Search Results

Search found 630 results on 26 pages for 'joel weise'.

Page 26/26 | < Previous Page | 22 23 24 25 26

Special thanks to everyone that helped me in 2010.

- by mbcrump

2010 has been a very good year for me and I wanted to create a list and thank everyone for what they have done for me. I also wanted to thank everyone for reading and subscribing to my blog. It is hard to believe that people actually want to read what I write. I feel like I owe a huge thanks to everyone listed below. Looking back upon 2010, I feel that I’ve grown as a developer and you are part of that reason. Sometimes we get caught up in day to day work and forget to give thanks to those that helped us along the way. The list below is mine, it includes people and companies. This list is obviously not going to include everyone that has helped, just those that have stood out in my mind. When I think back upon 2010, their names keep popping up in my head. So here goes, in no particular order. People Dave Campbell – For everything he has done for the Silverlight Community with his Silverlight Cream blog. I can’t think of a better person to get recognition at the Silverlight FireStarter event. I also wanted to thank him for spending several hours of his time helping me track down a bug in my feedburner account. Victor Gaudioso – For his large collection of video tutorials on his blog and the passion and enthusiasm he has for Silverlight. We have talked on the phone and I’ve never met anyone so fired up for Silverlight. Kunal Chowdhury – Kunal has always been available for me to bounce ideas off of. Kunal has also answered a lot of questions that stumped me. His blog and CodeProject article have green a great help to me and the Silverlight Community. Glen Gordon – I was looking frantically for a Windows Phone 7 several months before release and Glen found one for me. This allowed me to start a blog series on the Windows Phone 7 hardware and developing an application from start to finish that Scott Guthrie retweeted. Jeff Blankenburg – For listening to my complaints in the early stages of Windows Phone 7. Jeff was always very polite and gave me his cell phone number to talk it over. He also walked me through several problems that I was having early on. Pete Brown – For writing Silverlight 4 in Action. This book is definitely a labor of love. I followed Pete on Twitter as he was writing it and he spent a lot of late nights and weekends working on it. I felt a lot smarter after reading it the first time. The second time was even better. John Papa – For all of his work on the Silverlight Firestarter and the Silverlight community in general. He has also helped me on a personal level with several things. Daniel Heisler – For putting up with me the past year while we worked on many .NET projects together in 2010. Alvin Ashcraft – For publishing a daily blog post on the best of .NET links. He has linked to my site many times and I really appreciate what he does for the community. Chris Alcock – For publishing the Morning Brew every weekday. I remember when I first appeared on his site, I started getting hundreds of hits on my site and wondered if I was getting a DOS attack or something. It was great to find out that Chris had linked to one of my articles. Joel Cochran – For spending a week teaching “Blend-O-Rama”. This was my one of my favorite sessions of this year. I learned a lot about Expression Blend from it and the best part was that it was free and during lunchtime. Jeremy Likness – Jeremy is smart – very smart. I have learned a lot from Jeremy over the past year. He is also involved in the Silverlight community in every way possible, from forums to blog post to screencast to open source. It goes on and on. The people that I met at VSLive Orlando 2010. I had a great time chatting with Walt Ritscher, Wallace McClure, Tim Huckabee and David Platt. Also a special thanks to all of my friends on Twitter like @wilhil, @DBVaughan, @DataArtist, @wbm, @DirkStrauss and @rsringeri and many many more. Software Companies / Events / May of gave me FREE stuff. =) Microsoft (3) – I was sent a free coupon code by Microsoft to take the Silverlight 4 Beta Exam. I jumped on the offer and took the exam. It was great being selected to try out the exam before it goes public even though Microsoft eventually published a universal coupon code for everyone. I am still waiting to find out if I passed the exam. My fingers are crossed. Microsoft reaching out to me with some questions regarding the .NET Community. I’ve never had a company contact me with such interest in the community. Having a contest where 75 people could win a $100 gift certificate and a T-Shirt for submitting a Windows Phone 7 app. I submitted my app and won. All of the free launch events this year (Windows Phone 7, Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC). Wintellect – For providing an awesome day of free technical training called T.E.N. Where else can you get free training from some of the best programmers in the world? I also won a contest from them that included a NETAdvantage Ultimate License from Infragistics. VSLive – I attended the Orlando 2010 Conference and it was the best developer’s conference that I have ever attended. I got to know a lot of people at this conference and hang out with many wonderful speakers. I live tweeted the event and while it may have annoyed some, the organizers of VSLive loved it. I won the contest on Twitter and they invited me back to the 2011 session of my choice. This is a very nice gift and I really appreciate the generosity. BarcodeLib.com – For providing free barcode generating tools for a Non-Profit ASP.NET project that I was working on. Their third party controls really made this a breeze compared to my existing solution. NDepend – It is absolutely the best tool to improve code quality. The product is extremely large and I would recommend heading over to their site to check it out. Silverlight Spy – I was writing a blog post on Silverlight Spy and Koen Zwikstra provided a FREE license to me. If you ever wanted to peek inside of a Silverlight Application then this is the tool for you. He is also working on a version that will support OOB and Windows Phone 7. I would recommend checking out his site. Birmingham .NET Users Group / Silverlight Nights User Group – It takes a lot of time to put together a user group meeting every month yet it always seems to happen. I don’t want to name names for fear of leaving someone out but both of these User Groups are excellent if you live in the Birmingham, Alabama area. Publishing Companies Manning Publishing – For giving me early access to Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown. It was really nice to be able to read this awesome book while Pete was writing it. I was also one of the first people to publish a review of the book. Sams Publishing and DZone – For providing a copy of Silverlight 4 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion for me to review for their site. The review is coming in January 2011. Special Shoutout to the following 3rd Party Silverlight Controls It has been a great pleasure to work with the following companies on 3rd Party Control Giveaways every month. It always amazes me how every 3rd Party Control company is so eager to help out the community. I’ve never been turned down by any of these companies! These giveaways have sparked a lot of interest in Silverlight and hopefully I can continue giving away a new set every month. If you are a 3rd Party Control company and are interested in participating in these giveaways then please email me at mbcrump29[at]gmail[d0t].com. The companies below have already participated in my giveaways: Infragistics (December 2010) - Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization! Mindscape (November 2010) - Mindscape Silverlight Controls + Free Mega Pack Contest Telerik (October 2010) - Win Telerik RadControls for Silverlight! ($799 Value) Again, I just wanted to say Thanks to everyone for helping me grow as a developer. Subscribe to my feed

Read the article
Web API, JavaScript, Chrome & Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

- by Brian Lanham

The team spent much of the week working through this issues related to Chrome running on Windows 8 consuming cross-origin resources using Web API. We thought it was resolved on day 2 but it resurfaced the next day. We definitely resolved it today though. I believe I do not fully understand the situation but I am going to explain what I know in an effort to help you avoid and/or resolve a similar issue. References We referenced many sources during our trial-and-error troubleshooting. These are the links we reference in order of applicability to the solution: Zoiner Tejada JavaScript and other material from -> http://www.devproconnections.com/content1/topic/microsoft-azure-cors-141869/catpath/windows-azure-platform2/page/3 WebDAV Where I learned about “Accept” –> http://www-jo.se/f.pfleger/cors-and-iis? IT Hit Tells about NOT using ‘*’ –> http://www.webdavsystem.com/ajax/programming/cross_origin_requests Carlos Figueira Sample back-end code (newer) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d (older version) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CORS-support-in-ASPNET-Web-01e9980a Background As a measure of protection, Web designers (W3C) and implementers (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla) made it so that a request, especially a JSON request (but really any URL), sent from one domain to another will only work if the requestee “knows” about the requester and allows requests from it. So, for example, if you write a ASP.NET MVC Web API service and try to consume it from multiple apps, the browsers used may (will?) indicate that you are not allowed by showing an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” error indicating the requester is not allowed to make requests. Internet Explorer (big surprise) is the odd-hair-colored step-child in this mix. It seems that running locally at least IE allows this for development purposes. Chrome and Firefox do not. In fact, Chrome is quite restrictive. Notice the images below. IE shows data (a tabular view with one row for each day of a week) while Chrome does not (trust me, neither does Firefox). Further, the Chrome developer console shows an XmlHttpRequest (XHR) error. Screen captures from IE (left) and Chrome (right). Note that Chrome does not display data and the console shows an XHR error. Why does this happen? The Web browser submits these requests and processes the responses and each browser is different. Okay, so, IE is probably the only one that’s truly different. However, Chrome has a specific process of performing a “pre-flight” check to make sure the service can respond to an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) request. So basically, the sequence is, if I understand correctly: 1)Page Loads –> 2)JavaScript Request Processed by Browser –> 3)Browsers Prepares to Submit Request –> 4)[Chrome] Browser Submits Pre-Flight Request –> 5)Server Responds with HTTP 200 –> 6)Browser Submits Request –> 7)Server Responds with Data –> 8)Page Shows Data This situation occurs for both GET and POST methods. Typically, GET methods are called with query string parameters so there is no data posted. Instead, the requesting domain needs to be permitted to request data but generally nothing more is required. POSTs on the other hand send form data. Therefore, more configuration is required (you’ll see the configuration below). AJAX requests are not friendly with this (POSTs) either because they don’t post in a form. How to fix it. The team went through many iterations of self-hair removal and we think we finally have a working solution. The trial-and-error approach eventually worked and we referenced many sources for the information. I indicate those references above. There are basically three (3) tasks needed to make this work. Assumptions: You are using Visual Studio, Web API, JavaScript, and have Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, and several browsers. 1. Configure the client Joel Cochran centralized our “cors-oriented” JavaScript (from here). There are two calls including one for GET and one for POST function(url, data, callback) { console.log(data); $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.post(url, data, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("post", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(data); } else { console.log(">" + jqXhHR.status); alert("corsAjax.post error: " + status + ", " + errorThrown); } }); }; The GET CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) function(url, callback) { $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.get(url, null, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("get", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(); } else { alert("CORS is not supported in this browser or from this origin."); } }); }; The POST CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) Now you need to call these functions to get and post your data (instead of, say, using $.Ajax). Here is a GET example: corsAjax.get(url, function(data) { if (data !== null && data.length !== undefined) { // do something with data } }); And here is a POST example: corsAjax.post(url, item); Simple…except…you’re not done yet. 2. Change Web API Controllers to Allow CORS There are actually two steps here. Do you remember above when we mentioned the “pre-flight” check? Chrome actually asks the server if it is allowed to ask it for cross-origin resource sharing access. So you need to let the server know it’s okay. This is a two-part activity. a) Add the appropriate response header Access-Control-Allow-Origin, and b) permit the API functions to respond to various methods including GET, POST, and OPTIONS. OPTIONS is the method that Chrome and other browsers use to ask the server if it can ask about permissions. Here is an example of a Web API controller thus decorated: NOTE: You’ll see a lot of references to using “*” in the header value. For security reasons, Chrome does NOT recognize this is valid. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "http://localhost:51234")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Credentials", "true")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, COPY, MOVE, DELETE, MKCOL, LOCK, UNLOCK, PUT, GETLIB, VERSION-CONTROL, CHECKIN, CHECKOUT, UNCHECKOUT, REPORT, UPDATE, CANCELUPLOAD, HEAD, OPTIONS, GET, POST")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destination, Content-Type, Depth, User-Agent, X-File-Size, X-Requested-With, If-Modified-Since, X-File-Name, Cache-Control")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Max-Age", "3600")] public abstract class BaseApiController : ApiController { [HttpGet] [HttpOptions] public IEnumerable<foo> GetFooItems(int id) { return foo.AsEnumerable(); } [HttpPost] [HttpOptions] public void UpdateFooItem(FooItem fooItem) { // NOTE: The fooItem object may or may not // (probably NOT) be set with actual data. // If not, you need to extract the data from // the posted form manually. if (fooItem.Id == 0) // However you check for default... { // We use NewtonSoft.Json. string jsonString = context.Request.Form.GetValues(0)[0].ToString(); Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer js = new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer(); fooItem = js.Deserialize<FooItem>(new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonTextReader(new System.IO.StringReader(jsonString))); } // Update the set fooItem object. } } Please note a few specific additions here: * The header attributes at the class level are required. Note all of those methods and headers need to be specified but we find it works this way so we aren’t touching it. * Web API will actually deserialize the posted data into the object parameter of the called method on occasion but so far we don’t know why it does and doesn’t. * [HttpOptions] is, again, required for the pre-flight check. * The “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” response header should NOT NOT NOT contain an ‘*’. 3. Headers and Methods and Such We had most of this code in place but found that Chrome and Firefox still did not render the data. Interestingly enough, Fiddler showed that the GET calls succeeded and the JSON data is returned properly. We learned that among the headers set at the class level, we needed to add “ACCEPT”. Note that I accidentally added it to methods and to headers. Adding it to methods worked but I don’t know why. We added it to headers also for good measure. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPA... [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destin... Next Steps That should do it. If it doesn’t let us know. What to do next? * Don’t hardcode the allowed domains. Note that port numbers and other domain name specifics will cause problems and must be specified. If this changes do you really want to deploy updated software? Consider Miguel Figueira’s approach in the following link to writing a custom HttpHeaderAttribute class that allows you to specify the domain names and then you can do it dynamically. There are, of course, other ways to do it dynamically but this is a clean approach. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d

Read the article
Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

- by Mark Rackley

I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding? Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code. Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance… Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites. Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid. Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it. :) We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested). Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software. SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

Read the article
What's up with OCFS2?

- by wcoekaer

On Linux there are many filesystem choices and even from Oracle we provide a number of filesystems, all with their own advantages and use cases. Customers often confuse ACFS with OCFS or OCFS2 which then causes assumptions to be made such as one replacing the other etc... I thought it would be good to write up a summary of how OCFS2 got to where it is, what we're up to still, how it is different from other options and how this really is a cool native Linux cluster filesystem that we worked on for many years and is still widely used. Work on a cluster filesystem at Oracle started many years ago, in the early 2000's when the Oracle Database Cluster development team wrote a cluster filesystem for Windows that was primarily focused on providing an alternative to raw disk devices and help customers with the deployment of Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). Oracle RAC is a cluster technology that lets us make a cluster of Oracle Database servers look like one big database. The RDBMS runs on many nodes and they all work on the same data. It's a Shared Disk database design. There are many advantages doing this but I will not go into detail as that is not the purpose of my write up. Suffice it to say that Oracle RAC expects all the database data to be visible in a consistent, coherent way, across all the nodes in the cluster. To do that, there were/are a few options : 1) use raw disk devices that are shared, through SCSI, FC, or iSCSI 2) use a network filesystem (NFS) 3) use a cluster filesystem(CFS) which basically gives you a filesystem that's coherent across all nodes using shared disks. It is sort of (but not quite) combining option 1 and 2 except that you don't do network access to the files, the files are effectively locally visible as if it was a local filesystem. So OCFS (Oracle Cluster FileSystem) on Windows was born. Since Linux was becoming a very important and popular platform, we decided that we would also make this available on Linux and thus the porting of OCFS/Windows started. The first version of OCFS was really primarily focused on replacing the use of Raw devices with a simple filesystem that lets you create files and provide direct IO to these files to get basically native raw disk performance. The filesystem was not designed to be fully POSIX compliant and it did not have any where near good/decent performance for regular file create/delete/access operations. Cache coherency was easy since it was basically always direct IO down to the disk device and this ensured that any time one issues a write() command it would go directly down to the disk, and not return until the write() was completed. Same for read() any sort of read from a datafile would be a read() operation that went all the way to disk and return. We did not cache any data when it came down to Oracle data files. So while OCFS worked well for that, since it did not have much of a normal filesystem feel, it was not something that could be submitted to the kernel mail list for inclusion into Linux as another native linux filesystem (setting aside the Windows porting code ...) it did its job well, it was very easy to configure, node membership was simple, locking was disk based (so very slow but it existed), you could create regular files and do regular filesystem operations to a certain extend but anything that was not database data file related was just not very useful in general. Logfiles ok, standard filesystem use, not so much. Up to this point, all the work was done, at Oracle, by Oracle developers. Once OCFS (1) was out for a while and there was a lot of use in the database RAC world, many customers wanted to do more and were asking for features that you'd expect in a normal native filesystem, a real "general purposes cluster filesystem". So the team sat down and basically started from scratch to implement what's now known as OCFS2 (Oracle Cluster FileSystem release 2). Some basic criteria were : Design it with a real Distributed Lock Manager and use the network for lock negotiation instead of the disk Make it a Linux native filesystem instead of a native shim layer and a portable core Support standard Posix compliancy and be fully cache coherent with all operations Support all the filesystem features Linux offers (ACL, extended Attributes, quotas, sparse files,...) Be modern, support large files, 32/64bit, journaling, data ordered journaling, endian neutral, we can mount on both endian /cross architecture,.. Needless to say, this was a huge development effort that took many years to complete. A few big milestones happened along the way... OCFS2 was development in the open, we did not have a private tree that we worked on without external code review from the Linux Filesystem maintainers, great folks like Christopher Hellwig reviewed the code regularly to make sure we were not doing anything out of line, we submitted the code for review on lkml a number of times to see if we were getting close for it to be included into the mainline kernel. Using this development model is standard practice for anyone that wants to write code that goes into the kernel and having any chance of doing so without a complete rewrite or.. shall I say flamefest when submitted. It saved us a tremendous amount of time by not having to re-fit code for it to be in a Linus acceptable state. Some other filesystems that were trying to get into the kernel that didn't follow an open development model had a lot harder time and a lot harsher criticism. March 2006, when Linus released 2.6.16, OCFS2 officially became part of the mainline kernel, it was accepted a little earlier in the release candidates but in 2.6.16. OCFS2 became officially part of the mainline Linux kernel tree as one of the many filesystems. It was the first cluster filesystem to make it into the kernel tree. Our hope was that it would then end up getting picked up by the distribution vendors to make it easy for everyone to have access to a CFS. Today the source code for OCFS2 is approximately 85000 lines of code. We made OCFS2 production with full support for customers that ran Oracle database on Linux, no extra or separate support contract needed. OCFS2 1.0.0 started being built for RHEL4 for x86, x86-64, ppc, s390x and ia64. For RHEL5 starting with OCFS2 1.2. SuSE was very interested in high availability and clustering and decided to build and include OCFS2 with SLES9 for their customers and was, next to Oracle, the main contributor to the filesystem for both new features and bug fixes. Source code was always available even prior to inclusion into mainline and as of 2.6.16, source code was just part of a Linux kernel download from kernel.org, which it still is, today. So the latest OCFS2 code is always the upstream mainline Linux kernel. OCFS2 is the cluster filesystem used in Oracle VM 2 and Oracle VM 3 as the virtual disk repository filesystem. Since the filesystem is in the Linux kernel it's released under the GPL v2 The release model has always been that new feature development happened in the mainline kernel and we then built consistent, well tested, snapshots that had versions, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8. But these releases were effectively just snapshots in time that were tested for stability and release quality. OCFS2 is very easy to use, there's a simple text file that contains the node information (hostname, node number, cluster name) and a file that contains the cluster heartbeat timeouts. It is very small, and very efficient. As Sunil Mushran wrote in the manual : OCFS2 is an efficient, easily configured, quickly installed, fully integrated and compatible, feature-rich, architecture and endian neutral, cache coherent, ordered data journaling, POSIX-compliant, shared disk cluster file system. Here is a list of some of the important features that are included : Variable Block and Cluster sizes Supports block sizes ranging from 512 bytes to 4 KB and cluster sizes ranging from 4 KB to 1 MB (increments in power of 2). Extent-based Allocations Tracks the allocated space in ranges of clusters making it especially efficient for storing very large files. Optimized Allocations Supports sparse files, inline-data, unwritten extents, hole punching and allocation reservation for higher performance and efficient storage. File Cloning/snapshots REFLINK is a feature which introduces copy-on-write clones of files in a cluster coherent way. Indexed Directories Allows efficient access to millions of objects in a directory. Metadata Checksums Detects silent corruption in inodes and directories. Extended Attributes Supports attaching an unlimited number of name:value pairs to the file system objects like regular files, directories, symbolic links, etc. Advanced Security Supports POSIX ACLs and SELinux in addition to the traditional file access permission model. Quotas Supports user and group quotas. Journaling Supports both ordered and writeback data journaling modes to provide file system consistency in the event of power failure or system crash. Endian and Architecture neutral Supports a cluster of nodes with mixed architectures. Allows concurrent mounts on nodes running 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian (x86, x86_64, ia64) and big-endian (ppc64) architectures. In-built Cluster-stack with DLM Includes an easy to configure, in-kernel cluster-stack with a distributed lock manager. Buffered, Direct, Asynchronous, Splice and Memory Mapped I/Os Supports all modes of I/Os for maximum flexibility and performance. Comprehensive Tools Support Provides a familiar EXT3-style tool-set that uses similar parameters for ease-of-use. The filesystem was distributed for Linux distributions in separate RPM form and this had to be built for every single kernel errata release or every updated kernel provided by the vendor. We provided builds from Oracle for Oracle Linux and all kernels released by Oracle and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SuSE provided the modules directly for every kernel they shipped. With the introduction of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux and our interest in reducing the overhead of building filesystem modules for every minor release, we decide to make OCFS2 available as part of UEK. There was no more need for separate kernel modules, everything was built-in and a kernel upgrade automatically updated the filesystem, as it should. UEK allowed us to not having to backport new upstream filesystem code into an older kernel version, backporting features into older versions introduces risk and requires extra testing because the code is basically partially rewritten. The UEK model works really well for continuing to provide OCFS2 without that extra overhead. Because the RHEL kernel did not contain OCFS2 as a kernel module (it is in the source tree but it is not built by the vendor in kernel module form) we stopped adding the extra packages to Oracle Linux and its RHEL compatible kernel and for RHEL. Oracle Linux customers/users obviously get OCFS2 included as part of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, SuSE customers get it by SuSE distributed with SLES and Red Hat can decide to distribute OCFS2 to their customers if they chose to as it's just a matter of compiling the module and making it available. OCFS2 today, in the mainline kernel is pretty much feature complete in terms of integration with every filesystem feature Linux offers and it is still actively maintained with Joel Becker being the primary maintainer. Since we use OCFS2 as part of Oracle VM, we continue to look at interesting new functionality to add, REFLINK was a good example, and as such we continue to enhance the filesystem where it makes sense. Bugfixes and any sort of code that goes into the mainline Linux kernel that affects filesystems, automatically also modifies OCFS2 so it's in kernel, actively maintained but not a lot of new development happening at this time. We continue to fully support OCFS2 as part of Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and other vendors make their own decisions on support as it's really a Linux cluster filesystem now more than something that we provide to customers. It really just is part of Linux like EXT3 or BTRFS etc, the OS distribution vendors decide. Do not confuse OCFS2 with ACFS (ASM cluster Filesystem) also known as Oracle Cloud Filesystem. ACFS is a filesystem that's provided by Oracle on various OS platforms and really integrates into Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management). It's a very powerful Cluster Filesystem but it's not distributed as part of the Operating System, it's distributed with the Oracle Database product and installs with and lives inside Oracle ASM. ACFS obviously is fully supported on Linux (Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) but OCFS2 independently as a native Linux filesystem is also, and continues to also be supported. ACFS is very much tied into the Oracle RDBMS, OCFS2 is just a standard native Linux filesystem with no ties into Oracle products. Customers running the Oracle database and ASM really should consider using ACFS as it also provides storage/clustered volume management. Customers wanting to use a simple, easy to use generic Linux cluster filesystem should consider using OCFS2. To learn more about OCFS2 in detail, you can find good documentation on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2 in the Documentation area, or get the latest mainline kernel from http://kernel.org and read the source. One final, unrelated note - since I am not always able to publicly answer or respond to comments, I do not want to selectively publish comments from readers. Sometimes I forget to publish comments, sometime I publish them and sometimes I would publish them but if for some reason I cannot publicly comment on them, it becomes a very one-sided stream. So for now I am going to not publish comments from anyone, to be fair to all sides. You are always welcome to email me and I will do my best to respond to technical questions, questions about strategy or direction are sometimes not possible to answer for obvious reasons.

Read the article
Down Tools Week Cometh: Kissing Goodbye to CVs/Resumes and Cover Letters

- by Bart Read

I haven't blogged about what I'm doing in my (not so new) temporary role as Red Gate's technical recruiter, mostly because it's been routine, business as usual stuff, and because I've been trying to understand the role by doing it. I think now though the time has come to get a little more radical, so I'm going to tell you why I want to largely eliminate CVs/resumes and cover letters from the application process for some of our technical roles, and why I think that might be a good thing for candidates (and for us). I have a terrible confession to make, or at least it's a terrible confession for a recruiter: I don't really like CV sifting, or reading cover letters, and, unless I've misread the mood around here, neither does anybody else. It's dull, it's time-consuming, and it's somewhat soul destroying because, when all is said and done, you're being paid to be incredibly judgemental about people based on relatively little information. I feel like I've dirtied myself by saying that - I mean, after all, it's a core part of my job - but it sucks, it really does. (And, of course, the truth is I'm still a software engineer at heart, and I'm always looking for ways to do things better.) On the flip side, I've never met anyone who likes writing their CV. It takes hours and hours of faffing around and massaging it into shape, and the whole process is beset by a gnawing anxiety, frustration, and insecurity. All you really want is a chance to demonstrate your skills - not just talk about them - and how do you do that in a CV or cover letter? Often the best candidates will include samples of their work (a portfolio, screenshots, links to websites, product downloads, etc.), but sometimes this isn't possible, or may not be appropriate, or you just don't think you're allowed because of what your school/university careers service has told you (more commonly an issue with grads, obviously). And what are we actually trying to find out about people with all of this? I think the common criteria are actually pretty basic: Smart Gets things done (thanks for these two Joel) Not an a55hole* (sorry, have to get around Simple Talk's swear filter - and thanks to Professor Robert I. Sutton for this one) *Of course, everyone has off days, and I don't honestly think we're too worried about somebody being a bit grumpy every now and again. We can do a bit better than this in the context of the roles I'm talking about: we can be more specific about what "gets things done" means, at least in part. For software engineers and interns, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Excellent coder For test engineers, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Good at finding problems in software Competent coder Team player, etc., to me, are covered by "not an a55hole". I don't expect people to be the life and soul of the party, or a wild extrovert - that's not what team player means, and it's not what "not an a55hole" means. Some of our best technical staff are quiet, introverted types, but they're still pleasant to work with. My problem is that I don't think the initial sift really helps us find out whether people are smart and get things done with any great efficacy. It's better than nothing, for sure, but it's not as good as it could be. It's also contentious, and potentially unfair/inequitable - if you want to get an idea of what I mean by this, check out the background information section at the bottom. Before I go any further, let's look at the Red Gate recruitment process for technical staff* as it stands now: (LOTS of) People apply for jobs. All these applications go through a brutal process of manual sifting, which eliminates between 75 and 90% of them, depending upon the role, and the time of year**. Depending upon the role, those who pass the sift will be sent an assessment or telescreened. For the purposes of this blog post I'm only interested in those that are sent some sort of programming assessment, or bug hunt. This means software engineers, test engineers, and software interns, which are the roles for which I receive the most applications. The telescreen tends to be reserved for project or product managers. Those that pass the assessment are invited in for first interview. This interview is mostly about assessing their technical skills***, although we're obviously on the look out for cultural fit red flags as well. If the first interview goes well we'll invite candidates back for a second interview. This is where team/cultural fit is really scoped out. We also use this interview to dive more deeply into certain areas of their skillset, and explore any concerns that may have come out of the first interview (these obviously won't have been serious or obvious enough to cause a rejection at that point, but are things we do need to look into before we'd consider making an offer). We might subsequently invite them in for lunch before we make them an offer. This tends to happen when we're recruiting somebody for a specific team and we'd like them to meet all the people they'll be working with directly. It's not an interview per se, but can prove pivotal if they don't gel with the team. Anyone who's made it this far will receive an offer from us. *We have a slightly quirky definition of "technical staff" as it relates to the technical recruiter role here. It includes software engineers, test engineers, software interns, user experience specialists, technical authors, project managers, product managers, and development managers, but does not include product support or information systems roles. **For example, the quality of graduate applicants overall noticeably drops as the academic year wears on, which is not to say that by now there aren't still stars in there, just that they're fewer and further between. ***Some organisations prefer to assess for team fit first, but I think assessing technical skills is a more effective initial filter - if they're the nicest person in the world, but can't cut a line of code they're not going to work out. Now, as I suggested in the title, Red Gate's Down Tools Week is upon us once again - next week in fact - and I had proposed as a project that we refactor and automate the first stage of marking our programming assessments. Marking assessments, and in fact organising the marking of them, is a somewhat time-consuming process, and we receive many assessment solutions that just don't make the cut, for whatever reason. Whilst I don't think it's possible to fully automate marking, I do think it ought to be possible to run a suite of automated tests over each candidate's solution to see whether or not it behaves correctly and, if it does, move on to a manual stage where we examine the code for structure, decomposition, style, readability, maintainability, etc. Obviously it's possible to use tools to generate potentially helpful metrics for some of these indices as well. This would obviously reduce the marking workload, and would provide candidates with quicker feedback about whether they've been successful - though I do wonder if waiting a tactful interval before sending a (nicely written) rejection might be wise. I duly scrawled out a picture of my ideal process, which looked like this: The problem is, as soon as I'd roughed it out, I realised that fundamentally it wasn't an ideal process at all, which explained the gnawing feeling of cognitive dissonance I'd been wrestling with all week, whilst I'd been trying to find time to do this. Here's what I mean. Automated assessment marking, and the associated infrastructure around that, makes it much easier for us to deal with large numbers of assessments. This means we can be much more permissive about who we send assessments out to or, in other words, we can give more candidates the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills to us. And this leads to a question: why not give everyone the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, to show that they're smart and can get things done? (Two or three of us even discussed this in the down tools week hustings earlier this week.) And isn't this a lot simpler than the alternative we'd been considering? (FYI, this was automated CV/cover letter sifting by some form of textual analysis to ideally eliminate the worst 50% or so of applications based on an analysis of the 20,000 or so historical applications we've received since 2007 - definitely not the basic keyword analysis beloved of recruitment agencies, since this would eliminate hardly anyone who was awful, but definitely would eliminate stellar Oxbridge candidates - #fail - or some nightmarishly complex Google-like system where we profile all our currently employees, only to realise that we're never going to get representative results because we don't have a statistically significant sample size in any given role - also #fail.) No, I think the new way is better. We let people self-select. We make them the masters (or mistresses) of their own destiny. We give applicants the power - we put their fate in their hands - by giving them the chance to demonstrate their skills, which is what they really want anyway, instead of requiring that they spend hours and hours creating a CV and cover letter that I'm going to evaluate for suitability, and make a value judgement about, in approximately 1 minute (give or take). It doesn't matter what university you attended, it doesn't matter if you had a bad year when you took your A-levels - here's your chance to shine, so take it and run with it. (As a side benefit, we cut the number of applications we have to sift by something like two thirds.) WIN! OK, yeah, sounds good, but will it actually work? That's an excellent question. My gut feeling is yes, and I'll justify why below (and hopefully have gone some way towards doing that above as well), but what I'm proposing here is really that we run an experiment for a period of time - probably a couple of months or so - and measure the outcomes we see: How many people apply? (Wouldn't be surprised or alarmed to see this cut by a factor of ten.) How many of them submit a good assessment? (More/less than at present?) How much overhead is there for us in dealing with these assessments compared to now? What are the success and failure rates at each interview stage compared to now? How many people are we hiring at the end of it compared to now? I think it'll work because I hypothesize that, amongst other things: It self-selects for people who really want to work at Red Gate which, at the moment, is something I have to try and assess based on their CV and cover letter - but if you're not that bothered about working here, why would you complete the assessment? Candidates who would submit a shoddy application probably won't feel motivated to do the assessment. Candidates who would demonstrate good attention to detail in their CV/cover letter will demonstrate good attention to detail in the assessment. In general, only the better candidates will complete and submit the assessment. Marking assessments is much less work so we'll be able to deal with any increase that we see (hopefully we will see). There are obviously other questions as well: Is plagiarism going to be a problem? Is there any way we can detect/discourage potential plagiarism? How do we assess candidates' education and experience? What about their ability to communicate in writing? Do we still want them to submit a CV afterwards if they pass assessment? Do we want to offer them the opportunity to tell us a bit about why they'd like the job when they submit their assessment? How does this affect our relationship with recruitment agencies we might use to hire for these roles? So, what's the objective for next week's Down Tools Week? Pretty simple really - we want to implement this process for the Graduate Software Engineer and Software Engineer positions that you can find on our website. I will be joined by a crack team of our best developers (Kevin Boyle, and new Red-Gater, Sam Blackburn), and recruiting hostess with the mostest Laura McQuillen, and hopefully a couple of others as well - if I can successfully twist more arms before Monday.* Hopefully by next Friday our experiment will be up and running, and we may have changed the way Red Gate recruits software engineers for good! Stay tuned and we'll let you know how it goes! *I'm going to play dirty by offering them beer and chocolate during meetings. Some background information: how agonising over the initial CV/cover letter sift helped lead us to bin it off entirely The other day I was agonising about the new university/good degree grade versus poor A-level results issue, and decided to canvas for other opinions to see if there was something I could do that was fairer than my current approach, which is almost always to reject. This generated quite an involved discussion on our Yammer site: I'm sure you can glean a pretty good impression of my own educational prejudices from that discussion as well, although I'm very open to changing my opinion - hopefully you've already figured that out from reading the rest of this post. Hopefully you can also trace a logical path from agonising about sifting to, "Uh, hang on, why on earth are we doing this anyway?!?" Technorati Tags: recruitment,hr,developers,testers,red gate,cv,resume,cover letter,assessment,sea change

Read the article

< Previous Page | 22 23 24 25 26