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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 14 &ndash; Insuring Integrity &amp; Availability

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Identify the characteristics of a network that keep data safe from loss or damage Protect an enterprise-wide network from viruses Explain network and system level fault tolerance techniques Discuss issues related to network backup and recovery strategies Describe the components of a useful disaster recovery plan and the options for disaster contingencies What are integrity and availability? Integrity – the soundness of a networks programs, data, services, devices, and connections Availability – How consistently and reliably a file or system can be accessed by authorized personnel A number of phenomena can compromise both integrity and availability including… security breaches natural disasters malicious intruders power flaws human error users etc Although you cannot predict every type of vulnerability, you can take measures to guard against the most damaging events. The following are some guidelines… Allow only network administrators to create or modify NOS and application system users. Monitor the network for unauthorized access or changes Record authorized system changes in a change management system’ Install redundant components Perform regular health checks on the network Check system performance, error logs, and the system log book regularly Keep backups Implement and enforce security and disaster recovery policies These are just some of the basics… Malware Malware refers to any program or piece of code designed to intrude upon or harm a system or its resources. Types of Malware… Boot sector viruses Macro viruses File infector viruses Worms Trojan Horse Network Viruses Bots Malware characteristics Some common characteristics of Malware include… Encryption Stealth Polymorphism Time dependence Malware Protection There are various tools available to protect you from malware called anti-malware software. These monitor your system for indications that a program is performing potential malware operations. A number of techniques are used to detect malware including… Signature Scanning Integrity Checking Monitoring unexpected file changes or virus like behaviours It is important to decide where anti-malware tools will be installed and find a balance between performance and protection. There are several general purpose malware policies that can be implemented to protect your network including… Every compute in an organization should be equipped with malware detection and cleaning software that regularly runs Users should not be allowed to alter or disable the anti-malware software Users should know what to do in case the anti-malware program detects a malware virus Users should be prohibited from installing any unauthorized software on their systems System wide alerts should be issued to network users notifying them if a serious malware virus has been detected. Fault Tolerance Besides guarding against malware, another key factor in maintaining the availability and integrity of data is fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is the ability for a system to continue performing despite an unexpected hardware or software malfunction. Fault tolerance can be realized in varying degrees, the optimal level of fault tolerance for a system depends on how critical its services and files are to productivity. Generally the more fault tolerant the system, the more expensive it is. The following describe some of the areas that need to be considered for fault tolerance. Environment (Temperature and humidity) Power Topology and Connectivity Servers Storage Power Typical power flaws include Surges – a brief increase in voltage due to lightening strikes, solar flares or some idiot at City Power Noise – Fluctuation in voltage levels caused by other devices on the network or electromagnetic interference Brownout – A sag in voltage for just a moment Blackout – A complete power loss The are various alternate power sources to consider including UPS’s and Generators. UPS’s are found in two categories… Standby UPS – provides continuous power when mains goes down (brief period of switching over) Online UPS – is online all the time and the device receives power from the UPS all the time (the UPS is charged continuously) Servers There are various techniques for fault tolerance with servers. Server mirroring is an option where one device or component duplicates the activities of another. It is generally an expensive process. Clustering is a fault tolerance technique that links multiple servers together to appear as a single server. They share processing and storage responsibilities and if one unit in the cluster goes down, another unit can be brought in to replace it. Storage There are various techniques available including the following… RAID Arrays NAS (Storage (Network Attached Storage) SANs (Storage Area Networks) Data Backup A backup is a copy of data or program files created for archiving or safekeeping. Many different options for backups exist with various media including… These vary in cost and speed. Optical Media Tape Backup External Disk Drives Network Backups Backup Strategy After selecting the appropriate tool for performing your servers backup, devise a backup strategy to guide you through performing reliable backups that provide maximum data protection. Questions that should be answered include… What data must be backed up At what time of day or night will the backups occur How will you verify the accuracy of the backups Where and for how long will backup media be stored Who will take responsibility for ensuring that backups occurred How long will you save backups Where will backup and recovery documentation be stored Different backup methods provide varying levels of certainty and corresponding labour cost. There are also different ways to determine which files should be backed up including… Full backup – all data on all servers is copied to storage media Incremental backup – Only data that has changed since the last full or incremental backup is copied to a storage medium Differential backup – Only data that has changed since the last backup is coped to a storage medium Disaster Recovery Disaster recovery is the process of restoring your critical functionality and data after an enterprise wide outage has occurred. A disaster recovery plan is for extreme scenarios (i.e. fire, line fault, etc). A cold site is a place were the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exist but they are not appropriately configured. A warm site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists with some appropriately configured devices. A hot site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists and all are appropriately configured.

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: What is HDFS – Day 8 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is MapReduce. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – HDFS. What is HDFS ? HDFS stands for Hadoop Distributed File System and it is a primary storage system used by Hadoop. It provides high performance access to data across Hadoop clusters. It is usually deployed on low-cost commodity hardware. In commodity hardware deployment server failures are very common. Due to the same reason HDFS is built to have high fault tolerance. The data transfer rate between compute nodes in HDFS is very high, which leads to reduced risk of failure. HDFS creates smaller pieces of the big data and distributes it on different nodes. It also copies each smaller piece to multiple times on different nodes. Hence when any node with the data crashes the system is automatically able to use the data from a different node and continue the process. This is the key feature of the HDFS system. Architecture of HDFS The architecture of the HDFS is master/slave architecture. An HDFS cluster always consists of single NameNode. This single NameNode is a master server and it manages the file system as well regulates access to various files. In additional to NameNode there are multiple DataNodes. There is always one DataNode for each data server. In HDFS a big file is split into one or more blocks and those blocks are stored in a set of DataNodes. The primary task of the NameNode is to open, close or rename files and directory and regulate access to the file system, whereas the primary task of the DataNode is read and write to the file systems. DataNode is also responsible for the creation, deletion or replication of the data based on the instruction from NameNode. In reality, NameNode and DataNode are software designed to run on commodity machine build in Java language. Visual Representation of HDFS Architecture Let us understand how HDFS works with the help of the diagram. Client APP or HDFS Client connects to NameSpace as well as DataNode. Client App access to the DataNode is regulated by NameSpace Node. NameSpace Node allows Client App to connect to the DataNode based by allowing the connection to the DataNode directly. A big data file is divided into multiple data blocks (let us assume that those data chunks are A,B,C and D. Client App will later on write data blocks directly to the DataNode. Client App does not have to directly write to all the node. It just has to write to any one of the node and NameNode will decide on which other DataNode it will have to replicate the data. In our example Client App directly writes to DataNode 1 and detained 3. However, data chunks are automatically replicated to other nodes. All the information like in which DataNode which data block is placed is written back to NameNode. High Availability During Disaster Now as multiple DataNode have same data blocks in the case of any DataNode which faces the disaster, the entire process will continue as other DataNode will assume the role to serve the specific data block which was on the failed node. This system provides very high tolerance to disaster and provides high availability. If you notice there is only single NameNode in our architecture. If that node fails our entire Hadoop Application will stop performing as it is a single node where we store all the metadata. As this node is very critical, it is usually replicated on another clustered as well as on another data rack. Though, that replicated node is not operational in architecture, it has all the necessary data to perform the task of the NameNode in the case of the NameNode fails. The entire Hadoop architecture is built to function smoothly even there are node failures or hardware malfunction. It is built on the simple concept that data is so big it is impossible to have come up with a single piece of the hardware which can manage it properly. We need lots of commodity (cheap) hardware to manage our big data and hardware failure is part of the commodity servers. To reduce the impact of hardware failure Hadoop architecture is built to overcome the limitation of the non-functioning hardware. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss the importance of the relational database in Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Converting LINQ to Twitter to Twitter API v1.1

  - by Joe Mayo

  Twitter recently updated their API to v1.1 (Current status: API v1.1). Naturally, LINQ to Twitter  needed to be updated too. This blog post outlines the changes made to LINQ to Twitter during this conversion and highlights important features that LINQ to Twitter developers will want to know. Overall Impact Generally speaking, Twitter API v1.1 is semantically very much the same as it’s predecessor. The base URL changed and so did a few resource segments, but the resources themselves are still intact. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has always shielded the developer from this plumbing, so the entities, types, and filters didn’t change much at all.  The following sections describe what did  change. Authentication In Twitter API v1.0 authentication was not required for some resources, such as user timelines and search. However, that’s all changed because *all* queries must be authenticated in Twitter API v1.1. LINQ to Twitter has various types of authorizers you can use, supporting whatever OAuth options are available via Twitter.  You can see the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications, for more info on OAuth support. The New Search One of the larger changes to the API was Search. To be more specific, the Search entity now contains a List<Status>, named Statuses, to hold results.  Additionally, any meta-data associated with the search is now in a property named SearchMetaData. The change to the Search entity and responses is the big change, but the good news is that your Search query syntax doesn’t change. Different Rate Limits The issue of rate limits itself is contentious, but this discussion is focused on the coding experience and I’ll leave the politics to those who prefer to engage in that activity. What’s important here is that both headers and resources have changed. You should review Twitter’s Rate Limit documentation to understand what the changes mean.  A quick explanation is that rate limits are applied individually to each resource in 15 minute time intervals. In LINQ to Twitter these changes surface on the Help entity, via HelpType.RateLimits. The RateLimits query has a Resources filter where you can specify a comma-separated list of categories to return rate limit info for.  The results materialize in the RateLimits dictionary, keyed on category. The Help entity also has a RateLimitsAuthorizationContext, holding the Access Token for the user performing queries – and to whom the rate limits apply. In addition to the new RateLimits query, there are new RateLimit headers that appear in the query response, whose HTTP header name is of the form X-Rate-Limit… which is different from the previous header name. LINQ to Twitter surfaces these headers via the existing properties of the TwitterContext instance. For anyone who retrieved rate limit information via the Headers property of TwitterContext, you should be aware of the new header names.  I haven’t done anything with Feature rate limit properties yet, but they appear to no longer be available – this will require more follow-up. Error Handling Twitter API v1.1 has a new format for Error Codes & Responses. LINQ to Twitter wraps these messages in the TwitterQueryException, which has been updated appropriately. The Message property of TwitterQueryException now reflects the Twitter error message, when available. There’s also a new ErrorCode that’s populated with the message error code. Parameters Most parameters stayed the same, but one of interest is Include Entities (different from LINQ to Twitter data object entities). Entities are metadata hanging off tweets, that provide start/end position in the tweet and other information for mentions, urls, hash tags, and media. Entities used to not be included unless you specified you wanted them. Now, in v1.1, entities are included by default for all APIs that return a Status.  If you were always setting IncludeEntities to true, then you won’t see a change. However, be aware that you’ll now be receiving additional data in your response from Twitter, which will explain a sudden increase in bandwidth utilization. This might or might not  matter to you  depending on the requirements of your application, but you should be aware of it. Everything Else There might be small changes here and there that I haven’t mentioned, but these were the ones you should be most aware of.  Streams didn’t change, but Twitter will be deprecating username/password authentication on public streams, in favor of OAuth, so you’ll be seeing me make that change some time in the future.  Also, Twitter will continue to evolve the API and you can expect that LINQ to Twitter will change accordingly. Summary The big changes to Twitter API were Authentication, Search, Rate Limits, and Error Handling. All API calls must be authenticated. You’ll need to change your code to read Search results differently, but the query is much the same as you use now. There’s a new RateLimits API, one of the Help queries.  Also, the new error messages are integrated into TwitterQueryException. Besides these changes, I expect  most others to be small or affect a smaller percentage of developers.  You can get the latest version of LINQ to Twitter from NuGet or visit the LINQ to Twitter download page at CodePlex.com.   @JoeMayo

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• creating a pre-menu level select screen

  - by Ephiras

  Hi I am working on creating a tower Defence java applet game and have come to a road block about implementing a title screen that i can select the level and difficulty of the rest of the game. my title screen class is called Menu. from this menu class i need to pass in many different variables into my Main class. i have used different classes before and know how to run them and such. but if both classes extend applet and each has its individual graphics method how can i run things from Main even though it was created in Menu. what i essentially want to do is run the Menu class withits action listeners and graphics until a Difficulty button has been selected, run the main class (which 100% works without having to have the Menu class) and pretty much terminate Menu so that i cannot go back to it, do not see its buttons or graphics menus. can i run one applet annd when i choose a button close that one and launch the other one? IF you would like to download the full project you can find it here, i had to comment out all the code that wasn't working my Menu class import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; import java.applet.*; public class Menu extends Applet implements ActionListener{ Button bEasy,bMed,bHard; Main m; public void init(){ bEasy= new Button("Easy"); bEasy.setBounds(140,200,100,50); add(bEasy); bMed = new Button("Medium");bMed.setBounds(280,200,100,50); add(bMed); bHard= new Button("Hard");bHard.setBounds(420,200,100,50); add(bHard); setLayout(null); } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ Main m = new Main(20,10,3000,mapMed);//break; switch (e.getSource()){ case bEasy: Main m = new Main(6000,20,"levels/levelEasy.png");break;//enimies tower money world case bMed: Main m = new Main(4000,15,"levels/levelMed.png");break; case bHard: Main m = new Main(2000,10,"levels/levelEasy.png");break; default: break; } } public void paint(){ //m.draw(g) } } and here is my main class initialising code. import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; import java.applet.*; import java.io.IOException; public class Main extends Applet implements Runnable, MouseListener, MouseMotionListener, ActionListener{ Button startButton, UpgRange, UpgDamage; //set up the buttons Color roadCol,startCol,finCol,selGrass,selRoad; //set up the colors Enemy e[][]; Tower t[]; Image towerpic,backpic,roadpic,levelPic; private Image i; private Graphics doubleG; //here is the world 0=grass 1=road 2=start 3=end int world[][],eStartX,eStartY; boolean drawMouse,gameEnd; static boolean start=false; static int gridLength=15; static int round=0; int Mx,My,timer=1500; static int sqrSize=31; int towers=0,towerSelected=-10; static int castleHealth=2000; String levelPath; //choose the level Easy Med or Hard int maxEnemy[] = {5,7,12,20,30,15,50,30,40,60};//number of enimies per round int maxTowers=15;//maximum number of towers allowed static int money =2000,damPrice=600,ranPrice=350,towerPrice=700; //money = the intial ammount of money you start of with //damPrice is the price to increase the damage of a tower //ranPrice is the price to increase the range of a tower public void main(int cH,int mT,int mo,int dP,int rP,int tP,String path,int[] mE)//constructor 1 castleHealth=cH; maxTowers=mT; money=mo; damPrice=dP; ranPrice=rP; towerPrice=tP; String levelPath=path; maxEnemy = mE; buildLevel(); } public void main(int cH,int mT,String path)//basic constructor castleHealth=cH; maxTowers=mT; String levelPath=path; maxEnemy = mE; buildLevel(); } public void init(){ setSize(sqrSize*15+200,sqrSize*15);//set the size of the screen roadCol = new Color(255,216,0);//set the colors for the different objects startCol = new Color(0,38,255); finCol = new Color(255,0,0); selRoad = new Color(242,204,155);//selColor is the color of something when your mouse hovers over it selGrass = new Color(0,190,0); roadpic = getImage(getDocumentBase(),"images/road.jpg"); towerpic = getImage(getDocumentBase(),"images/tower.png"); backpic = getImage(getDocumentBase(),"images/grass.jpg"); levelPic = getImage(getDocumentBase(),"images/level.jpg"); e= new Enemy[maxEnemy.length][];//activates all of the enimies for (int r=0;r<e.length;r++) e[r] = new Enemy[maxEnemy[r]]; t= new Tower[maxTowers]; for (int i=0;i<t.length;i++) t[i]= new Tower();//activates all the towers for (int i=0;i<e.length; i++)//sets all of the enimies starting co ordinates for (int j=0;j<e[i].length;j++) e[i][j] = new Enemy(eStartX,eStartY,world); initButtons();//initialise all the buttons addMouseMotionListener(this); addMouseListener(this); }

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• Oracle Romania Summer School

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 What would you say about a Summer School within a corporation where you can learn, play and practice? You might think that this is something usually uncommon for a company and you would be right. However, Oracle’s main value being innovation, we came up with a new project for Romanian students and graduates. We organised Oracle Summer School , offering them the opportunity to develop their soft skills and gain valuable business knowledge and exposure. How was Oracle Summer School programme organised? We focused on students and graduates’ needs and combined business experience with training and practice. The twenty four participants had different backgrounds, being interested in Software, Hardware, Finance, Marketing or other areas. The programme fulfilled each of these needs, bringing them in contact with Specialists and Managers. The first two weeks were dedicated to the company visits, business presentations and networking. The participants got an insight about employees’ activities and projects. Storytelling was also part of the program and people from different departments spent a couple of hours with the participants, sharing their experiences, knowledge and interesting stories. The Recruitment team delivered a training about the job interview skills in order to make the participants feel better prepared for a Recruitment process. The second module consisted of two weeks of Soft Skills trainings delivered by professional trainers from different departments. The participants gained useful insight on the competencies required within a business environment. The evenings were dedicated to social activities and it not very long until they started feel part of a team. The third module will take place at the end of September and will put the participants in contact with senior people from the business who will become their Mentors. What do the participants say about Oracle Summer School? “ As a fresh computer science graduate, Oracle Summer School gave me the opportunity of finding what are the technical and nontechnical skills required in a large multinational company. It was a great way of seeing how the theoretical knowledge I received during college is applied in real-life scenarios and what skills I still need to develop. “  (Cosmin Radu) “ When arriving at Oracle I had high expectations, but did not know exactly what was going to unfold because of the program's lack of precedence. Right after the first day, my feedback outgrew the initial forecast and the following weeks continued to build upon it. I had the pleasure to acquaint with brilliant people. The program was outlined on various profiles, delivering a comprehensive experience. It was very engaging, informative and nevertheless fun. “ (Vlad Manciu) „ Oracle Summer School is by far the best summer school that I have ever attended. For me it has been a great experience so far, because I’ve learned not only how to use soft skills in a corporate environment, but I’ve learned a great deal about myself as well. However, the most valuable asset of this 3-week period were the people that I’ve met: great individuals and great professionals, whom I really grew fond of.” (Alexandru Purcarea) “Applying to Oracle Summer School has been the best decision I took in regard to how to spend my summer holiday. I had the chance to do job shadowing at some of the departments I was interested in and I attended great trainings on various subjects such as time management and emotional intelligence. Moreover, I made friends with the other participants and we enjoyed going out together after “classes”.(Andreea Tudor) If you are interested in joining our team and attending our events please follow us on https://campus.oracle.com/campus/HR/emea_main.html /* 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-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• The Unintended Consequences of Sound Security Policy

  - by Tanu Sood

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Author: Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM Meet the Author: Kevin Moulton, Senior Sales Consulting Manager, Oracle Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM, has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East Enterprise Security Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. When I speak to a room of IT administrators, I like to begin by asking them if they have implemented a complex password policy. Generally, they all nod their heads enthusiastically. I ask them if that password policy requires long passwords. More nodding. I ask if that policy requires upper and lower case letters – faster nodding – numbers – even faster – special characters – enthusiastic nodding all around! I then ask them if their policy also includes a requirement for users to regularly change their passwords. Now we have smiles with the nodding! I ask them if the users have different IDs and passwords on the many systems that they have access to. Of course! I then ask them if, when they walk around the building, they see something like this: Thanks to Jake Ludington for the nice example. Can these administrators be faulted for their policies? Probably not but, in the end, end-users will find a way to get their job done efficiently. Post-It Notes to the rescue! I was visiting a business in New York City one day which was a perfect example of this problem. First I walked up to the security desk and told them where I was headed. They asked me if they should call upstairs to have someone escort me. Is that my call? Is that policy? I said that I knew where I was going, so they let me go. Having the conference room number handy, I wandered around the place in a search of my destination. As I walked around, unescorted, I noticed the post-it note problem in abundance. Had I been so inclined, I could have logged in on almost any machine and into any number of systems. When I reached my intended conference room, I mentioned my post-it note observation to the two gentlemen with whom I was meeting. One of them said, “You mean like this,” and he produced a post it note full of login IDs and passwords from his breast pocket! I gave him kudos for not hanging the list on his monitor. We then talked for the rest of the meeting about the difficulties faced by the employees due to the security policies. These policies, although well-intended, made life very difficult for the end-users. Most users had access to 8 to 12 systems, and the passwords for each expired at a different times. The post-it note solution was understandable. Who could remember even half of them? What could this customer have done differently? I am a fan of using a provisioning system, such as Oracle Identity Manager, to manage all of the target systems. With OIM, and email could be automatically sent to all users when it was time to change their password. The end-users would follow a link to change their password on a web page, and then OIM would propagate that password out to all of the systems that the user had access to, even if the login IDs were different. Another option would be an Enterprise Single-Sign On Solution. With Oracle eSSO, all of a user’s credentials would be stored in a central, encrypted credential store. The end-user would only have to login to their machine each morning and then, as they moved to each new system, Oracle eSSO would supply the credentials. Good-bye post-it notes! 3M may be disappointed, but your end users will thank you. I hear people say that this post-it note problem is not a big deal, because the only people who would see the passwords are fellow employees. Do you really know who is walking around your building? What are the password policies in your business? How do the end-users respond?

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• Remote Workers...We're Not That Bad!

  - by user12601034

  I work from home a lot – my team is located in different cities and countries, my manager is in a different city, and most of our work is done via conference calls, email and collaboration through Oracle Social Network. We’ve figured out how to be effective and involve team members, regardless of where we are all located. When I mention that I work from home, a lot of my friends will laugh, roll their eyes or use their fingers to make quotation marks around “work from home.” Their belief is that I’m sitting at home, eating bon-bons and watching television. The attempts at humor only multiply when they know that my husband also mostly works from home. So, it was with great joy that I read the Lifehacker article Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged. I’m not going to re-write the article for you, but four highlights from the article include: Proximity breeds complacency –because communicating with employees sitting next to you is so easy, you may not do it well. Absence makes people try harder to connect – because you have to make an effort to connect to your team, you tend to pay better attention when you do connect Leaders of virtual team make better use of tools – when working remotely, you will use technology (many different forms of it) to connect with your team. This daily use of the tools makes you more proficient with those tools Leaders of far-flung teams maximize the time spent together – getting together takes effort, time and money, so leaders tend to filter out distractions when teams do get together. These points made me happy because I’ve seen the same things play out in my team located around the world. And I’m not saying that a virtual team is more effective than a co-located team – but my virtual team doesn’t have the option of filing into a conference room for a face-to-face meeting whenever we want. Instead, we have to figure out how to work effectively without meeting face-to-face. Am I more engaged as a remote worker? I’d like to think that I am. I’ve been on calls with colleagues at 3am – this would never happen if my only option was to be in the office. I can leave my “office” to pick up my kids from school…and I’m willingly back online after kids are in bed to finish up anything I need to. Oracle Social Network lets me use my iPad to engage with my teammates when I’m waiting at music lessons, the doctor’s office or any place else with a network connection. I feel like I’m more connected with my team, and I feel like I’m more connected with my family life. So yes, I am a remote worker, and I am engaged. If you lead a virtual team, I challenge you to increase the ways that you communicate to effectively engage your team. If you are on a virtual team, I challenge you to think about how you might interact with team members to keep both them and yourself engaged in your work. And if you have some great ideas on how to make virtual teams (and workers) effective and engaged, please share those ideas in the comments! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get a bon-bon...   :) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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;}

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• Finding it Hard to Deliver Right Customer Experience: Think BPM!

  - by Ajay Khanna

  Our relationship with our customers is not a just a single interaction and we should not treat it like one. A customer’s relationship with a vendor is like a journey which starts way before customer makes a purchase and lasts long after that. The journey may start with customer researching a product that may lead to the eventual purchase and may continue with support or service needs for the product. A typical customer journey can be represented as shown below: As you may notice, customers tend to use multiple channels to interact with a company throughout their journey.  They also expect that they should get consistent experience, no matter what interaction channel they may choose. Customers do not like to repeat the information they have already provided and expect companies to remember their preferences, and offer them relevant products and services. If the company fails to meet this expectation, customers not only will abandon the purchase and go to the competitor but may also influence others’ purchase decision. Gone are the days when word of mouth was the only medium, and the customer could influence “Six” others. This is the age of social media and customer’s good or bad experience, especially bad get highly amplified and may influence hundreds of others. Challenges that face B2C companies today include: Delivering consistent experience: The reason that delivering consistent experience is challenging is due to fragmented data, disjointed systems and siloed multichannel interactions. Customers tend to get different service quality if they use web vs. phone vs. store. They get different responses from different service agents or get inconsistent answers if they call sales vs. service group in the company. Such inconsistent experiences result in lower customer satisfaction or NPS (net promoter score) numbers. Increasing Revenue: To stay competitive companies frequently introduce new products and services. Delay in launching such offerings has a significant impact on revenue realization. In addition to new product revenue, there are multiple opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell that impact bottom line. If companies are not able to identify such opportunities, bring a product to market quickly, or not offer the right product to the right customer at the right time, significant loss of revenue may occur. Ensuring Compliance: Companies must be compliant to ever changing regulations, these could be about Know Your Customer (KYC), Export/Import regulations, or taxation policies. In addition to government agencies, companies also need to comply with the SLA that they have committed to their customers. Lapse in meeting any of these requirements may lead to serious fines, penalties and loss in business. Companies have to make sure that they are in compliance will all such regulations and SLA commitments, at any given time. With the advent of social networks and mobile technology, companies not only need to focus on process efficiency but also on customer engagement. Improving engagement means delivering the customer experience as the customer is expecting and interacting with the customer at right time using right channel. Customers expect to be able to contact you via any channel of their choice (web, email, chat, mobile, social media), purchase via any viable channel (web, phone, store, mobile). Customers expect companies to understand their particular needs and remember their preferences on repeated visits. To deliver such an integrated, consistent, and contextual experience, power of BPM in must. Your company may be organized in departments like Marketing, Sales, Service. You may hold prospect data in SFA, order information in ERP, customer issues in CRM. However, the experience delivered to the customer must not be constrained by your system legacy. BPM helps in designing the right experience for the right customer and integrates all the underlining channels, systems, applications to make sure right information will be delivered to the right knowledge worker or to the customer every single time.     Orchestrating information across all systems (MDM, CRM, ERP), departments (commerce, merchandising, marketing service) and channels (Email, phone, web, social)  is the key, and that’s what BPM delivers. In addition to orchestrating systems and channels for consistency, BPM also provides an ability for analysis and decision management. By using data from historical transactions, social media and from other systems, users can determine the customer preferences, customer value, and churn propensity. This information, in the context, is then used while making a decision at a process step. Working with real-time decision management system can also suggest right up-sell or cross-sell offers, discounts or next-best-action steps for a particular customer. Timely action on customer issues or request is also a key tenet of a good customer experience. BPM’s complex event processing capabilities help companies to take proactive actions before issues get escalated. BPM system can be designed to listen to a certain event patters then deduce from those customer situations (credit card stolen, baggage lost, change of address) and do a triage before situation goes out of control. If such a situation arises you can send alerts to right people or immediately invoke corrective actions. Last but not least one of BPM’s key values is to drive continuous improvement. Learning about customers past experiences, interactions and social conversations, provide valuable insight. Such insight can be used to improve products, customer facing processes, and customer experience. You may take these insights as an input to design better more efficient and customer friendly sales, contact center or self-service processes. If customer experience is important for your business, make sure you have incorporated BPM as a part of your strategy to design, orchestrate and improve your customer facing processes.

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• Breaking 1NF to model subset constraints. Does this sound sane?

  - by Chris Travers

  My first question here. Appologize if it is in the wrong forum but this seems pretty conceptual. I am looking at doing something that goes against conventional wisdom and want to get some feedback as to whether this is totally insane or will result in problems, so critique away! I am on PostgreSQL 9.1 but may be moving to 9.2 for this part of this project. To re-iterate: Does it seem sane to break 1NF in this way? I am not looking for debugging code so much as where people see problems that this might lead. The Problem In double entry accounting, financial transactions are journal entries with an arbitrary number of lines. Each line has either a left value (debit) or a right value (credit) which can be modelled as a single value with negatives as debits and positives as credits or vice versa. The sum of all debits and credits must equal zero (so if we go with a single amount field, sum(amount) must equal zero for each financial journal entry). SQL-based databases, pretty much required for this sort of work, have no way to express this sort of constraint natively and so any approach to enforcing it in the database seems rather complex. The Write Model The journal entries are append only. There is a possibility we will add a delete model but it will be subject to a different set of restrictions and so is not applicable here. If and when we allow deletes, we will probably do them using a simple ON DELETE CASCADE designation on the foreign key, and require that deletes go through a dedicated stored procedure which can enforce the other constraints. So inserts and selects have to be accommodated but updates and deletes do not for this task. My Proposed Solution My proposed solution is to break first normal form and model constraints on arrays of tuples, with a trigger that breaks the rows out into another table. CREATE TABLE journal_line ( entry_id bigserial primary key, account_id int not null references account(id), journal_entry_id bigint not null, -- adding references later amount numeric not null ); I would then add "table methods" to extract debits and credits for reporting purposes: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION debits(journal_line) RETURNS numeric LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE AS $$ SELECT CASE WHEN $1.amount < 0 THEN $1.amount * -1 ELSE NULL END; $$; CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION credits(journal_line) RETURNS numeric LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE AS $$ SELECT CASE WHEN $1.amount > 0 THEN $1.amount ELSE NULL END; $$; Then the journal entry table (simplified for this example): CREATE TABLE journal_entry ( entry_id bigserial primary key, -- no natural keys :-( journal_id int not null references journal(id), date_posted date not null, reference text not null, description text not null, journal_lines journal_line[] not null ); Then a table method and and check constraints: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION running_total(journal_entry) returns numeric language sql immutable as $$ SELECT sum(amount) FROM unnest($1.journal_lines); $$; ALTER TABLE journal_entry ADD CONSTRAINT CHECK (((journal_entry.running_total) = 0)); ALTER TABLE journal_line ADD FOREIGN KEY journal_entry_id REFERENCES journal_entry(entry_id); And finally we'd have a breakout trigger: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION je_breakout() RETURNS TRIGGER LANGUAGE PLPGSQL AS $$ BEGIN IF TG_OP = 'INSERT' THEN INSERT INTO journal_line (journal_entry_id, account_id, amount) SELECT NEW.id, account_id, amount FROM unnest(NEW.journal_lines); RETURN NEW; ELSE RAISE EXCEPTION 'Operation Not Allowed'; END IF; END; $$; And finally CREATE TRIGGER AFTER INSERT OR UPDATE OR DELETE ON journal_entry FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE_PROCEDURE je_breaout(); Of course the example above is simplified. There will be a status table that will track approval status allowing for separation of duties, etc. However the goal here is to prevent unbalanced transactions. Any feedback? Does this sound entirely insane? Standard Solutions? In getting to this point I have to say I have looked at four different current ERP solutions to this problems: Represent every line item as a debit and a credit against different accounts. Use of foreign keys against the line item table to enforce an eventual running total of 0 Use of constraint triggers in PostgreSQL Forcing all validation here solely through the app logic. My concerns are that #1 is pretty limiting and very hard to audit internally. It's not programmer transparent and so it strikes me as being difficult to work with in the future. The second strikes me as being very complex and required a series of contraints and foreign keys against self to make work, and therefore it strikes me as complex, hard to sort out at least in my mind, and thus hard to work with. The fourth could be done as we force all access through stored procedures anyway and this is the most common solution (have the app total things up and throw an error otherwise). However, I think proof that a constraint is followed is superior to test cases, and so the question becomes whether this in fact generates insert anomilies rather than solving them. If this is a solved problem it isn't the case that everyone agrees on the solution....

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• Why everybody should do Sales!

  - by FelixWehmeyer

  I speak with many business students and ask them what job they want to get into. Most of them tell me they want a job in Marketing, Management Consulting or Finance. I hardly ever hear “Sales, that is what I want to do”, and I often wonder why. I would like to start with a quote from Zig Ziglar, a successful salesman: "Nothing happens until someone sells something." But to get back to the main point, why wouldn’t you want to get in sales? When people think of sales, they picture a typical salesman in their head and think that selling is scary and all about manipulating, pressuring and pushing someone into buying something they don’t need. Are these stereotypes accurate? I don’t believe so: So why should you want to be in sales? If you think about selling as providing the solution for the problem and talking about the benefits of making a decision, then every job in this world comes out of selling. In every job you deal with coworkers that you want to convince of your ideas or convincing your boss that the project you want to work on is good for the company.  These days, consumers and businesses are very well informed about services and products. When we are talking about highly complex products, such as IT solutions, businesses don’t accept your run-of-the-mill salesman who is pushing a sale. These are often long projects where salespeople have a consulting and leading role. Salespeople need to be able to consult companies and customers with their problem and convince a client that their solution is the best fit. Next to the fact that sales, is by far, not as scary and shady as you thought, there are a few points that will make you want to consider a sales career: Negotiating skills – When you are in sales you will learn how to negotiate. Salespeople learn to listen to their customers and try to make them happy, overcoming objections and come to a final agreement that both parties are happy with. Persistence/Challenge – As a salesperson you will often hear a negative answer, in a sales role you will start to embrace this and see a ‘no’ as a challenge not as a rejection. This attitude change can help you a lot in your career, but also in your personal life. You will become more optimistic and gain a go-getter attitude. Salary – As salespeople are seen as the moneymakers for the company, companies often reward their sales teams generously. Most likely in a sales role, you will receive a good basic salary and often you get nice bonuses on top of that based on your performance. Oracle is, for instance, the company that offers the highest average commission in the world. Further you can expect many other benefits as companies know that there is a high demand for good salespeople. Teamwork – Sales is a lot like having your own business, you are responsible for your own territory or set of clients. You are the one who is responsible for the revenue coming from that territory. So in order to gain revenue you will have to work together with many departments and people to make that happen. Every (potential) client could be seen as a different project, and you are the project leader. Understanding customers and the business – From any job that you choose sales will get you the most insight in the market. Salespeople are usually well-connected, talk with different customers and learn about the market and are up-to-date about all latest changes. Even if you want to change to a different role in the long run, you have a great head start as you understand the market and customers like no one else. Job security – Look at all the job postings out there. Many of them are sales-related. So if you want to have a steady job, plenty of choice and companies willing to invest in you, sales could be something for you.  Are you interested in exploring a sales career? At Oracle we are always looking for good sales professionals and fresh graduates who want to get into sales! For many languages such as Flemish, Dutch, German, French, Swedish and Norwegian (and more) we are currently looking for graduates who want to develop their career in Oracle. Please have a look at this article for the experience of a Business Development Consultant at Oracle in Dublin. Want to learn more about this job check out this link or send an email to jessica.ebbelaar-at-oracle.com! Have a look at our website http://campus.oracle.com for all of our other latest sales and non-sales vacancies!

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• Inside BackgroundWorker

  - by João Angelo

  The BackgroundWorker is a reusable component that can be used in different contexts, but sometimes with unexpected results. If you are like me, you have mostly used background workers while doing Windows Forms development due to the flexibility they offer for running a background task. They support cancellation and give events that signal progress updates and task completion. When used in Windows Forms, these events (ProgressChanged and RunWorkerCompleted) get executed back on the UI thread where you can freely access your form controls. However, the logic of the progress changed and worker completed events being invoked in the thread that started the background worker is not something you get directly from the BackgroundWorker, but instead from the fact that you are running in the context of Windows Forms. Take the following example that illustrates the use of a worker in three different scenarios: – Console Application or Windows Service; – Windows Forms; – WPF. using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Threading; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Windows.Threading; class Program { static AutoResetEvent Synch = new AutoResetEvent(false); static void Main() { var bw1 = new BackgroundWorker(); var bw2 = new BackgroundWorker(); var bw3 = new BackgroundWorker(); Console.WriteLine("DEFAULT"); var unspecializedThread = new Thread(() => { OutputCaller(1); SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new SynchronizationContext()); bw1.DoWork += (sender, e) => OutputWork(1); bw1.RunWorkerCompleted += (sender, e) => OutputCompleted(1); // Uses default SynchronizationContext bw1.RunWorkerAsync(); }); unspecializedThread.IsBackground = true; unspecializedThread.Start(); Synch.WaitOne(); Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("WINDOWS FORMS"); var windowsFormsThread = new Thread(() => { OutputCaller(2); SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext()); bw2.DoWork += (sender, e) => OutputWork(2); bw2.RunWorkerCompleted += (sender, e) => OutputCompleted(2); // Uses WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext bw2.RunWorkerAsync(); Application.Run(); }); windowsFormsThread.IsBackground = true; windowsFormsThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); windowsFormsThread.Start(); Synch.WaitOne(); Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("WPF"); var wpfThread = new Thread(() => { OutputCaller(3); SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new DispatcherSynchronizationContext()); bw3.DoWork += (sender, e) => OutputWork(3); bw3.RunWorkerCompleted += (sender, e) => OutputCompleted(3); // Uses DispatcherSynchronizationContext bw3.RunWorkerAsync(); Dispatcher.Run(); }); wpfThread.IsBackground = true; wpfThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); wpfThread.Start(); Synch.WaitOne(); } static void OutputCaller(int workerId) { Console.WriteLine( "bw{0}.{1} | Thread: {2} | IsThreadPool: {3}", workerId, "RunWorkerAsync".PadRight(18), Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId, Thread.CurrentThread.IsThreadPoolThread); } static void OutputWork(int workerId) { Console.WriteLine( "bw{0}.{1} | Thread: {2} | IsThreadPool: {3}", workerId, "DoWork".PadRight(18), Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId, Thread.CurrentThread.IsThreadPoolThread); } static void OutputCompleted(int workerId) { Console.WriteLine( "bw{0}.{1} | Thread: {2} | IsThreadPool: {3}", workerId, "RunWorkerCompleted".PadRight(18), Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId, Thread.CurrentThread.IsThreadPoolThread); Synch.Set(); } } Output: //DEFAULT //bw1.RunWorkerAsync | Thread: 3 | IsThreadPool: False //bw1.DoWork | Thread: 4 | IsThreadPool: True //bw1.RunWorkerCompleted | Thread: 5 | IsThreadPool: True //WINDOWS FORMS //bw2.RunWorkerAsync | Thread: 6 | IsThreadPool: False //bw2.DoWork | Thread: 5 | IsThreadPool: True //bw2.RunWorkerCompleted | Thread: 6 | IsThreadPool: False //WPF //bw3.RunWorkerAsync | Thread: 7 | IsThreadPool: False //bw3.DoWork | Thread: 5 | IsThreadPool: True //bw3.RunWorkerCompleted | Thread: 7 | IsThreadPool: False As you can see the output between the first and remaining scenarios is somewhat different. While in Windows Forms and WPF the worker completed event runs on the thread that called RunWorkerAsync, in the first scenario the same event runs on any thread available in the thread pool. Another scenario where you can get the first behavior, even when on Windows Forms or WPF, is if you chain the creation of background workers, that is, you create a second worker in the DoWork event handler of an already running worker. Since the DoWork executes in a thread from the pool the second worker will use the default synchronization context and the completed event will not run in the UI thread.

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• "Imprinting" as a language feature?

  - by MKO

  Idea I had this idea for a language feature that I think would be useful, does anyone know of a language that implements something like this? The idea is that besides inheritance a class can also use something called "imprinting" (for lack of better term). A class can imprint one or several (non-abstract) classes. When a class imprints another class it gets all it's properties and all it's methods. It's like the class storing an instance of the imprinted class and redirecting it's methods/properties to it. A class that imprints another class therefore by definition also implements all it's interfaces and it's abstract class. So what's the point? Well, inheritance and polymorphism is hard to get right. Often composition gives far more flexibility. Multiple inheritance offers a slew of different problems without much benefits (IMO). I often write adapter classes (in C#) by implementing some interface and passing along the actual methods/properties to an encapsulated object. The downside to that approach is that if the interface changes the class breaks. You also you have to put in a lot of code that does nothing but pass things along to the encapsulated object. A classic example is that you have some class that implements IEnumerable or IList and contains an internal class it uses. With this technique things would be much easier Example (c#) [imprint List<Person> as peopleList] public class People : PersonBase { public void SomeMethod() { DoSomething(this.Count); //Count is from List } } //Now People can be treated as an List<Person> People people = new People(); foreach(Person person in people) { ... } peopleList is an alias/variablename (of your choice)used internally to alias the instance but can be skipped if not needed. One thing that's useful is to override an imprinted method, that could be achieved with the ordinary override syntax public override void Add(Person person) { DoSomething(); personList.Add(person); } note that the above is functional equivalent (and could be rewritten by the compiler) to: public class People : PersonBase , IList<Person> { private List<Person> personList = new List<Person>(); public override void Add(object obj) { this.personList.Add(obj) } public override int IndexOf(object obj) { return personList.IndexOf(obj) } //etc etc for each signature in the interface } only if IList changes your class will break. IList won't change but an interface that you, someone in your team, or a thirdparty has designed might just change. Also this saves you writing a whole lot of code for some interfaces/abstract classes. Caveats There's a couple of gotchas. First we, syntax must be added to call the imprinted classes's constructors from the imprinting class constructor. Also, what happends if a class imprints two classes which have the same method? In that case the compiler would detect it and force the class to define an override of that method (where you could chose if you wanted to call either imprinted class or both) So what do you think, would it be useful, any caveats? It seems it would be pretty straightforward to implement something like that in the C# language but I might be missing something :) Sidenote - Why is this different from multiple inheritance Ok, so some people have asked about this. Why is this different from multiple inheritance and why not multiple inheritance. In C# methods are either virtual or not. Say that we have ClassB who inherits from ClassA. ClassA has the methods MethodA and MethodB. ClassB overrides MethodA but not MethodB. Now say that MethodB has a call to MethodA. if MethodA is virtual it will call the implementation that ClassB has, if not it will use the base class, ClassA's MethodA and you'll end up wondering why your class doesn't work as it should. By the terminology sofar you might already confused. So what happens if ClassB inherits both from ClassA and another ClassC. I bet both programmers and compilers will be scratching their heads. The benefit of this approach IMO is that the imprinting classes are totally encapsulated and need not be designed with multiple inheritance in mind. You can basically imprint anything.

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• High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

  - by BuckWoody

  Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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• 2D isometric picking

  - by Bikonja

  I'm trying to implement picking in my isometric 2D game, however, I am failing. First of all, I've searched for a solution and came to several, different equations and even a solution using matrices. I tried implementing every single one, but none of them seem to work for me. The idea is that I have an array of tiles, with each tile having it's x and y coordinates specified (in this simplified example it's by it's position in the array). I'm thinking that the tile (0, 0) should be on the left, (max, 0) on top, (0, max) on the bottom and (max, max) on the right. I came up with this loop for drawing, which googling seems to have verified as the correct solution, as has the rendered scene (ofcourse, it could still be wrong, also, forgive the messy names and stuff, it's just a WIP proof of concept code) // Draw code int col = 0; int row = 0; for (int i = 0; i < nrOfTiles; ++i) { // XOffset and YOffset are currently hardcoded values, but will represent camera offset combined with HUD offset Point tile = IsoToScreen(col, row, TileWidth / 2, TileHeight / 2, XOffset, YOffset); int x = tile.X; int y = tile.Y; spriteBatch.Draw(_tiles[i], new Rectangle(tile.X, tile.Y, TileWidth, TileHeight), Color.White); col++; if (col >= Columns) // Columns is the number of tiles in a single row { col = 0; row++; } } // Get selection overlay location (removed check if selection exists for simplicity sake) Point tile = IsoToScreen(_selectedTile.X, _selectedTile.Y, TileWidth / 2, TileHeight / 2, XOffset, YOffset); spriteBatch.Draw(_selectionTexture, new Rectangle(tile.X, tile.Y, TileWidth, TileHeight), Color.White); // End of draw code public Point IsoToScreen(int isoX, int isoY, int widthHalf, int heightHalf, int xOffset, int yOffset) { Point newPoint = new Point(); newPoint.X = widthHalf * (isoX + isoY) + xOffset; newPoint.Y = heightHalf * (-isoX + isoY) + yOffset; return newPoint; } This code draws the tiles correctly. Now I wanted to do picking to select the tiles. For this, I tried coming up with equations of my own (including reversing the drawing equation) and I tried multiple solutions I found on the internet and none of these solutions worked. Trying out lots of solutions, I came upon one that didn't work, but it seemed like an axis was just inverted. I fiddled around with the equations and somehow managed to get it to actually work (but have no idea why it works), but while it's close, it still doesn't work. I'm not really sure how to describe the behaviour, but it changes the selection at wrong places, while being fairly close (sometimes spot on, sometimes a tile off, I believe never more off than the adjacent tile). This is the code I have for getting which tile coordinates are selected: public Point? ScreenToIso(int screenX, int screenY, int tileHeight, int offsetX, int offsetY) { Point? newPoint = null; int nX = -1; int nY = -1; int tX = screenX - offsetX; int tY = screenY - offsetY; nX = -(tY - tX / 2) / tileHeight; nY = (tY + tX / 2) / tileHeight; newPoint = new Point(nX, nY); return newPoint; } I have no idea why this code is so close, especially considering it doesn't even use the tile width and all my attempts to write an equation myself or use a solution I googled failed. Also, I don't think this code accounts for the area outside the "tile" (the transparent part of the tile image), for which I intend to add a color map, but even if that's true, it's not the problem as the selection sometimes switches on approx 25% or 75% of width or height. I'm thinking I've stumbled upon a wrong path and need to backtrack, but at this point, I'm not sure what to do so I hope someone can shed some light on my error or point me to the right path. It may be worth mentioning that my goal is to not only pick the tile. Each main tile will be divided into 5x5 smaller tiles which won't be drawn seperately from the whole main tile, but they will need to be picked out. I think a color map of a main tile with different colors for different coordinates within the main tile should take care of that though, which would fall within using a color map for the main tile (for the transparent parts of the tile, meaning parts that possibly belong to other tiles).

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• Rules for Naming

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Naming Documents (or is it “Document, Naming”?) Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself.  Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet Act II, Scene 2 We normally only use the bold portion of the famous Shakespearean quote above, but it is really out of context. As the play unfolds, we learn that a name is all too powerful. Indeed it is because of their names that the doomed lovers die. There might be life and death in a name (BTW, when I wrote this monogram, I was in Hatfield, PA. Remember the Hatfields and the McCoys?) This is a bit extreme, but in the field of Knowledge Management (KM) names are of the utmost importance as well. When I write an article about managing SharePoint sites, how should I name it? “Managing a site” or “Site, managing”? Nine times out of ten I’d opt for the latter. Almost everything we do is “Managing” so to make life easier for a person looking for meaningful content, we title our articles starting with the differentiator rather than the common factor. As a rule of thumb, we start the name with the noun rather than the verb. It is not what we do that is the primary key; it is what we do it to. So, answer this – is it a “rule of thumb” or a “thumb rule?” This is tough. A lot of what we do when naming is a judgment call. Both thumb and rule are nouns, albeit concrete and abstract (more about this later), but to most people “thumb rule” is meaningless while “rule of thumb” is an idiom. The difference between knowledge and information is that knowledge is meaningful information placed in context. Thus I elect the “rule of thumb”. It is the more meaningful title. Abstract and Concrete are relative terms. Many nouns (and verbs) that are abstract to a commoner, are concrete to a practitioner of one profession or another and may even have different concrete meanings in different professional jargons. Think about “running”. To an executive it means running a business, to a marathoner its meaning is much more literal. Generally speaking, we store and disseminate knowledge within a practice more than we do it in general. Even dictionaries encyclopedias define terms as they apply to different audiences. The rule of thumb is to put the more concrete first, but within the audience’s jargon. Even the title of this monogram is a question. Do I name it “Naming Documents” or “Documents, Naming”? Well, my own rule of thumb (“Here he goes again!?”) states that the latter is better because it starts with a noun, but this is a document about naming more than it about documents. The rules of naming also apply to graphs and charts, excel spreadsheets, and so on. Thus, I vote for the former.  A better title could have been “Naming Objects” only the word “Object” is a bit too abstract. How about just “Naming” or “Naming, rules of”? You get the drift. One of the ways to resolve all of this is to store the documents in Knowledge-Bases, which may become the subjects of a future punditry. Knowledge bases use keywords to describe their content.  Use a Metadata store for the keywords to at least attempt some common grounds. Here is another general rule (rule of thumb?!!) – put at least the one keyword in the title. Use subtitles. Here is an example: Migrating documents – Screening, cleaning, and organizing our knowledge. The main keyword is “documents”, next is “migrating”, other keywords also appear in the subtitle. They are “screening”, “cleaning”, and “organizing”. Any questions? Send me an amply named document by email: [email protected]

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• CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, Please recommendation for further education of the former performing art manager seeking career in IT industries? [on hold]

  - by Baek Seungjoo

  IT specialists there J Thank you very much for your collective efforts here, and I got huge help reading your professional comments and advices on each questions I have searched so far! This time, I would like to ask for your practical advices or recommendation on what I am struggling on at this moment. I am currently seeking higher education for my career transition from performing art manager and director to “IT software and/or service development and management specialist”. However, as this field is quite new to me, and there are lots of different work positions, I have no idea which grad major I better pursue in order to get qualification. Of course I know this question could sounds wired as it is kind of personal choice. But my lack of understanding on how IT software companies work in general, your practical and experience-based advice will be great help to me, who spent more than two months of self-research on net. OK. Before my question, here is my plan and history, which are quite different from those currently in IT industry I think… 1) Target Firstly, get career transition into IT service or products companies and get experiences. Eventually, pursue IT entrepreneurship in combination with my arts and cultural production and business expertise. 2) Background Career: performing arts director and manager in theatre-based scale opera and musical Art education in youth BA in literature and Chinese studies (Art & Humanities) MA in Cultural & Creative Industries (Art & Humanities) – dissertation with focus on digital prosumption and the lived experience of the prosumer. (a qualitative research on the agents in the digital world) 2) Personally Huge interest in IT hardware and software, and their trend. Skills to build up, repair, tune PCs -of course this is no more than personal hobby, but shows my interests in this field. 4) Problem Encounter a question “So, what do you think you can contribute practically in this position”. This question turn me down everytime I go through job interviews, and I decided more education in the relevant area. Here are my questions. 1) In terms of work positions in IT software companies, I wonder if I can put the comparison of what “Artists” is to “Arts Manager or Director” is what “Developer” is to “Product Manager”. (Of course, this stereotypical division of Artist-Art Manager is out of sense because the domain overlaps to some extent, and is blurring at least in my field, and they are in different contexts, but just speaking easily.) Normally, artist comes with special arts educations, and they live in their own world of artistic inspiration and creation, and they feel alive in practice and on stages. Meanwhile, from the point of staging and managing productions, the role of art manager is critical as well. Our role cares how the production appeals to the audience in effective way, how to make profit and future sustainable management through that, how to set up future strategy in consideration of the external conditions such as political and social circumstances, audience trend and level, other production trends from on-going and historical perspectives, how and what the production make voice to the society from political, economic, humanitarian stances. So, we need keen eyes on economic, political, and societal environment, have to understand human-being and their desires, must know how to make presentation and attract investors, must have sense in managing and fighting over the limited financial resource, how to extend networking and so on. It is common that the two agents create productions in collaboration (normally not in that ideal way but in conflict and fight though J ). So, we need to know each other’s expertise to some extent, for better production. What are the work positions in IT software industries equivalent to the role of “art manager” in performing arts? From my view, considering developers come with special education in the world of computer science, software engineering, or others (self-education sometimes), and they express themselves with the arts of coding, computer languages on the black screen, and make sort of their artistic production online to the audience, I guess there might be someone who collaborate with developers in creating, managing, and launching IT services or products. 2) Which education among CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, is needed for those seeking such work position? Especially for person like me. (At this moment, Information Science has the highest possibility to get in, since I lack Calculus and Math in undergrad educaiton. But please let me know irrespective of this concern, I think there are ways to back it up if CS or SE education needed in my case) 3) Which field between Information Science and HCI can be more practical background regarding job hungting? And which of them have more demands in job market? AS I checked, HCI is more close to CS than IS in its focus of study area. Thank you very much for your patience reading such a long inquiry, and I appreciate to your efforts in advance. Have a nice day in this beautiful summer.

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• The design of a generic data synchronizer, or, an [object] that does [actions] with the aid of [helpers]

  - by acheong87

  I'd like to create a generic data-source "synchronizer," where data-source "types" may include MySQL databases, Google Spreadsheets documents, CSV files, among others. I've been trying to figure out how to structure this in terms of classes and interfaces, keeping in mind (what I've read about) composition vs. inheritance and is-a vs. has-a, but each route I go down seems to violate some principle. For simplicity, assume that all data-sources have a header-row-plus-data-rows format. For example, assume that the first rows of Google Spreadsheets documents and CSV files will have column headers, a.k.a. "fields" (to parallel database fields). Also, eventually, I would like to implement this in PHP, but avoiding language-specific discussion would probably be more productive. Here's an overview of what I've tried. Part 1/4: ISyncable class CMySQL implements ISyncable GetFields() // sql query, pdo statement, whatever AddFields() RemFields() ... _dbh class CGoogleSpreadsheets implements ISyncable GetFields() // zend gdata api AddFields() RemFields() ... _spreadsheetKey _worksheetId class CCsvFile implements ISyncable GetFields() // read from buffer AddFields() RemFields() ... _buffer interface ISyncable GetFields() AddFields($field1, $field2, ...) RemFields($field1, $field2, ...) ... CanAddFields() // maybe the spreadsheet is locked for write, or CanRemFields() // maybe no permission to alter a database table ... AddRow() ModRow() RemRow() ... Open() Close() ... First Question: Does it make sense to use an interface, as above? Part 2/4: CSyncer Next, the thing that does the syncing. class CSyncer __construct(ISyncable $A, ISyncable $B) Push() // sync A to B Pull() // sync B to A Sync() // Push() and Pull() only differ in direction; factor. // Sync()'s job is to make sure that the fields on each side // match, to add fields where appropriate and possible, to // account for different column-orderings, etc., and of // course, to add and remove rows as necessary to sync. ... _A _B Second Question: Does it make sense to define such a class, or am I treading dangerously close to the "Kingdom of Nouns"? Part 3/4: CTranslator? ITranslator? Now, here's where I actually get lost, assuming the above is passable. Sometimes, two ISyncables speak different "dialects." For example, believe it or not, Google Spreadsheets (accessed through the Google Data API "list feed") returns column headers lower-cased and stripped of all spaces and symbols! That is, sys_TIMESTAMP is systimestamp, as far as my code can tell. (Yes, I am aware that the "cell feed" does not strip the name so; however cell-by-cell manipulation is too slow for what I'm doing.) One can imagine other hypothetical examples. Perhaps even the data itself can be in different "dialects." But let's take it as given for now, and not argue this if possible. Third Question: How would you implement "translation"? Note: Taking all this as an exercise, I'm more interested in the "idealized" design, rather than the practical one. (God knows that shipped sailed when I began this project.) Part 4/4: Further Thought Here's my train of thought to demonstrate I've thunk, albeit unfruitfully: First, I thought, primitively, "I'll just modify CMySQL::GetFields() to lower-case and strip field names so they're compatible with Google Spreadsheets." But of course, then my class should really be called, CMySQLForGoogleSpreadsheets, and that can't be right. So, the thing which translates must exist outside of an ISyncable implementor. And surely it can't be right to make each translation a method in CSyncer. If it exists outside of both ISyncable and CSyncer, then what is it? (Is it even an "it"?) Is it an abstract class, i.e. abstract CTranslator? Is it an interface, since a translator only does, not has, i.e. interface ITranslator? Does it even require instantiation? e.g. If it's an ITranslator, then should its translation methods be static? (I learned what "late static binding" meant, today.) And, dear God, whatever it is, how should a CSyncer use it? Does it "have" it? Is it, "it"? Who am I? ...am I, "I"? I've attempted to break up the question into sub-questions, but essentially my question is singular: How does one implement an object A that conceptually "links" (has) two objects b1 and b2 that share a common interface B, where certain pairs of b1 and b2 require a helper, e.g. a translator, to be handled by A? Something tells me that I've overcomplicated this design, or violated a principle much higher up. Thank you all very much for your time and any advice you can provide.

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• Implementing a Custom Coherence PartitionAssignmentStrategy

  - by jpurdy

  A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. Traditionally, Coherence used a distributed algorithm spread across the cache servers (and as of Coherence 3.7, this is still the default implementation). With the introduction of the PAS interface, the model of operation was changed so that the logic would run solely in the cache service senior member. Obviously, this makes the development of a custom PAS vastly less complex, and in practice does not introduce a significant single point of failure/bottleneck. Note that Coherence ships with a default PAS implementation but it is not used by default. Further, custom PAS implementations are uncommon (this engagement was the first custom implementation that we know of). The particular implementation mentioned above also faced challenges related to managing multiple backup copies but that won't be discussed here. There were a few challenges that arose during design and implementation: Naive algorithms had an unreasonable upper bound of computational cost. There was significant complexity associated with configurations where the member count varied significantly between physical machines. Most of the complexity of a PAS is related to rebalancing, not initial assignment (which is usually fairly simple). A custom PAS may need to solve several problems simultaneously, such as: Ensuring that each member has a similar number of primary and backup partitions (e.g. each member has the same number of primary and backup partitions) Ensuring that each member carries similar responsibility (e.g. the most heavily loaded member has no more than one partition more than the least loaded). Ensuring that each partition is on the same member as a corresponding local resource (e.g. for applications that use partitioning across message queues, to ensure that each partition is collocated with its corresponding message queue). Ensuring that a given member holds no more than a given number of partitions (e.g. no member has more than 10 partitions) Ensuring that backups are placed far enough away from the primaries (e.g. on a different physical machine or a different blade enclosure) Achieving the above goals while ensuring that partition movement is minimized. These objectives can be even more complicated when the topology of the cluster is irregular. For example, if multiple cluster members may exist on each physical machine, then clearly the possibility exists that at certain points (e.g. following a member failure), the number of members on each machine may vary, in certain cases significantly so. Consider the case where there are three physical machines, with 3, 3 and 9 members each (respectively). This introduces complexity since the backups for the 9 members on the the largest machine must be spread across the other 6 members (to ensure placement on different physical machines), preventing an even distribution. For any given problem like this, there are usually reasonable compromises available, but the key point is that objectives may conflict under extreme (but not at all unlikely) circumstances. The most obvious general purpose partition assignment algorithm (possibly the only general purpose one) is to define a scoring function for a given mapping of partitions to members, and then apply that function to each possible permutation, selecting the most optimal permutation. This would result in N! (factorial) evaluations of the scoring function. This is clearly impractical for all but the smallest values of N (e.g. a partition count in the single digits). It's difficult to prove that more efficient general purpose algorithms don't exist, but the key take away from this is that algorithms will tend to either have exorbitant worst case performance or may fail to find optimal solutions (or both) -- it is very important to be able to show that worst case performance is acceptable. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the problem must be further constrained, perhaps by limiting functionality or by using domain-specific optimizations. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to design these more focused algorithms. In the specific case mentioned, we constrained the solution space to very small clusters (in terms of machine count) with small partition counts and supported exactly two backup copies, and accepted the fact that partition movement could potentially be significant (preferring to solve that issue through brute force). We then used the out-of-the-box PAS implementation as a fallback, delegating to it for configurations that were not supported by our algorithm. Our experience was that the PAS interface is quite usable, but there are intrinsic challenges to designing PAS implementations that should be very carefully evaluated before committing to that approach.

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• Processing Text and Binary (Blob, ArrayBuffer, ArrayBufferView) Payload in WebSocket - (TOTD #185)

  - by arungupta

  The WebSocket API defines different send(xxx) methods that can be used to send text and binary data. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will show how to send and receive text and binary data using WebSocket. TOTD #183 explains how to get started with a WebSocket endpoint using GlassFish 4. A simple endpoint from that blog looks like: @WebSocketEndpoint("/endpoint") public class MyEndpoint { public void receiveTextMessage(String message) { . . . } } A message with the first parameter of the type String is invoked when a text payload is received. The payload of the incoming WebSocket frame is mapped to this first parameter. An optional second parameter, Session, can be specified to map to the "other end" of this conversation. For example: public void receiveTextMessage(String message, Session session) {     . . . } The return type is void and that means no response is returned to the client that invoked this endpoint. A response may be returned to the client in two different ways. First, set the return type to the expected type, such as: public String receiveTextMessage(String message) { String response = . . . . . . return response; } In this case a text payload is returned back to the invoking endpoint. The second way to send a response back is to use the mapped session to send response using one of the sendXXX methods in Session, when and if needed. public void receiveTextMessage(String message, Session session) {     . . .     RemoteEndpoint remote = session.getRemote();     remote.sendString(...);     . . .     remote.sendString(...);    . . .    remote.sendString(...); } This shows how duplex and asynchronous communication between the two endpoints can be achieved. This can be used to define different message exchange patterns between the client and server. The WebSocket client can send the message as: websocket.send(myTextField.value); where myTextField is a text field in the web page. Binary payload in the incoming WebSocket frame can be received if ByteBuffer is used as the first parameter of the method signature. The endpoint method signature in that case would look like: public void receiveBinaryMessage(ByteBuffer message) {     . . . } From the client side, the binary data can be sent using Blob, ArrayBuffer, and ArrayBufferView. Blob is a just raw data and the actual interpretation is left to the application. ArrayBuffer and ArrayBufferView are defined in the TypedArray specification and are designed to send binary data using WebSocket. In short, ArrayBuffer is a fixed-length binary buffer with no format and no mechanism for accessing its contents. These buffers are manipulated using one of the views defined by one of the subclasses of ArrayBufferView listed below: Int8Array (signed 8-bit integer or char) Uint8Array (unsigned 8-bit integer or unsigned char) Int16Array (signed 16-bit integer or short) Uint16Array (unsigned 16-bit integer or unsigned short) Int32Array (signed 32-bit integer or int) Uint32Array (unsigned 16-bit integer or unsigned int) Float32Array (signed 32-bit float or float) Float64Array (signed 64-bit float or double) WebSocket can send binary data using ArrayBuffer with a view defined by a subclass of ArrayBufferView or a subclass of ArrayBufferView itself. The WebSocket client can send the message using Blob as: blob = new Blob([myField2.value]);websocket.send(blob); where myField2 is a text field in the web page. The WebSocket client can send the message using ArrayBuffer as: var buffer = new ArrayBuffer(10);var bytes = new Uint8Array(buffer);for (var i=0; i<bytes.length; i++) { bytes[i] = i;}websocket.send(buffer); A concrete implementation of receiving the binary message may look like: @WebSocketMessagepublic void echoBinary(ByteBuffer data, Session session) throws IOException {    System.out.println("echoBinary: " + data);    for (byte b : data.array()) {        System.out.print(b);    }    session.getRemote().sendBytes(data);} This method is just printing the binary data for verification but you may actually be storing it in a database or converting to an image or something more meaningful. Be aware of TYRUS-51 if you are trying to send binary data from server to client using method return type. Here are some references for you: JSR 356: Java API for WebSocket - Specification (Early Draft) and Implementation (already integrated in GlassFish 4 promoted builds) TOTD #183 - Getting Started with WebSocket in GlassFish TOTD #184 - Logging WebSocket Frames using Chrome Developer Tools, Net-internals and Wireshark Subsequent blogs will discuss the following topics (not necessary in that order) ... Error handling Custom payloads using encoder/decoder Interface-driven WebSocket endpoint Java client API Client and Server configuration Security Subprotocols Extensions Other topics from the API

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• Determining the angle to fire a shot when target and shooter moves, and bullet moves with shooter velocity added in

  - by Azaral

  I saw this question: Predicting enemy position in order to have an object lead its target and followed the link in the answer to stack overflow. In the stack overflow page I used the 2nd answer, the one that is a large mathematical derivation. My situation is a little different though. My first question though is will the answer provided in the stack overflow page even work to begin with, assuming the original circumstances of moving target and stationary shooter. My situation is a little different than that situation. My target moves, the shooter moves, and the bullets from the shooter start off with the velocities in x and y added to the bullets' x and y velocities. If you are sliding to the right, the bullets will remain in front of you as you move so as long as your velocity remains constant. What I'm trying to do is to get the enemy to be able to determine where they need to shoot in order to hit the player. Unless the player and enemy is stationary, the velocity from the ship adding to the velocity of the bullets will cause a miss. I'd rather like to prevent that. I used the formula in the stack overflow answer and did what I thought were the appropriate adjustments. I've been banging at this for the last four hours and I just can't make it click. It is probably something really simple and boneheaded that I am missing (that seems to be a lot of my problems lately). Here is the solution presented from the stack overflow answer: It boils down to solving a quadratic equation of the form: a * sqr(x) + b * x + c == 0 Note that by sqr I mean square, as opposed to square root. Use the following values: a := sqr(target.velocityX) + sqr(target.velocityY) - sqr(projectile_speed) b := 2 * (target.velocityX * (target.startX - cannon.X) + target.velocityY * (target.startY - cannon.Y)) c := sqr(target.startX - cannon.X) + sqr(target.startY - cannon.Y) Now we can look at the discriminant to determine if we have a possible solution. disc := sqr(b) - 4 * a * c If the discriminant is less than 0, forget about hitting your target -- your projectile can never get there in time. Otherwise, look at two candidate solutions: t1 := (-b + sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) t2 := (-b - sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) Note that if disc == 0 then t1 and t2 are equal. If there are no other considerations such as intervening obstacles, simply choose the smaller positive value. (Negative t values would require firing backward in time to use!) Substitute the chosen t value back into the target's position equations to get the coordinates of the leading point you should be aiming at: aim.X := t * target.velocityX + target.startX aim.Y := t * target.velocityY + target.startY Here is my code, after being corrected by Sam Hocevar (thank you again for your help!). It still doesn't work. For some reason it never enters the section of code inside the if(disc = 0) (obviously because it is always less than zero but...). However, if I plug the numbers from my game log on the enemy and player positions and velocities it outputs a valid firing solution. I have looked at the code side by side a couple of times now and I can't find any differences. There has got to be something simple I'm missing here. If someone else could look at this code and determine what is going on here I'd appreciate it. I know it's not going through that section because if it were, shouldShoot would become true and the enemy would be blasting away at the player. This section calls the function in question, CalculateShootHeading() if(shouldMove) { UseEngines(); } x += xVelocity; y += yVelocity; CalculateShootHeading(); if(shouldShoot) { ShootWeapons(); } UpdateWeapons(); This is CalculateShootHeading(). This is inside the enemy class so x and y are the enemy's x and y and the same with velocity. One output from my game log gives Player X = 2108, Player Y = -180.956, Player X velocity = 10.9949, Player Y Velocity = -6.26017, Enemy X = 1988.31, Enemy Y = -339.051, Enemy X velocity = 1.81666, Enemy Y velocity = -9.67762, 0 enemy projectiles. The output from the console tester is Bullet position = 2210.49, -239.313 and Player Position = 2210.49, -239.313. This doesn't make any sense. The only thing that could be different is the code or the input into my function in the game and I've checked that and I don't think that it is wrong as it's updated before this and never changed. float const bulletSpeed = 30.f; float const dx = playerX - x; float const dy = playerY - y; float const vx = playerXVelocity - xVelocity; float const vy = playerYVelocity - yVelocity; float const a = vx * vx + vy * vy - bulletSpeed * bulletSpeed; float const b = 2.f * (vx * dx + vy * dy); float const c = dx * dx + dy * dy; float const disc = b * b - 4.f * a * c; shouldShoot = false; if (disc >= 0.f) { float t0 = (-b - std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); float t1 = (-b + std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); if (t0 < 0.f || (t1 < t0 && t1 >= 0.f)) { t0 = t1; } if (t0 >= 0.f) { float shootx = vx + dx / t0; float shooty = vy + dy / t0; heading = std::atan2(shooty, shootx) * RAD2DEGREE; } shouldShoot = true; }

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• Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction NHibernate and Entity Framework are two of the most popular O/RM frameworks on the .NET world. Although they share some functionality, there are some aspects on which they are quite different. This post will describe this differences and will hopefully help you get started with the one you know less. Mind you, this is a personal selection of features to compare, it is by no way an exhaustive list. History First, a bit of history. NHibernate is an open-source project that was first ported from Java’s venerable Hibernate framework, one of the first O/RM frameworks, but nowadays it is not tied to it, for example, it has .NET specific features, and has evolved in different ways from those of its Java counterpart. Current version is 3.3, with 3.4 on the horizon. It currently targets .NET 3.5, but can be used as well in .NET 4, it only makes no use of any of its specific functionality. You can find its home page at NHForge. Entity Framework 1 came out with .NET 3.5 and is now on its second major version, despite being version 4. Code First sits on top of it and but came separately and will also continue to be released out of line with major .NET distributions. It is currently on version 4.3.1 and version 5 will be released together with .NET Framework 4.5. All versions will target the current version of .NET, at the time of their release. Its home location is located at MSDN. Architecture In NHibernate, there is a separation between the Unit of Work and the configuration and model instances. You start off by creating a Configuration object, where you specify all global NHibernate settings such as the database and dialect to use, the batch sizes, the mappings, etc, then you build an ISessionFactory from it. The ISessionFactory holds model and metadata that is tied to a particular database and to the settings that came from the Configuration object, and, there will typically be only one instance of each in a process. Finally, you create instances of ISession from the ISessionFactory, which is the NHibernate representation of the Unit of Work and Identity Map. This is a lightweight object, it basically opens and closes a database connection as required and keeps track of the entities associated with it. ISession objects are cheap to create and dispose, because all of the model complexity is stored in the ISessionFactory and Configuration objects. As for Entity Framework, the ObjectContext/DbContext holds the configuration, model and acts as the Unit of Work, holding references to all of the known entity instances. This class is therefore not lightweight as its NHibernate counterpart and it is not uncommon to see examples where an instance is cached on a field. Mappings Both NHibernate and Entity Framework (Code First) support the use of POCOs to represent entities, no base classes are required (or even possible, in the case of NHibernate). As for mapping to and from the database, NHibernate supports three types of mappings: XML-based, which have the advantage of not tying the entity classes to a particular O/RM; the XML files can be deployed as files on the file system or as embedded resources in an assembly; Attribute-based, for keeping both the entities and database details on the same place at the expense of polluting the entity classes with NHibernate-specific attributes; Strongly-typed code-based, which allows dynamic creation of the model and strongly typing it, so that if, for example, a property name changes, the mapping will also be updated. Entity Framework can use: Attribute-based (although attributes cannot express all of the available possibilities – for example, cascading); Strongly-typed code mappings. Database Support With NHibernate you can use mostly any database you want, including: SQL Server; SQL Server Compact; SQL Server Azure; Oracle; DB2; PostgreSQL; MySQL; Sybase Adaptive Server/SQL Anywhere; Firebird; SQLLite; Informix; Any through OLE DB; Any through ODBC. Out of the box, Entity Framework only supports SQL Server, but a number of providers exist, both free and commercial, for some of the most used databases, such as Oracle and MySQL. See a list here. Inheritance Strategies Both NHibernate and Entity Framework support the three canonical inheritance strategies: Table Per Type Hierarchy (Single Table Inheritance), Table Per Type (Class Table Inheritance) and Table Per Concrete Type (Concrete Table Inheritance). Associations Regarding associations, both support one to one, one to many and many to many. However, NHibernate offers far more collection types: Bags of entities or values: unordered, possibly with duplicates; Lists of entities or values: ordered, indexed by a number column; Maps of entities or values: indexed by either an entity or any value; Sets of entities or values: unordered, no duplicates; Arrays of entities or values: indexed, immutable. Querying NHibernate exposes several querying APIs: LINQ is probably the most used nowadays, and really does not need to be introduced; Hibernate Query Language (HQL) is a database-agnostic, object-oriented SQL-alike language that exists since NHibernate’s creation and still offers the most advanced querying possibilities; well suited for dynamic queries, even if using string concatenation; Criteria API is an implementation of the Query Object pattern where you create a semi-abstract conceptual representation of the query you wish to execute by means of a class model; also a good choice for dynamic querying; Query Over offers a similar API to Criteria, but using strongly-typed LINQ expressions instead of strings; for this, although more refactor-friendlier that Criteria, it is also less suited for dynamic queries; SQL, including stored procedures, can also be used; Integration with Lucene.NET indexer is available. As for Entity Framework: LINQ to Entities is fully supported, and its implementation is considered very complete; it is the API of choice for most developers; Entity-SQL, HQL’s counterpart, is also an object-oriented, database-independent querying language that can be used for dynamic queries; SQL, of course, is also supported. Caching Both NHibernate and Entity Framework, of course, feature first-level cache. NHibernate also supports a second-level cache, that can be used among multiple ISessionFactorys, even in different processes/machines: Hashtable (in-memory); SysCache (uses ASP.NET as the cache provider); SysCache2 (same as above but with support for SQL Server SQL Dependencies); Prevalence; SharedCache; Memcached; Redis; NCache; Appfabric Caching. Out of the box, Entity Framework does not have any second-level cache mechanism, however, there are some public samples that show how we can add this. ID Generators NHibernate supports different ID generation strategies, coming from the database and otherwise: Identity (for SQL Server, MySQL, and databases who support identity columns); Sequence (for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others who support sequences); Trigger-based; HiLo; Sequence HiLo (for databases that support sequences); Several GUID flavors, both in GUID as well as in string format; Increment (for single-user uses); Assigned (must know what you’re doing); Sequence-style (either uses an actual sequence or a single-column table); Table of ids; Pooled (similar to HiLo but stores high values in a table); Native (uses whatever mechanism the current database supports, identity or sequence). Entity Framework only supports: Identity generation; GUIDs; Assigned values. Properties NHibernate supports properties of entity types (one to one or many to one), collections (one to many or many to many) as well as scalars and enumerations. It offers a mechanism for having complex property types generated from the database, which even include support for querying. It also supports properties originated from SQL formulas. Entity Framework only supports scalars, entity types and collections. Enumerations support will come in the next version. Events and Interception NHibernate has a very rich event model, that exposes more than 20 events, either for synchronous pre-execution or asynchronous post-execution, including: Pre/Post-Load; Pre/Post-Delete; Pre/Post-Insert; Pre/Post-Update; Pre/Post-Flush. It also features interception of class instancing and SQL generation. As for Entity Framework, only two events exist: ObjectMaterialized (after loading an entity from the database); SavingChanges (before saving changes, which include deleting, inserting and updating). Tracking Changes For NHibernate as well as Entity Framework, all changes are tracked by their respective Unit of Work implementation. Entities can be attached and detached to it, Entity Framework does, however, also support self-tracking entities. Optimistic Concurrency Control NHibernate supports all of the imaginable scenarios: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Oracle’s ORA_ROWSCN; A column containing date and time; A column containing a version number; All/dirty columns comparison. Entity Framework is more focused on Entity Framework, so it only supports: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Comparing all/some columns. Batching NHibernate has full support for insertion batching, but only if the ID generator in use is not database-based (for example, it cannot be used with Identity), whereas Entity Framework has no batching at all. Cascading Both support cascading for collections and associations: when an entity is deleted, their conceptual children are also deleted. NHibernate also offers the possibility to set the foreign key column on children to NULL instead of removing them. Flushing Changes NHibernate’s ISession has a FlushMode property that can have the following values: Auto: changes are sent to the database when necessary, for example, if there are dirty instances of an entity type, and a query is performed against this entity type, or if the ISession is being disposed; Commit: changes are sent when committing the current transaction; Never: changes are only sent when explicitly calling Flush(). As for Entity Framework, changes have to be explicitly sent through a call to AcceptAllChanges()/SaveChanges(). Lazy Loading NHibernate supports lazy loading for Associated entities (one to one, many to one); Collections (one to many, many to many); Scalar properties (thing of BLOBs or CLOBs). Entity Framework only supports lazy loading for: Associated entities; Collections. Generating and Updating the Database Both NHibernate and Entity Framework Code First (with the Migrations API) allow creating the database model from the mapping and updating it if the mapping changes. Extensibility As you can guess, NHibernate is far more extensible than Entity Framework. Basically, everything can be extended, from ID generation, to LINQ to SQL transformation, HQL native SQL support, custom column types, custom association collections, SQL generation, supported databases, etc. With Entity Framework your options are more limited, at least, because practically no information exists as to what can be extended/changed. It features a provider model that can be extended to support any database. Integration With Other Microsoft APIs and Tools When it comes to integration with Microsoft technologies, it will come as no surprise that Entity Framework offers the best support. For example, the following technologies are fully supported: ASP.NET (through the EntityDataSource); ASP.NET Dynamic Data; WCF Data Services; WCF RIA Services; Visual Studio (through the integrated designer). Documentation This is another point where Entity Framework is superior: NHibernate lacks, for starters, an up to date API reference synchronized with its current version. It does have a community mailing list, blogs and wikis, although not much used. Entity Framework has a number of resources on MSDN and, of course, several forums and discussion groups exist. Conclusion Like I said, this is a personal list. I may come as a surprise to some that Entity Framework is so behind NHibernate in so many aspects, but it is true that NHibernate is much older and, due to its open-source nature, is not tied to product-specific timeframes and can thus evolve much more rapidly. I do like both, and I chose whichever is best for the job I have at hands. I am looking forward to the changes in EF5 which will add significant value to an already interesting product. So, what do you think? Did I forget anything important or is there anything else worth talking about? Looking forward for your comments!

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• Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

  - by ScottGu

  Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework.  You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release.  Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it.  For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers.  For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool.  Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds).  It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories.  Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it.  Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there.  You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time.  This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions.  By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically.  To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity.  ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios.  This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue.  This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development.  They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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