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• The Rise of Project Intelligence and Why It Matters

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} By Amy DeWolf Are you doing any of these in your organization? How are you leveraging historical data to forecast projects? There’s a lot going on in government today. The economic pressures agencies feel from the uncertainty of budget cuts and sequestration effect every part of an organization, including the Project Management Office (PMO).  The PMO is responsible for monitoring and administering government IT projects. As time goes on, priorities shift, technology advances, and new regulations are imposed, all of which make planning and executing projects more difficult.  For example, think about your own projects.  How many boxes do you need to check and hoops do you need to jump through to ensure you comply with new regulations? While new regulations and technology advancements can be a good thing, they add an additional layer of complexity to already complex projects. To overcome some of these pressures, particularly new regulations, many in the PMO world are adopting a new approach- Project Intelligence (PI). According to a new Oracle Primavera white paper, The Rise of Project Intelligence: When Project Management is Just Not Enough, “PI uses Business Intelligence methods to leverage historical project data to make more informed decisions and greatly enhance project execution.” Currently, project managers plan and forecast the possible phases in an execution cycle.  However, most project managers don’t have the proper tools to do this as effectively as they would like. As the white paper noted, “The underlying deficiencies in most forecasting approaches are that 1) the PM fails in most instances to leverage historical data and 2) the PM doesn’t employ current Business Intelligence tools.” PI seeks to overturn this by combining modeling tools used in Business Intelligence for projects with the understanding of Emotional Intelligence for managing people.   Simply put, Project Intelligence is built off four main pillars: Actively use historical data to forecast project cycles Understand the intricacies of complex projects Enhance social and emotional intelligence in projects Actively use Business intelligence tools Read our complimentary whitepaper and discover the importance of emotional intelligence and best practices for improving projects, specifically in terms of communication.

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• How should I plan the inheritance structure for my game?

  - by Eric Thoma

  I am trying to write a platform shooter in C++ with a really good class structure for robustness. The game itself is secondary; it is the learning process of writing it that is primary. I am implementing an inheritance tree for all of the objects in my game, but I find myself unsure on some decisions. One specific issue that it bugging me is this: I have an Actor that is simply defined as anything in the game world. Under Actor is Character. Both of these classes are abstract. Under Character is the Philosopher, who is the main character that the user commands. Also under Character is NPC, which uses an AI module with stock routines for friendly, enemy and (maybe) neutral alignments. So under NPC I want to have three subclasses: FriendlyNPC, EnemyNPC and NeutralNPC. These classes are not abstract, and will often be subclassed in order to make different types of NPC's, like Engineer, Scientist and the most evil Programmer. Still, if I want to implement a generic NPC named Kevin, it would nice to be able to put him in without making a new class for him. I could just instantiate a FriendlyNPC and pass some values for the AI machine and for the dialogue; that would be ideal. But what if Kevin is the one benevolent Programmer in the whole world? Now we must make a class for him (but what should it be called?). Now we have a character that should inherit from Programmer (as Kevin has all the same abilities but just uses the friendly AI functions) but also should inherit from FriendlyNPC. Programmer and FriendlyNPC branched away from each other on the inheritance tree, so inheriting from both of them would have conflicts, because some of the same functions have been implemented in different ways on the two of them. 1) Is there a better way to order these classes to avoid these conflicts? Having three subclasses; Friendly, Enemy and Neutral; from each type of NPC; Engineer, Scientist, and Programmer; would amount to a huge number of classes. I would share specific implementation details, but I am writing the game slowly, piece by piece, and so I haven't implemented past Character yet. 2) Is there a place where I can learn these programming paradigms? I am already trying to take advantage of some good design patterns, like MVC architecture and Mediator objects. The whole point of this project is to write something in good style. It is difficult to tell what should become a subclass and what should become a state (i.e. Friendly boolean v. Friendly class). Having many states slows down code with if statements and makes classes long and unwieldy. On the other hand, having a class for everything isn't practical. 3) Are there good rules of thumb or resources to learn more about this? 4) Finally, where does templating come in to this? How should I coordinate templates into my class structure? I have never actually taken advantage of templating honestly, but I hear that it increases modularity, which means good code.

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• Deliberate Practice

  - by Jeff Foster

  It’s easy to assume, as software engineers, that there is little need to “practice” writing code. After all, we write code all day long! Just by writing a little each day, we’re constantly learning and getting better, right? Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Of course, developers do improve with experience. Each time we encounter a problem we’re more likely to avoid it next time. If we’re in a team that deploys software early and often, we hone and improve the deployment process each time we practice it. However, not all practice makes perfect. To develop true expertise requires a particular type of practice, deliberate practice, the only goal of which is to make us better programmers. Everyday software development has other constraints and goals, not least the pressure to deliver. We rarely get the chance in the course of a “sprint” to experiment with potential solutions that are outside our current comfort zone. However, if we believe that software is a craft then it’s our duty to strive continuously to raise the standard of software development. This requires specific and sustained efforts to get better at something we currently can’t do well (from Harvard Business Review July/August 2007). One interesting way to introduce deliberate practice, in a sustainable way, is the code kata. The term kata derives from martial arts and refers to a set of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. One of the better-known examples is the Bowling Game kata by Bob Martin, the goal of which is simply to write some code to do the scoring for 10-pin bowling. It sounds too easy, right? What could we possibly learn from such a simple example? Trust me, though, that it’s not as simple as five minutes of typing and a solution. Of course, we can reach a solution in a short time, but the important thing about code katas is that we explore each technique fully and in a controlled way. We tackle the same problem multiple times, using different techniques and making different decisions, understanding the ramifications of each one, and exploring edge cases. The short feedback loop optimizes opportunities to learn. Another good example is Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a simple problem to solve, but try solving it in a functional style. If you’re used to mutability, solving the problem without mutating state will push you outside of your comfort zone. Similarly, if you try to solve it with the focus of “tell-don’t-ask“, how will the responsibilities of each object change? As software engineers, we don’t get enough opportunities to explore new ideas. In the middle of a development cycle, we can’t suddenly start experimenting on the team’s code base. Code katas offer an opportunity to explore new techniques in a safe environment. If you’re still skeptical, my challenge to you is simply to try it out. Convince a willing colleague to pair with you and work through a kata or two. It only takes an hour and I’m willing to bet you learn a few new things each time. The next step is to make it a sustainable team practice. Start with an hour every Friday afternoon (after all who wants to commit code to production just before they leave for the weekend?) for month and see how that works out. Finally, consider signing up for the Global Day of Code Retreat. It’s like a daylong code kata, it’s on December 8th and there’s probably an event in your area!

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• Finding Leaders Breakfasts - Adelaide and Perth

  - by rdatson-Oracle

  HR Executives Breakfast Roundtables: Find the best leaders using science and social media! Perth, 22nd July & Adelaide, 24th July What is leadership in the 21st century? What does the latest research tell us about leadership? How do you recognise leadership qualities in individuals? How do you find individuals with these leadership qualities, hire and develop them? Join the Neuroleadership Institute, the Hay Group, and Oracle to hear: 1. the latest neuroscience research about human bias, and how it applies to finding and building better leaders; 2. the latest techniques to recognise leadership qualities in people; 3. and how you can harness your people and social media to find the best people for your company. Reflect on your hiring practices at this thought provoking breakfast, where you will be challenged to consider whether you are using best practices aimed at getting the right people into your company. Speakers Abigail Scott, Hay Group Abigail is a UK registered psychologist with 10 years international experience in the design and delivery of talent frameworks and assessments. She has delivered innovative assessment programmes across a range of organisations to identify and develop leaders. She is experienced in advising and supporting clients through new initiatives using evidence-based approach and has published a number of research papers on fairness and predictive validity in assessment. Karin Hawkins, NeuroLeadership Institute Karin is the Regional Director of NeuroLeadership Institute’s Asia-Pacific region. She brings over 20 years experience in the financial services sector delivering cultural and commercial results across a variety of organisations and functions. As a leadership risk specialist Karin understands the challenge of building deep bench strength in teams and she is able to bring evidence, insight, and experience to support executives in meeting today’s challenges. Robert Datson, Oracle Robert is a Human Capital Management specialist at Oracle, with several years as a practicing manager at IBM, learning and implementing latest management techniques for hiring, deploying and developing staff. At Oracle he works with clients to enable best practices for HR departments, and drawing the linkages between HR initiatives and bottom-line improvements. Agenda 07:30 a.m. Breakfast and Registrations 08:00 a.m. Welcome and Introductions 08:05 a.m. Breaking Bias in leadership decisions - Karin Hawkins 08:30 a.m. Identifying and developing leaders - Abigail Scott 08:55 a.m. Finding leaders, the social way - Robert Datson 09:20 a.m. Q&A and Closing Remarks 09:30 a.m. Event concludes If you are an employee or official of a government organisation, please click here for important ethics information regarding this event. To register for Perth, Tuesday 22nd July, please click HERE To register for Adelaide, Thursday 24th July, please click HERE 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Contact: To register or have questions on the event? Contact Aaron Tait on +61 2 9491 1404

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• Seperation of project responsibilities in new project

  - by dreza

  We have very recently started a new project (MVC 3.0) and some of our early discussion has been around how the work and development will be split amongst the team members to ensure we get the least amount of overlap of work and so help make it a bit easier for each developer to get on and do their work. The project is expected to take about 6 months - 1 year (although not all developers are likely to be on and might filter off towards the end), Our team is going to be small so this will help out a bit I believe. The team will essentially consist of: 3 x developers (1 a slightly more experienced and will be the lead) 1 x project manager / product owner / tester An external company responsbile for doing our design work General project/development decisions so far have included: Develop in an Agile way using SCRUM techniques (We are still very much learning this approach as a company) Use MVVM archectecture Use Ninject and DI where possible Attempt to use as TDD as much as possible to drive development. Keep our controllers as skinny as possible Keep our views as simple as possible During our discussions two approaches have been broached as too how to seperate the workload given our objectives outlined above. OPTION 1: A framework seperation where each person is responsible for conceptual areas with overlap and discussion primarily in the integration areas. The integration areas would the responsibily of both developers as required. View prototypes (**Graphic designer**) | - Mockups | Views (Razor and view helpers etc) & Javascript (**Developer 1**) | - View models (Integration point) | Controllers and Application logic (**Developer 2**) | - Models (Integration point) | Domain model and persistence (**Developer 3**) PROS: Integration points are quite clear and so developers can work without dependencies on others fairly easily Code practices such as naming conventions and style is more easily managed in regards to consistancy as primarily only one developer will be handling an area CONS: Completion of an entire feature becomes a bit grey as no single person is responsible for an entire feature (story?) A person might not have a full appreciation for all areas of the project and so code overlap might be lacking if suddenly that person left. OPTION 2: A more task orientated approach where each person is responsible for the completion of the entire task from view - controller - model. PROS: A person is responsible for one entire feature so it's "complete" state can be clearly defined Code overlap into different areas will occur so each individual has good coverage over the entire application CONS: Overlap of development will occur in all the modules and developers can develop/extend without a true understanding of what the original code owner was intending. This could potentially lead more easily to code bloat? Following a convention might be harder as developers are adding to all areas of the project If a developer sets up a way of doing things would it be harder to enforce the other developers to follow that convention or even build on it (or even discuss it?). Dunno.. Bugs could more easily be introduced into areas not thought about by the developer It's easier to possibly to carry a team member in so far as one member just hacks code together to complete a task whilst another takes time to build a foundation that could be used by others and so help make future tasks easier i.e. starts building a framework? QUESTION: As it might appear I'm more in favor of option 1, however I'm interested to see how others might have approached this or what is the standard or best or preferred way of undertaking a project. Or indeed any different approach to handling this?

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• 4 Key Ingredients for the Cloud

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  It's a short week here with the US Thanksgiving Holiday. So, before we put on our stretch pants and get ready to belly up to the dinner table for turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes, let's spend a little time this week talking about the Cloud (kind of like the feathery whipped goodness that tops the infamous Thanksgiving pumpkin pie!) But before we dive into the Cloud, let's do a side by side comparison of the key ingredients for each. Cloud Whipped Cream  Application Integration  1 cup heavy cream  Security  1/4 cup sugar  Virtual I/O  1 teaspoon vanilla  Storage  Chilled Bowl It’s no secret that millions of people are connected to the Internet. And it also probably doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of those people are connected on social networking sites.  Social networks have become an excellent platform for sharing and communication that reflects real world relationships and they play a major part in the everyday lives of many people. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and hundreds of others have transformed the way we interact and communicate with one another.Social networks are becoming more than just an online gathering of friends. They are becoming a destination for ideation, e-commerce, and marketing. But it doesn’t just stop there. Some organizations are utilizing social networks internally, integrated with their business applications and processes and the possibility of social media and cloud integration is compelling. Forrester alone estimates enterprise cloud computing to grow to over $240 billion by 2020. It’s hard to find any current IT project today that is NOT considering cloud-based deployments. Security and quality of service concerns are no longer at the forefront; rather, it’s about focusing on the right mix of capabilities for the business. Cloud vs. On-Premise? Policies & governance models? Social in the cloud? Cloud’s increasing sophistication, security in applications, mobility, transaction processing and social capabilities make it an attractive way to manage information. And Oracle offers all of this through the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Social Network. Oracle Social Network is a secure private network that provides a broad range of social tools designed to capture and preserve information flowing between people, enterprise applications, and business processes. By connecting you with your most critical applications, Oracle Social Network provides contextual, real-time communication within and across enterprises. With Oracle Social Network, you and your teams have the tools you need to collaborate quickly and efficiently, while leveraging the organization’s collective expertise to make informed decisions and drive business forward. Oracle Social Network is available as part of a portfolio of application and platform services within the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud offers self-service business applications delivered on an integrated development and deployment platform with tools to rapidly extend and create new services. Oracle Social Network is pre-integrated with the Fusion CRM Cloud Service and the Fusion HCM Cloud Service within the Oracle Cloud. If you are looking for something to watch as you veg on the couch in a post-turkey dinner hangover, you might consider watching these how-to videos! And yes, it is perfectly ok to have that 2nd piece of pie

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• There are 2 jobs available - which one sounds better all round [closed]

  - by Steve Gates

  I am currently employed at a company where we scrape by each year breaking even, sometimes having a little profit. The development environment is very relaxed and we have a laugh. My colleagues are not interested in improving their knowledge unless they have to, so trying to get them to adopt things like TDD is a non-starter. My development manager is stuck in .Net 2 land and refuses to use things like LINQ. He over complicates architecture and writes very unreadable code, heres an example SortedList<int,<SortedList<int,SortedList<int, MyClass>>>> The MD of the company has no drive and lets the one sales guy bring in the contracts. We are not busy all the time and this allows me time to look at new technology and learn. In terms of using things like TDD, my development manager has no problem with it and can kind of see the purpose of it, he just wont use it himself. This means I am alone in learning new things and am often resorting to StackOverflow to make sure I get things right. The company has a lot of flexibility, I can work from home if needs be and when my daughter was born they let me work from home 1 day a week however they expect this flexibility in return often asking me to travel occasionally on a Friday afternoon for the following week. Sometimes its abroad. We are also pretty much on call 24/5 as we have engineers in various countries. Also we have no testers so most of the testing is done by us developers and some testing by engineers. Either way no-one likes testing! I have been offered a role at a company I worked at 5 years ago. They were quite Victorian in their working practices but it appears to have relaxed now although I suspect still reasonably formal. There is a new team of developers I don't know and they are about to move to new offices. The team lead is a guy that was there when I was and I get the impression he takes his role seriously and likes his formal procedures and documentation. I think some of the Victorian practices may have rubbed off on him. However he did say if things crop up then as long as I can trust the person they can work at home although he prefers people in the office. The team uses SCRUM, TDD and SOLID design principles so they are quite up to date in technology. They are reasonably Microsoft focused. It appears the Technical Director might be the R&D man and research new technology on his own not allowing developers to play with new technology. He possibly might be a super developer and makes all the decisions that no can argue with. They are currently moving to Entity Framework away from NHibernate based on issues that their queries seem to fail sometimes and they feel NHibernate is stagnant. They have analysts and a QA team. The MD is focused and they are an expanding company making profit each year. I'm not sure what the team morale is and whether they have a laugh. When I had a tour around the office they were there in dead silence. I'm really unsure which role is the best for me and going with my gut instinct is useless as I'm not sure what my gut is telling me. Based on the information above which role would you choose and why?

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• When things go awry

  - by Phil Factor

  The moment the Entrepreneur opened his mouth on prime-time national TV, spelled out the URL and waxed big on how exciting ‘his’ new website was, I knew I was in for a busy night. I’d designed and built it. All at once, half a million people tried to log into the website. Although all my stress-testing paid off, I have to admit that the network locked up tight long before there was any danger of a database or website problem. Soon afterwards, the Entrepreneur and the Big Boss were there in the autopsy meeting. We picked through all our systems in detail to see how they’d borne the unexpected strain. Mercifully, in view of the sour mood of the Big Boss, it turned out that the only thing we could have done better was buy a bigger pipe to and from the internet. We’d specified that ‘big pipe’ when designing the system. The Big Boss had then railed at the cost and so we’d subsequently compromised. I felt that my design decisions were vindicated. The Big Boss brooded for a while. Then he made the significant comment: “What really ****** me off is the fact that, for ten minutes, we couldn’t take people’s money.” At that point I stopped feeling smug. Had the internet connection been better, the system would have reached its limit and failed rather precipitously, and that wasn’t what he wanted. Then it occurred to me that what had gummed up the connection was all those images on the site, that had made it so impressive for the visitors. If there had been a way to automatically pare down the site to the bare essentials under stress… Hmm. I began to consider disaster-recovery in the broadest sense – maintaining a service in spite of unusual or unexpected events. What he said makes a lot of sense: sacrifice whatever isn’t essential to keep the core service running when we approach the capacity limits. Maybe in IT we should borrow (or revive) the business concept of the ‘Skeleton service’, maintaining only the priority parts under stress, using a process that is well-prepared and carefully rehearsed. How might this work? Whatever the event we have to prepare for, it is all about understanding the priorities; knowing what one can dispense with when the going gets tough. In the event of database disaster, it’s much faster to deploy a skeletal system with only the essential data than to restore the entire system, though there would have to be a reconciliation process to update the revived database retrospectively, once the emergency was over. It isn’t just the database that could be designed for resilience. One could prepare for unusually high traffic in a website by designing a system that degraded gradually to a ‘skeletal’ site, one that maintained the commercial essentials without fat images, JavaScript libraries and razzmatazz. This is all what the Big Boss scathingly called ‘a mere technicality’. It seems to me that what is needed first is a culture of application and database design which acknowledges that we live in a very imperfect world, and react accordingly when things go awry.

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• New Oracle BI Applications released

  - by THE

  Oracle has just released two new Applications for Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics with the Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} 7.9.6.x Extension Pack: Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} · Oracle Manufacturing Analytics, part of the Oracle BI Applications product family, helps discrete and process manufacturing organizations optimize their supply networks by integrating data from across the enterprise value chain, thereby enabling executives, operations managers, cost accountants and production supervisors to make informed and actionable decisions related to manufacturing execution. Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} · Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics, part of the Oracle BI Applications product family, offers complete and enhanced visibility to enterprise-wide maintenance information. Pre-built reports covering Maintenance History, Maintenance Cost Analysis and Maintenance Work Orders, provide Maintenance Managers information to maximize performance, identify potential issues much in advance, and address them before they escalate into serious problems.  More Information about the existing Business Intelligence Analytics Applications can be found on this page: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/bi-applications-066544.html If you are not familiar with Oracle Manufacturing or Oracle Enterprise Asset Management, these PDFs might get you started: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/060289.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/057127.pdf

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• Moving StarterSTS to the (Azure) Cloud

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Quite some people asked me about an Azure version of StarterSTS. While I kinda knew what I had to do to make the move, I couldn’t find the time. Until recently. This blog post briefly documents the necessary changes and design decisions for the next version of StarterSTS which will work both on-premise and on Azure. Provider Fortunately StarterSTS is already based on the idea of “providers”. Authentication, roles and claims generation is based on the standard ASP.NET provider infrastructure. This makes the migration to different data stores less painful. In my case I simply moved the ASP.NET provider database to SQL Azure and still use the standard SQL Server based membership, roles and profile provider. In addition StarterSTS has its own providers to abstract resource access for certificates, relying party registration, client certificate registration and delegation. So I only had to provide new implementations. Signing and SSL keys now go in the Azure certificate store and user mappings (client certificates and delegation settings) have been moved to Azure table storage. The one thing I didn’t anticipate when I originally wrote StarterSTS was the need to also encapsulate configuration. Currently configuration is “locked” to the standard .NET configuration system. The new version will have a pluggable SettingsProvider with versions for .NET configuration as well as Azure service configuration. If you want to externalize these settings into e.g. a database, it is now just a matter of supplying a corresponding provider. Moving between the on-premise and Azure version will be just a matter of using different providers. URL Handling Another thing that’s substantially different on Azure (and load balanced scenarios in general) is the handling of URLs. In farm scenarios, the standard APIs like ASP.NET’s Request.Url return the current (internal) machine name, but you typically need the address of the external facing load balancer. There’s a hotfix for WCF 3.5 (included in v4) that fixes this for WCF metadata. This was accomplished by using the HTTP Host header to generate URLs instead of the local machine name. I now use the same approach for generating WS-Federation metadata as well as information card files. New Features I introduced a cache provider. Since we now have slightly more expensive lookups (e.g. relying party data from table storage), it makes sense to cache certain data in the front end. The default implementation uses the ASP.NET web cache and can be easily extended to use products like memcached or AppFabric Caching. Starting with the relying party provider, I now also provide a read/write interface. This allows building management interfaces on top of this provider. I also include a (very) simple web page that allows working with the relying party provider data. I guess I will use the same approach for other providers in the future as well. I am also doing some work on the tracing and health monitoring area. Especially important for the Azure version. Stay tuned.

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• Rethinking Oracle Optimizer Statistics for P6 Part 2

  - by Brian Diehl

  In the previous post (Part 1), I tried to draw some key insights about the relationship between P6 and Oracle Optimizer Statistics.  The first is that average cardinality has the greatest impact on query optimization and that the particular queries generated by P6 are more likely to use this average during calculations. The second is that these are statistics that are unlikely to change greatly over the life of the application. Ultimately, our goal is to get the best query optimization possible.  Or is it? Stability No application administrator wants to get the call at 9am that their application users cannot get there work done because everything is running slow. This is a possibility with a regularly scheduled nightly collection of statistics. It may not just be slow performance, but a complete loss of service because one or more queries are optimized poorly. Ideally, this should not be the case. The database optimizer should make better decisions with more up-to-date data. Better statistics may give incremental performance benefit. However, this benefit must be balanced against the potential cost of system down time.  It is stability that we ultimately desire and not absolute optimal performance. We do want the benefit from more accurate statistics and better query plans, but not at the risk of an unusable system. As a result, I've developed the following methodology around managing database statistics for the P6 database.  1. No Automatic Re-Gathering - The daily, weekly, or other interval of statistic gathering is unlikely to be beneficial. Quite the opposite. It is more likely to cause problems. 2. Smart Re-Gathering - The time to collect statistics is when things have changed significantly. For a new installation of P6, this is happening more often because the data is growing from a few rows to thousands and more. But for a mature system, the data is not changing significantly from week-to-week. There are times to collect statistics: New releases of the application Changes in the underlying hardware or software versions (ex. new Oracle RDBMS version) When additional user groups are added. The new groups may use the software in significantly different ways. After significant changes in the data. This may be monthly, quarterly or yearly.  3. Always Test - If you take away one thing from this post, it would be to always have a plan to test after changing statistics. In reality, statistics can be collected as often as you desire provided there are tests in place to verify that performance is the same or better. These might be automated tests or simply a manual script of application functions. 4. Have a Way Out - Never change the statistics without a way to return to the previous set. Think of the statistics as one part of the overall application code that also includes the source code--both application and RDBMS. It would be foolish to change to the new code without a way to get back to the previous version. In the final post, I will talk about the actual script I created for P6 PMDB and possible future direction for managing query performance. 

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• Is there any kind of established architecture for browser based games?

  - by black_puppydog

  I am beginning the development of a broser based game in which players take certain actions at any point in time. Big parts of gameplay will be happening in real life and just have to be entered into the system. I believe a good kind of comparison might be a platform for managing fantasy football, although I have virtually no experience playing that, so please correct me if I am mistaken here. The point is that some events happen in the program (i.e. on the server, out of reach for the players) like pulling new results from some datasource, starting of a new round by a game master and such. Other events happen in real life (two players closing a deal on the transfer of some team member or whatnot - again: have never played fantasy football) and have to be entered into the system. The first part is pretty easy since the game masters will be "staff" and thus can be trusted to a certain degree to not mess with the system. But the second part bothers me quite a lot, especially since the actions may involve multiple steps and interactions with different players, like registering a deal with the system that then has to be approved by the other party or denied and passed on to a game master to decide. I would of course like to separate the game logic as far as possible from the presentation and basic form validation but am unsure how to do this in a clean fashion. Of course I could (and will) put some effort into making my own architectural decisions and prototype different ideas. But I am bound to make some stupid mistakes at some point, so I would like to avoid some of that by getting a little "book smart" beforehand. So the question is: Is there any kind of architectural works that I can read up on? Papers, blogs, maybe design documents or even source code? Writing this down this seems more like a business application with business rules, workflows and such... Any good entry points for that? EDIT: After reading the first answers I am under the impression of having made a mistake when including the "MMO" part into the title. The game will not be all fancy (i.e. 3D or such) on the client side and the logic will completely exist on the server. That is, apart from basic form validation for the user which will also be mirrored on the server side. So the target toolset will be HTML5, JavaScript, probably JQuery(UI). My question is more related to the software architecture/design of a system that enforces certain rules. Separation of ruleset and presentation One problem I am having is that I want to separate the game rules from the presentation. The first step would be to make an own module for the game "engine" that only exposes an interface that allows all actions to be taken in a clean way. If an action fails with regard to some pre/post condition, the engine throws an exception which is then presented to the user like "you cannot sell something you do not own" or "after that you would end up in a situation which is not a valid game state." The problem here is that I would like to be able to not even present invalid action in the first place or grey out the corresponding UI elements. Changing and tweaking the ruleset Another big thing is the ruleset. It will probably evolve over time and most definitely must be tweaked. What's more, it should be possible (to a certain extent) to build a ruleset that fits a specific game round, i.e. choosing different kinds of behaviours in different aspects of the game. This would do something like "we play it with extension A today but we throw out extension B." For me, this screams "Architectural/Design pattern" but I have no idea on who might have published on something like this, not even what to google for.

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• How to edit the XSL for RSS Viewer Webpart

  - by Nagendra

  I am using a blog site as a source for my RSS Feed. As I see the RSS feed, its showing up as the following :: Blog: Posts Test Thursday, March 04, 2010 - Body: With 25 four's and 3 sixers Sachin crosses 200 (147 balls) runs in an single ODI innings. Creates another world record. Watch the final over where he got it double hundred with MSD on the other end. This is what he had to say after getting the MOM (man of the match): I dedicate this knock to all the people of India, who have supported me throughout over the last 20 years. I was timing the ball well, and I felt that anywhere between 340 to 350 was a good target. I thought Karthik, Yusuf and Dhoni supported me well. I thought that a 200 would be possible once I crossed 175 in the 42nd over. I am enjoying my cricket at the moment. There have been a few bad decisions I have made as a batsman, but as long as the passion is there I will carry on. It feels good that I lasted the 50 overs, it was a good test of my fitness and I would like to do this once again. Well!!! Wait for more. Published: 3/4/2010 3:18 PM More... I actually wanted to remove the Body, Published parameters. I just want my XSLT to be able to show only the Description of the blog. No need to have this meta data. Can anyone help me in specifying tthe XSL changes?

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• Why is "Fixup" needed for Persistence Ignorant POCO's in EF 4?

  - by Eric J.

  One of the much-anticipated features of Entity Framework 4 is the ability to use POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) in a Persistence Ignorant manner (i.e. they don't "know" that they are being persisted with Entity Framework vs. some other mechanism). I'm trying to wrap my head around why it's necessary to perform association fixups and use FixupCollection in my "plain" business object. That requirement seems to imply that the business object can't be completely ignorant of the persistence mechanism after all (in fact the word "fixup" sounds like something needs to be fixed/altered to work with the chosen persistence mechanism). Specifically I'm referring to the Association Fixup region that's generated by the ADO.NET POCO Entity Generator, e.g.: #region Association Fixup private void FixupImportFile(ImportFile previousValue) { if (previousValue != null && previousValue.Participants.Contains(this)) { previousValue.Participants.Remove(this); } if (ImportFile != null) { if (!ImportFile.Participants.Contains(this)) { ImportFile.Participants.Add(this); } if (ImportFileId != ImportFile.Id) { ImportFileId = ImportFile.Id; } } } #endregion as well as the use of FixupCollection. Other common persistence-ignorant ORMs don't have similar restrictions. Is this due to fundamental design decisions in EF? Is some level of non-ignorance here to stay even in later versions of EF? Is there a clever way to hide this persistence dependency from the POCO developer? How does this work out in practice, end-to-end? For example, I understand support was only recently added for ObservableCollection (which is needed for Silverlight and WPF). Are there gotchas in other software layers from the design requirements of EF-compatible POCO objects?

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• Does RabbitMq do round-robin from the exchange to the queues

  - by Lancelot

  Hi, I am currently evaluating message queue systems and RabbitMq seems like a good candidate, so I'm digging a little more into it. To give a little context I'm looking to have something like one exchange load balancing the message publishing to multiple queues. I don't want to replicate the messages, so a fanout exchange is not an option. Also the reason I'm thinking of having multiple queues vs one queue handling the round-robin w/ the consumers, is that I don't want our single point of failure to be at the queue level. Sounds like I could add some logic on the publisher side to simulate that behavior by editing the routing key and having the appropriate bindings in place. But that's kind of a passive approach that wouldn't take the pace of the message consumption on each queue into account, potentially leading to fill up one queue if the consumer applications for that queue are dead. I was looking for a more pro-active way from the exchange entity side, that would decide where to send the next message based on each queue size or something of that nature. I read about Alice and the available RESTful APIs but that seems kind of a heavy duty solution to implement fast routing decisions. Anyone knows if round-robin between the exchange the queues is feasible w/ RabbitMQ then? Thanks.

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• Java EE suitablity for a social network using Cassandra datastore ??

  - by Marcos

  We are in the process of making some important technology decisions for a social networking application. We're planning to have Cassandra(a NoSQL database to support efficient data storage). We would be using Hector(a Java client) to interact with Cassandra. 1.) Would Java EE be a good choice over PHP for a social networking application in terms of performance, scalabilty & complexities? 2.) Another possible implementation strategy, Is it suitable to have backend alone in Java and rest in PHP? 3.) What differences(as compared to PHP) it makes in terms of costs at various stages of application development, deployment and maintenance ? 4.) What are the things to keep in mind as we move along with Java development& deployment(as we are relatively new to the Java background) ? 5.) If you could list some major production deployments of similar type(social network) applications in Java. Thank you!

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• Open Source CMS (.Net vs Java)

  - by CmsAndDotNetKindaGuy

  I must say up-front that this is not a strictly programming-related question and a very opinionated one. I am the lead developer of the dominant .Net CMS in my country and I don't like my own product :). Managerial decisions over what is important or not and large chunks of legacy code done before I joined gives me headache every day I go for work. Anyway, having a vast amount of experience in web industry and a very good grasp of C# and programming practices I'm designing my own CMS the past few months. Now the problem is that I'm an open source kinda guy so I have a dilemma. Should I use C# and .Net which has crippled multi-platform support or should I drop .Net entirely and start learning Java where I can create a truly open-source and cross-platform CMS? Please don't answer that I should contribute to an existing open source CMS. I ruled that out after spending a great deal of time searching for something similar in structure to what I have in mind. I am not a native speaker, so feel free to correct my syntax or rephrase my question.

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• Is there a standard mapping between JSON and Protocol Buffers?

  - by Daniel Earwicker

  From a comment on the announcement blog post: Regarding JSON: JSON is structured similarly to Protocol Buffers, but protocol buffer binary format is still smaller and faster to encode. JSON makes a great text encoding for protocol buffers, though -- it's trivial to write an encoder/decoder that converts arbitrary protocol messages to and from JSON, using protobuf reflection. This is a good way to communicate with AJAX apps, since making the user download a full protobuf decoder when they visit your page might be too much. It may be trivial to cook up a mapping, but is there a single "obvious" mapping between the two that any two separate dev teams would naturally settle on? If two products supported PB data and could interoperate because they shared the same .proto spec, I wonder if they would still be able to interoperate if they independently introduced a JSON reflection of the same spec. There might be some arbitrary decisions to be made, e.g. should enum values be represented by a string (to be human-readable a la typical JSON) or by their integer value? So is there an established mapping, and any open source implementations for generating JSON encoder/decoders from .proto specs?

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• Documentation for java.util.concurrent.locks.ReentrantReadWriteLock

  - by Andrei Taptunov

  Disclaimer: I'm not very good at Java and just comparing read/writer locks between C# and Java to understand this topic better & decisions behind both implementations. There is JavaDoc about ReentrantReadWriteLock. It states the following about upgrade/downgrade for locks: Lock downgrading ... However, upgrading from a read lock to the write lock is not possible. It also has the following example that shows manual upgrade from read lock to write lock: // Here is a code sketch showing how to exploit reentrancy // to perform lock downgrading after updating a cache void processCachedData() { rwl.readLock().lock(); if (!cacheValid) { // upgrade lock manually #1: rwl.readLock().unlock(); // must unlock first to obtain writelock #2: rwl.writeLock().lock(); if (!cacheValid) { // recheck ... } ... } use(data); rwl.readLock().unlock(); Does it mean that actually the sample from above may not behave correctly in some cases - I mean there is no lock between lines #1 & #2 and underlying structure is exposed to changes from other threads. So it can not be considered as the correct way to upgrade the lock or do I miss something here?

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• How can I test this SQL Server performance Utility?

  - by Martin Smith

  As part of my MSc I need to do a three month project later this year. I have decided to do something which will likely be useful for me in the workplace and spend the time getting to understand SQL Server internals. The deliverable for this project will be a performance advisor looking at a variety of different rules. Some static such as finding redundant indexes, some more dynamic such as using XEvents to find outlying invocations of stored procedure execution times when certain parameters are passed. I am struggling to come up with a good way of testing this though. I can obviously design a "bad" database and a synthetic workload that my tool will pick up issues on but I also need to demonstrate that it has real world utility. Looking at the self tuning database literature it is common to use TPC benchmarks but I've had a look at the TPCC site and it looks very time consuming to implement and not that good a fit to my project's testing needs in any event (I would still be able to "rig" it by the decisions I made on indexing or physical architecture). Plan A would be to find willing beta tester(s) but in the event that isn't possible I will need a fallback plan. The best idea I have come up with so far is to use the various MS sample applications as examples of real world applications. e.g. http://msftdpprodsamples.codeplex.com/ http://www.asp.net/community/projects/ Does anyone have any better suggestions?

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• Advice on improving programming skills, learning capabilities?

  - by anonymous-coward1234

  Hi all, After 2,5 years of professional Java programing, I still have problems that make my job difficult and, more importantly - more times that I would like to admit - not enjoyable. I would like to ask for advice by more experienced people on ways that would help me overcome them. These are the problems I have: I do not absorb new knowledge easily. Even when I understand something, after a couple of days I easily forget even basic stuff. Other co-workers, even with the same working experience, when reading new technologies put things easily into "context", and are able to compare in "real time| similar technologies they already have used. I always try to address all the issues to whatever I am doing at one go, which results in me trying to resolve too many problems at the same time, losing completely control. I find it difficult to make my mind on a single problem that I should address first, and even when I do, and find myself throwing away code that I wrote because I started addressing the wrong issue first. As far as architecture and data modeling is concerned, I have difficulty making decisions on what objects must be created, with what hierarchy, interfaces, abstraction etc. I imagine that - to a certain degree - these things come with experience. But after 2,5 years of Java programming, I would expect myself to have come much farther that I have come, both in terms of absorption and experience. Is there a way to improve my learning speed? Any books, methods, advice is welcome.

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• Workflow UI Integration - is WF a good approach?

  - by AJ

  Somewhat similar to this question, except we haven't decided that we're going with WF yet. I'm working on designing a system that requires a series of decisions and activities on a "work object," so I naturally began to consider workflow, specifically WF. What I'm wondering is if WF is a good solution for a situation like the following (oversimplified for this question) case (please forgive bad ascii art): __________________ | Gather some info | | (web page) | |__________________| | | / \ / \ / \ / \ / cond \ \ 1 / \ / \ / \ / \ / | | ______________|_______________ | | | | | ______|______ ______|________ / do some / | Get more info | / process / | (web page) | /____________/ |_______________| | | / \ / \ / \ / cond. \ \ 2 / \ / \ / \ / | | |__________________ | | | | _____|_____ _____|_____ / some / / another / / process / / process / /__________/ /__________/ The part I'm struggling with is the get more info (web page) step and what happens subsequent, which would mean a halt in the execution of the workflow runtime. I'm aware that this is possible, but I'm not sure that WF is the best approach for this type of code, as the user interaction may be required at many different points through the entire workflow, and the workflow will drive what data entry screens are needed. We are using a WinForms/ASP.NET web forms package for UI, which is homegrown and difficult to push deployments on, so something like SharePoint integration is out of the question. Our back-end is DB2, and the workflow code (whether it's in WF or otherwise) will need to interact with that as well. I guess the bottom line is, should we look into using WF for this, or would we be better served just coding it ourselves? Can WF easily integrate data entry screens to capture information that can be used further on in the workflow?

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• Alternative to MS Project 2007 for production scheduling?

  - by john c

  OK... Im coming to grips with the fact that MS Project 2007 may not be the correct tool for my production scheduling. We serve 120 to 150 projects a year with durations from 6 weeks to 12 months. The task are simple (6 to 8 per project) and the resource pool is stable (15 to 20 people). It's really an assembly line product but with extremely varied durations. I need to be able to prioritize the projects for production and run projects concurrently to fully utilize my resources. What are the feelings of the stackoverflow community. Am I using the wrong program? I was really hoping to make this simple for non-programer types to input project data into a form and have the schedule software automated enough to make most of the decisions. Is there a better solution available commercially? I'd like to hold on writing a custom spreadsheet as a last resort but if that's the best route then so be it. Thank you so much for your input.

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• Who architected / designed C++'s IOStreams, and would it still be considered well-designed by today'

  - by stakx

  First off, it may seem that I'm asking for subjective opinions, but that's not what I'm after. I'd love to hear some well-grounded arguments on this topic. In the hope of getting some insight into how a modern streams / serialization framework ought to be designed, I recently got myself a copy of the book Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales by Angelika Langer and Klaus Kreft. I figured that if IOStreams wasn't well-designed, it wouldn't have made it into the C++ standard library in the first place. After having read various parts of this book, I am starting to have doubts if IOStreams can compare to e.g. the STL from an overall architectural point-of-view. Read e.g. this interview with Alexander Stepanov (the STL's "inventor") to learn about some design decisions that went into the STL. What surprises me in particular: It seems to be unknown who was responsible for IOStreams' overall design (I'd love to read some background information about this — does anyone know good resources?); Once you delve beneath the immediate surface of IOStreams, e.g. if you want to extend IOStreams with your own classes, you get to an interface with fairly cryptic and confusing member function names, e.g. getloc/imbue, uflow/underflow, snextc/sbumpc/sgetc/sgetn, pbase/pptr/epptr (and there's probably even worse examples). This makes it so much harder to understand the overall design and how the single parts co-operate. Even the book I mentioned above doesn't help that much (IMHO). Thus my question: If you had to judge by today's software engineering standards (if there actually is any general agreement on these), would C++'s IOStreams still be considered well-designed? (I wouldn't want to improve my software design skills from something that's generally considered outdated.)

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• File Storage for Web Applications: Filesystem vs DB vs NoSQL engines

  - by El Yobo

  I have a web application that stores a lot of user generated files. Currently these are all stored on the server filesystem, which has several downsides for me. When we move "folders" (as defined by our application) we also have to move the files on disk (although this is more due to strange design decisions on the part of the original developers than a requirement of storing things on the filesystem). It's hard to write tests for file system actions; I have a mock filesystem class that logs actions like move, delete etc, without performing them, which more or less does the job, but I don't have 100% confidence in the tests. I will be adding some other jobs which need to access the files from other service to perform additional tasks (e.g. indexing in Solr, generating thumbnails, movie format conversion), so I need to get at the files remotely. Doing this over network shares seems dodgy... Dealing with permissions on the filesystem as sometimes given us problems in the past, although now that we've moved to a pure Linux environment this should be less of an issue. What are the downsides of storing files as BLOBs in MySQL? I guess that it would massively increase the database size and reduce the effectiveness of caches, but are there other problems? Do the same problems exist with NoSQL systems like Cassandra? Does anyone have any other suggestions that might be appropriate?

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