn’t die in a freak smelting accident yet, but I have been dealing with a lot of different things.  I had to take a bit of a break to deal with the cat death issue.  I am not fully recovered, because well it just happened a few months ago.  It kind of sucked.  Plus the apartment feels a lot bigger. Then you have the whole New York Comic Con thing where I had to plan some cosplay costumes.  I have been trying to find time to hang out with friends and have a social life.  That plus I built an entire presentation for iOS development for New York Code Camp.  I am also planning a couple MS Community dinners (namely one a week from Tuesday) plus a give camp.  I am also planning a vacation around SPS UK plus I will be at SPC.  Life is just incredibly hectic and when you factor in dating to the mix it’s gotten insane to the point where some day I just have to go dark.  Hence the lack of blogging.  I am just trying to keep up with everything and everyone without losing myself. If you guys will be at SPC or SPS UK I will be at both places this year.  Stop by the Planet Technologies booth and see me or I’ll be around somewhere.  I am really sorry if I don’t remember you from an event or if you are someone following me on twitter.  I am trying to get better at the mnemonic memory devices, but I think things broke down around the 47th event I attended or spoke at or something to that nature.  If anyone wants to talk to Cathy, Lori, or I about Women in SharePoint definitely find us at the event.  Anyway good night and good luck guys.  I promise to check back at least once before the year ends.  In the meantime twitter stalking is always possible.  Sometimes I even respond back. Technorati Tags: SPC,SPS UK,NYCC,NYC Code Camp,MOSSLover

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• Microsoft Desktop Player is a Valuable Tool for IT Pro’s

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you are an IT Professional, a new education tool introduced by Microsoft is the MS Desktop Player. Today we take a look at what it has to offer, from Webcasts, White Papers, Training Videos, and more. Microsoft Desktop Player You can run the player from the website (shown here) or download the application for use on your local machine (link below). It allows you to easily access MS training and information in a central interface. To get the Desktop version, download the .msi file from the site… And run through the installer…   When you first start out, enter in if you’re an IT Pro, Developer and your role. Then you can decide on the resources you’re looking for such as Exchange Server, SharePoint, Windows 7, Security…etc. Here is an example of checking out a Podcast on Office 2007 setup and configuration from TechNet radio. Under Settings you can customize your search results and local resources. This helps you narrow down pertinent information for your needs. If you find something you really like, hover the pointer over the screen and you can add it to your library, share it, send feedback, and check for additional resources. If you don’t need items in your library they can be easily deleted. Under the News tab you get previews of Microsoft news items, clicking on it will open the full article in a separate browser. While you’re watching a presentation you can show or hide the details related to it. Conclusion Microsoft Desktop Player is currently in Beta, but has a lot of cool features to offer for your learning needs. You can easily find Podcasts, Webcasts, and more without having to browse all over the place. In our experience we didn’t notice any bugs, and what it offers so far works well. If you’re a geek who’s constantly browsing TechNet and other Microsoft learning sites, this helps keep everything consolidated in one app.  Download Microsoft Desktop Player Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesBuilt-in Quick Launch Hotkeys in Windows VistaNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineHow to Get Virtual Desktops on Windows XPWindows 7 Welcome Screen Taking Forever? Here’s the Fix (Maybe) TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool

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• Analysis Services Tabular books #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Many people are looking for books about Analysis Services Tabular. Today there are two books available and they complement each other: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model by Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: Tabular Modeling by Teo Lachev The book I wrote with Alberto and Chris is a complete guide to create tabular models and has a good coverage about DAX, including how to use it for enriching a semantic model with calculated columns and measures and how to use it for querying a Tabular model. In my experience, DAX as a query language is a very interesting option for custom analytical applications that requires a fast calculation engine, or simply for standard reports running in Reporting Services and accessing a Tabular model. You can freely preview the table of content and read some excerpts from the book on Safari Books Online. The book is in printing and should be shipped within mid-July, so finally it will be very soon on the shelf of all the people already preordered it! The Teo Lachev’s book, covers the full spectrum of Tabular models provided by Microsoft: starting with self-service BI, you have users creating a model with PowerPivot for Excel, publishing it to PowerPivot for SharePoint and exploring data by using Power View; then, the PowerPivot for Excel model can be imported in a Tabular model and published in Analysis Services, adding more control on the model through row-level security and partitioning, for example. Teo’s book follows a step-by-step approach describing each feature that is very good for a beginner that is new to PowerPivot and/or to BISM Tabular. If you need to get the big picture and to start using the products that are part of the new Microsoft wave of BI products, the Teo’s book is for you. After you read the book from Teo, or if you already have a certain confidence with PowerPivot or BISM Tabular and you want to go deeper about internals, best practices, design patterns in just BISM Tabular, then our book is a suggested read: it contains several chapters about DAX, includes discussions about new opportunities in data model design offered by Tabular models, and also provides examples of optimizations you can obtain in DAX and best practices in data modeling and queries. It might seem strange that an author write a review of a book that might seem to compete with his one, but in reality these two books complement each other and are not alternatives. If you have any doubt, buy both: you will be not disappointed! Moreover, Amazon usually offers you a deal to buy three books, including the Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View, another good choice for getting all the details about Power View.

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• This Task Is Currently Locked by a Running Workflow and Cannot Be Edited

  - by Jayant Sharma

  Problem: In SharePoint Workflow, "This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited" is the common exception, that we face. Solution: Generally this exception occurs 1.  when the number of items in the Task List gets highThis exception says that the workflow is not able to deliver the all the events at a given time and so the tasks get locked.  Out Of Box, the default event delivery throttle value is 15.  Event delivery throttle value Specifies the number of workflows that can be processed at the same time across all front-end Web serverslook at following link.(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vincent_runge/archive/2008/09/16/about-the-workflow-eventdelivery-throttle-parameter.aspx)If the value returned by query is superior to the throttle (15 by default), any new workflow event will not be processed immediately. so we need to change it by stsadm command like...stsadm -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle -pv "20"(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287939(office.12).aspx) 2. When we modify a Workflow Task from Custom TaskEdit Page.   when we try to modify the workflow task from outside workflow default Page, like custom workflow taskedit page. then is exception occurs.suppose we have custom task edit page with dropdown  and values are submitted/ Progress/ completed etc and we want to complete task from here. it will throw exception on SPWorkflowTask.AlterTask method, which changes the TaskStatus.When I debug, to find the root cause I actully found that the workflow is not locked. The InternalState flag of the workflow does not include the Locked flag bits(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd928318(v=office.12).aspx) When I found this link http://geek.hubkey.com/2007/09/locked-workflow.htmlIt is exactly what I wanted. It says that "when the WorkflowVersion of the task list item is not equal to 1" then the error occurs. The solution that is propsed here works fantastically if ((int)task[SPBuiltInFieldId.WorkflowVersion] != 1){    SPList parentList = task.ParentList.ParentWeb.Lists[new Guid(task[SPBuiltInFieldId.WorkflowListId].ToString())];    SPListItem parentItem = parentList.Items.GetItemById((int)task[SPBuiltInFieldId.WorkflowItemId]);    SPWorkflow workflow = parentItem.Workflows[new Guid(task[SPBuiltInFieldId.WorkflowInstanceID].ToString())];    if (!workflow.IsLocked)    {       task[SPBuiltInFieldId.WorkflowVersion] = 1;       task.SystemUpdate();      break;    }} It will reset the workflow version to 1 again.Conclusion: This Exception is completely confusing. So, we need to find at first whether our workflow is really locked or not. If it is really locked then use 1st method. If not, then check the workflow version and set it to 1 again.Jayant Sharma

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• Making the WPeFfort

  - by Laila

  Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 will be launched on April 12th. The basic layout looks pretty much as it did, so it is not immediately obvious on first inspection that it was completely rewritten in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The current VS 2008 codebase had reached the end of its life; It was getting slow to initialize and sluggish to run, and was never going to allow for multi-monitor support or easier extensibility. It can't have been an easy decision to rewrite Visual Studio, but the gamble seems to have paid off. Although certain bugs in the betas caused some anxiety about performance, these seem to have been fixed, and the new Visual Studio is definitely faster. In rewriting the codebase, it has been possible to make obvious improvements, such as being able to run different windows on different monitors, and you only being presented with the Toolbox controls and References that are appropriate to your target .NET version. There is also an IntelliTrace debugger, and Intellisense has been improved by virtue of separating a 'Suggestion Mode' and 'Completion Mode' (with its 'Generate From.' 'Highlight References.', and 'Navigate to...' features). At the same time, there has been quite a clearout; Certain features that had been tucked away in the previous versions, such as Brief or Emacs emulation support, have been dropped. (Yes, they were being used!) There are a lot of features that didn't require the rewrite, but are welcome. It is now easier to develop WPF applications (e.g. drag-and-drop Databinding), and there is support for Azure. There are more, and better templates and the design tools are greatly improved (e.g. Expression Web, Expression Blend, WPF Sketchflow, Silverlight designer, Document Map Margin and Inline Call Hierarchy). Sharepoint is better supported, and Office apps will benefit from C#'s support of optional and named arguments, and allowing several Office Solutions within a Deployment package. Most importantly, it is a vote of confidence in the WPF. VS 2010 is the essential missing component that has been impeding the faster adoption of WPF. The fact that it is actually now written in WPF should now reassure the doubters, and convince more developers to make the move from WinForms to WPF. In using WPF, the developers of Visual Studio have had the clout to fix some issues which have been bothering WPF developers for some time (such as blurred text). Do you see a brighter future as a result of transferring from WinForms to WPF? I'd love to know what you think. Cheers, Laila

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• Where's My Windows Azure Subscriptions

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/03/wheres-my-windows-azure-subscriptions.aspxYesterday when I opened Windows Azure manage portal I found some resources were missed. I checked the website for those missed cloud service and they are still live. Then I checked my billing history but didn't found any problem. When I back to the portal I found that all of those resource are under my MSDN subscription. So I remembered that if this is related with the recently Windows Azure platform update.   This feature named "Enterprise Management", which provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution. By default, all existing windows azure account would have a default Windows Azure Active Directory (a.k.a. WAAD) associated. In the address bar I can find the default login WAAD of my account, which is "microsoft.onmicrosoft.com". To change the WAAD we can click "subscriptions" on top of the manage portal, select the active directory from the list of "filter by directory" and select the subscription we want to see, then press "apply". As you can see, the subscription under my MSDN was located in a WAAD named "beijingtelecom.onmicrosoft.com". This is because when Microsoft applied this feature, they will check if you have an existing WAAD in your subscription. If not, it will create a new one, otherwise it will use your WAAD and move your subscription into this directory. Since I created a WAAD for test several months ago, this subscription was moved to this directory.   To change the subscription's directory is simple. First we need to create a new WAAD with the name we preferred. As below I created a new directory named "shaunxu". Then select "settings" from the left navigation bar, select the subscription we wanted to change and click "edit directory". You don't have the permission to edit/change directory unless your Microsoft Account is the service administrator of this subscription. Then in the popup window, select the WAAD you want to change and press "next". All done. You need to log off and log in the portal then your subscription will be in the directory you wanted. And after these steps I can view my resources in this subscription.   Summary In this post I described how to change subscriptions into a new directory. With this new feature we can manage our Windows Azure subscription more flexible. But there are something we need keep in mind. 1. Only the service administrator could be able to move subscription. 2. Currently there's no way for us to see our Windows Azure services in more than one directory at the same time. Like me, I can see my services under "shaunxu.onmicrosoft.com" and I must change the filter directory from the "subscriptions" menu to see other services under "microsoft.onmicrosoft.com". 3. Currently we cannot delete an existing WAAD.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Connect to QuickBooks from PowerBuilder using RSSBus ADO.NET Data Provider

  - by dataintegration

  The RSSBus ADO.NET providers are easy-to-use, standards based controls that can be used from any platform or development technology that supports Microsoft .NET, including Sybase PowerBuilder. In this article we show how to use the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks in PowerBuilder. A similar approach can be used from PowerBuilder with other RSSBus ADO.NET Data Providers to access data from Salesforce, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Google, OData, etc. In this article we will show how to create a basic PowerBuilder application that performs CRUD operations using the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks. Step 1: Open PowerBuilder and create a new WPF Window Application solution. Step 2: Add all the Visual Controls needed for the connection properties. Step 3: Add the DataGrid control from the .NET controls. Step 4:Configure the columns of the DataGrid control as shown below. The column bindings will depend on the table. <DataGrid AutoGenerateColumns="False" Margin="13,249,12,14" Name="datagrid1" TabIndex="70" ItemsSource="{Binding}"> <DataGrid.Columns> <DataGridTextColumn x:Name="idColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=ID}" Header="ID" Width="SizeToHeader" /> <DataGridTextColumn x:Name="nameColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=Name}" Header="Name" Width="SizeToHeader" /> ... </DataGrid.Columns> </DataGrid> Step 5:Add a reference to the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks assembly. Step 6:Optional: Set the QBXML Version to 6. Some of the tables in QuickBooks require a later version of QuickBooks to support updates and deletes. Please check the help for details. Connect the DataGrid: Once the visual elements have been configured, developers can use standard ADO.NET objects like Connection, Command, and DataAdapter to populate a DataTable with the results of a SQL query: System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksConnection conn conn = create System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksConnection(connectionString) System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksCommand comm comm = create System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksCommand(command, conn) System.Data.DataTable table table = create System.Data.DataTable System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksDataAdapter dataAdapter dataAdapter = create System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksDataAdapter(comm) dataAdapter.Fill(table) datagrid1.ItemsSource=table.DefaultView The code above can be used to bind data from any query (set this in command), to the DataGrid. The DataGrid should have the same columns as those returned from the SELECT statement. PowerBuilder Sample Project The included sample project includes the steps outlined in this article. You will also need the QuickBooks ADO.NET Data Provider to make the connection. You can download a free trial here.

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• AWS .NET SDK v2: setting up queues and topics

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/13/aws-.net-sdk-v2-setting-up-queues-and-topics.aspxFollowing on from my last post, reading from SQS queues with the new SDK is easy stuff, but linking a Simple Notification Service topic to an SQS queue is a bit more involved. The AWS model for topics and subscriptions is a bit more advanced than in Azure Service Bus. SNS lets you have subscribers on multiple different channels, so you can send a message which gets relayed to email address, mobile apps and SQS queues all in one go. As the topic owner, when you request a subscription on any channel, the owner needs to confirm they’re happy for you to send them messages. With email subscriptions, the user gets a confirmation request from Amazon which they need to reply to before they start getting messages. With SQS, you need to grant the topic permission to write to the queue. If you own both the topic and the queue, you can do it all in code with the .NET SDK. Let’s say you want to create a new topic, a new queue as a topic subscriber, and link the two together. Creating the topic is easy with the SNS client (which has an expanded name, AmazonSimpleNotificationServiceClient, compare to the SQS class which is just called QueueClient): var request = new CreateTopicRequest(); request.Name = TopicName; var response = _snsClient.CreateTopic(request); TopicArn = response.TopicArn; In the response from AWS (which I’m assuming is successful), you get an ARN – Amazon Resource Name – which is the unique identifier for the topic. We create the queue using the same code from my last post, AWS .NET SDK v2: the message-pump pattern, and then we need to subscribe the queue to the topic. The topic creates the subscription request: var response = _snsClient.Subscribe(new SubscribeRequest { TopicArn = TopicArn, Protocol = "sqs", Endpoint = _queueClient.QueueArn }); That response will give you an ARN for the subscription, which you’ll need if you want to set attributes like RawMessageDelivery. Then the SQS client needs to confirm the subscription by allowing the topic to send messages to it. The SDK doesn’t give you a nice mechanism for doing that, so I’ve extended my AWS wrapper with a method that encapsulates it: internal void AllowSnsToSendMessages(TopicClient topicClient) { var policy = Policies.AllowSendFormat.Replace("%QueueArn%", QueueArn).Replace("%TopicArn%", topicClient.TopicArn); var request = new SetQueueAttributesRequest(); request.Attributes.Add("Policy", policy); request.QueueUrl = QueueUrl; var response = _sqsClient.SetQueueAttributes(request); } That builds up a policy statement, which gets added to the queue as an attribute, and specifies that the topic is allowed to send messages to the queue. The statement itself is a JSON block which contains the ARN of the queue, the ARN of the topic, and an Allow effect for the sqs:SendMessage action: public const string AllowSendFormat= @"{ ""Statement"": [ { ""Sid"": ""MySQSPolicy001"", ""Effect"": ""Allow"", ""Principal"": { ""AWS"": ""*"" }, ""Action"": ""sqs:SendMessage"", ""Resource"": ""%QueueArn%"", ""Condition"": { ""ArnEquals"": { ""aws:SourceArn"": ""%TopicArn%"" } } } ] }"; There’s a new gist with an updated QueueClient and a new TopicClient here: Wrappers for the SQS and SNS clients in the AWS SDK for .NET v2. Both clients have an Ensure() method which creates the resource, so if you want to create a topic and a subscription you can use:  var topicClient = new TopicClient(“BigNews”, “ImListening”); And the topic client has a Subscribe() method, which calls into the message pump on the queue client: topicClient.Subscribe(x=>Log.Debug(x.Body)); var message = {}; //etc. topicClient.Publish(message); So you can isolate all the fiddly bits and use SQS and SNS with a similar interface to the Azure SDK.

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• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

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• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

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• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

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• Virtual Lab part 2&ndash;Templates, Patterns, Baselines

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Once you have a good virtualization platform chosen, whether it is a desktop, server or laptop environment, the temptation is to build “X”.  “X” may be a SharePoint lab, a Virtual Cluster, an AD test environment or some other cool project that you really need RIGHT NOW.  That would be doing it wrong. My grandfather taught woodworking and cabinetmaking for twenty-seven years at a trade school in Alabama.  He was the first instructor hired at that school and the only teacher for the first two years.  His students built tables, chairs, and workbenches so the school could start its HVAC courses.   Visiting as a child, I also noticed many extra “helper” stands, benches, holders, and gadgets all built from wood.  What does that have to do with a virtual lab, you ask?  Well, that is the same approach you should take.  Build stuff that you will use.  Not for solving a particular problem, but to let the Virtual Lab be part of your normal troubleshooting toolkit. Start with basic copies of various Operating Systems.  Load and patch server and desktop OS environments.  This also helps build your collection of ISO files, another essential element of a virtual Lab.  Once you have these “baseline” images, you can use your Virtualization software’s snapshot capability to freeze the image.  Clone the snapshot and you have a brand new fully patched machine in mere moments.  You may have to sysprep some of the Microsoft OS environments if you are going to create a domain environment or experiment with clustering.  That is still much faster than loading and patching from scratch. So once you have a stock of raw materials (baseline images in this case) where should you start.  Again, my grandfather’s workshop gives us the answer.  In the shop it was workbenches and tables to hold large workpieces that made the equipment more useful.  In a Windows environment the same role falls to the fundamental network services:  DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Routing, File Services, and Storage services.  Plan your internal network setup.  Build out an AD controller with all the features listed.  Make the actual domain an isolated domain so it will not care about where you take it.  Add the Microsoft iSCSI target.  Once you have this single system, you can leverage it for almost any network environment beyond a simple stand-alone system. Having these templates and fundamental infrastructure elements ready to run means I can build a quick lab in minutes instead of hours.  My solutions are well-tested, my processes fully documented with screenshots, and my plans validated well before I have to make any changes to client systems.  the work I put in is easily returned in increased value and client satisfaction.

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• TFS Hosting: discountasp.net TFS

  - by Enrique Lima

  In the last month or so I have been able to test and experience first hand the offering from discountasp.net for hosted TFS 2010. This first part is a description of the setup process for the account itself and getting some additional information on what you will find through the portal on their site. Not long ago, I posted a little tidbit on hosting TFS.  Through it I also did a shameless plug to my employer, our services and the type of hosting we recommend.  So, wouldn’t me running on discountasp.net be an issue?  Actually? NO. Ok, enough rambling.  Let’s get some details here. It is a Software as a Service model.  Through it we get Source Control, Version Control, Work Item Tracking and such.  What about Build?  If your need includes Build Management and such, you may need to look at some other options.  But, still this is a great offering for those that are moving from SourceSafe.  Or organizations who have 3 to 5 developers on staff, and do not foresee getting larger anytime soon.  Can it support more than 5 developers?  Yes, but then we need to get into how are you using TFS.  Do you need more than just Basic?  For example, SharePoint and Reporting Services integration. The signup process was seamless! Very easy to follow, complete and transition to Visual Studio to start working. An email followed the signup process, it contained details on how to get to the Team Foundation Server Control Panel login.  Once there, here is what I saw after the initial setup process of naming my Team Project Collection: So, moving on … once I clicked the area to get my server info, I got the following: Then it was a matter of getting the first user in there: Then on to connecting Visual Studio to my hosted TFS. Getting the server information, and the user account created I will configure those options in Visual Studio. Using Team Explorer, I am adding a new server configuration. Once this is provided, click OK, I will be challenged for a username and password, provide them and you will land on the following screen. Then Click Close. You will now be connected to your server and Team Project Collection. Since this will likely be the first time connecting, you will have no Projects (I already have 2 going). Click Connect, and you will be back in Team Explorer. My next post in the topic will be on Creating your First Team Project and uploading a Project Template to the server.

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• If not now, then when?

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/10/25/if-not-now-then-when.aspx The time has been flying by this year. It seems like only yesterday that I mentioned the gorillagator, a simple construct of confusion to try to draw attention to my message. In reality, that message was sent over a month ago. During that time, the hours slipped to days and days to weeks. Many exciting things have happened to myself; I'm sure many exciting things have happened to you. I'm also sure that many terrifying things have happened to children and their families. 62 children enter treatment at a Children's Miracle Network Hospital every minute. That's nearly 60,000 children since I sent the last email. To put that number in perspective, that is more than the population of Greenland. If we expand that to the past year, they have been nearly 550,000 children treated. That is almost the population of Huntsville, Decatur, and all their suburbs combined. Over the past 4 years, I have raised a little more than $3,000 for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As a result, I received a call from the organizers of Extra Life thanking me for my dedicated work and informing me that I was the top supporters for Children's Hospital of Alabama ... with my measly three grand. We can do much better than that. It may sound like I'm trying to have fun by playing games for 24 hours. It is more than that. It is me using my time and body as a catalyst. It is me putting my passion to work for a cause. It is me turning my love into something tangible. I have been campaigning and fighting to give these children a chance for years. I have been asking you to help me support these children and families. I've been putting in countless hours of talking to people, impassioned emails, and carefully constructed tweets. I have been fighting with cutting edge, and sometimes expensive, technology to try to provide live streams of my marathons. I yearly put my body through 24 (and, this year, 25) hours of no sleep. I do this to represent the countless hours these families sit awake at their children's side. All I ask is a few minutes on a website and a few dollars. These few minutes and few dollars go a long way help people that are experiencing circumstances that only occur in our nightmares. I also ask that you take one extra step. Forward this plea to those that you know. I can only reach a small fraction of a percentage of the people that may be able to help. Together, we can reach the world. I raise money for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As this message branches out, people may wish to support a hospital closer to their area. I have included a link to the list of people that have dedicated their time and have received no donations. Find someone on the list supporting your local hospital and give them a donation. Let them know that their time and effort are appreciated. Together, we can do something great. Together, we can make a difference. Together, we all stand tall. Thank you. You can get more information at http://www.extra-life.org and http://childrensmiraclenetworkhospitals.org/" My donation page is http://www.extra-life.org/participant/cgardner The list of participants without donations is http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.eventParticipantList&page=629&eventID=512

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• Updates about Multidimensional vs Tabular #ssas #msbi

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I recently read the blog post from James Serra Tabular model: Not ready for prime time? (read also the comments because there are discussions about a few points raised by James) and the following post from Christian Wade Multidimensional or Tabular. In the last 2 years I worked with many companies adopting Tabular in different scenarios and I agree with some of the points expressed by James in his post (especially about missing features in Tabular if compared to Multidimensional), but I strongly disagree in others. In general, Tabular is a good choice for a new project when: the development team does not have a good knowledge of Multidimensional and MDX (DAX is faster to learn, not so easy as it is sold by MS, but definitely easier than MDX) you don’t need calculations based on hierarchies (common in certain financial applications, but not so common as it could seem) there are important calculations based on distinct count measures there are complex calculations based on many-to-many relationships Until now, I never suggested to migrate an existing Multidimensional model to a Tabular one. There should be very important reasons for that, such as performance issues in distinct count and many-to-many relationships that cannot be easily solved by optimizing the Multidimensional model, but I still never encountered this scenario. I would say that in 80% of the new projects, you might use either Multidimensional or Tabular and the real difference is the time-to-market depending on the skills of the development team. So it’s not strange that who is used to Multidimensional is not moving to Tabular, not getting a particular benefit from the new model unless specific requirements exist. The recent DAXMD feature that allows using SharePoint Power View on Multidimensional is a really important one, even if I’d like having also Excel Power View enabled for this scenario (this should be just a question of time). Another scenario in which I’m seeing a growing adoption of Tabular is in companies that creates models for their product/service and do that by using XMLA or Tabular AMO 2012. I am used to call them ISVs, even if those providing services cannot be really defined in this way. These companies are facing the multitenancy challenge with Tabular and even if this is a niche market, I see some potential here, because adopting Tabular seems a much more natural choice than Multidimensional in those scenario where an analytical engine has to be embedded to deliver one of the features of a larger product/service delivered to customers. I’d like to see other feedbacks in the comments: tell your story of choosing between Tabular and Multidimensional in a BI project you started with SQL Server 2012, thanks!

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• The Case of the Missing Date/Time Stamp: Reporting Services 2008 R2 Snapshots

  - by smisner

  This week I stumbled upon an undocumented “feature” in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services as I was preparing a demonstration on how to set up and use report snapshots. If you’re familiar with the main changes in this latest release of Reporting Services, you probably already know that Report Manager got a facelift this time around. Although this facelift was generally a good thing, one of the casualties – in my opinion – is the loss of the snapshot label that served two purposes… First, it flagged the report as a snapshot. Second, it let you know when that snapshot was created. As part of my standard operating procedure when demonstrating report snapshots, I point out this label, so I was rather taken aback when I didn’t see it in the demonstration I was preparing. It sort of upset my routine, and I’m rather partial to my routines. I thought perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right place and changed Report Manager from Tile View to Detail View, but no – that label was still missing. In the grand scheme of life, it’s not an earth-shattering change, but you’ll have to look at the Modified Date in Details View to know when the snapshot was run. Or hope that the report developer included a textbox to show the execution time in the report. (Hint: this is a good time to add this to your list of report development best practices, whether a report gets set up as a report snapshot or not!) A snapshot from the past In case you don’t remember how a snapshot appeared in Report Manager back in the old days (of SQL Server 2008 and earlier), here’s an image I snagged from my Reporting Services 2008 Step by Step manuscript: A snapshot in the present A report server running in SharePoint integrated mode had no such label. There you had to rely on the Report Modified date-time stamp to know the snapshot execution time. So I guess all platforms are now consistent. Here’s a screenshot of Report Manager in the 2008 R2 version. One of these is a snapshot and the rest execute on demand. Can you tell which is the snapshot? Consider descriptions as an alternative So my report snapshot demonstration has one less step, and I’ll need to edit the Denali version of the Step by Step book. Things are simpler this way, but I sure wish we had an easier way to identify the execution methods of the reports. Consider using the description field to alert users that the report is a snapshot. It might save you a few questions about why the data isn’t up-to-date if the users know that something changed in the source of the report. Notice that the full description doesn’t display in Tile View, so keep it short and sweet or instruct users to open Details View to see the entire description.

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• Visual Studio 2010 Launch Events

  - by Jim Duffy

  Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn about the new features in Visual Studio 2010. Check out the MSDN Events page and find out when the talented folks of the Developer & Evangelism group will be visiting your city to prove to you that /*Life Runs On Code*/. I’ll be attending the Raleigh event June 2, 2010 from 1:00 - 5:00 PM. North Carolina State University, Jane S. McKimmon Conference Center 1101 Gorman St Raleigh North Carolina 27606 United States From the Raleigh Event page: Event Overview Learn about the rich application platforms that Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 supports, including Windows® 7, the Web, SharePoint®, Windows Azure™, SQL®, and Windows® Phone 7 Series. From tighter tester and dev collaboration to new ALM tools, there’s a lot that’s new. Here’s what you can expect: Windows Development with Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio has always been the best way to build compelling visual solutions for Windows. Visual Studio 2010 continues this trend with great new tooling support for Silverlight 4, WPF, and native development. In this demo heavy session, you’ll see how you can build rich Windows applications with Silverlight 4 using new trusted application features including out-of-browser execution, saving to the file system, and even COM Automation. You’ll also see how you can use the new Task Parallel Library from within a WPF application to take advantage of all those cores in today’s modern computers. Web and Cloud Development with Visual Studio 2010 If you build solutions for the web, then this session is for you. Come see how your existing skills move forward with Visual Studio 2010 both for in-house ASP.NET development and the new frontier of the Cloud. In this session, you’ll see improved designers, new HTML and JavaScript snippets, Web Forms enhancements, and how you can quickly build great web sites using Dynamic Data. You’ll see the changes made to testable web sites with MVC 2.0 and how we’ve integrated JQuery support into the platform. You’ll then see how easy it is to leverage your existing code and move to the cloud with Windows Azure. Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools and Platform Overview This session provides an overview of Visual Studio® 2010 for Windows Phone. Learn about the powerful capabilities of this new application platform and the developer tools experience including basic IDE usage, debugging, packaging, and deployment. This session also shows how you can use Microsoft Expression® Blend™ for Windows Phone to build great Silverlight applications. Have a day. :-|

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