Search Results

Search found 6764 results on 271 pages for 'bryan head'.

Page 264/271 | < Previous Page | 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 | Next Page >

How to hide the div on any click outside

- by user1720527

I am starting up on jquery and was tryin to create a simple div hide and show effect. The effects seem to work fine but i need that when user clicks on any other part of the document(i. except the hide/show box), the box should hide back. This is the jsfiddle : http://jsfiddle.net/39DzJ/. I have not styled it properly. I wanted the effects to work first. Can anyone help me out ? Here's the HTML code : <style> #mail_floater { background:#fce8bd; height:88px; width:342px; border:1px solid #b7ad02; border-radius:5px; position:absolute; left:200px; top:50px; border-top:none; z-index:100; padding:0; } #subscribe_user { width:248px; height:16px; border:1px solid #b7ad02; } #cust_care_floater { background:#fce8bd; height:12px; width:108px; border:1px solid #b7ad02; border-radius:2px; border-bottom-left-radius:2px; position:absolute; left:450px; top:30px; border-top:none; z-index:100; clear:both; font-family:Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:10px; font-weight:bold; color:#036f05; box-shadow:1px 1px 3px #ccc inset; } #closer { float:right; margin-right:5px; margin-top:2px; width:19px; height:19px; background:url(../images/close.png) no-repeat; } </style> </head> <body> <a href="#" id="subscribe">Subscribe</a> <a href="#" id="customer_care">Customer care</a> <div id="mail_floater"> <h5>Email</h5> <div id="closer"></div> <div id="email_input"><form><label>Enter E-mail : </label><span><input type="text" id="subscribe_user" /></span> <input type="submit" id="subscribe_me" value="Done" /></form></div> </div> <div id="cust_care_floater"> <span style="padding:0px 10px 0 10px;">033-993-99920</span> </div> </body>? The javascript code : $(document).ready ( function() { var disp_box=$('#mail_floater'); var sub_link=$('#subscribe'); var disp_box_2=$('#cust_care_floater'); var sub_link_2=$('#customer_care'); disp_box.hide(); disp_box_2.hide(); sub_link.click ( function() { disp_box.show(); }); disp_box.find('#closer').click ( function() { disp_box.hide(); }); sub_link_2.click ( function() { disp_box_2.show(); }); });

Read the article
How can I Display an extract from MySQL database entry?

- by ThatMacLad

I'm after creating a webpage that includes a blog section and it currently displays the whole post on the homepage. I'd like to set it so that it only displays a certain part of the entry i.e 50 words. I'd then like to be able to set it so that I have a read more button below the post that links to the post id. I currently use post.php?=# (# = whatever the post id is). Here is the homepage: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Blog Name</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" type="text/css" /> <body> <div id="upper-bar"> <div id="bar-content"> <a href="#">Home</a> <a href="#">Archives</a> <a href="#">Contact</a> <a href="#">About</a> <a href="#"><img src="images/twitter.png" id="tweet"></a><a href="#"><img src="images/feed.png" id="feed"></a> </div> </div> <div id="clear"> </div> <div class="main"> <h1>Blog Name</h1> <div class="post-col"> <?php mysql_connect ('localhost', 'root', 'root') ; mysql_select_db ('tmlblog'); $sql = "SELECT * FROM php_blog ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 5"; $result = mysql_query($sql) or print ("Can't select entries from table php_blog.<br />" . $sql . "<br />" . mysql_error()); while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { $date = date("l F d Y", $row['timestamp']); $title = stripslashes($row['title']); $entry = stripslashes($row['entry']); $id = $row['id']; ?> <div id='post-info'><?php echo "<p id='title'><strong><a href=\"post.php?id=". $id . "\">" . $title . "</a></strong></p>"; ?><br /></div> <div id="post"> <?php echo $entry; ?>  </p> </div> </p> </div> <?php } ?> </div> </div> </body> </html>

Read the article
Processing Email in Outlook

- by Daniel Moth

A. Why Goal 1 = Help others: Have at most a 24-hour response turnaround to internal (from colleague) emails, typically achieving same day response. Goal 2 = Help projects: Not to implicitly pass/miss an opportunity to have impact on electronic discussions around any project on the radar. Not achieving goals 1 & 2 = Colleagues stop relying on you, drop you off conversations, don't see you as a contributing resource or someone that cares, you are perceived as someone with no peripheral vision. Note this is perfect if all you are doing is cruising at your job, trying to fly under the radar, with no ambitions of having impact beyond your absolute minimum 'day job'. B. DON'T: Leave unread email lurking around Don't: Receive or process all incoming emails in a single folder ('inbox' or 'unread mail'). This is actually possible if you receive a small number of emails (e.g. new to the job, not working at a company like Microsoft). Even so, with (your future) success at any level (company, community) comes large incoming email, so learn to deal with it. With large volumes, it is best to let the system help you by doing some categorization and filtering on your behalf (instead of trying to do that in your head as you process the single folder). See later section on how to achieve this. Don't: Leave emails as 'unread' (or worse: read them, then mark them as unread). Often done by individuals who think they possess super powers ("I can mentally cache and distinguish between the emails I chose not to read, the ones that are actually new, and the ones I decided to revisit in the future; the fact that they all show up the same (bold = unread) does not confuse me"). Interactions with this super-powered individuals typically end up with them saying stuff like "I must have missed that email you are talking about (from 2 weeks ago)" or "I am a bit behind, so I haven't read your email, can you remind me". TIP: The only place where you are "allowed" unread email is in your Deleted Items folder. Don't: Interpret a read email as an email that has been processed. Doing that, means you will always end up with fake unread email (that you have actually read, but haven't dealt with completely so you then marked it as unread) lurking between actual unread email. Another side effect is reading the email and making a 'mental' note to action it, then leaving the email as read, so the only thing left to remind you to carry out the action is… you. You are not super human, you will forget. This is a key distinction. Reading (or even scanning) a new email, means you now know what needs to be done with it, in order for it to be truly considered processed. Truly processing an email is to, for example, write an email of your own (e.g. to reply or forward), or take a non-email related action (e.g. create calendar entry, do something on some website), or read it carefully to gain some knowledge (e.g. it had a spec as an attachment), or keep it around as reference etc. 'Reading' means that you know what to do, not that you have done it. An email that is read is an email that is triaged, not an email that is resolved. Sometimes the thing that needs to be done based on receiving the email, you can (and want) to do immediately after reading the email. That is fine, you read the email and you processed it (typically when it takes no longer than X minutes, where X is your personal tolerance – mine is roughly 2 minutes). Other times, you decide that you don't want to spend X minutes at that moment, so after reading the email you need a quick system for "marking" the email as to be processed later (and you still leave it as 'read' in outlook). See later section for how. C. DO: Use Outlook rules and have multiple folders where incoming email is automatically moved to Outlook email rules are very powerful and easy to configure. Use them to automatically file email into folders. Here are mine (note that if a rule catches an email message then no further rules get processed): "personal" Email is either personal or business related. Almost all personal email goes to my gmail account. The personal emails that end up on my work email account, go to a dedicated folder – that is achieved via a rule that looks at the email's 'From' field. For those that slip through, I use the new Outlook 2010 quick step of "Conversation To Folder" feature to let the slippage only occur once per conversation, and then update my rules. "External" and "ViaBlog" The remaining external emails either come from my blog (rule on the subject line) or are unsolicited (rule on the domain name not being microsoft) and they are filed accordingly. "invites" I may do a separate blog post on calendar management, but suffice to say it should be kept up to date. All invite requests end up in this folder, so that even if mail gets out of control, the calendar can stay under control (only 1 folder to check). I.e. so I can let the organizer know why I won't be attending their meeting (or that I will be). Note: This folder is the only one that shows the total number of items in it, instead of the total unread. "Inbox" The only email that ends up here is email sent TO me and me only. Note that this is also the only email that shows up above the systray icon in the notification toast – all other emails cannot interrupt. "ToMe++" Email where I am on the TO line, but there are other recipients as well (on the TO or CC line). "CC" Email where I am on the CC line. I need to read these, but nobody is expecting a response or action from me so they are not as urgent (and if they are and follow up with me, they'll receive a link to this). "@ XYZ" Emails to aliases that are about projects that I directly work on (and I wasn't on the TO or CC line, of course). Test: these projects are in my commitments that I get measured on at the end of the year. "Z Mass" and subfolders under it per distribution list (DL) Emails to aliases that are about topics that I am interested in, but not that I formally own/contribute to. Test: if I unsubscribed from these aliases, nobody could rightfully complain. "Admin" folder, which resides under "Z Mass" folder Emails to aliases that I was added typically by an admin, e.g. broad emails to the floor/group/org/building/division/company that I am a member of. "BCC" folder, which resides under "Z Mass" Emails where I was not on the TO or the CC line explicitly and the alias it was sent to is not one I explicitly subscribed to (or I have been added to the BCC line, which I briefly touched on in another post). When there are only a few quick minutes to catch up on email, read as much as possible from these folders, in this order: Invites, Inbox, ToMe++. Only when these folders are all read (remember that doesn't mean that each email in them has been fully dealt with), we can move on to the @XYZ and then the CC folders. Only when those are read we can go on to the remaining folders. Note that the typical flow in the "Z Mass" subfolders is to scan subject lines and use the new Ctrl+Delete Outlook 2010 feature to ignore conversations. D. DO: Use Outlook Search folders in combination with categories As you process each folder, when you open a new email (i.e. click on it and read it in the preview pane) the email becomes read and stays read and you have to decide whether: It can take 2 minutes to deal with for good, right now, or It will take longer than 2 minutes, so it needs to be postponed with a clear next step, which is one of ToReply – there may be intermediate action steps, but ultimately someone else needs to receive email about this Action – no email is required, but I need to do something ReadLater – no email is required from the quick scan, but this is too long to fully read now, so it needs to be read it later WaitingFor – the email is informing of an intermediate status and 'promising' a future email update. Need to track. SomedayMaybe – interesting but not important, non-urgent, non-time-bound information. I may want to spend part of one of my weekends reading it. For all these 'next steps' use Outlook categories (right click on the email and assign category, or use shortcut key). Note that I also use category 'WaitingFor' for email that I send where I am expecting a response and need to track it. Create a new search folder for each category (I dragged the search folders into my favorites at the top left of Outlook, above my inboxes). So after the activity of reading/triaging email in the normal folders (where the email arrived) is done, the result is a bunch of emails appearing in the search folders (configure them to show the total items, not the total unread items). To actually process email (that takes more than 2 minutes to deal with) process the search folders, starting with ToReply and Action. E. DO: Get into a Routine Now you have a system in place, get into a routine of using it. Here is how I personally use mine, but this part I keep tweaking: Spend short bursts of time (between meetings, during boring but mandatory meetings and, in general, 2-4 times a day) aiming to have no unread emails (and in the process deal with some emails that take less than 2 minutes). Spend around 30 minutes at the end of each day processing most urgent items in search folders. Spend as long as it takes each Friday (or even the weekend) ensuring there is no unnecessary email baggage carried forward to the following week. F. Other resources Official Outlook help on: Create custom actions rules, Manage e-mail messages with rules, creating a search folder. Video on ignoring conversations (Ctrl+Del). Official blog post on Quick Steps and in particular the Move Conversation to folder. If you've read "Getting Things Done" it is very obvious that my approach to email management is driven by GTD. A very similar approach was described previously by ScottHa (also influenced by GTD), worth reading here. He also described how he sets up 2 outlook rules ('invites' and 'external') which I also use – worth reading that too. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

Read the article
Using LINQ Distinct: With an Example on ASP.NET MVC SelectListItem

- by Joe Mayo

One of the things that might be surprising in the LINQ Distinct standard query operator is that it doesn’t automatically work properly on custom classes. There are reasons for this, which I’ll explain shortly. The example I’ll use in this post focuses on pulling a unique list of names to load into a drop-down list. I’ll explain the sample application, show you typical first shot at Distinct, explain why it won’t work as you expect, and then demonstrate a solution to make Distinct work with any custom class. The technologies I’m using are LINQ to Twitter, LINQ to Objects, Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 2, and Visual Studio 2010. The function of the example program is to show a list of people that I follow. In Twitter API vernacular, these people are called “Friends”; though I’ve never met most of them in real life. This is part of the ubiquitous language of social networking, and Twitter in particular, so you’ll see my objects named accordingly. Where Distinct comes into play is because I want to have a drop-down list with the names of the friends appearing in the list. Some friends are quite verbose, which means I can’t just extract names from each tweet and populate the drop-down; otherwise, I would end up with many duplicate names. Therefore, Distinct is the appropriate operator to eliminate the extra entries from my friends who tend to be enthusiastic tweeters. The sample doesn’t do anything with the drop-down list and I leave that up to imagination for what it’s practical purpose could be; perhaps a filter for the list if I only want to see a certain person’s tweets or maybe a quick list that I plan to combine with a TextBox and Button to reply to a friend. When the program runs, you’ll need to authenticate with Twitter, because I’m using OAuth (DotNetOpenAuth), for authentication, and then you’ll see the drop-down list of names above the grid with the most recent tweets from friends. Here’s what the application looks like when it runs: As you can see, there is a drop-down list above the grid. The drop-down list is where most of the focus of this article will be. There is some description of the code before we talk about the Distinct operator, but we’ll get there soon. This is an ASP.NET MVC2 application, written with VS 2010. Here’s the View that produces this screen: <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<TwitterFriendsViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="DistinctSelectList.Models" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Home Page </asp:Content><asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <fieldset> <legend>Twitter Friends</legend> <div> <%= Html.DropDownListFor( twendVM => twendVM.FriendNames, Model.FriendNames, "<All Friends>") %> </div> <div> <% Html.Telerik().Grid<TweetViewModel>(Model.Tweets) .Name("TwitterFriendsGrid") .Columns(cols => { cols.Template(col => { %> <img src="<%= col.ImageUrl %>" alt="<%= col.ScreenName %>" /> <% }); cols.Bound(col => col.ScreenName); cols.Bound(col => col.Tweet); }) .Render(); %> </div> </fieldset> </asp:Content> As shown above, the Grid is from Telerik’s Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. The first column is a template that renders the user’s Avatar from a URL provided by the Twitter query. Both the Grid and DropDownListFor display properties that are collections from a TwitterFriendsViewModel class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// For finding friend info on screen /// public class TwitterFriendsViewModel { /// /// Display names of friends in drop-down list /// public List FriendNames { get; set; } /// /// Display tweets in grid /// public List Tweets { get; set; } } } I created the TwitterFreindsViewModel. The two Lists are what the View consumes to populate the DropDownListFor and Grid. Notice that FriendNames is a List of SelectListItem, which is an MVC class. Another custom class I created is the TweetViewModel (the type of the Tweets List), shown below: namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// Info on friend tweets /// public class TweetViewModel { /// /// User's avatar /// public string ImageUrl { get; set; } /// /// User's Twitter name /// public string ScreenName { get; set; } /// /// Text containing user's tweet /// public string Tweet { get; set; } } } The initial Twitter query returns much more information than we need for our purposes and this a special class for displaying info in the View. Now you know about the View and how it’s constructed. Let’s look at the controller next. The controller for this demo performs authentication, data retrieval, data manipulation, and view selection. I’ll skip the description of the authentication because it’s a normal part of using OAuth with LINQ to Twitter. Instead, we’ll drill down and focus on the Distinct operator. However, I’ll show you the entire controller, below, so that you can see how it all fits together: using System.Linq; using System.Web.Mvc; using DistinctSelectList.Models; using LinqToTwitter; namespace DistinctSelectList.Controllers { [HandleError] public class HomeController : Controller { private MvcOAuthAuthorization auth; private TwitterContext twitterCtx; /// /// Display a list of friends current tweets /// /// public ActionResult Index() { auth = new MvcOAuthAuthorization(InMemoryTokenManager.Instance, InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken); string accessToken = auth.CompleteAuthorize(); if (accessToken != null) { InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken = accessToken; } if (auth.CachedCredentialsAvailable) { auth.SignOn(); } else { return auth.BeginAuthorize(); } twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); var twendsVM = new TwitterFriendsViewModel { Tweets = friendTweets, FriendNames = friendNames }; return View(twendsVM); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } } } The important part of the listing above are the LINQ to Twitter queries for friendTweets and friendNames. Both of these results are used in the subsequent population of the twendsVM instance that is passed to the view. Let’s dissect these two statements for clarification and focus on what is happening with Distinct. The query for friendTweets gets a list of the 20 most recent tweets (as specified by the Twitter API for friend queries) and performs a projection into the custom TweetViewModel class, repeated below for your convenience: var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); The LINQ to Twitter query above simplifies what we need to work with in the View and the reduces the amount of information we have to look at in subsequent queries. Given the friendTweets above, the next query performs another projection into an MVC SelectListItem, which is required for binding to the DropDownList. This brings us to the focus of this blog post, writing a correct query that uses the Distinct operator. The query below uses LINQ to Objects, querying the friendTweets collection to get friendNames: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); The above implementation of Distinct seems normal, but it is deceptively incorrect. After running the query above, by executing the application, you’ll notice that the drop-down list contains many duplicates. This will send you back to the code scratching your head, but there’s a reason why this happens. To understand the problem, we must examine how Distinct works in LINQ to Objects. Distinct has two overloads: one without parameters, as shown above, and another that takes a parameter of type IEqualityComparer<T>. In the case above, no parameters, Distinct will call EqualityComparer<T>.Default behind the scenes to make comparisons as it iterates through the list. You don’t have problems with the built-in types, such as string, int, DateTime, etc, because they all implement IEquatable<T>. However, many .NET Framework classes, such as SelectListItem, don’t implement IEquatable<T>. So, what happens is that EqualityComparer<T>.Default results in a call to Object.Equals, which performs reference equality on reference type objects. You don’t have this problem with value types because the default implementation of Object.Equals is bitwise equality. However, most of your projections that use Distinct are on classes, just like the SelectListItem used in this demo application. So, the reason why Distinct didn’t produce the results we wanted was because we used a type that doesn’t define its own equality and Distinct used the default reference equality. This resulted in all objects being included in the results because they are all separate instances in memory with unique references. As you might have guessed, the solution to the problem is to use the second overload of Distinct that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T> instance. If you were projecting into your own custom type, you could make that type implement IEqualityComparer<T>, but SelectListItem belongs to the .NET Framework Class Library. Therefore, the solution is to create a custom type to implement IEqualityComparer<T>, as in the SelectListItemComparer class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { public class SelectListItemComparer : EqualityComparer { public override bool Equals(SelectListItem x, SelectListItem y) { return x.Value.Equals(y.Value); } public override int GetHashCode(SelectListItem obj) { return obj.Value.GetHashCode(); } } } The SelectListItemComparer class above doesn’t implement IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, but rather derives from EqualityComparer<SelectListItem>. Microsoft recommends this approach for consistency with the behavior of generic collection classes. However, if your custom type already derives from a base class, go ahead and implement IEqualityComparer<T>, which will still work. EqualityComparer is an abstract class, that implements IEqualityComparer<T> with Equals and GetHashCode abstract methods. For the purposes of this application, the SelectListItem.Value property is sufficient to determine if two items are equal. Since SelectListItem.Value is type string, the code delegates equality to the string class. The code also delegates the GetHashCode operation to the string class.You might have other criteria in your own object and would need to define what it means for your object to be equal. Now that we have an IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, let’s fix the problem. The code below modifies the query where we want distinct values: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct(new SelectListItemComparer()) .ToList(); Notice how the code above passes a new instance of SelectListItemComparer as the parameter to the Distinct operator. Now, when you run the application, the drop-down list will behave as you expect, showing only a unique set of names. In addition to Distinct, other LINQ Standard Query Operators have overloads that accept IEqualityComparer<T>’s, You can use the same techniques as shown here, with SelectListItemComparer, with those other operators as well. Now you know how to resolve problems with getting Distinct to work properly and also have a way to fix problems with other operators that require equality comparisons. @JoeMayo

Read the article
Processing Email in Outlook

- by Daniel Moth

A. Why Goal 1 = Help others: Have at most a 24-hour response turnaround to internal (from colleague) emails, typically achieving same day response. Goal 2 = Help projects: Not to implicitly pass/miss an opportunity to have impact on electronic discussions around any project on the radar. Not achieving goals 1 & 2 = Colleagues stop relying on you, drop you off conversations, don't see you as a contributing resource or someone that cares, you are perceived as someone with no peripheral vision. Note this is perfect if all you are doing is cruising at your job, trying to fly under the radar, with no ambitions of having impact beyond your absolute minimum 'day job'. B. DON'T: Leave unread email lurking around Don't: Receive or process all incoming emails in a single folder ('inbox' or 'unread mail'). This is actually possible if you receive a small number of emails (e.g. new to the job, not working at a company like Microsoft). Even so, with (your future) success at any level (company, community) comes large incoming email, so learn to deal with it. With large volumes, it is best to let the system help you by doing some categorization and filtering on your behalf (instead of trying to do that in your head as you process the single folder). See later section on how to achieve this. Don't: Leave emails as 'unread' (or worse: read them, then mark them as unread). Often done by individuals who think they possess super powers ("I can mentally cache and distinguish between the emails I chose not to read, the ones that are actually new, and the ones I decided to revisit in the future; the fact that they all show up the same (bold = unread) does not confuse me"). Interactions with this super-powered individuals typically end up with them saying stuff like "I must have missed that email you are talking about (from 2 weeks ago)" or "I am a bit behind, so I haven't read your email, can you remind me". TIP: The only place where you are "allowed" unread email is in your Deleted Items folder. Don't: Interpret a read email as an email that has been processed. Doing that, means you will always end up with fake unread email (that you have actually read, but haven't dealt with completely so you then marked it as unread) lurking between actual unread email. Another side effect is reading the email and making a 'mental' note to action it, then leaving the email as read, so the only thing left to remind you to carry out the action is… you. You are not super human, you will forget. This is a key distinction. Reading (or even scanning) a new email, means you now know what needs to be done with it, in order for it to be truly considered processed. Truly processing an email is to, for example, write an email of your own (e.g. to reply or forward), or take a non-email related action (e.g. create calendar entry, do something on some website), or read it carefully to gain some knowledge (e.g. it had a spec as an attachment), or keep it around as reference etc. 'Reading' means that you know what to do, not that you have done it. An email that is read is an email that is triaged, not an email that is resolved. Sometimes the thing that needs to be done based on receiving the email, you can (and want) to do immediately after reading the email. That is fine, you read the email and you processed it (typically when it takes no longer than X minutes, where X is your personal tolerance – mine is roughly 2 minutes). Other times, you decide that you don't want to spend X minutes at that moment, so after reading the email you need a quick system for "marking" the email as to be processed later (and you still leave it as 'read' in outlook). See later section for how. C. DO: Use Outlook rules and have multiple folders where incoming email is automatically moved to Outlook email rules are very powerful and easy to configure. Use them to automatically file email into folders. Here are mine (note that if a rule catches an email message then no further rules get processed): "personal" Email is either personal or business related. Almost all personal email goes to my gmail account. The personal emails that end up on my work email account, go to a dedicated folder – that is achieved via a rule that looks at the email's 'From' field. For those that slip through, I use the new Outlook 2010 quick step of "Conversation To Folder" feature to let the slippage only occur once per conversation, and then update my rules. "External" and "ViaBlog" The remaining external emails either come from my blog (rule on the subject line) or are unsolicited (rule on the domain name not being microsoft) and they are filed accordingly. "invites" I may do a separate blog post on calendar management, but suffice to say it should be kept up to date. All invite requests end up in this folder, so that even if mail gets out of control, the calendar can stay under control (only 1 folder to check). I.e. so I can let the organizer know why I won't be attending their meeting (or that I will be). Note: This folder is the only one that shows the total number of items in it, instead of the total unread. "Inbox" The only email that ends up here is email sent TO me and me only. Note that this is also the only email that shows up above the systray icon in the notification toast – all other emails cannot interrupt. "ToMe++" Email where I am on the TO line, but there are other recipients as well (on the TO or CC line). "CC" Email where I am on the CC line. I need to read these, but nobody is expecting a response or action from me so they are not as urgent (and if they are and follow up with me, they'll receive a link to this). "@ XYZ" Emails to aliases that are about projects that I directly work on (and I wasn't on the TO or CC line, of course). Test: these projects are in my commitments that I get measured on at the end of the year. "Z Mass" and subfolders under it per distribution list (DL) Emails to aliases that are about topics that I am interested in, but not that I formally own/contribute to. Test: if I unsubscribed from these aliases, nobody could rightfully complain. "Admin" folder, which resides under "Z Mass" folder Emails to aliases that I was added typically by an admin, e.g. broad emails to the floor/group/org/building/division/company that I am a member of. "BCC" folder, which resides under "Z Mass" Emails where I was not on the TO or the CC line explicitly and the alias it was sent to is not one I explicitly subscribed to (or I have been added to the BCC line, which I briefly touched on in another post). When there are only a few quick minutes to catch up on email, read as much as possible from these folders, in this order: Invites, Inbox, ToMe++. Only when these folders are all read (remember that doesn't mean that each email in them has been fully dealt with), we can move on to the @XYZ and then the CC folders. Only when those are read we can go on to the remaining folders. Note that the typical flow in the "Z Mass" subfolders is to scan subject lines and use the new Ctrl+Delete Outlook 2010 feature to ignore conversations. D. DO: Use Outlook Search folders in combination with categories As you process each folder, when you open a new email (i.e. click on it and read it in the preview pane) the email becomes read and stays read and you have to decide whether: It can take 2 minutes to deal with for good, right now, or It will take longer than 2 minutes, so it needs to be postponed with a clear next step, which is one of ToReply – there may be intermediate action steps, but ultimately someone else needs to receive email about this Action – no email is required, but I need to do something ReadLater – no email is required from the quick scan, but this is too long to fully read now, so it needs to be read it later WaitingFor – the email is informing of an intermediate status and 'promising' a future email update. Need to track. SomedayMaybe – interesting but not important, non-urgent, non-time-bound information. I may want to spend part of one of my weekends reading it. For all these 'next steps' use Outlook categories (right click on the email and assign category, or use shortcut key). Note that I also use category 'WaitingFor' for email that I send where I am expecting a response and need to track it. Create a new search folder for each category (I dragged the search folders into my favorites at the top left of Outlook, above my inboxes). So after the activity of reading/triaging email in the normal folders (where the email arrived) is done, the result is a bunch of emails appearing in the search folders (configure them to show the total items, not the total unread items). To actually process email (that takes more than 2 minutes to deal with) process the search folders, starting with ToReply and Action. E. DO: Get into a Routine Now you have a system in place, get into a routine of using it. Here is how I personally use mine, but this part I keep tweaking: Spend short bursts of time (between meetings, during boring but mandatory meetings and, in general, 2-4 times a day) aiming to have no unread emails (and in the process deal with some emails that take less than 2 minutes). Spend around 30 minutes at the end of each day processing most urgent items in search folders. Spend as long as it takes each Friday (or even the weekend) ensuring there is no unnecessary email baggage carried forward to the following week. F. Other resources Official Outlook help on: Create custom actions rules, Manage e-mail messages with rules, creating a search folder. Video on ignoring conversations (Ctrl+Del). Official blog post on Quick Steps and in particular the Move Conversation to folder. If you've read "Getting Things Done" it is very obvious that my approach to email management is driven by GTD. A very similar approach was described previously by ScottHa (also influenced by GTD), worth reading here. He also described how he sets up 2 outlook rules ('invites' and 'external') which I also use – worth reading that too. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

Read the article
Preventing duplicate Data with ASP.NET AJAX

- by Yousef_Jadallah

Some times you need to prevent User names ,E-mail ID's or other values from being duplicated by a new user during Registration or any other cases,So I will add a simple approach to make the page more user-friendly. Instead the user filled all the Registration fields then press submit after that received a message as a result of PostBack that "THIS USERNAME IS EXIST", Ajax tidies this up by allowing asynchronous querying while the user is still completing the registration form. ASP.NET enables you to create Web services can be accessed from client script in Web pages by using AJAX technology to make Web service calls. Data is exchanged asynchronously between client and server, typically in JSON format. I’ve added an article to show you step by step how to use ASP.NET AJAX with Web Services , you can find it here . Lets go a head with the steps : 1-Create a new project , if you are using VS 2005 you have to create ASP.NET Ajax Enabled Web site. 2-Create your own Database which contain user table that have User_Name field. for Testing I’ve added SQL Server Database that come with Dot Net 2008: Then I’ve created tblUsers: This table and this structure just for our example, you can use your own table to implement this approach. 3-Add new Item to your project or website, Choose Web Service file, lets say WebService.cs .In this Web Service file import System.Data.SqlClient Namespace, Then Add your web method that contain string parameter which received the Username parameter from the Script , Finally don’t forget to qualified the Web Service Class with the ScriptServiceAttribute attribute ([System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService]) using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Services; using System.Data.SqlClient; [WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] [System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService] public class WebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public int CheckDuplicate(string User_Name) { string strConn = @"Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\TestDB.mdf;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True"; string strQuery = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tblUsers WHERE User_Name = @User_Name"; SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection(strConn); SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(strQuery, con); cmd.Parameters.Add("User_Name", User_Name); con.Open(); int RetVal= (int)cmd.ExecuteScalar(); con.Close(); return RetVal; } } .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; } Our Web Method here is CheckDuplicate Which accept User_Name String as a parameter and return number of the rows , if the name will found in the database this method will return 1 else it will return 0. I’ve applied [WebMethod] Attribute to our method CheckDuplicate, And applied the ScriptService attribute to a Web Service class named WebService. 4-Add this simple Registration form : <fieldset> <table id="TblRegistratoin" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td> User Name </td> <td> <asp:TextBox ID="txtUserName" onblur="CallWebMethod();" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="lblDuplicate" runat="server" ForeColor="Red" Text=""></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="3"> <asp:Button ID="btnRegistration" runat="server" Text="Registration" /> </td> </tr> </table> </fieldset> .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; } onblur event is added to the Textbox txtUserName, This event Fires when the Textbox loses the input focus, That mean after the user get focus out from the Textbox CallWebMethod function will be fired. CallWebMethod will be implemented in step 6. 5-Add ScriptManager Control to your aspx file then reference the Web service by adding an asp:ServiceReference child element to the ScriptManager control and setting its path attribute to point to the Web service, That generate a JavaScript proxy class for calling the specified Web service from client script. <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" ID="scriptManager"> <Services> <asp:ServiceReference Path="WebService.asmx" /> </Services> </asp:ScriptManager> .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; } 6-Define the JavaScript code to call the Web Service : <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> // This function calls the Web service method // passing simple type parameters and the // callback function function CallWebMethod() { var User_Name = document.getElementById('<%=txtUserName.ClientID %>').value; WebService.CheckDuplicate(User_Name, OnSucceeded, OnError); } // This is the callback function invoked if the Web service // succeeded function OnSucceeded(result) { var rsltElement = document.getElementById("lblDuplicate"); if (result == 1) rsltElement.innerHTML = "This User Name is exist"; else rsltElement.innerHTML = ""; } function OnError(error) { // Display the error. alert("Service Error: " + error.get_message()); } </script> .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 call references the WebService Class and CheckDuplicate Web Method defined in the service. It passes a User_Name value obtained from a textbox as well as a callback function named OnSucceeded that should be invoked when the asynchronous Web Service call returns. If the Web Service in different Namespace you can refer it before the class name this Main formula may help you : NameSpaceName.ClassName.WebMethdName(Parameters , Success callback function, Error callback function); Parameters: you can pass one or many parameters. Success callback function :handles returned data from the service . Error callback function :Any errors that occur when the Web Service is called will trigger in this function. Using Error Callback function is optional. Hope these steps help you to understand this approach.

Read the article
Step by Step:How to use Web Services in ASP.NET AJAX

- by Yousef_Jadallah

In my Article Preventing Duplicate Date With ASP.NET AJAX I’ve used ASP.NET AJAX With Web Service Technology, Therefore I add this topic as an introduction how to access Web services from client script in AJAX-enabled ASP.NET Web pages. As well I write this topic to answer the common questions which most of the developers face while working with ASP.NET Ajax Web Services especially in Microsoft ASP.NET official forum http://forums.asp.net/. ASP.NET enables you to create Web services can be accessed from client script in Web pages by using AJAX technology to make Web service calls. Data is exchanged asynchronously between client and server, typically in JSON format. Lets go a head with the steps : 1-Create a new project , if you are using VS 2005 you have to create ASP.NET Ajax Enabled Web site. 2-Add new Item , Choose Web Service file . 3-To make your Web Services accessible from script, first it must be an .asmx Web service whose Web service class is qualified with the ScriptServiceAttribute attribute and every method you are using to be called from Client script must be qualified with the WebMethodAttribute attribute. On other hand you can use your Web page( CS or VB files) to add static methods accessible from Client Script , just you need to add WebMethod Attribute and set the EnablePageMethods attribute of the ScriptManager control to true.. The other condition is to register the ScriptHandlerFactory HTTP handler, which processes calls made from script to .asmx Web services : <system.web> <httpHandlers> <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx"/> <add verb="*" path="*.asmx" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory" validate="false"/> </httpHandlers> <system.web> .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; } but this already added automatically for any Web.config file of any ASP.NET AJAX Enabled WebSite or Project, So you don’t need to add it. 4-Avoid the default Method HelloWorld, then add your method in your asmx file lets say OurServerOutput , As a consequence your Web service will be like this : using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Services; [WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] [System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService] public class WebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string OurServerOutput() { return "The Server Date and Time is : " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } .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; } 5-Add ScriptManager Contol to your aspx file then reference the Web service by adding an asp:ServiceReference child element to the ScriptManager control and setting its path attribute to point to the Web service, That generate a JavaScript proxy class for calling the specified Web service from client script. <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" ID="scriptManager"> <Services> <asp:ServiceReference Path="WebService.asmx" /> </Services> </asp:ScriptManager> .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; } Basically ,to enable your application to call Web services(.asmx files) by using client script, the server asynchronous communication layer automatically generates JavaScript proxy classes. A proxy class is generated for each Web service for which an <asp:ServiceReference> element is included under the <asp:ScriptManager> control in the page. 6-Create new button to call the JavaSciprt function and a label to display the returned value . <input id="btnCallDateTime" type="button" value="Call Web Service" onclick="CallDateTime()"/> <asp:Label ID="lblOutupt" runat="server" Text="Label"></asp:Label> .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; } 7-Define the JavaScript code to call the Web Service : <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function CallDateTime() { WebService.OurServerOutput(OnSucceeded); } function OnSucceeded(result) { var lblOutput = document.getElementById("lblOutupt"); lblOutput.innerHTML = result; } </script> .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; } CallDateTime function calls the Web Service Method OurServerOutput… OnSucceeded function Used as the callback function that processes the Web Service return value. which the result parameter is a simple parameter contain the Server Date Time value returned from the Web Service . Finally , when you complete these steps and run your application you can press the button and retrieve Server Date time without postback. Conclusion: In this topic I describes how to access Web services from client script in AJAX-enabled ASP.NET Web pages With a full .NET Framework/JSON serialize, direct integration with the familiar .asmx Web services ,Using simple example,Also you can connect with the database to return value by create WebMethod in your Web Service file and the same steps you can use. Next time I will show you more complex example which returns a complex type like objects. Hope this help.

Read the article
Preventing duplicate Data with ASP.NET AJAX

- by Yousef_Jadallah

Some times you need to prevent User names ,E-mail ID's or other values from being duplicated by a new user during Registration or any other cases,So I will add a simple approach to make the page more user-friendly. Instead the user filled all the Registration fields then press submit after that received a message as a result of PostBack that "THIS USERNAME IS EXIST", Ajax tidies this up by allowing asynchronous querying while the user is still completing the registration form. ASP.NET enables you to create Web services can be accessed from client script in Web pages by using AJAX technology to make Web service calls. Data is exchanged asynchronously between client and server, typically in JSON format. I’ve added an article to show you step by step how to use ASP.NET AJAX with Web Services , you can find it here . Lets go a head with the steps : 1-Create a new project , if you are using VS 2005 you have to create ASP.NET Ajax Enabled Web site. 2-Create your own Database which contain user table that have User_Name field. for Testing I’ve added SQL Server Database that come with Dot Net 2008: Then I’ve created tblUsers: This table and this structure just for our example, you can use your own table to implement this approach. 3-Add new Item to your project or website, Choose Web Service file, lets say WebService.cs .In this Web Service file import System.Data.SqlClient Namespace, Then Add your web method that contain string parameter which received the Username parameter from the Script , Finally don’t forget to qualified the Web Service Class with the ScriptServiceAttribute attribute ([System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService]) using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Services; using System.Data.SqlClient; [WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] [System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService] public class WebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public int CheckDuplicate(string User_Name) { string strConn = @"Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\TestDB.mdf;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True"; string strQuery = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tblUsers WHERE User_Name = @User_Name"; SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection(strConn); SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(strQuery, con); cmd.Parameters.Add("User_Name", User_Name); con.Open(); int RetVal= (int)cmd.ExecuteScalar(); con.Close(); return RetVal; } } .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; } Our Web Method here is CheckDuplicate Which accept User_Name String as a parameter and return number of the rows , if the name will found in the database this method will return 1 else it will return 0. I’ve applied [WebMethod] Attribute to our method CheckDuplicate, And applied the ScriptService attribute to a Web Service class named WebService. 4-Add this simple Registration form : <fieldset> <table id="TblRegistratoin" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td> User Name </td> <td> <asp:TextBox ID="txtUserName" onblur="CallWebMethod();" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="lblDuplicate" runat="server" ForeColor="Red" Text=""></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="3"> <asp:Button ID="btnRegistration" runat="server" Text="Registration" /> </td> </tr> </table> </fieldset> .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; } onblur event is added to the Textbox txtUserName, This event Fires when the Textbox loses the input focus, That mean after the user get focus out from the Textbox CallWebMethod function will be fired. CallWebMethod will be implemented in step 6. 5-Add ScriptManager Control to your aspx file then reference the Web service by adding an asp:ServiceReference child element to the ScriptManager control and setting its path attribute to point to the Web service, That generate a JavaScript proxy class for calling the specified Web service from client script. <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" ID="scriptManager"> <Services> <asp:ServiceReference Path="WebService.asmx" /> </Services> </asp:ScriptManager> .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; } 6-Define the JavaScript code to call the Web Service : <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> // This function calls the Web service method // passing simple type parameters and the // callback function function CallWebMethod() { var User_Name = document.getElementById('<%=txtUserName.ClientID %>').value; WebService.CheckDuplicate(User_Name, OnSucceeded, OnError); } // This is the callback function invoked if the Web service // succeeded function OnSucceeded(result) { var rsltElement = document.getElementById("lblDuplicate"); if (result == 1) rsltElement.innerHTML = "This User Name is exist"; else rsltElement.innerHTML = ""; } function OnError(error) { // Display the error. alert("Service Error: " + error.get_message()); } </script> .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 call references the WebService Class and CheckDuplicate Web Method defined in the service. It passes a User_Name value obtained from a textbox as well as a callback function named OnSucceeded that should be invoked when the asynchronous Web Service call returns. If the Web Service in different Namespace you can refer it before the class name this Main formula may help you : NameSpaceName.ClassName.WebMethdName(Parameters , Success callback function, Error callback function); Parameters: you can pass one or many parameters. Success callback function :handles returned data from the service . Error callback function :Any errors that occur when the Web Service is called will trigger in this function. Using Error Callback function is optional. Hope these steps help you to understand this approach.

Read the article
What You Need to Know About Windows 8.1

- by Chris Hoffman

Windows 8.1 is available to everyone starting today, October 19. The latest version of Windows improves on Windows 8 in every way. It’s a big upgrade, whether you use the desktop or new touch-optimized interface. The latest version of Windows has been dubbed “an apology” by some — it’s definitely more at home on a desktop PC than Windows 8 was. However, it also offers a more fleshed out and mature tablet experience. How to Get Windows 8.1 For Windows 8 users, Windows 8.1 is completely free. It will be available as a download from the Windows Store — that’s the “Store” app in the Modern, tiled interface. Assuming upgrading to the final version will be just like upgrading to the preview version, you’ll likely see a “Get Windows 8.1″ pop-up that will take you to the Windows Store and guide you through the download process. You’ll also be able to download ISO images of Windows 8.1, so can perform a clean install to upgrade. On any new computer, you can just install Windows 8.1 without going through Windows 8. New computers will start to ship with Windows 8.1 and boxed copies of Windows 8 will be replaced by boxed copies of Windows 8.1. If you’re using Windows 7 or a previous version of Windows, the update won’t be free. Getting Windows 8.1 will cost you the same amount as a full copy of Windows 8 — $120 for the standard version. If you’re an average Windows 7 user, you’re likely better off waiting until you buy a new PC with Windows 8.1 included rather than spend this amount of money to upgrade. Improvements for Desktop Users Some have dubbed Windows 8.1 “an apology” from Microsoft, although you certainly won’t see Microsoft referring to it this way. Either way, Steven Sinofsky, who presided over Windows 8′s development, left the company shortly after Windows 8 was released. Coincidentally, Windows 8.1 contains many features that Steven Sinofsky and Microsoft refused to implement. Windows 8.1 offers the following big improvements for desktop users: Boot to Desktop: You can now log in directly to the desktop, skipping the tiled interface entirely. Disable Top-Left and Top-Right Hot Corners: The app switcher and charms bar won’t appear when you move your mouse to the top-left or top-right corners of the screen if you enable this option. No more intrusions into the desktop. The Start Button Returns: Windows 8.1 brings back an always-present Start button on the desktop taskbar, dramatically improving discoverability for new Windows 8 users and providing a bigger mouse target for remote desktops and virtual machines. Crucially, the Start menu isn’t back — clicking this button will open the full-screen Modern interface. Start menu replacements will continue to function on Windows 8.1, offering more traditional Start menus. Show All Apps By Default: Luckily, you can hide the Start screen and its tiles almost entirely. Windows 8.1 can be configured to show a full-screen list of all your installed apps when you click the Start button, with desktop apps prioritized. The only real difference is that the Start menu is now a full-screen interface. Shut Down or Restart From Start Button: You can now right-click the Start button to access Shut down, Restart, and other power options in just as many clicks as you could on Windows 7. Shared Start Screen and Desktop Backgrounds; Windows 8 limited you to just a few Steven Sinofsky-approved background images for your Start screen, but Windows 8.1 allows you to use your desktop background on the Start screen. This can make the transition between the Start screen and desktop much less jarring. The tiles or shortcuts appear to be floating above the desktop rather than off in their own separate universe. Unified Search: Unified search is back, so you can start typing and search your programs, settings, and files all at once — no more awkwardly clicking between different categories when trying to open a Control Panel screen or search for a file. These all add up to a big improvement when using Windows 8.1 on the desktop. Microsoft is being much more flexible — the Start menu is full screen, but Microsoft has relented on so many other things and you’d never have to see a tile if you didn’t want to. For more information, read our guide to optimizing Windows 8.1 for a desktop PC. These are just the improvements specifically for desktop users. Windows 8.1 includes other useful features for everyone, such as deep SkyDrive integration that allows you to store your files in the cloud without installing any additional sync programs. Improvements for Touch Users If you have a Windows 8 or Windows RT tablet or another touch-based device you use the interface formerly known as Metro on, you’ll see many other noticeable improvements. Windows 8′s new interface was half-baked when it launched, but it’s now much more capable and mature. App Updates: Windows 8′s included apps were extremely limited in many cases. For example, Internet Explorer 10 could only display ten tabs at a time and the Mail app was a barren experience devoid of features. In Windows 8.1, some apps — like Xbox Music — have been redesigned from scratch, Internet Explorer allows you to display a tab bar on-screen all the time, while apps like Mail have accumulated quite a few useful features. The Windows Store app has been entirely redesigned and is less awkward to browse. Snap Improvements: Windows 8′s Snap feature was a toy, allowing you to snap one app to a small sidebar at one side of your screen while another app consumed most of your screen. Windows 8.1 allows you to snap two apps side-by-side, seeing each app’s full interface at once. On larger displays, you can even snap three or four apps at once. Windows 8′s ability to use multiple apps at once on a tablet is compelling and unmatched by iPads and Android tablets. You can also snap two of the same apps side-by-side — to view two web pages at once, for example. More Comprehensive PC Settings: Windows 8.1 offers a more comprehensive PC settings app, allowing you to change most system settings in a touch-optimized interface. You shouldn’t have to use the desktop Control Panel on a tablet anymore — or at least not as often. Touch-Optimized File Browsing: Microsoft’s SkyDrive app allows you to browse files on your local PC, finally offering a built-in, touch-optimized way to manage files without using the desktop. Help & Tips: Windows 8.1 includes a Help+Tips app that will help guide new users through its new interface, something Microsoft stubbornly refused to add during development. There’s still no “Modern” version of Microsoft Office apps (aside from OneNote), so you’ll still have to head to use desktop Office apps on tablets. It’s not perfect, but the Modern interface doesn’t feel anywhere near as immature anymore. Read our in-depth look at the ways Microsoft’s Modern interface, formerly known as Metro, is improved in Windows 8.1 for more information. In summary, Windows 8.1 is what Windows 8 should have been. All of these improvements are on top of the many great desktop features, security improvements, and all-around battery life and performance optimizations that appeared in Windows 8. If you’re still using Windows 7 and are happy with it, there’s probably no reason to race out and buy a copy of Windows 8.1 at the rather high price of $120. But, if you’re using Windows 8, it’s a big upgrade no matter what you’re doing. If you buy a new PC and it comes with Windows 8.1, you’re getting a much more flexible and comfortable experience. If you’re holding off on buying a new computer because you don’t want Windows 8, give Windows 8.1 a try — yes, it’s different, but Microsoft has compromised on the desktop while making a lot of improvements to the new interface. You just might find that Windows 8.1 is now a worthwhile upgrade, even if you only want to use the desktop.

Read the article
Add Free Google Apps to Your Website or Blog

- by Matthew Guay

Would you like to have an email address from your own domain, but prefer Gmail’s interface and integration with Google Docs? Here’s how you can add the free Google Apps Standard to your site and get the best of both worlds. Note: To signup for Google Apps and get it setup on your domain, you will need to be able to add info to your WordPress blog or change Domain settings manually. Getting Started Head to the Google Apps signup page (link below), and click the Get Started button on the right. Note that we are signing up for the free Google Apps which allows a max of 50 users; if you need more than 50 email addresses for your domain, you can choose Premiere Edition instead for $50/year. Select that you are the Administrator of the domain, and enter the domain or subdomain you want to use with Google Apps. Here we’re adding Google Apps to the techinch.com site, but we could instead add Apps to mail.techinch.com if needed…click Get Started. Enter your name, phone number, an existing email address, and other Administrator information. The Apps signup page also includes some survey questions about your organization, but you only have to fill in the required fields. On the next page, enter a username and password for the administrator account. Note that the user name will also be the administrative email address as [email protected]. Now you’re ready to authenticate your Google Apps account with your domain. The steps are slightly different depending on whether your site is on WordPress.com or on your own hosting service or server, so we’ll show how to do it both ways. Authenticate and Integrate Google Apps with WordPress.com To add Google Apps to a domain you have linked to your WordPress.com blog, select Change yourdomain.com CNAME record and click Continue. Copy the code under #2, which should be something like googleabcdefg123456. Do not click the button at the bottom; wait until we’ve completed the next step. Now, in a separate browser window or tab, open your WordPress Dashboard. Click the arrow beside Upgrades, and select Domains from the menu. Click the Edit DNS link beside the domain name you’re adding to Google Apps. Scroll down to the Google Apps section, and paste your code from Google Apps into the verification code field. Click Generate DNS records when you’re done. This will add the needed DNS settings to your records in the box above the Google Apps section. Click Save DNS records. Now, go back to the Google Apps signup page, and click I’ve completed the steps above. Authenticate Google Apps on Your Own Server If your website is hosted on your own server or hosting account, you’ll need to take a few more steps to add Google Apps to your domain. You can add a CNAME record to your domain host using the same information that you would use with a WordPress account, or you can upload an HTML file to your site’s main directory. In this test we’re going to upload an HTML file to our site for verification. Copy the code under #1, which should be something like googleabcdefg123456. Do not click the button at the bottom; wait until we’ve completed the next step first. Create a new HTML file and paste the code in it. You can do this easily in Notepad: create a new document, paste the code, and then save as googlehostedservice.html. Make sure to select the type as All Files or otherwise the file will have a .txt extension. Upload this file to your web server via FTP or a web dashboard for your site. Make sure it is in the top level of your site’s directory structure, and try visiting it at yoursite.com/googlehostedservice.html. Now, go back to the Google Apps signup page, and click I’ve completed the steps above. Setup Your Email on Google Apps When this is done, your Google Apps account should be activated and ready to finish setting up. Google Apps will offer to launch a guide to step you through the rest of the process; you can click Launch guide if you want, or click Skip this guide to continue on your own and go directly to the Apps dashboard. If you choose to open the guide, you’ll be able to easily learn the ropes of Google Apps administration. Once you’ve completed the tutorial, you’ll be taken to the Google Apps dashboard. Most of the Google Apps will be available for immediate use, but Email may take a bit more setup. Click Activate email to get your Gmail-powered email running on your domain. Add Google MX Records to Your Server You will need to add Google MX records to your domain registrar in order to have your mail routed to Google. If your domain is hosted on WordPress.com, you’ve already made these changes so simply click I have completed these steps. Otherwise, you’ll need to manually add these records before clicking that button. Adding MX Entries is fairly easy, but the steps may depend on your hosting company or registrar. With some hosts, you may have to contact support to have them add the MX records for you. Our site’s host uses the popular cPanel for website administration, so here’s how we added the MX Entries through cPanel. Add MX Entries through cPanel Login to your site’s cPanel, and click the MX Entry link under Mail. Delete any existing MX Records for your domain or subdomain first to avoid any complications or interactions with Google Apps. If you think you may want to revert to your old email service in the future, save a copy of the records so you can switch back if you need. Now, enter the MX Records that Google listed. Here’s our account after we added all of the entries to our account. Finally, return to your Google Apps Dashboard and click the I have completed these steps button at the bottom of the page. Activating Service You’re now officially finished activating and setting up your Google Apps account. Google will first have to check the MX records for your domain; this only took around an hour in our test, but Google warns it can take up to 48 hours in some cases. You may then see that Google is updating its servers with your account information. Once again, this took much less time than Google’s estimate. When everything’s finished, you can click the link to access the inbox of your new Administrator email account in Google Apps. Welcome to Gmail … at your own domain! All of the Google Apps work just the same in this version as they do in the public @gmail.com version, so you should feel right at home. You can return to the Google Apps dashboard from the Administrative email account by clicking the Manage this domain at the top right. In the Dashboard, you can easily add new users and email accounts, as well as change settings in your Google Apps account and add your site’s branding to your Apps. Your Google Apps will work just like their standard @gmail.com counterparts. Here’s an example of an inbox customized with the techinch logo and a Gmail theme. Links to Remember Here are the common links to your Google Apps online. Substitute your domain or subdomain for yourdomain.com. Dashboard https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com Email https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com Calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/yourdomain.com Docs https://docs.google.com/a/yourdomain.com Sites https://sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com Conclusion Google Apps offers you great webapps and webmail for your domain, and let’s you take advantage of Google’s services while still maintaining the professional look of your own domain. Setting up your account can be slightly complicated, but once it’s finished, it will run seamlessly and you’ll never have to worry about email or collaboration with your team again. Signup for the free Google Apps Standard Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Mysticgeek Blog: Create Your Own Simple iGoogle GadgetAccess Your Favorite Google Services in Chrome the Easy WayRevo Uninstaller Pro [REVIEW]Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPFind Similar Websites in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox

Read the article
Connecting Linux to WatchGuard Firebox SSL (OpenVPN client)

Recently, I got a new project assignment that requires to connect permanently to the customer's network through VPN. They are using a so-called SSL VPN. As I am using OpenVPN since more than 5 years within my company's network I was quite curious about their solution and how it would actually be different from OpenVPN. Well, short version: It is a disguised version of OpenVPN. Unfortunately, the company only offers a client for Windows and Mac OS which shouldn't bother any Linux user after all. OpenVPN is part of every recent distribution and can be activated in a couple of minutes - both client as well as server (if necessary). WatchGuard Firebox SSL - About dialog Borrowing some files from a Windows client installation Initially, I didn't know about the product, so therefore I went through the installation on Windows 8. No obstacles (and no restart despite installation of TAP device drivers!) here and the secured VPN channel was up and running in less than 2 minutes or so. Much appreciated from both parties - customer and me. Of course, this whole client package and my long year approved and stable installation ignited my interest to have a closer look at the WatchGuard client. Compared to the original OpenVPN client (okay, I have to admit this is years ago) this commercial product is smarter in terms of file locations during installation. You'll be able to access the configuration and key files below your roaming application data folder. To get there, simply enter '%AppData%\WatchGuard\Mobile VPN' in your Windows/File Explorer and confirm with Enter/Return. This will display the following files: Application folder below user profile with configuration and certificate files From there we are going to borrow four files, namely: ca.crt client.crt client.ovpn client.pem and transfer them to the Linux system. You might also be able to isolate those four files from a Mac OS client. Frankly, I'm just too lazy to run the WatchGuard client installation on a Mac mini only to find the folder location, and I'm going to describe why a little bit further down this article. I know that you can do that! Feedback in the comment section is appreciated. Configuration of OpenVPN (console) Depending on your distribution the following steps might be a little different but in general you should be able to get the important information from it. I'm going to describe the steps in Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail). As usual, there are two possibilities to achieve your goal: console and UI. Let's what it is necessary to be done. First of all, you should ensure that you have OpenVPN installed on your system. Open your favourite terminal application and run the following statement: $ sudo apt-get install openvpn network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome Just to be on the safe side. The four above mentioned files from your Windows machine could be copied anywhere but either you place them below your own user directory or you put them (as root) below the default directory: /etc/openvpn At this stage you would be able to do a test run already. Just in case, run the following command and check the output (it's the similar information you would get from the 'View Logs...' context menu entry in Windows: $ sudo openvpn --config client.ovpn Pay attention to the correct path to your configuration and certificate files. OpenVPN will ask you to enter your Auth Username and Auth Password in order to establish the VPN connection, same as the Windows client. Remote server and user authentication to establish the VPN Please complete the test run and see whether all went well. You can disconnect pressing Ctrl+C. Simplifying your life - authentication file In my case, I actually set up the OpenVPN client on my gateway/router. This establishes a VPN channel between my network and my client's network and allows me to switch machines easily without having the necessity to install the WatchGuard client on each and every machine. That's also very handy for my various virtualised Windows machines. Anyway, as the client configuration, key and certificate files are located on a headless system somewhere under the roof, it is mandatory to have an automatic connection to the remote site. For that you should first change the file extension '.ovpn' to '.conf' which is the default extension on Linux systems for OpenVPN, and then open the client configuration file in order to extend an existing line. $ sudo mv client.ovpn client.conf $ sudo nano client.conf You should have a similar content to this one here: dev tunclientproto tcp-clientca ca.crtcert client.crtkey client.pemtls-remote "/O=WatchGuard_Technologies/OU=Fireware/CN=Fireware_SSLVPN_Server"remote-cert-eku "TLS Web Server Authentication"remote 1.2.3.4 443persist-keypersist-tunverb 3mute 20keepalive 10 60cipher AES-256-CBCauth SHA1float 1reneg-sec 3660nobindmute-replay-warningsauth-user-pass auth.txt Note: I changed the IP address of the remote directive above (which should be obvious, right?). Anyway, the required change is marked in red and we have to create a new authentication file 'auth.txt'. You can give the directive 'auth-user-pass' any file name you'd like to. Due to my existing OpenVPN infrastructure my setup differs completely from the above written content but for sake of simplicity I just keep it 'as-is'. Okay, let's create this file 'auth.txt' $ sudo nano auth.txt and just put two lines of information in it - username on the first, and password on the second line, like so: myvpnusernameverysecretpassword Store the file, change permissions, and call openvpn with your configuration file again: $ sudo chmod 0600 auth.txt $ sudo openvpn --config client.conf This should now work without being prompted to enter username and password. In case that you placed your files below the system-wide location /etc/openvpn you can operate your VPNs also via service command like so: $ sudo service openvpn start client $ sudo service openvpn stop client Using Network Manager For newer Linux users or the ones with 'console-phobia' I'm going to describe now how to use Network Manager to setup the OpenVPN client. For this move your mouse to the systray area and click on Network Connections => VPN Connections => Configure VPNs... which opens your Network Connections dialog. Alternatively, use the HUD and enter 'Network Connections'. Network connections overview in Ubuntu Click on 'Add' button. On the next dialog select 'Import a saved VPN configuration...' from the dropdown list and click on 'Create...' Choose connection type to import VPN configuration Now you navigate to your folder where you put the client files from the Windows system and you open the 'client.ovpn' file. Next, on the tab 'VPN' proceed with the following steps (directives from the configuration file are referred): General Check the IP address of Gateway ('remote' - we used 1.2.3.4 in this setup) Authentication Change Type to 'Password with Certificates (TLS)' ('auth-pass-user') Enter User name to access your client keys (Auth Name: myvpnusername) Enter Password (Auth Password: verysecretpassword) and choose your password handling Browse for your User Certificate ('cert' - should be pre-selected with client.crt) Browse for your CA Certificate ('ca' - should be filled as ca.crt) Specify your Private Key ('key' - here: client.pem) Then click on the 'Advanced...' button and check the following values: Use custom gateway port: 443 (second value of 'remote' directive) Check the selected value of Cipher ('cipher') Check HMAC Authentication ('auth') Enter the Subject Match: /O=WatchGuard_Technologies/OU=Fireware/CN=Fireware_SSLVPN_Server ('tls-remote') Finally, you have to confirm and close all dialogs. You should be able to establish your OpenVPN-WatchGuard connection via Network Manager. For that, click on the 'VPN Connections => client' entry on your Network Manager in the systray. It is advised that you keep an eye on the syslog to see whether there are any problematic issues that would require some additional attention. Advanced topic: routing As stated above, I'm running the 'WatchGuard client for Linux' on my head-less server, and since then I'm actually establishing a secure communication channel between two networks. In order to enable your network clients to get access to machines on the remote side there are two possibilities to enable that: Proper routing on both sides of the connection which enables both-direction access, or Network masquerading on the 'client side' of the connection Following, I'm going to describe the second option a little bit more in detail. The Linux system that I'm using is already configured as a gateway to the internet. I won't explain the necessary steps to do that, and will only focus on the additional tweaks I had to do. You can find tons of very good instructions and tutorials on 'How to setup a Linux gateway/router' - just use Google. OK, back to the actual modifications. First, we need to have some information about the network topology and IP address range used on the 'other' side. We can get this very easily from /var/log/syslog after we established the OpenVPN channel, like so: $ sudo tail -n20 /var/log/syslog Or if your system is quite busy with logging, like so: $ sudo less /var/log/syslog | grep ovpn The output should contain PUSH received message similar to the following one: Jul 23 23:13:28 ios1 ovpn-client[789]: PUSH: Received control message: 'PUSH_REPLY,topology subnet,route 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0,dhcp-option DOMAIN ,route-gateway 192.168.6.1,topology subnet,ping 10,ping-restart 60,ifconfig 192.168.6.2 255.255.255.0' The interesting part for us is the route command which I highlighted already in the sample PUSH_REPLY. Depending on your remote server there might be multiple networks defined (172.16.x.x and/or 10.x.x.x). Important: The IP address range on both sides of the connection has to be different, otherwise you will have to shuffle IPs or increase your the netmask. {loadposition content_adsense} After the VPN connection is established, we have to extend the rules for iptables in order to route and masquerade IP packets properly. I created a shell script to take care of those steps: #!/bin/sh -eIPTABLES=/sbin/iptablesDEV_LAN=eth0DEV_VPNS=tun+VPN=192.168.1.0/24 $IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $DEV_LAN -o $DEV_VPNS -d $VPN -j ACCEPT$IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $DEV_VPNS -o $DEV_LAN -s $VPN -j ACCEPT$IPTABLES -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $DEV_VPNS -d $VPN -j MASQUERADE I'm using the wildcard interface 'tun+' because I have multiple client configurations for OpenVPN on my server. In your case, it might be sufficient to specify device 'tun0' only. Simplifying your life - automatic connect on boot Now, that the client connection works flawless, configuration of routing and iptables is okay, we might consider to add another 'laziness' factor into our setup. Due to kernel updates or other circumstances it might be necessary to reboot your system. Wouldn't it be nice that the VPN connections are established during the boot procedure? Yes, of course it would be. To achieve this, we have to configure OpenVPN to automatically start our VPNs via init script. Let's have a look at the responsible 'default' file and adjust the settings accordingly. $ sudo nano /etc/default/openvpn Which should have a similar content to this: # This is the configuration file for /etc/init.d/openvpn## Start only these VPNs automatically via init script.# Allowed values are "all", "none" or space separated list of# names of the VPNs. If empty, "all" is assumed.# The VPN name refers to the VPN configutation file name.# i.e. "home" would be /etc/openvpn/home.conf#AUTOSTART="all"#AUTOSTART="none"#AUTOSTART="home office"## ... more information which remains unmodified ... With the OpenVPN client configuration as described above you would either set AUTOSTART to "all" or to "client" to enable automatic start of your VPN(s) during boot. You should also take care that your iptables commands are executed after the link has been established, too. You can easily test this configuration without reboot, like so: $ sudo service openvpn restart Enjoy stable VPN connections between your Linux system(s) and a WatchGuard Firebox SSL remote server. Cheers, JoKi

Read the article
Run WordPress & Other Web Apps with Windows Web Platform

- by Matthew Guay

Would you like to run WordPress or other web apps on your PC so you can easily test and design websites? Here we’ll look at how you can get the latest web apps on your computer in only a few quick steps. Many web apps today, such as WordPress, MediaWiki, and more, are open source and can be run for free from any computer with even a simple local web server. They are often very difficult to install on your computer, since they require a number of dependencies such as PHP and MySQL. Microsoft has worked to make this easier, releasing the Windows Web Platform Installer. This lets you install many popular web apps and free tools in Windows with only a few clicks. Here we’re going to look at how to install WordPress and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express to edit web code with the Web Platform Installer. But, if you’d rather install a different web app or tool, feel free to choose those as the installations are generally similar. Getting Started Head over to Microsoft’s Web development site and download the Web Platform Installer (link below). This will download very quick, as it is just a small loader. When you run this loader, it will download the Web Platform Installer files. The Web Platform Installer works on XP, Vista, and Windows 7, as well as the related versions of Windows Server. After a couple moments, the Web Platform Installer will open and load information about the latest web offerings. Now you can choose what you want to install. You can quickly select the recommended products for several categories such as Web Server, Database, and more. Alternately, click Customize under the category and select exactly what you want to install. Note that items already installed on your computer will be grayed out. We wanted to install Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, so select Customize under Tools, and select Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. Or, for more preset choices, select Options on the bottom of the window. You can choose to add Multimedia, Developer, and Enterprise tools to the lists, or add a new preset list from a feed. Choose Specific Web apps to Install We wanted to install WordPress, so instead of choosing a preset, select the Web Applications tab on the left. Now you can choose from a variety of apps based on category, or you can view them all together in an A to Z, Most Popular, or Highest Rating list. Click the checkbox beside the app you want to install to select it, or click the “i” for more information. Here’s the More Information pane for WordPress. If you’re ready to install it, click the checkbox. Now you can go back and add more web apps or tools to the install list if you like. The Web Platform Installer will automatically find and select prerequisite apps such as MySQL, so you won’t need to worry about finding them. Once you’ve selected everything you want to install, click the Install button on the bottom of the window. The Web Platform Installer will now show you everything that’s selected, including components that it automatically selected. Notice we only chose to install WordPress and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, but it also has selected MySQL and PHP automatically. Click I Accept to proceed. Enter an administrator password for MySQL before the setup begins. Now the Web Platform Installer will take over, automatically downloading, installing, and configuring all of your web apps. It will also activate optional Windows components that may be needed on your computer. This may take several minutes, depending on the components you selected and your internet speed. Setting up Your Test Site Once the installation is finished, you’ll be asked to enter some information about your site. You can simply accept the defaults or enter your own choices, and then click Continue. Now you’ll need to enter some information for your web apps. When installing WordPress, you’ll need to choose a database and enter administrative usernames and passwords. You may also be asked to enter extra information for additional security, but for a local-only test site this isn’t necessary. Click Continue when you’re finished. You’ll need to wait a few more moments as it complete the setup of your web apps. The good thing is, once it’s finished, they’ll be ready to go with only minimal configuration. And you’re finished! The installer will let you know everything it installed, and if there were any problems. In our test, Visual Web Developer 2010 Express failed to install successfully. Often the problems may be with the download, so click Finish and then reselect the apps that didn’t install and run the installer again. Now you’re ready to run WordPress from your PC. Click the Launch WordPress link or enter http://localhost:80/wordpress in your browser to get started. You’ll only have a little more setup to do on WordPress to get it running. Once you’ve opened your WordPress page in your browser, enter a name for your blog and your email address, and click Install WordPress. After a few seconds, you should see a Success! page with your username and a temporary password. Copy the password, and then click Log In. Enter admin as the Username and paste the random generated password, and click Log In. WordPress will remind you to change the default password. Click the Yes, Take me to my profile page link to do this. Enter something easier for you to remember, and click Update Profile. Now you’re ready to enjoy your new WordPress install on Windows. You can add plugins and themes, and everything else you’d do with a normal WordPress site. Here’s the dashboard running from localhost. And here’s the default blog running. Setting up Visual Web Developer 2010 Express As mentioned before, Visual Web Developer 2010 Express didn’t install correctly on our first try, but the second time it installed seamlessly. Once it’s installed, launch it from your start menu as normal. It may take a few minutes to load on the first run as it is finishing up setup. You may notice that the splash screen displayed while the program is loading says For Evaluation Purposes Only. This is because you still need to register the program. You have 30 days to register the program, but let’s go ahead and do it to get this step out of the way. Click Help in the menu bar, and select Register Product. Click Obtain a registration key online in the popup window. You’ll need to sign in with your Windows Live ID, and then fill out a quick form. When you’re done, copy the registration key displayed and paste it into the registration dialog in Visual Web Developer. Now you’ve got a registered, free web development program with full standards compliance and IntelliSense to help you work smarter and faster. And it works great with your local web apps, so you can create, tweak, and then deploy, all from your desktop with this simple installer! Install More Apps You can always run the Web Platform Installer again in the future and add more apps if you’d like. The install adds a link to the Installer in the Start menu; just run it and repeat the steps above with your new selections. Also, from the installer, you can cleanup the setup files downloaded during the installation if you want. Click the Options link in the bottom of the window, and then scroll down and select Delete installer cache folder. Uninstalling the apps is not as easy, unfortunately. If you wish to uninstall the Web Platform Installer and everything you installed with it, you’ll need to uninstall each item individually. One easy way to see what was all installed together is to sort the entries in Uninstall Programs by date. In our case, we also installed some other applications on the same day, but it’s easier to see what was installed together. Or if you are not a fan of using Programs and Features to uninstall them, try out a program like Revo Uninstaller Pro. Conclusion Whether you’re a full-time web developer or just enjoy testing out the latest web apps, the Web Platform Installer makes it quick and easy to get your computer loaded up with the latest bits. In fact, it’s easier to install these tools with all their dependencies than it is to install many standard boxed programs. If you’d like to take your web server anywhere you go and not have it confined to your desktop, then check out our article on how to Turn Your Flashdrive into a Portable Webserver. Link Download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Linux QuickTip: Downloading and Un-tarring in One StepQuick Tip: Set a Future Date for a Post in WordPressHow-To Geek SoftwareAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow-To Geek Software: WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7

Read the article
Simple Branching and Merging with SVN

Its a good idea not to do too much work without checking something into source control. By too much work I mean typically on the order of a couple of hours at most, and certainly its a good practice to check in anything you have before you leave the office for the day. But what if your changes break the build (on the build server you do have a build server dont you?) or would cause problems for others on your team if they get the latest code? The solution with Subversion is branching and merging (incidentally, if youre using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, you can shelve your changes and share shelvesets with others, which accomplishes many of the same things as branching and merging, but is a bit simpler to do). Getting Started Im going to assume you have Subversion installed along with the nearly ubiquitous client, TortoiseSVN. See my previous post on installing SVN server if you want to get it set up real quick (you can put it on your workstation/laptop just to learn how it works easily enough). Overview When you know you are going to be working on something that you wont be able to check in quickly, its a good idea to start a branch. Its also perfectly fine to create the branch after-the-fact (have you ever started something thinking it would be an hour and 4 hours later realized you were nowhere near done?). In any event, the first thing you need to do is create a branch. A branch is simply a copy of the current trunk (a typical subversion setup has root directories called trunk, tags, and branches its a good idea to keep this and to put your branches in the branches folder). Once you have a new branch, you need to switch your working copy so that it is bound to your branch. As you work, you may want to merge in changes that are happening in the trunk to your branch, and ultimately when you are done youll want to merge your branch back into the trunk. When done, you can delete your branch (or not, but it may add clutter). To sum up: Create a new branch Switch your local working copy to the new branch Develop in the branch (commit changes, etc.) Merge changes from trunk into your branch Merge changes from branch into trunk Delete the branch Create a new branch From the root of your repository, right-click and select TortoiseSVN > Branch/tag as shown at right (click to enlarge). This will bring up the Copy (Branch / Tag) interface. By default the From WC at URL: should be pointing at the trunk of your repository. I recommend (after ensuring that you have the latest version) that you choose to make the copy from the HEAD revision in the repository (the first radio button). In the To URL: textbox, you should change the URL from /trunk to /branches/NAME_OF_BRANCH. You can name the branch anything you like, but its often useful to give it your name (if its just for your use) or some useful information (such as a datestamp or a bug/issue ID from that it relates to, or perhaps just the name of the feature you are adding. When youre done with that, enter in a log message for your new branch. If you want to immediately switch your local working copy to the new branch/tag, check the box at the bottom of the dialog (Switch working copy to new branch/tag). You can see an example at right. Assuming everything works, you should very quickly see a window telling you the Copy finished, like the one shown below: Switch Local Working Copy to New Branch If you followed the instructions above and checked the box when you created your branch, you dont need to do this step. However, if you have a branch that already exists and you would like to switch over to working on it, you can do so by using the Switch command. Youll find it in the explorer context menu under TortoiseSVN > Switch: This brings up a dialog that shows you your current binding, and lets you enter in a new URL to switch to: In the screenshot above, you can see that Im currently bound to a branch, and so I could switch back to the trunk or to another branch. If youre not sure what to enter here, you can click the [] next to the URL textbox to explore your repository and find the appropriate root URL to use. Also, the dropdown will show you URLs that might be a good fit (such as the trunk of the current repository). Develop in the Branch Once you have created a branch and switched your working copy to use it, you can make changes and Commit them as usual. Your commits are now going into the branch, so they wont impact other users or the build server that are working off of the trunk (or their own branches). In theory you can keep on doing this forever, but practically its a good idea to periodically merge the trunk into your branch, and/or keep your branches short-lived and merge them back into the trunk before they get too far out of sync. Merge Changes from Trunk into your Branch Once you have been working in a branch for a little while, change to the trunk will have occurred that youll want to merge into your branch. Its much safer and easier to integrate changes in small increments than to wait for weeks or months and then try to merge in two very different codebases. To perform the merge, simply go to the root of your branch working copy and right click, select TortoiseSVN->Merge. Youll be presented with this dialog: In this case you want to leave the default setting, Merge a range of revisions. Click Next. Now choose the URL to merge from. You should select the trunk of your current repository (which should be in the dropdownlist, or you can click the [] to browse your repository for the correct URL). You can leave everything else blank since you want to merge everything: Click Next. Again you can leave the default settings. If you want to do something more granular than everything in the trunk, you can select a different Merge depth, to include merging just one item in the tree. You can also perform a Test merge to see what changes will take place before you click Merge (which is often a good idea). Heres what the dialog should look like before you click Merge: After clicking Merge (or Test merge) you should see a confirmation like this (it will say Test Only in the title if you click Test merge): Now you should build your solution, run all of your tests, and verify that your branch still works the way it should, given the updates that youve just integrated from the trunk. Once everything works, Commit your changes, and then continue with your work on the branch. Note that until you commit, nothing has actually changed in your branch on the server. Other team members who may also be working in this branch wont be impacted, etc. The Merge is purely a client-side operation until you perform a Commit. In a more real-world scenario, you may have conflicts. When you do, youll be presented with a dialog like this one: Its up to you which option you want to go with. The more frequently you Merge, the fewer of these youll have to deal with. Also, be very sure that youre merging the right folders together. If you try and merge your trunk with some subfolder in your branchs structure, youll end up with all kinds of conflicts and problems. Fortunately, theyre only on your working copy (unless you commit them!) but if you see something like that, be sure to doublecheck your URL and your local file location. Merge Your Branch Back Into Trunk When youre done working in your branch, its time to pull it back into the trunk. The first thing you should do is follow the previous steps instructions for merging the latest from the trunk into your branch. This lets you ensure that what you have in your branch works correctly with the current trunk. Once youve done that and committed your changes to your branch, youre ready to proceed with this step. Once youre confident your branch is good to go, you should go to its root folder and select TortoiseSVN->Merge (as above) from the explorer right-click menu. This time, select Reintegrate a branch as shown below: Click Next. Youll want it to merge with the trunk, which should be the default: Click Next. Leave the default settings: Click Test merge to see a test, and then if all looks good, click Merge. Note that if you havent checked in your working copy changes, youll see something like this: If on the other hand things are successful: After this step, its likely you are finished working in your branch. Dont forget to use the ToroiseSVN->Switch command to change your working copy back to the trunk. Delete the Branch You dont have to delete the branch, but over time your branches area of your repository will get cluttered, and in any event if theyre not actively being worked on the branches are just taking up space and adding to later confusion. Keeping your branches limited to things youre actively working on is simply a good habit to get into, just like making sure your codebase itself remains tidy and not filled with old commented out bits of code. To delete the branch after youre finished with it, the simplest thing to do is choose TortoiseSVN->Repo Browser. From there, assuming you did this from your branch, it should already be highlighted. In any event, navigate to your branch in the treeview on the left, and then right-click and select Delete. Enter a log message if youd like: Click OK, and its gone. Dont be too afraid of this, though. You can still get to the files by viewing the log for branches, and selecting a previous revision (anything before the delete action): If for some reason you needed something that was previously in this branch, you could easily get back to any changeset you checked in, so you should have absolutely no fear when it comes to deleting branches youre done with. Resources If youre using Eclipse, theres a nice write-up of the steps required by Zach Cox that I found helpful here. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

Read the article
Getting WCF Services in a Silverlight solution to play nice on deployment

- by brendonpage

I have come across 2 issues with deploying WCF services in a Silverlight solution, admittedly the one is more of a hiccup, and only occurs if you take the easy way out and reference your services through visual studio. The First Issue This occurs when you deploy your WFC services to an IIS server. When browse to the services using your web browser, you are greeted with “This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.”. When you make a call to this service from your Silverlight application, you get the extremely helpful “NotFound” error, this error message can be found in the error property of the event arguments on the complete event handler for that call. As it did with me this will leave most people scratching their head, because the very same services work just fine on the ASP.NET Development Web Server and on my local IIS server. Now I’m no server/hosting/IIS expert so I did a bit of searching when I first encountered this issue. I found out this happens because IIS supports multiple address bindings per protocol (http/https/ftp … etc) per web site, but WCF only supports binding to one address per protocol. This causes a problem when the WCF service is hosted on a site with multiple address bindings, because IIS provides all of the bindings to the host factory when running the service. While this problem occurs mainly on shared hosting solutions, it is not limited to shared hosting, it just seems like all shared hosting providers setup sites on their servers with multiple address bindings. For interests sake I added functionality to the example project attached to this post to dump the addresses given to the WCF service by IIS into a log file. This was the output on the shared hosting solution I use: http://mydomain.co.za/Services/TestService.svc http://www.mydomain.co.za/Services/TestService.svc http://mydomain-co-za.win13.wadns.net/Services/TestService.svc http://win13/Services/TestService.svc As you can see all these addresses are for the http protocol, which is where it all goes wrong for WCF. Fixes for the First Issue There are a few ways to get around this. The first being the easiest, target .NET 4! Yes that's right in .NET 4 WCF services support multiple addresses per protocol. This functionality is enabled by an option, which is on by default if you create a new project, you will need to turn on if you are upgrading to .NET 4. To do this set the multipleSiteBindingsEnabled property of the serviceHostingEnviroment tag in the web.config file to true, as shown below: <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel> Beware this ONLY works in .NET 4, so if you don’t have a server with .NET 4 installed on that you can deploy to, you will need to employ one of the other work a rounds. The second option will work for .NET 3.5 & 4. For this option all you need to do is modify the web.config file and add baseAddressPrefixFilters to the serviceHostingEnviroment tag as shown below: <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment> <baseAddressPrefixFilters> <add prefix="http://www.mydomain.co.za"/> </baseAddressPrefixFilters> </serviceHostingEnvironment> </system.serviceModel> These will be used to filter the list of base addresses that IIS provides to the host factory. When specifying these prefix filters be sure to specify filters which will only allow 1 result through, otherwise the entire exercise will be pointless. There is however a problem with this work a round, you are only allowed to specify 1 prefix filter per protocol. Which means you can’t add filters for all your environments, this will therefore add to the list of things to do before deploying or switching dev machines. The third option is the one I currently employ, it will work for .NET 3, 3.5 & 4, although it is not needed for .NET 4. For this option you create a custom host factory which inherits from the ServiceHostFactory class. In the implementation of the ServiceHostFactory you employ logic to figure out which of the base addresses, that are give by IIS, to use when creating the service host. The logic you use to do this is completely up to you, I have seen quite a few solutions that simply statically reference an index from the list of base addresses, this works for most situations but falls short in others. For instance, if the order of the base addresses where to change, it might end up returning an address that only resolves on the servers local network, like the last one in the example I gave at the beginning. Another instance, if a request comes in on a different protocol, like https, you will be creating the service host using an address which is on the incorrect protocol, like http. To reliably find the correct address to use, I use the address that the service was requested on. To accomplish this I use the HttpContext, which requires the service to operate with AspNetCompatibilityRequirements set on. If for some reason running you services with AspNetCompatibilityRequirements on isn’t an option, you can still use this method, you will just have to come up with your own logic for selecting the correct address. First you will need to enable AspNetCompatibilityRequirements for your hosting environment, to do this you will need to set it to true in the web.config file as shown below: <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment AspNetCompatibilityRequirements="true" /> </system.serviceModel> You will then need to mark any services that are going to use the custom host factory, to allow AspNetCompatibilityRequirements, as shown below: [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class TestService { } Now for the custom host factory, this is where the logic lives that selects the correct address to create service host with. The one i use is shown below: public class CustomHostFactory : ServiceHostFactory { protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) { // // Compose a prefix filter based on the requested uri // string prefixFilter = HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.Scheme + "://" + HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.DnsSafeHost; if (!HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.IsDefaultPort) { prefixFilter += ":" + HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.Port.ToString() + "/"; } // // Find a base address that matches the prefix filter // foreach (Uri baseAddress in baseAddresses) { if (baseAddress.OriginalString.StartsWith(prefixFilter)) { return new ServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddress); } } // // Throw exception if no matching base address was found // throw new Exception("Custom Host Factory: No base address matching '" + prefixFilter + "' was found."); } } The most important line in the custom host factory is the one that returns a new service host. This has to return a service host that specifies only one base address per protocol. Since I filter by the address the request came on in, I only need to create the service host with one address, since this address will always be of the correct protocol. Now you have a custom host factory you have to tell your services to use it. To do this you view the markup of the service by right clicking on it in the solution explorer and choosing “View Markup”. Then you add/set the value of the Factory property to the full namespace path of you custom host factory, as shown below. And that is it done, the service will now use the specified custom host factory. The Second Issue As I mentioned earlier this issue is more of a hiccup, but I thought worthy of a mention so I included it. This issue only occurs when you add a service reference to a Silverlight project. Visual Studio will generate a lot of code for you, part of that generated code is the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file. This file stores the endpoint configuration that is used when accessing your services using the generated proxy classes. Here is what that file looks like: <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="CustomBinding_TestService"> <binaryMessageEncoding /> <httpTransport maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" maxBufferSize="2147483647" /> </binding> <binding name="CustomBinding_BrokenService"> <binaryMessageEncoding /> <httpTransport maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" maxBufferSize="2147483647" /> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="http://localhost:49347/services/TestService.svc" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomBinding_TestService" contract="TestService.TestService" name="CustomBinding_TestService" /> <endpoint address="http://localhost:49347/Services/BrokenService.svc" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomBinding_BrokenService" contract="BrokenService.BrokenService" name="CustomBinding_BrokenService" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> As you will notice the addresses for the end points are set to the addresses of the services you added the service references from, so unless you are adding the service references from your live services, you will have to change these addresses before you deploy. This is little more than an annoyance really, but it adds to the list of things to do before you can deploy, and if left unchecked that list can get out of control. Fix for the Second Issue The way you would usually access a service added this way is to create an instance of the proxy class like so: BrokenServiceClient proxy = new BrokenServiceClient(); Closer inspection of these generated proxy classes reveals that there are a few overloaded constructors, one of which allows you to specify the end point address to use when creating the proxy. From here all you have to do is come up with some logic that will provide you with the relative path to your services. Since my WCF services are usually hosted in the same project as my Silverlight app I use the class shown below: public class ServiceProxyHelper { /// <summary> /// Create a broken service proxy /// </summary> /// <returns>A broken service proxy</returns> public static BrokenServiceClient CreateBrokenServiceProxy() { Uri address = new Uri(Application.Current.Host.Source, "../Services/BrokenService.svc"); return new BrokenServiceClient("CustomBinding_BrokenService", address.AbsoluteUri); } } Then I will create an instance of the proxy class using my service helper class like so: BrokenServiceClient proxy = ServiceProxyHelper.CreateBrokenServiceProxy(); The way this works is “Application.Current.Host.Source” will return the URL to the ClientBin folder the Silverlight app is hosted in, the “../Services/BrokenService.svc” is then used as the relative path to the service from the ClientBin folder, combined by the Uri object this gives me the URL to my service. The “CustomBinding_BrokenService” is a reference to the end point configuration in the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file. Yes this means you still need the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file. All this is doing is using a different end point address than the one specified in the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file, all the other settings form the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file are still used when creating the proxy. I have uploaded an example project which covers the custom host factory solution from the first issue and everything from the second issue. I included the code to write a list of base addresses to a log file in my implementation of the custom host factory, this is not need for the custom host factory to function and can safely be removed. Download (WCFServicesDeploymentExample.zip)

Read the article
NINE Questions with Michelle Juett

- by NINEQuestions

Michelle Juett is one of the more interesting people I know, even though we’ve never met face to face. She’s part artist, part techie and all cool. We “met” via my good buddy George Clingerman and have plotting to take over the world, errr… I mean “collaborating” ever since. If you happen to live in the Seattle area, you can catch her and her work at Sakura Con on April 2-4, 2010 and various other gamer and art cons throughout the year. You can also find her on Twitter as @Shelldragon. Now that you know a little bit, I’ll let her tell you the rest of the story in these NINE Questions: 1. Where are you from? I was born in Clearwater, Florida. I like to tell people I'm from the Bermuda Triangle, it just makes explaining myself so much easier. My family moved to Washington when I was 5 and I've been in the Pacific Northwest ever since. We like to QQ about the rain but we really love the green trees and clean water. 2. What do you do? I fight evil by moonlight and win love by daylight.. or something like that. I’ve been in quality assurance for games during the day since January 2008 and an artist for life. I currently work in QA for a really awesome game company in Bellevue. At home, I work on personal digital art, making game assets as well as other random freelance projects as they pop up. 3. How did you get to where you are now? I'm still not where I want to be but I'm getting closer. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to work hard and never settle for the minimum required. I tend to overwork myself but I've never regretted it. You can want something really bad but if you aren't willing to work for it, then you can't expect it to just happen. I've always drawn and had an unhealthy love for video games that I was told I’d grow out of. I knew I would not ‘grow out’ of games and that real adults make them and I could too. After I graduated, in searching for jobs, I discovered game testing. I figured this would be a good way to get my foot in the door and start networking. I’ve worked with consoles, websites and now, PC games. I stuck with my journey, although it has been a rocky one, daylighting as a tester and moonlighting as an artist. I'm still on that journey but I wouldn't have it any other way. Test has given me a perspective that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain any other way. It gives an unconditional respect for other hard working testers and an insight into creative problem solving. 4. So video game testing probably sounds WAY cooler than the reality. What's it like? What's a given day for you? Game testers don't get a lot of respect because of their stigmas and the fact most people don't actually know what we do. People hear about the opening and closing disc trays all day. Many places do treat their testers like numbers. It all depends on where you work and how awesome your company is. I've had to deal with a lot of bad work situations to get to a really good one. QA exists to ensure the game is as flawless and enjoyable as it can be by the time it has to leave the nest and go out into the world. This includes everything obvious: “can I beat the level and save the princess?” to the more obscure: ‘What happens when I lose internet connection while trying to save right before falling into a pit to my death while holding the jump key then my cat pulls out my memory card and hides it in her litter box?” On the dev side, for developers, testers can be very scary people. Especially when the test team is not in house and you can’t see each other’s faces. I've seen both sides. We don't mean to hurt your feelings. We really DO love you and want your game to be the best it can be! It can be some serious tough love. 5. You are also an accomplished artist. Got any major projects right now you'd like to talk about? LOL, I don't know if I’d say I'm an accomplished artist just yet. I’m still a long way from where I want to be. I figure that’s what makes you grow though: the desire to never stop improving. I like QA but I want to be a full time artist. I was lucky enough to register for a table at Sakura Con in the 11 second window that the tables sold out. As such, I’ll be selling my wares in the Artist Alley April 2-4th. Part of preparing for this is actually making the art to be sold there. Anime is a fun pass time but I don’t draw a whole lot of it so I’m making up for lost time. As I seem to enjoy burying myself in work, I’m an art lead for a secret project that’s so secret I might be killed tonight for even mentioning it. I also take on various freelance projects and do what I can to help out indie games. I discovered the XNA community a year and a half ago and developed a love for Indies when I was writing a weekly newsletter on XBLA news. I’m a little late to the party but I find myself in a unique position where I am an artist and also have technical skills in games. While not programmer myself, I have a lot of game sense and experience. I hope to make some awesome happen. Lastly, I have an ongoing web comic Shell’s Angels) that tends to get neglected when I get busy. I still love drawing comics and keep a little book with me to sketch down ideas as they pop into my head. I may pick it back up again as a larger project sometime in the future. 6. Can you talk about any of the other freelance projects you're doing or are you sworn to secrecy on those too? We wouldn't want a team of game developer ninjas to take you out or anything. All my projects are currently 2d. I have personal projects such as the ongoing comic as well as a graphic novel I've been picking at here and there. My main focus until April is Sakura Con, Sakura Con, Sakura Con. I see it as a great way to get exposure and convention experience. I found out I love conventions a couple years ago and I want to get more involved in them. 7. As an artist, what is your weapon of choice? What do you use to get most of your stuff done? I am a Photoshop Hero and I have the hoodie to prove it. (http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pah090011.html) I've dabbled in other paint programs but I always gravitate back to Photoshop. She is my one true love. I'd like to learn programs like Flash or Anime Studio when I get a bit more time because of their animation abilities. I've worked on frame by frame animation forever but I would love to learn 2d rigging. Still, nothing can compare to a simple sketchpad and a pencil. I always have one on me in case I come across or think of something interesting and can't get to a computer. If the Courier ever comes to exist it will be an ideal weapon for me. 8. You did some videos too, depicting the art creation process. What was the motivation behind those? The creative process is just as important as the final product, if not more so. I've always loved watching speed paint videos and wanted to try it out myself. Turns out it's a lot of work and time but it's definitely fun to go back and rewatch them. Art isn't always the end result and is more often the process itself. 9. Got any interesting tattoos? Designed any for yourself or other people? Not yet, but not for lack of desire. I've toiled over what and where for years. Last year, I finally decided the back of my shoulders would be the place. Like anything permanent, I want it to have meaning. I thought of somehow incorporating games but I couldn't find something I felt would stand the test of time even with all the classic sprite games. I'm very picky so we'll see if I can get something solid decided. Come see me at Sakura Con April 2 -4!!!

Read the article
Migrating from SQL Trace to Extended Events

- by extended_events

In SQL Server codenamed “Denali” we are moving our diagnostic tracing capabilities forward by building a system on top of Extended Events. With every new system you face the specter of migration which is always a bit of a hassle. I’m obviously motivated to see everyone move their diagnostic tracing systems over to the new extended events based system, so I wanted to make sure we lowered the bar for the migration process to help ease your trials. In my initial post on Denali CTP 1 I described a couple tables that we created that will help map the existing SQL Trace Event Classes to the equivalent Extended Events events. In this post I’ll describe the tables in a bit more details, explain the relationship between the SQL Trace objects (Event Class & Column) and Extended Event objects (Events & Actions) and at the end provide some sample code for a managed stored procedure that will take an existing SQL Trace session (eg. a trace that you can see in sys.Traces) and converts it into event session DDL. Can you relate? In some ways, SQL Trace and Extended Events is kind of like the Standard and Metric measuring systems in the United States. If you spend too much time trying to figure out how to convert between the two it will probably make your head hurt. It’s often better to just use the new system without trying to translate between the two. That said, people like to relate new things to the things they’re comfortable with, so, with some trepidation, I will now explain how these two systems are related to each other. First, some terms… SQL Trace is made up of Event Classes and Columns. The Event Class occurs as the result of some activity in the database engine, for example, SQL:Batch Completed fires when a batch has completed executing on the server. Each Event Class can have any number of Columns associated with it and those Columns contain the data that is interesting about the Event Class, such as the duration or database name. In Extended Events we have objects named Events, EventData field and Actions. The Event (some people call this an xEvent but I’ll stick with Event) is equivalent to the Event Class in SQL Trace since it is the thing that occurs as the result of some activity taking place in the server. An EventData field (from now on I’ll just refer to these as fields) is a piece of information that is highly correlated with the event and is always included as part of the schema of an Event. An Action is something that can be associated with any Event and it will cause some additional “action” to occur when ever the parent Event occurs. Actions can do a number of different things for example, there are Actions that collect additional data and, take memory dumps. When mapping SQL Trace onto Extended Events, Columns are covered by a combination of both fields and Actions. Knowing exactly where a Column is covered by a field and where it is covered by an Action is a bit of an art, so we created the mapping tables to make you an Artist without the years of practice. Let me draw you a map. Event Mapping The table dbo.trace_xe_event_map exists in the master database with the following structure: Column_name Type trace_event_id smallint package_name nvarchar xe_event_name nvarchar By joining this table sys.trace_events using trace_event_id and to the sys.dm_xe_objects using xe_event_name you can get a fair amount of information about how Event Classes are related to Events. The most basic query this lends itself to is to match an Event Class with the corresponding Event. SELECT t.trace_event_id, t.name [event_class], e.package_name, e.xe_event_name FROM sys.trace_events t INNER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map e ON t.trace_event_id = e.trace_event_id There are a couple things you’ll notice as you peruse the output of this query: For the most part, the names of Events are fairly close to the original Event Class; eg. SP:CacheMiss == sp_cache_miss, and so on. We’ve mostly stuck to a one to one mapping between Event Classes and Events, but there are a few cases where we have combined when it made sense. For example, Data File Auto Grow, Log File Auto Grow, Data File Auto Shrink & Log File Auto Shrink are now all covered by a single event named database_file_size_change. This just seemed like a “smarter” implementation for this type of event, you can get all the same information from this single event (grow/shrink, Data/Log, Auto/Manual growth) without having multiple different events. You can use Predicates if you want to limit the output to just one of the original Event Class measures. There are some Event Classes that did not make the cut and were not migrated. These fall into two categories; there were a few Event Classes that had been deprecated, or that just did not make sense, so we didn’t migrate them. (You won’t find an Event related to mounting a tape – sorry.) The second class is bigger; with rare exception, we did not migrate any of the Event Classes that were related to Security Auditing using SQL Trace. We introduced the SQL Audit feature in SQL Server 2008 and that will be the compliance and auditing feature going forward. Doing this is a very deliberate decision to support separation of duties for DBAs. There are separate permissions required for SQL Audit and Extended Events tracing so you can assign these tasks to different people if you choose. (If you’re wondering, the permission for Extended Events is ALTER ANY EVENT SESSION, which is covered by CONTROL SERVER.) Action Mapping The table dbo.trace_xe_action_map exists in the master database with the following structure: Column_name Type trace_column_id smallint package_name nvarchar xe_action_name nvarchar You can find more details by joining this to sys.trace_columns on the trace_column_id field. SELECT c.trace_column_id, c.name [column_name], a.package_name, a.xe_action_name FROM sys.trace_columns c INNER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_action_map a ON c.trace_column_id = a.trace_column_id If you examine this list, you’ll notice that there are relatively few Actions that map to SQL Trace Columns given the number of Columns that exist. This is not because we forgot to migrate all the Columns, but because much of the data for individual Event Classes is included as part of the EventData fields of the equivalent Events so there is no need to specify them as Actions. Putting it all together If you’ve spent a bunch of time figuring out the inner workings of SQL Trace, and who hasn’t, then you probably know that the typically set of Columns you find associated with any given Event Class in SQL Profiler is not fix, but is determine by the contents of the table sys.trace_event_bindings. We’ve used this table along with the mapping tables to produce a list of Event + Action combinations that duplicate the SQL Profiler Event Class definitions using the following query, which you can also find in the Books Online topic How To: View the Extended Events Equivalents to SQL Trace Event Classes. USE MASTER; GO SELECT DISTINCT tb.trace_event_id, te.name AS 'Event Class', em.package_name AS 'Package', em.xe_event_name AS 'XEvent Name', tb.trace_column_id, tc.name AS 'SQL Trace Column', am.xe_action_name as 'Extended Events action' FROM (sys.trace_events te LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map em ON te.trace_event_id = em.trace_event_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.trace_event_bindings tb ON em.trace_event_id = tb.trace_event_id LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.trace_columns tc ON tb.trace_column_id = tc.trace_column_id LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_action_map am ON tc.trace_column_id = am.trace_column_id ORDER BY te.name, tc.name As you might imagine, it’s also possible to map an existing trace definition to the equivalent event session by judicious use of fn_trace_geteventinfo joined with the two mapping tables. This query extracts the list of Events and Actions equivalent to the trace with ID = 1, which is most likely the Default Trace. You can find this query, along with a set of other queries and steps required to migrate your existing traces over to Extended Events in the Books Online topic How to: Convert an Existing SQL Trace Script to an Extended Events Session. USE MASTER; GO DECLARE @trace_id int SET @trace_id = 1 SELECT DISTINCT el.eventid, em.package_name, em.xe_event_name AS 'event' , el.columnid, ec.xe_action_name AS 'action' FROM (sys.fn_trace_geteventinfo(@trace_id) AS el LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map AS em ON el.eventid = em.trace_event_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_action_map AS ec ON el.columnid = ec.trace_column_id WHERE em.xe_event_name IS NOT NULL AND ec.xe_action_name IS NOT NULL You’ll notice in the output that the list doesn’t include any of the security audit Event Classes, as I wrote earlier, those were not migrated. But wait…there’s more! If this were an infomercial there’d by some obnoxious guy next to me blogging “Well Mike…that’s pretty neat, but I’m sure you can do more. Can’t you make it even easier to migrate from SQL Trace?” Needless to say, I’d blog back, in an overly excited way, “You bet I can' obnoxious blogger side-kick!” What I’ve got for you here is a Extended Events Team Blog only special – this tool will not be sold in any store; it’s a special offer for those of you reading the blog. I’ve wrapped all the logic of pulling the configuration information out of an existing trace and and building the Extended Events DDL statement into a handy, dandy CLR stored procedure. Once you load the assembly and register the procedure you just supply the trace id (from sys.traces) and provide a name for the event session. Run the procedure and out pops the DDL required to create an equivalent session. Any aspects of the trace that could not be duplicated are included in comments within the DDL output. This procedure does not actually create the event session – you need to copy the DDL out of the message tab and put it into a new query window to do that. It also requires an existing trace (but it doesn’t have to be running) to evaluate; there is no functionality to parse t-sql scripts. I’m not going to spend a bunch of time explaining the code here – the code is pretty well commented and hopefully easy to follow. If not, you can always post comments or hit the feedback button to send us some mail. Sample code: TraceToExtendedEventDDL Installing the procedure Just in case you’re not familiar with installing CLR procedures…once you’ve compile the assembly you can load it using a script like this: -- Context to master USE master GO -- Create the assembly from a shared location. CREATE ASSEMBLY TraceToXESessionConverter FROM 'C:\Temp\TraceToXEventSessionConverter.dll' WITH PERMISSION_SET = SAFE GO -- Create a stored procedure from the assembly. CREATE PROCEDURE CreateEventSessionFromTrace @trace_id int, @session_name nvarchar(max) AS EXTERNAL NAME TraceToXESessionConverter.StoredProcedures.ConvertTraceToExtendedEvent GO Enjoy! -Mike

Read the article
Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

- by Manesh Karunakaran

It’s been more than a month since SharePoint 2010 RTMed. And a lot of people have downloaded and set up their very own SharePoint 2010 development rigs. And quite a few people have written blogs about setting up good development environments, there is even an MSDN article on it. Two of the blogs worth noting are from MVPs Sahil Malik and Wictor Wilén. Make sure that you check these out as well. Part of the bad side-effects of being a geek is the need to do the technical stuff the best way possible (pragmatic or otherwise), but the problem with this is that what is considered “best” is relative. Precisely the reason why you are reading this post now. Most of the posts that I read are out dated/need updations or are using the wrong OS’es or virtualization solutions (again, opinions vary) or using them the wrong way. Here’s a developer’s view of Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Rig. If you are a sales guy, it’s time to close this window. Confusion 1: Which Host Operating System and Virtualization Solution to use? This point has been beaten to death in numerous blog posts in the past, if you have time to invest, read this excellent post by our very own SharePoint Joel on this subject. But if you are planning to build the Ultimate Development Rig, then Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the option that you should be looking at. I have been using this as my primary OS for about 6-7 months now, and I haven’t had any Driver issue or Application compatibility issue. In my experience all the Windows 7 drivers work fine with WIN2008 R2 also. You can enable Aero for eye candy (and the Windows 7 look and feel) and except for a few things like the Hibernation support (which a can be enabled if you really want it), Windows Server 2008 R2, is the best Workstation OS that I have used till date. But frankly the answer to this question of which OS to use depends primarily on one question - Are you willing to change your primary OS? If the answer to that is ‘Yes’, then Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the best option, if not look at vmWare or VirtualBox, both are equally good. Those who are familiar with a Virtual PC background might prefer Sun VirtualBox. Besides, these provide support for running 64 bit guest machines on 32 bit hosts if the underlying hardware is truly 64 bit. See my earlier post on this. Since we are going to make the ultimate rig, we will use Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, for reasons mentioned above. Confusion 2: Should I use a multi-(virtual) server set up? A lot of people use multiple servers for their development environments - like Wictor Wilén is suggesting - one server hosting the Active directory, one hosting SharePoint Server and another one for SQL Server. True, this mimics the production environment the best possible way, but as somebody who has fallen for this set up earlier, I can tell you that you don’t really get anything by doing this. Microsoft has done well to ensure that if you can do it on one machine, you can do it in a farm environment as well. Besides, when you run multiple Server class machine instances in parallel, there are a lot of unwanted processor cycles wasted for no good use. In my personal experience, as somebody who needs to switch between MOSS 2007/SharePoint 2010 environments from time to time, the best possible solution is to Make the host Windows Server 2008 R2 machine your Domain Controller (AD Server) Make all your Virtual Guest OS’es join this domain. Have each Individual Guest OS Image have it’s own local SQL Server instance. The advantages are that you can reuse the users and groups in each of the Guest operating systems, you can manage the users in one place, AD is light weight and doesn't take too much resources on your host machine and also having separate SQL instances for each of the Development images gives you maximum flexibility in terms of configuration, for example your SharePoint rigs can have simpler DB configurations, compared to your MS BI blast pits. Confusion 3: Which Operating System should I use to run SharePoint 2010 Now that’s a no brainer. Use Windows 2008 R2 as your Guest OS. When you are building the ultimate rig, why compromise? If you are planning to run Windows Server 2008 as your Guest OS, there are a few patches that you need to install at different times during the installation, for that follow the steps mentioned here Okay now that we have made our choices, let’s get to the interesting part of building the rig, Step 1: Prepare the host machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on your best Desktop/Laptop. If you have read this far, I am quite sure that you are somebody who can install an OS on your own, so go ahead and do that. Make sure that you run the compatibility wizard before you go ahead and nuke your current OS. There are plenty of blogs telling you how to make a good Windows 2008 R2 Workstation that feels and behaves like a Windows 7 machine, follow one and once you are done, head to Step 2. Step 2: Configure the host machine as a Domain Controller Before we begin this, let me tell you, this step is completely optional, you don’t really need to do this, you can simply use the local users on the Guest machines instead, but if this is a much cleaner approach to manage users and groups if you run multiple guest operating systems. This post neatly explains how to configure your Windows Server 2008 R2 host machine as a Domain Controller. Follow those simple steps and you are good to go. If you are not able to get it to work, try this. Step 3: Prepare the guest machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Open Hyper-V Manager Choose to Create a new Guest Operating system Allocate at least 2 GB of Memory to the Guest OS Choose the Windows 2008 R2 Installation Media Start the Virtual Machine to commence installation. Once the Installation is done, Activate the OS. Step 4: Make the Guest operating systems Join the Domain This step is quite simple, just follow these steps below, Fire up Hyper-V Manager, open your Guest OS Click on Start, and Right click on ‘Computer’ and choose ‘Properties’ On the window that pops-up, click on ‘Change Settings’ On the ‘System Properties’ Window that comes up, Click on the ‘Change’ button Now a window named ‘Computer Name/Domain Changes’ opens up, In the text box titled Domain, type in the Domain name from Step 2. Click Ok and windows will show you the welcome to domain message and ask you to restart the machine, click OK to restart. If the addition to domain fails, that means that you have not set up networking in Hyper-V for the Guest OS to communicate with the Host. To enable it, follow the steps I had mentioned in this post earlier. Step 5: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 on the Guest Machine SQL Server 2008 R2 gets installed with out hassle on Windows Server 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 needs SP2 to work properly on WIN2008 R2. Also SQL Server 2008 R2 allows you to directly add PowerPivot support to SharePoint. Choose to install in SharePoint Integrated Mode in Reporting Server Configuration. Step 6: Install KB971831 and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites Now install the WCF Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB971831) from this location, and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites from the SP2010 Installation media. Step 7: Install and Configure SharePoint 2010 Install SharePoint 2010 from the installation media, after the installation is complete, you are prompted to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. If you are using a local instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, install the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 before starting the wizard. If your development environment uses a remote instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or if it has a pre-existing installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on which KB 970315 x64 has already been applied, this step is not necessary. With the wizard open, do the following: Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64. After the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 installation is finished, complete the wizard. Alternatively, you can choose not to run the wizard by clearing the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard check box and closing the completed installation dialog box. Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64, and then manually start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard by opening a Command Prompt window and executing the following command: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared Debug\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\psconfigui.exe The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard may fail if you are using a computer that is joined to a domain but that is not connected to a domain controller. Step 8: Install Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 SDK Install Visual Studio 2010 Download and Install the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK Step 9: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint and Configure Reporting Services Pop-In the SQLServer 2008 R2 installation media once again and install PowerPivot for SharePoint. This will get added as another instance named POWERPIVOT. Configure Reporting Services by following the steps mentioned here, if you need to get down to the details on how the integration between SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 works, see Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010 an excellent article by Alan Le Marquand Step 10: Download and Install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 SharePoint 2010 comes with a lot of cool stuff like PerformancePoint Services and BCS, if you need to try these out, you need to have data in your databases. So if you want to save yourself the trouble of creating sample data for your PerformancePoint and BCS experiments, download and install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 from CodePlex. And you are done! Fire up your Visual Studio 2010 and Start Coding away!!

Read the article
NRF Online Merchandising Workshop: Where Online Retailers Are Focusing for Holiday and Beyond

- by Rose Spicer-Oracle

0 0 1 1204 6863 Oracle Corporation 57 16 8051 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Last month we attended the NRF Online Merchandising Workshop in LA, and it was a great opportunity to catch up with our customers, meet new retailers, and hear some great presentations from VF Corporation, Zazzle, Julep Beauty, Backcountry, eBags and more. The one-on-one conversations with Merchants and the keynote presentations carry the same themes across companies of all sizes and across verticals. With only 125 days left (and counting) until Black Friday, these conversations provided some great insight in to what’s top of mind for retailers during the most stressful time of their year, and a sneak peek in to what they will deliver this holiday season. Some of the most popular topics were: When to start promoting for holiday: seems like a funny conversation to have in July, but a number of retailers said they already had their holiday shopping gift guides live on their site, and it was attracting a significant portion of their onsite traffic. When it comes to timing, most retailers were questioning when to begin their holiday promotions -- carefully balancing when to release pricing and specials, and knowing that customers are holding out for last-minute deals and price drops. Many retailers noted the frustrations around transparent pricing by Amazon and a few other mega-retailers last year, publishing their “lowest prices of the season” as early as October – ensuring shoppers that those prices were the best they could get all season long. Many retailers felt their hands were forced to drop prices. Others kept their set pricing with negative customer reaction, causing some to miss their holiday goals. The pressure is on, and most retailers identified November 1 as their target start date for the holiday promotions blitz. Some are even waiting for the big guys to release their “lowest prices of the season” guides and will then follow suit. Attribution is tough – and a huge focus: understanding the path to conversion is a tough nut to crack, especially in the new omnichannel world where consumers use multiple touchpoints to make a single purchase, and internal management wants to know hard data. This has lead many retailers to invest in attribution; carefully tracking their online marketing efforts to determine what gets “credit” for the sale, instead of giving credit to the “last click.” Retailers noted that it is very difficult to determine the numbers when online and offline worlds collide – like when a shopper uses digital channels for research and then makes a purchase in a store. As one of the presenters from The North Face mentioned in her keynote, a key to enabling better customer service and satisfaction when it comes to converged online and offline sales is training the in-store staff, and creating a culture where it eventually “doesn’t matter what group gets the credit” if they all add to the sale. No doubt, the area of attribution will be a big area of retail investment in the coming years. How to plan for the converged world: planning to ensure inventory gets where it needs to be was another concern. In conversations with retailers, we advised them to analyze customer patterns: where shoppers purchase items, where the items were sourced from and even where items are returned. This analysis is very valuable in determining inventory plans. From there, retailers can more accurately plan and allocate inventory to support both the online and offline customer behavior. As we head into the holiday season, the need for accurate enterprise-wide inventory visibility, and providing that information to associates, is even more critical to the brand-wide customer experience. Improving the search / navigation / usability of the site(s): Aside from some of the big ideas and standard holiday pricing pressure, most conversations we had centered around continuing to improve the basics of the site. Reinvesting in search and navigation came up time and time again (FitForCommerce blogged about what a big topic it was at the event as well). Obviously getting shoppers on their path quickly and allowing them to find what they need fast is critical, but it was definitely interesting to hear just how much effort is still going in to honing the search and navigation experience. Adding new elements to search and navigation like typeahed, inventive navigation refinements, and new navigation categories like gift guides, specialized boutiques and flash sales were top of mind, in addition to searchandising and making search-driven product recommendations. (Oracle can help!) Reducing cart abandonment: always a hot topic that is top of mind for every online retailer. Getting shoppers to the cart is often less then half the battle; getting them to click “buy” and complete the transaction is much more difficult. While retailers carefully study the checkout process and where shoppers tend to bounce, they know that how they design their checkout page is critical. We’re all online shoppers in our personal lives and we know how frustrating it can be when total prices are not transparent (i.e. shipping, processing, taxes is not included until the very last possible screen before clicking that buy button). Online retailers are struggling with where in the checkout process to surface the total price to be charged to reduce cart abandonment, while not showing the total figure too early in the process that it keeps shoppers from getting to checkout altogether. Recent research shows that providing total pricing prior to the checkout process dramatically reduces cart abandonment – as it serves as a filter to those shopping within a specific price band. Much of the cart abandonment discussion leads us to… The free shipping / free returns question: it’s no secret that because of Amazon and programs like Prime, consumers expect free shipping, much to the chagrin of the smaller retailer. The reality is that if you’re not a mega-retailer, shipping is an expensive part of doing business that doesn’t allow most retailers to keep their prices low and offer free shipping. This has many retailers venturing out on the “free returns” path, especially in apparel. A number of retailers we spoke with are testing a flat rate shipping fee with free returns to see if they can crack the price threshold where shoppers are willing to pay for shipping with an added service. But, free shipping remains king. Social ads and retargeting: they are working, but do they turn off consumers? That’s the big question. Every retailer we spoke with during a roundtable on the topic said that social ads and retargeting (where that pair of boots you’re been eyeing on a site magically follows you around the Internet) work and are meeting campaign goals. The larger question many retailers are asking is if this type of tactic is turning off a large number of shoppers, even if these campaigns are meeting their early goals. Retailers also mentioned that Facebook ads are working very well for them, especially when it comes to new customer acquisition, serving as a complimentary a channel to SEO when it comes to engaging new customers. While there are always new things to experiment with in retail, standard challenges are top of mind as retailers scramble to get ready for holiday. It will undoubtedly be another record-breaking online shopping season, but as retailers get more and more advanced with each Black Friday, expect some exciting things. This excitement needs to be backed by sound solutions and optimized operations. Then again, consumers are expecting more than ever, so I don’t doubt that retailers are already thinking about the possibilities of holiday 2015… and beyond. Customers who read this article, also found value in the following stories: Personalization for Retail: http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/personalization_for_retailShop Direct User Experience Focus Drives Sales:https://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/shop_direct_user_experience_focusMaking Waves: Australian Online Retailer SurfStitch: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracleretail/entry/surf_stitchWhat’s new in Oracle Commerce v11.1 for RetailWhat the Content+Commerce Equation is Missing

Read the article
Your Day-by-Day Guide to Agile PLM at Oracle OpenWorld 2012

- by Kerrie Foy

This year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference is nearly here, and we’re all excited about what we have planned! With five days of activities and customer presenters from market leaders and top innovators like The Coca-Cola Company, Starbucks, JDSU, Facebook, GlobalFoundries, and more, this is an event you don't want to miss. I've compiled this day-by-day guide to help anyone keep track of all the “Product Lifecycle Management and Product Value Chain” sessions and activities at OpenWorld 2012, September 30 – October 4 in San Francisco, California. Monday, October 1 There are great networking activities on Sunday September 30, but PLM specific sessions start after general conference keynotes on Monday, October 1 at 10:45 a.m. at the InterContinental Hotel in room Telegraph Hill. In fact, most of our sessions this year will be held in this room, which is still close to the conference keynotes in Moscone, but just far enough away to allow some focused networking and discussions. This first session, 10:45 – 11:45 a.m. is a joint session with the Agile and AutoVue teams, entitled “Streamline PLM Design-to-Manufacturing Processes with AutoVue Visualization Soltuions” featuring presenters from Oracle as well as joint AutoVue and Agile PLM customer GlobalFoundries. In the following 12:15 – 1:15 p.m. slot, there are two sessions to choose from, so if you have a team of representatives attending OpenWorld, you may consider splitting up to catch both of these: a) Our General Session will be held in the InterContinental Hotel Ballroom C, which will cover our complete enterprise PLM strategy, product updates, and roadmaps. It’s our pleasure to feature a customer keynote presentation from Chris Bedi, CIO, and Rajeev Sethi, Director IT Business Engagement, of JDSU. b) A focused session on integrating PLM with Engineering and Supply Chain Systems will be held on the second floor of Moscone West (next to the InterContinental) in room 2022. Join to discover how these types of integrations help companies manage common and integrated design information across all MCAD, ECAD, and software components. After a lunch break and perhaps a visit to the Demogrounds in Moscone West, select from two product roadmap sessions in the next time slot (3:15 – 4:15 p.m.): an Agile 9.3.x session located in the InterContinental’s Ballroom C, and an Agile PLM for Process session located back in the InterContinental’s Telegraph Room. Both sessions will have strong content around each product line’s latest releases, vision, and customer examples. We are very pleased to feature Daniel Soosai of Facebook in the A9 session and Vinnie D’Agostino of The Coca-Cola Company in the PLM for Process session. Afterwards, hang in there for one last session of the day from 4:45 – 5:45 p.m.; it’s an insightful discussion on leveraging Agile PLM as the Foundation for Enterprise Quality Management, and it’s sure to be one of the best. In the Telegraph Room, this session will feature Oracle experts, partner co-presenter David Bartlett from CPG Solutions, and customer co-presenter Thomas Crowe, CIO of PL Developments. Hear their experience around implementing collaborative, integrated solutions to ensure effective knowledge transfer throughout an organization, and how to perform analysis in real time to resolve product quality issues swiftly and efficiently. On Monday evening there will be plenty of industry, product, and partner dinners, so take advantage of all the networking opportunities and catch some great tunes at the 5 day Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival! Tuesday, October 2 Tuesday starts early with a special PLM Networking Brunch, sponsored by several partners, from 8:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. at the B Restaurant that sits atop Yerba Buena Gardens. You’ll have the unique opportunity to meet with like-minded industry peers and a PLM partner to discuss a topic of your choosing while enjoying a delicious meal. Registration is required, so to inquire about attending this brunch, please email Terri.Hiskey-AT-oracle.com. After wrapping up your conversations over brunch, head over to the Marriott Marquis in the Nob Hill CD room for a chance to experience the Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics solution in a Hands-On Lab, open from 10:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Experts will be there to answer your questions. Back in the InterContinental Hotel’s Telegraph room, the session on “Ideation and Requirements Management: Capturing the Voice of the Customer” begins at 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. This may be the session for you if you’re struggling with challenges like too many repositories of customer needs, requests, and ideas; limited visibility into which ideas are being advanced by customers and field resources; or if you’re unable to leverage internal expertise to expose effort and potential risks. This session will discuss how Agile PLM can help you overcome ideation challenges to deliver the right products to their targeted markets and fulfill customer desires. Next, from 1:15 – 2:15 p.m. join us for a session on Managing Profitable Innovation with Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics. If you missed the Hands-on Lab, have more questions, or simply want to be inspired by the product’s forward-thinking vision and capabilities, this is a great opportunity to meet the progressive-minded executives behind the application. After this session, it may be a good opportunity to swing by the Demogrounds in Moscone West and visit the Agile PLM demos at exhibit booths #81 for Agile PLM for Discrete Manufacturing, #70 for Agile PLM for Process, and #82 for AutoVue and Agile PLM Enterprise Visualization. Check out the related Supply Chain Management booths close by if you’re interested - here's the map. There’s always lots to see and do around the exhibit area. But don’t forget the last session of the day from 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. in Telegraph Hill on Managing Product Innovation and Compliance in Life Science Companies, a “must-see” if you’re in this industry. Launching innovative products quickly is already a high-stakes challenge, but companies in the life sciences industry face uniquely severe consequences when new products don’t perform or comply as required. In recent years, more and more regulations have become mandatory, and new ones, such as REACH, are currently going into effect for several companies. Customer presenters from pharmaceutical leader Eli Lilly will share how they’ve leveraged Agile PLM to deliver high-quality, innovative products in a fast-paced, heavily regulated market environment. Tuesday evening unwind at the Supply Chain Management Reception from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the premier boutique Roe Nightclub and Lounge, which is located about three blocks down on Howard Street (on the other side of Moscone from the InterContinental Hotel). Registration is required. Click here for the details. Wednesday, October 3 We have another full line-up on Wednesday, so be ready for an action-packed day. We start with a session at 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. in the Telegraph Room where we have a session on “PLM for Consumer Products: Building an Engine for Quality and Innovation” with featured presenters from Starbucks and partner Kalypso. This is a rare opportunity to learn directly from Starbucks how they instill quality and innovation throughout their organization, products, and processes, leveraging PLM disciplines with strong support from their partner. If you’re not in the consumer products industry, we recommend attending another session at 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. in Moscone West room 3005: “Eco-Enterprise Innovation Awards and the Business Case for Sustainability” featuring Jeff Henley, Oracle’s Chairman of the Board and Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer. Oracle will honor select customers with Oracle’s Eco-Enterprise Innovation award, which recognizes customers and their respective partners who rely on Oracle products to support their green business practices to reduce their environmental impact while improving business efficiencies and reducing costs. The awards presentation is followed by a panel discussion with customers and Oracle executives, who describe how these award-winning organizations are embracing environmental initiatives as a central part of their business strategy and how information technology plays a pivotal role. Next at 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. in Telegraph Hill attend our session devoted to exploring Product Lifecycle Management’s role in Software Lifecycle Management. This is a thought leadership session with Oracle experts in the field on the importance of change management, and we’ll discuss how Oracle has for years leveraged Agile PLM to develop Agile PLM. If software lifecycle management doesn’t apply to your business or you’d rather engage in some lively one-on-one discussions, we also have a “Supply Chain Meet the Experts” session in Moscone West Room 2001A. Product experts, thought leaders and executives will be on hand to discuss your questions/topics, so come prepared. This session tends to fill up fast so try to get in early. At 1:15 – 2:15 p.m. join us back in Telegraph Hill for a session focused on leveraging the Agile Product Portfolio Management application as the Product Development Master Schedule to improve efficiencies, optimize resources, and gain visibility across projects enterprise-wide to improve portfolio profitability. Customer presenters from Broadcom will explain how they’ve leveraged the product to enable a master schedule with enterprise-level, phase-gate program and project collaboration and resource optimization. Again in Telegraph Hill from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. we have an interesting session with leading semiconductor customer LSI and partner Kalypso on how LSI leveraged Agile PLM to advance from homegrown applications to complete Product Value Chain Management. That type of transition can be challenging, and LSI details how they were able to achieve their goals and the value they gained along the journey – a fascinating account for any company interested in leveraging best practices to innovate their business processes and even end products. Lastly, we’ll wrap up in Telegraph Hill from 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. with a session on “Ensuring New Product Success by Achieving Excellence in New Product Introduction.” This is a cross-industry session, guaranteed to deliver insight in the often elusive practice of creating winning products, and we’re very excited about. According to IDC Manufacturing Insights analyst Joe Barkai, “Product Failures are not necessarily a result of bad ideas…they are a result of suboptimal decisions.” We’ll show you how to wire your business processes to enhance decision-making and maximize product potential. Now, quickly hit your hotel room to freshen up and then catch one of the many complimentary shuttles to the much-anticipated Oracle Customer Appreciation Event on Treasure Island. We have a very exciting show planned – check out what’s in store here. Thursday, October 4 PLM has a light schedule on Thursday this year with just one session, but this again is one of our best sessions on managing the Product Value Chain: at 11:15 a.m – 12:15 p.m.in Telegraph Hill, it’s a customer and partner driven session with Sonoco Products and Deloitte telling their story about how to achieve integrated change control by interfacing Agile PLM with Oracle E-Business Suite. Sonoco Products, a global manufacturer of consumer and industrial packaging materials, with its systems integrator, Deloitte, is doing this by implementing prebuilt integration (Oracle Design-to-Release Integration Pack for Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process and Oracle Process) to integrate Agile with Oracle Product Hub/Oracle Product Information Management and Oracle E-Business Suite. This session presents a case study of how Sonoco is leveraging this solution to improve data quality and build a framework for stronger master data governance. Even though that ends our PLM line-up at OpenWorld, there will still be many sessions and activities at the conference, so visit the Oracle OpenWorld website to review agendas and build your schedule. And of course, download and bring this guide and the latest version of the Agile PLM Focus-On Document (available soon!). San Francisco is a wonderful city to explore, and we’re glad you’re considering joining the Agile PLM team at Oracle OpenWorld! I hope to see you there! Follow me before the conference and on site for real-time updates about #OOW12 on Twitter @Kerrie_Foy or @AgilePLM.

Read the article
Part 2: Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

- by albertpascual

Seems like my previous post inspired by the work of Michael “Doc” Norton was a great success for the amount of emails I have received. Yet amazed how many people didn’t want to discuss their questions in the comments sections. I would encourage people to be more public, still I would like to reply to all of you on this public media. I still welcome those emails. What I found out is that many people feels like me, they want to be developers and still be compensated for their experience without wanting to take a job as a manager. Their perfect day is a full day of coding and learning. Many believe their companies will never pay a manager’s salary to a developer no matter what. Most of you ask how to get the ball rolling. And is the later that I’m addressing here, the previous group, will never try. What companies understand developers value and where can I find them? This is a very difficult question to ask, I don’t have a list of those companies or departments, I have seen in my past signs in companies bending backwards to compensate, in more ways the monetary, a developer that is a good resource to them. Allowing the person to move out of the state and still let them work for the company from home is a sign that company goes by individual cases. Allowing them to go to conference that will not benefit the company is another big sign. Simple signs like flexible hours and letting some people work from home. To see those signs you need to be working in that company for awhile and look at the departments where the manager is taking care of their employees in individual cases. Look for the department where people get quiet extra perks, where some people in the department work from home or remotely. In my experience, but not always true, medium to big companies, are prompt to recognize good developers. Then again, some companies just don’t get it and is when you see many technical people managing developers. For all the people that email me stating that developers can also be very good managers, I do not disagree, I just think that a good developers loves writing code, when you remove that part the better salary isn’t enough to keep a developer happy. Burned out developers appreciate being promoted to managers. How do I know I work in a bad company? In my experience I have been a consultant and seen many companies, a few signs I have learned about companies that will not recognize good developers are: When the turn over is pretty high, when developers are moving out in a big rate, no rocket scientist needs to tap you in the shoulder. When the company is looking always to outsource their development resources. The product is not that interesting nor the company cares too much for their final result and support. Code sweat shops. You’ll know when you start working in one of those. Run for the hills! Where do I start? Disclaimer: I have only based this post on Michael “Doc” Norton, this is just my interpretation and ideas. First thing is to look at Michael “Doc” Norton presentation Take Control of Your Development Career http://docondev.blogspot.com/ That should be the first thing any developer should look and follow like it was a pattern. I would personally recommend to find some language or pattern you are interested with and learn it, learn something that will make you happy. Second, join a User Group and get involve in the community. There are hundreds of user groups, and I’m sure you’ll find one in your city or near you town. Code Camps are Developers Meet Ups are also good resources. Third, I would join a open source project you are interested or better yet, create a new open source project with the new technology that you have learn and get coding. Fourth, create a Twitter account and follow the people that talks about the technology you are interested on. If you follow this 4 steps above I think you’ll be on your way, after they are complete, when you release your Open Source project you can say that you accomplished the first steps. Now, do not expect anything to change in your career life, you are changing and should not expect anything in return, besides borrowing some time from sleeping and your family. Creating a good schedule may help you, I find wasted time in many places that I use. Flying for work is actually one of those that allows me to do my best work on a airplane, don’t need to borrow time from anywhere else. Making sure you always have a light, charged laptop is so important. Next steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern or my interpretation of. First, help run a user group or better yet, start a new user group. I’ll add, as well, go to one conference a year and free development events around your city; Code Camps, Geek Dinners, etc. There are many free events sponsored by different companies for developers to get to know their products, I highly recommend those as the way to get connected. Second, chose a mentor, this is a very hard thing to do I experienced, find an expert in the technology you are learning that has the time for you, it is difficult, I wish you best of luck. Third, learn another technology or pattern, open your horizons a little bit more. Why not, if you had fun previously, keep doing it. Fourth, get involved in forums to answer and ask questions, getting notice in public forums is rewarding for your ego after such a long journey. Final steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern Teach what you know, become humble on your knowledge, find as many opportunities to teach and to get involved with the community, bring all that to your day job. Mr. Norton talks about getting naked, expose yourself to others in your knowledge and what you do not know. You are never too important for small opportunities, yet don’t be afraid to take anything big and learn from the experience. Anytime you have the opportunity to talk to somebody that has reach the point the community knows his or her name, means that you should learn from it. Take opportunities that won’t make you money, yet will make you happy. Sometimes you need to spend money and time. Register talks in Code Camps and Dev Meet Ups, those are free, also go to Conference, Development Summits and Geek Diners for example. One day, people will pay you to attend. When will all these pay off? I don’t know. I’m still in the path, there are a few things that during your journey you may get little acknowledgements that you are in the correct path. In my case I think those are the little signs that tells you about your journey. I got awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for ASP.NET in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I got selected to speak at the DevConnections in Las Vegas in 2010 and Orlando 2011. I do believe that I do have a long way to go, yet what I do makes me happy and I hope I can keep doing for years to come. Every year I can see an improvement on my code, and more frameworks and languages are under my belt, I learn to embrace them all as well as in my daily job, I have been able to work in a few projects beyond my department. I’m a learner and believer of the Michael “Doc” Norton pattern. Looking forward to learn more about it to be able to apply it better. In my short journey I now see my mistakes, I did a few things right, I have been listening the intelligent people and not being afraid to move along the technology changes. In my professional life, I have tried to avoid being placed in only one technology and product. I have always share my code and never confused anybody that wanted to take over any of my projects, I didn’t think anything I created as my own nor care too much when politics didn’t see my vision. I stayed flexible, ready and visible, yet humble. I keep my head just below the clouds, and avoided managers meetings. I credit my manager for my success, and I faulted publicly only myself for the failures. Hope this helps. Cheers, Al Follow me in Twitter Read my previous post tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/09/part-2-career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

Read the article
Move Files from a Failing PC with an Ubuntu Live CD

- by Trevor Bekolay

You’ve loaded the Ubuntu Live CD to salvage files from a failing system, but where do you store the recovered files? We’ll show you how to store them on external drives, drives on the same PC, a Windows home network, and other locations. We’ve shown you how to recover data like a forensics expert, but you can’t store recovered files back on your failed hard drive! There are lots of ways to transfer the files you access from an Ubuntu Live CD to a place that a stable Windows machine can access them. We’ll go through several methods, starting each section from the Ubuntu desktop – if you don’t yet have an Ubuntu Live CD, follow our guide to creating a bootable USB flash drive, and then our instructions for booting into Ubuntu. If your BIOS doesn’t let you boot using a USB flash drive, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! Use a Healthy Hard Drive If your computer has more than one hard drive, or your hard drive is healthy and you’re in Ubuntu for non-recovery reasons, then accessing your hard drive is easy as pie, even if the hard drive is formatted for Windows. To access a hard drive, it must first be mounted. To mount a healthy hard drive, you just have to select it from the Places menu at the top-left of the screen. You will have to identify your hard drive by its size. Clicking on the appropriate hard drive mounts it, and opens it in a file browser. You can now move files to this hard drive by drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste, both of which are done the same way they’re done in Windows. Once a hard drive, or other external storage device, is mounted, it will show up in the /media directory. To see a list of currently mounted storage devices, navigate to /media by clicking on File System in a File Browser window, and then double-clicking on the media folder. Right now, our media folder contains links to the hard drive, which Ubuntu has assigned a terribly uninformative label, and the PLoP Boot Manager CD that is currently in the CD-ROM drive. Connect a USB Hard Drive or Flash Drive An external USB hard drive gives you the advantage of portability, and is still large enough to store an entire hard disk dump, if need be. Flash drives are also very quick and easy to connect, though they are limited in how much they can store. When you plug a USB hard drive or flash drive in, Ubuntu should automatically detect it and mount it. It may even open it in a File Browser automatically. Since it’s been mounted, you will also see it show up on the desktop, and in the /media folder. Once it’s been mounted, you can access it and store files on it like you would any other folder in Ubuntu. If, for whatever reason, it doesn’t mount automatically, click on Places in the top-left of your screen and select your USB device. If it does not show up in the Places list, then you may need to format your USB drive. To properly remove the USB drive when you’re done moving files, right click on the desktop icon or the folder in /media and select Safely Remove Drive. If you’re not given that option, then Eject or Unmount will effectively do the same thing. Connect to a Windows PC on your Local Network If you have another PC or a laptop connected through the same router (wired or wireless) then you can transfer files over the network relatively quickly. To do this, we will share one or more folders from the machine booted up with the Ubuntu Live CD over the network, letting our Windows PC grab the files contained in that folder. As an example, we’re going to share a folder on the desktop called ToShare. Right-click on the folder you want to share, and click Sharing Options. A Folder Sharing window will pop up. Check the box labeled Share this folder. A window will pop up about the sharing service. Click the Install service button. Some files will be downloaded, and then installed. When they’re done installing, you’ll be appropriately notified. You will be prompted to restart your session. Don’t worry, this won’t actually log you out, so go ahead and press the Restart session button. The Folder Sharing window returns, with Share this folder now checked. Edit the Share name if you’d like, and add checkmarks in the two checkboxes below the text fields. Click Create Share. Nautilus will ask your permission to add some permissions to the folder you want to share. Allow it to Add the permissions automatically. The folder is now shared, as evidenced by the new arrows above the folder’s icon. At this point, you are done with the Ubuntu machine. Head to your Windows PC, and open up Windows Explorer. Click on Network in the list on the left, and you should see a machine called UBUNTU in the right pane. Note: This example is shown in Windows 7; the same steps should work for Windows XP and Vista, but we have not tested them. Double-click on UBUNTU, and you will see the folder you shared earlier! As well as any other folders you’ve shared from Ubuntu. Double click on the folder you want to access, and from there, you can move the files from the machine booted with Ubuntu to your Windows PC. Upload to an Online Service There are many services online that will allow you to upload files, either temporarily or permanently. As long as you aren’t transferring an entire hard drive, these services should allow you to transfer your important files from the Ubuntu environment to any other machine with Internet access. We recommend compressing the files that you want to move, both to save a little bit of bandwidth, and to save time clicking on files, as uploading a single file will be much less work than a ton of little files. To compress one or more files or folders, select them, and then right-click on one of the members of the group. Click Compress…. Give the compressed file a suitable name, and then select a compression format. We’re using .zip because we can open it anywhere, and the compression rate is acceptable. Click Create and the compressed file will show up in the location selected in the Compress window. Dropbox If you have a Dropbox account, then you can easily upload files from the Ubuntu environment to Dropbox. There is no explicit limit on the size of file that can be uploaded to Dropbox, though a free account begins with a total limit of 2 GB of files in total. Access your account through Firefox, which can be opened by clicking on the Firefox logo to the right of the System menu at the top of the screen. Once into your account, press the Upload button on top of the main file list. Because Flash is not installed in the Live CD environment, you will have to switch to the basic uploader. Click Browse…find your compressed file, and then click Upload file. Depending on the size of the file, this could take some time. However, once the file has been uploaded, it should show up on any computer connected through Dropbox in a matter of minutes. Google Docs Google Docs allows the upload of any type of file – making it an ideal place to upload files that we want to access from another computer. While your total allocation of space varies (mine is around 7.5 GB), there is a per-file maximum of 1 GB. Log into Google Docs, and click on the Upload button at the top left of the page. Click Select files to upload and select your compressed file. For safety’s sake, uncheck the checkbox concerning converting files to Google Docs format, and then click Start upload. Go Online – Through FTP If you have access to an FTP server – perhaps through your web hosting company, or you’ve set up an FTP server on a different machine – you can easily access the FTP server in Ubuntu and transfer files. Just make sure you don’t go over your quota if you have one. You will need to know the address of the FTP server, as well as the login information. Click on Places > Connect to Server… Choose the FTP (with login) Service type, and fill in your information. Adding a bookmark is optional, but recommended. You will be asked for your password. You can choose to remember it until you logout, or indefinitely. You can now browse your FTP server just like any other folder. Drop files into the FTP server and you can retrieve them from any computer with an Internet connection and an FTP client. Conclusion While at first the Ubuntu Live CD environment may seem claustrophobic, it has a wealth of options for connecting to peripheral devices, local computers, and machines on the Internet – and this article has only scratched the surface. Whatever the storage medium, Ubuntu’s got an interface for it! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Backup Your Windows Live Writer SettingsMove a Window Without Clicking the Titlebar in UbuntuRecover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CD TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals

Read the article
Dotfuscator Deep Dive with WP7

- by Bil Simser

I thought I would share some experience with code obfuscation (specifically the Dotfuscator product) and Windows Phone 7 apps. These days twitter is a buzz with black hat and white operations coming out about how the marketplace is insecure and Microsoft failed, blah, blah, blah. So it’s that much more important to protect your intellectual property. You should protect it no matter what when releasing apps into the wild but more so when someone is paying for them. You want to protect the time and effort that went into your code and have some comfort that the casual hacker isn’t going to usurp your next best thing. Enter code obfuscation. Code obfuscation is one tool that can help protect your IP. Basically it goes into your compiled assemblies, rewrites things at an IL level (like renaming methods and classes and hiding logic flow) and rewrites it back so that the assembly or executable is still fully functional but prying eyes using a tool like ILDASM or Reflector can’t see what’s going on. You can read more about code obfuscation here on Wikipedia. A word to the wise. Code obfuscation isn’t 100% secure. More so on the WP7 platform where the OS expects certain things to be as they were meant to be. So don’t expect 100% obfuscation of every class and every method and every property. It’s just not going to happen. What this does do is give you some level of protection but don’t put all your eggs in one basket and call it done. Like I said, this is just one step in the process. There are a few tools out there that provide code obfuscation and support the Windows Phone 7 platform (see links to other tools at the end of this post). One such tool is Dotfuscator from PreEmptive solutions. The thing about Dotfuscator is that they’ve struck a deal with Microsoft to provide a *free* copy of their commercial product for Windows Phone 7. The only drawback is that it only runs until March 31, 2010. However it’s a good place to start and the focus of this article. Getting Started When you fire up Dotfuscator you’re presented with a dialog to start a new project or load a previous one. We’ll start with a new project. You’re then looking at a somewhat blank screen that shows an Input tab (among others) and you’re probably wondering what to do? Click on the folder icon (first one) and browse to where your xap file is. At this point you can save the project and click on the arrow to start the process. Bam! You’re done. Right? Think again. The program did indeed run and create a new version of your xap (doing it’s thing and rewriting back your *obfuscated* assemblies) but let’s take a look at the assembly in Reflector to see the end result. Remember a xap file is really just a glorified zip file (or cab file if you prefer). When you ran Dotfuscator for the first time with the default settings you’ll see it created a new version of your xap in a folder under “My Documents” called “Dotfuscated” (you can configure the output directory in settings). Here’s the new xap file. Since a xap is just a zip, rename it to .cab or .zip or something and open it with your favorite unarchive program (I use WinRar but it doesn’t matter as long as it can unzip files). If you already have the xap file associated with your unarchive tool the rename isn’t needed. Once renamed extract the contents of the xap to your hard drive: Now you’ll have a folder with the contents of the xap file extracted: Double click or load up your assembly (WindowsPhoneDataBoundApplication1.dll in the example) in Reflector and let’s see the results: Hmm. That doesn’t look right. I can see all the methods and the code is all there for my LoadData method I wanted to protect. Product failure. Let’s return it for a refund. Hold your horses. We need to check out the settings in the program first. Remember when we loaded up our xap file. It started us on the Input tab but there was a settings tab before that. Wonder what it does? Here’s the default settings: Renaming Taking a closer look, all of the settings in Feature are disabled. WTF? Yeah, it leaves me scratching my head why an obfuscator by default doesn’t obfuscate. However it’s a simple fix to change these settings. Let’s enable Renaming as it sounds like a good start. Renaming obscures code by renaming methods and fields to names that are not understandable. Great. Run the tool again and go through the process of unzipping the updated xap and let’s take a look in Reflector again at our project. This looks a lot better. Lots of methods named a, b, c, d, etc. That’ll help slow hackers down a bit. What about our logic that we spent days weeks on? Let’s take a look at the LoadData method: What gives? We have renaming enabled but all of our code is still there. If you look through all your methods you’ll find it’s still sitting there out in the open. Control Flow Back to the settings page again. Let’s enable Control Flow now. Control Flow obfuscation synthesizes branching, conditional, and iterative constructs (such as if, for, and while) that produce valid executable logic, but yield non-deterministic semantic results when decompilation is attempted. In other words, the code runs as before, but decompilers cannot reproduce the original code. Do the dance again and let’s see the results in Reflector. Ahh, that’s better. Methods renamed *and* nobody can look at our LoadData method now. Life is good. More than Minimum This is the bare minimum to obfuscate your xap to at least a somewhat comfortable level. However I did find that while this worked in my Hello World demo, it didn’t work on one of my real world apps. I had to do some extra tweaking with that. Below are the screens that I used on one app that worked. I’m not sure what it was about the app that the approach above didn’t work with (maybe the extra assembly?) but it works and I’m happy with it. YMMV. Remember to test your obfuscated app on your device first before submitting to ensure you haven’t obfuscated the obfuscator. settings tab: rename tab: string encryption tab: premark tab: A few final notes Play with the settings and keep bumping up the bar to try to get as much obfuscation as you can. The more the better but remember you can overdo it. Always (always, always, always) deploy your obfuscated xap to your device and test it before submitting to the marketplace. I didn’t and got rejected because I had gone overboard with the obfuscation so the app wouldn’t launch at all. Not everything is going to be obfuscated. Specifically I don’t see a way to obfuscate auto properties and a few other language features. Again, if you crank the settings up you might hide these but I haven’t spent a lot of time optimizing the process. Some people might say to obfuscate your xaml using string encryption but again, test, test, test. Xaml is picky so too much obfuscation (or any) might disable your app or produce odd rendering effets. Remember, obfuscation is not 100% secure! Don’t rely on it as a sole way of protecting your assets. Other Tools Dotfuscator is one just product and isn’t the end-all be-all to obfuscation so check out others below. For example, Crypto can make it so Reflector doesn’t even recognize the app as a .NET one and won’t open it. Others can encrypt resources and Xaml markup files. Here are some other obfuscators that support the Windows Phone 7 platform. Feel free to give them a try and let people know your experience with them! Dotfuscator Windows Phone Edition Crypto Obfuscator for .NET DeepSea Obfuscation

Read the article
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
Looking Back at MIX10

- by WeigeltRo

It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background. Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL. Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session. The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for. 10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some! Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with! The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff. An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things. Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means. Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

Read the article
That Escalated Quickly

- by Jesse Taber

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2014/05/17/that-escalated-quickly.aspxI have been working remotely out of my home for over 4 years now. All of my coworkers during that time have also worked remotely. Lots of folks have written about the challenges inherent in facilitating communication on remote teams and strategies for overcoming them. A popular theme around this topic is the notion of “escalating communication”. In this context “escalating” means taking a conversation from one mode of communication to a different, higher fidelity mode of communication. Here are the five modes of communication I use at work in order of increasing fidelity: Email – This is the “lowest fidelity” mode of communication that I use. I usually only check it a few times a day (and I’m trying to check it even less frequently than that) and I only keep items in my inbox if they represent an item I need to take action on that I haven’t tracked anywhere else. Forums / Message boards – Being a developer, I’ve gotten into the habit of having other people look over my code before it becomes part of the product I’m working on. These code reviews often happen in “real time” via screen sharing, but I also always have someone else give all of the changes another look using pull requests. A pull request takes my code and lets someone else see the changes I’ve made side-by-side with the existing code so they can see if I did anything dumb. Pull requests can facilitate a conversation about the code changes in an online-forum like style. Some teams I’ve worked on also liked using tools like Trello or Google Groups to have on-going conversations about a topic or task that was being worked on. Chat & Instant Messaging - Chat and instant messaging are the real workhorses for communication on the remote teams I’ve been a part of. I know some teams that are co-located that also use it pretty extensively for quick messages that don’t warrant walking across the office to talk with someone but reqire more immediacy than an e-mail. For the purposes of this post I think it’s important to note that the terms “chat” and “instant messaging” might insinuate that the conversation is happening in real time, but that’s not always true. Modern chat and IM applications maintain a searchable history so people can easily see what might have been discussed while they were away from their computers. Voice, Video and Screen sharing – Everyone’s got a camera and microphone on their computers now, and there are an abundance of services that will let you use them to talk to other people who have cameras and microphones on their computers. I’m including screen sharing here as well because, in my experience, these discussions typically involve one or more people showing the other participants something that’s happening on their screen. Obviously, this mode of communication is much higher-fidelity than any of the ones listed above. Scheduled meetings are typically conducted using this mode of communication. In Person – No matter how great communication tools become, there’s no substitute for meeting with someone face-to-face. However, opportunities for this kind of communcation are few and far between when you work on a remote team. When a conversation gets escalated that usually means it moves up one or more positions on this list. A lot of people advocate jumping to #4 sooner than later. Like them, I used to believe that, if it was possible, organizing a call with voice and video was automatically better than any kind of text-based communication could be. Lately, however, I’m becoming less convinced that escalating is always the right move. Working Asynchronously Last year I attended a talk at our local code camp given by Drew Miller. Drew works at GitHub and was talking about how they use GitHub internally. Many of the folks at GitHub work remotely, so communication was one of the main themes in Drew’s talk. During the talk Drew used the phrase, “asynchronous communication” to describe their use of chat and pull request comments. That phrase stuck in my head because I hadn’t heard it before but I think it perfectly describes the way in which remote teams often need to communicate. You don’t always know when your co-workers are at their computers or what hours (if any) they are working that day. In order to work this way you need to assume that the person you’re talking to might not respond right away. You can’t always afford to wait until everyone required is online and available to join a voice call, so you need to use text-based, persistent forms of communication so that people can receive and respond to messages when they are available. Going back to my list from the beginning of this post for a second, I characterize items #1-3 as being “asynchronous” modes of communication while we could call items #4 and #5 “synchronous”. When communication gets escalated it’s almost always moving from an asynchronous mode of communication to a synchronous one. Now, to the point of this post: I’ve become increasingly reluctant to escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication for two primary reasons: 1 – You can often find a higher fidelity way to convey your message without holding a synchronous conversation 2 - Asynchronous modes of communication are (usually) persistent and searchable. You Don’t Have to Broadcast Live Let’s start with the first reason I’ve listed. A lot of times you feel like you need to escalate to synchronous communication because you’re having difficulty describing something that you’re seeing in words. You want to provide the people you’re conversing with some audio-visual aids to help them understand the point that you’re trying to make and you think that getting on Skype and sharing your screen with them is the best way to do that. Firing up a screen sharing session does work well, but you can usually accomplish the same thing in an asynchronous manner. For example, you could take a screenshot and annotate it with some text and drawings to illustrate what it is you’re seeing. If a screenshot won’t work, taking a short screen recording while your narrate over it and posting the video to your forum or chat system along with a text-based description of what’s in the recording that can be searched for later can be a great way to effectively communicate with your team asynchronously. I Said What?!? Now for the second reason I listed: most asynchronous modes of communication provide a transcript of what was said and what decisions might have been made during the conversation. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the search feature of my team’s chat application to find a conversation that happened several weeks or months ago to remember what was decided. Unfortunately, I think the benefits associated with the persistence of communicating asynchronously often get overlooked when people decide to escalate to a in-person meeting or voice/video call. I’m becoming much more reluctant to suggest a voice or video call if I suspect that it might lead to codifying some kind of design decision because everyone involved is going to hang up the call and immediately forget what was decided. I recognize that you can record and archive these types of interactions, but without being able to search them the recordings aren’t terribly useful. When and How To Escalate I don’t mean to imply that communicating via voice/video or in person is never a good idea. I probably jump on a Skype call with a co-worker at least once a day to quickly hash something out or show them a bit of code that I’m working on. Also, meeting in person periodically is really important for remote teams. There’s no way around the fact that sometimes it’s easier to jump on a call and show someone my screen so they can see what I’m seeing. So when is it right to escalate? I think the simplest way to answer that is when the communication starts to feel painful. Everyone’s tolerance for that pain is different, but I think you need to let it hurt a little bit before jumping to synchronous communication. When you do escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication, there are a couple of things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of the communication: Takes notes – This is huge and yet I’ve found that a lot of teams don’t do this. If you’re holding a meeting with > 2 people you should have someone taking notes. Taking notes while participating in a meeting can be difficult but there are a few strategies to deal with this challenge that probably deserve a short post of their own. After the meeting, make sure the notes are posted to a place where all concerned parties (including those that might not have attended the meeting) can review and search them. Persist decisions made ASAP – If any decisions were made during the meeting, persist those decisions to a searchable medium as soon as possible following the conversation. All the teams I’ve worked on used a web-based system for tracking the on-going work and a backlog of work to be done in the future. I always try to make sure that all of the cards/stories/tasks/whatever in these systems always reflect the latest decisions that were made as the work was being planned and executed. If held a quick call with your team lead and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to build real-time validation into that new UI you were working on, go and codify that decision in the story associated with that work immediately after you hang up. Even better, write it up in the story while you are both still on the phone. That way when the folks from your QA team pick up the story to test a few days later they’ll know why the real-time validation isn’t there without having to invoke yet another conversation about the work. Communicating Well is Hard At this point you might be thinking that communicating asynchronously is more difficult than having a live conversation. You’re right: it is more difficult. In order to communicate effectively this way you need to very carefully think about the message that you’re trying to convey and craft it in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. This is almost always harder than just talking through a problem in real time with someone; this is why escalating communication is such a popular idea. Why wouldn’t we want to do the thing that’s easier? Easier isn’t always better. If you and your team can get in the habit of communicating effectively in an asynchronous manner you’ll find that, over time, all of your communications get less painful because you don’t need to re-iterate previously made points over and over again. If you communicate right the first time, you often don’t need to rehash old conversations because you can go back and find the decisions that were made laid out in plain language. You’ll also find that you get better at doing things like writing useful comments in your code, creating written documentation about how the feature that you just built works, or persuading your team to do things in a certain way.

Read the article

Search Results

Search found 6764 results on 271 pages for 'bryan head'.

Page 264/271 | < Previous Page | 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 | Next Page >

- by user1720527

- by ThatMacLad

- by Daniel Moth

- by Joe Mayo

- by Daniel Moth

- by Yousef_Jadallah

- by Yousef_Jadallah

- by Yousef_Jadallah

- by Chris Hoffman

- by Matthew Guay

- by Matthew Guay

- by brendonpage

- by NINEQuestions

- by extended_events

- by Manesh Karunakaran

- by Rose Spicer-Oracle

- by Kerrie Foy

- by albertpascual

- by Trevor Bekolay

- by Bil Simser

- by mbcrump

- by WeigeltRo

- by Jesse Taber

< Previous Page | 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 | Next Page >